Sermons and Reflections

Where Are the Cartoons?

2012-01-25T12:57:00.000-08:00

Scripture for the 3rd Sunday after the Epiphany includes Jonah 3:1-5,10; I Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20

I can’t hear these scripture readings today without imagining how they might look as cartoons in The New Yorker.

Jonah would be sulking as he obeys God’s order to summon to repentance the people of great urban Nineveh (the New York City of its day). There’s a particular cartoonist I have in mind. He would make Jonah squat and stout, a protest sign over his shoulder with “REPENT!” in bold letters—I’m betting the cartoonist would make those Hebrew letters, knowing that Jonah had no intention of making it easy for these pagan Assyrians to escape divine judgment. Jonah is sulking because of what God has directed him to say, words that Jonah was eager to see come true—“Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”—but to be shouting them as a warning that Israel’s adversaries might heed and change their ways and remain the annoyingly greatest city of that time, to have become an agent of Nineveh’s brighter future… that would really have frosted Jonah.

That’s one cartoon. The next one I can’t see yet, but surely someone in that talented department would know what to do with St. Paul’s peculiar words—peculiar, at least, these 20 centuries after they were spoken—“The appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none…” (You know, I could swear we never heard this passage when we were using the Prayer Book table of Sunday readings; but now that we follow the new Revised Common Lectionary, we’re hearing some fresh language!) St. Paul’s outburst sounds like the Gospel of Click and Clack, the Car Talk brothers, whose lives came to grief when they married and acquired mothers-in-law.

And if there’s a third cartoon to be had out of our Gospel from Mark, I imagine it focusing on old Zebedee, father of the suddenly-missing fishermen James and John. “Where ARE those boys? They were here just a minute ago…” Perhaps he would be shown grumbling something like, “Must be that Occupy Galilee movement…”

I don’t mean to diminish the message today, when I imagine rendering these readings in less-serious ways. Cartoons are highly effective vehicles for revealing meanings and messages.

At St. Luke’s, Worcester, where I served before coming here, there are two stained glass windows in the church. One is located just to the right of the preacher in the pulpit. It is full of cartoons, drawn by Al Banx, former cartooner for Yankee Magazine. He taught Sunday School at St. Luke’s, and there are his drawings of all the stories unique to Luke’s Gospel. The Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, and more. And there they were. If the preacher proved dry that day, your eyes had only to shift left and you’d be in the Funnies.

Cartoons invite us to cross from one side of our brain to the other. They spark our own imagination. And they tap the deep well of humor that can free people to consider life in a fresh way, uniting them in a moment of laughter.

Laughter is often what I hear in the background when scripture is read aloud. Sometimes, laughter takes us right to the heart of what Jesus means, right to the edge of what the Spirit of God has for us… and wants of us. You might call this the Norman Cousins approach to scriptural hermeneutics.

Applying this to today’s readings yields mixed results. There’s no question that as the Book of Jonah spins out the huge fish story of Jonah, someone’s tongue is in his cheek. This is pure unalloyed yarn-spinning—but purposeful. One purpose is to poke fun at the tribal instinct and xenophobic biases of human beings who are geographic neighbors on planet earth, but act as if they aren’t and shouldn’t be. And the greater purpose of this little book in the Hebrew Bible is to bear witness to the universal mercy and grace of God. The Book of Jonah presents a Deity Without Borders. And if its author gets us chuckling at ourselves (that we can be as narrow-minded and self-willed as Jonah), he’s doing that to persuade us to do some reappraisal of our own theology and ask if it’s broad-minded enough to represent the heart and will of God. The spirit of this little book is much like that old hymn: “For the love of God is broader than the measure of the mind, and the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind…”

Is anyone chuckling in the background of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians? Not so much, no. His puzzling words seem to devalue the marital bond and contradict our priorities. But priorities—establishing and honoring faithful priorities—is a central theme in Paul’s correspondence with the Church at Corinth. In today’s brief portion, he unsettles every form of settling that church leaders might be tempted to treat with priority. “For the present form of this world is passing away,” he declares.

Therefore, travel light, he urges. Find and use your freedom to follow and obey the Holy Spirit, whatever may be asked of you. Let nothing tie you down or tie you up, nothing—not your marital status (whatever it is), your emotional state (whatever that may be), your daily work (whatever it is), your possessions (whatever they are or are not), or your dealings with the world (whatever they are)—let none of these distract you from your highest and deepest allegiance to the Spirit of God.

Paul does not say, “So get rid of all those lesser allegiances.” In the chapters around our little portion today, he says clearly, “I don’t want your many allegiances to make you anxious. I don’t want you worrying. Use your present circumstances, whatever they are, to glorify God. In his own words, “In whatever condition you were called, brothers and sisters, there remain with God.” And, arching over all his words like a rainbow, is his proclaiming of good news: “Remember that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God. You are not your own. For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.” In your present circumstances, your present condition.

This is not the stuff of laughter. But it is the stuff of fulfillment and joy.

Paul’s pastoral advice is that we should bloom where we’re planted. This makes eminent sense in a religion that starts among fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. Yes, Jesus calls them away from their boats, but he casts their higher calling in terms of their day jobs. “Follow me, fisherman Simon and fisherman Andrew, and I’ll make you fish… (and the pause here is important)… for people!”

That, by the way, is for me a laugh-aloud moment in the reading of that Gospel. Can’t you picture Simon and Andrew at least snorting a chuckle at Jesus’s promise? Surprise can do that to a fellow. “What? You see us doing what? You’re kidding, right?”

In another story, Jesus does something very similar. When he calls Matthew, he goes right to the tax accountant’s desk and couches his call in the imagery of his prospect’s day job: “Follow me, and I’ll make you account… for the boundless generosity of God!” Now, I know I’ve taken some liberties in retelling that moment, but something like that happened, and can’t you hear laughter igniting within earshot as Matthew’s friends and foes find their own reasons to picture it hard to imagine a tax man as an apostle? Even more unlikely than expecting a fisherman to become an ambassador.

How did you first hear him call you? How might he call you now… to bloom where you’re planted, to glorify God in your present circumstances… and to laugh at the surprises that come in company with the Christ who works extraordinary results when the ordinary is honored and fulfilled.

Martin Luther King: What Might He Say Now?

2012-01-16T11:59:00.000-08:00

Scripture for the 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany includes I Samuel 3:1-20, I Corinthians 6:12-20, and John 1:43-51. On this Sunday before Martin Luther King Day, a Williams sophomore (Corey) selected and read an excerpt from one of Dr. King’s sermons, in lieu of the second scripture reading.

We’re grateful to Corey for helping us today to hear the voice of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hearing a portion of the Drum Major Sermon was both stirring and challenging. After that, with what temerity would a preacher try to preach more?

Perhaps to briefly imagine what Dr. King would be paying attention to today, if he were alive. I’ve thought of him three times this past week. Each time I’ve said to myself, “He would be speaking to this situation.”

First was signaled by the headline, ”Social tensions rising,” reporting that relations and perceptions between the rich and the poor in the United States have reached an intensity of antagonism not seen in a quarter century. “Americans now see more social conflict over wealth inequality than over the hot-button topics of immigration, race relations, and age,” writes AP reporter Hope Yen. She expects we’ll hear more, as this issue moves to the forefront of the presidential campaign.

Dr. King would speak to this. What might he say? In the sermon we heard today, he spoke to those ambitious disciples of Jesus, John and James, the Sons of Thunder, who wanted to be greatest among the twelve. His words could be directed today to people at both ends of the socio-economic ladder, and all in-between: “You want to be great? Wonderful. You want to be important? Wonderful… I want you to be first in love. I want you to be first in moral excellence. I want you to be first in generosity.” Dr. King would, I believe, issue a unifying challenge like that. And wouldn’t it be good, right about now, to hear a unifying voice in our land?

The second time I thought of him was hearing of the alleged defilement of Afghan corpses by United States Marines. Dr. King would speak to that. He might remind us of a man who was spat upon, beaten, and nailed to a cross, a man who fulfilled the role of the suffering servant foretold by the prophet, a man who was despised and rejected. Dr. King would remind us that this man “stands as the most influential figure that ever entered human history,” affecting the life of the human race more than all the armies, all the navies, all the parliaments, all the kings, by modeling and teaching reverence for life, even, as Dr. King said in his sermon, “when we will be victimized with what is life’s final common denominator—that something we call death.”

And the third time I thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., was reading the article “Humankind’s Most Savage Cruelty,” written by Williamstown resident and King biographer Stewart Burns, published in the current issue of Sojourners Magazine. Burns, who has spoken here and is known to many of us, writes in this article about human trafficking of children.

If the most important thing we know about slavery is that it is a thing of the past, then we are ignorant about the world we inhabit. “Enslavement of children and adults, mostly female, has spread to virtually every country in the world, with the number of host nations—slave states—doubling since 2001. Worldwide at any given time, Burns says, more than a million children are trapped in some form of trafficking. He speaks of the 300,000 child soldiers who are fighting in more than a dozen countries, and he estimates that there are as many as 100,000 girls trafficked as sex slaves within the United States, “truck stops are the most lucrative 21st-century brothels,” he says, in “the land of the free whose (amended) Constitution prohibits slavery.”

“What is the responsibility of a great nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality—yet drenched for much of its history in the blood and tears of chattel slavery—to destroy once and for all the global holocaust of labor and sexual servitude? What is the moral mandate of a great, if imperfect, people who eventually vanquished their own slavery, to apply similar democratic and nonviolent tools to fight the modern slavery that has spread wildly with the collapse of the Soviet empire, the dominance of the globalized free market, and the entrenchment of desperate poverty? What is the responsibility of an American citizen, a global citizen, who can no longer tolerate the hollowness of easy human rights pledges while millions of children and women are raped and wrecked as disposable commodities?”

Dr. King would have ready and demanding answers to these questions raised by our neighbor Stewart Burns. Perhaps King’s sermon that we heard today guides us to our own answers, if I may paraphrase the question he put to himself: “What is it that we would want said of us?” Not so much as eulogy, but as commentary on us and our society in this 21st century that is as much in need of emancipation as was the 19th century, as much in need of achieving universal human rights as was the 20th.

Don’t we want it said of us that we were willing to be united, to care less about our place on the socioeconomic ladder, to extend our passion and compassion beyond our own most hotbutton issues, and be united “so that we can make of this old world a new world”?

(Stewart Burns’s article appeared in the February 2012 issue of “Sojourners”.)

Copying the Christ

2012-01-10T15:03:00.000-08:00

Scripture for the 1st Sunday after the Epiphany includes Genesis 1:1-5, Acts 19:1-7, and Mark 1:4-11

“Into what then were you baptized?”

Paul’s question just begs to be used by the preacher today.

But first, did you hear about the association of 3000 file-sharers in Sweden who successfully petitioned the Swedish government to be declared a religion? Every week, they encourage their members to gather to share music files, video files, whatever—they consider their files to be holy, and they consider copying to be a sacrament. Their 20-year-old leader announced last week the success of their petition, and the name of their religious movement: Koptimism.

Into what then were you baptized?

In fact, Christian baptism , to a large degree, encourages—even mandates—copying. The same words constitute the same covenant, each time the sacrament is administered. What has stood the test of time by demonstrating fidelity to the vision and teaching and Spirit of God in Jesus Christ remains the standard to which members of his body are held, not by the requirement of law but by grateful response to gift, by grace. Mystical expression is given to this central process of imitation in the question and answer in the baptism of a child: “Will you by your prayers and witness help this child to grow into the full stature of Christ? …I will, with God’s help.”

Into what then were you baptized? Paul needed to ask that question because God’s Spirit was causing the earliest Christian movement to evolve, and Paul would be among its catalysts and midwives. But into what would the Jesus movement develop? In the encounter we heard today, he had found in Ephesus a small house church of a dozen or so disciples of Jesus who apparently had first been disciples of John the Baptizer. Notice how quick they are to describe their baptismal experience as being John’s baptism.

Without demeaning that experience, Paul simply tells them that as strong a foundation as John’s baptism was, baptism in the name of Jesus Christ does more for people. That could sound arrogant, but the utter simplicity of Paul’s language suggests that he is dealing with facts on the ground.

Fact: the movement led by John the Baptizer preceded Jesus’s public ministry—more accurately, the Jesus movement overlapped the John the Baptizer movement and may be said to have come out of it. The Baptizer’s movement was so significant that it is where we first meet Jesus in the Gospels of Mark and John. While the opening salvo in Luke and Matthew is the dramatic birth at Bethlehem, what reveals Jesus as Son of God in Mark and John is his baptism by John the Baptist.

Fact: John’s baptism called people to repent of their greed, their me-first-ism, their brutality, their cynical going-along-with-the-crowd. John’s baptism called them to repentance and to ethical awakening, persuading them that the prophetic call to do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with God was the divine call to them, was within their reach, and to reach for this God-given power would save them and their society from its worst fate. John’s baptism was a wake-up call to confront a corrupt culture by daring to recognize and take best ethical choices.

Fact: John got specific about that. When he preached to the crowds, “Bear fruits worthy of repentance!” they shouted back, “What should we do?” “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” Act like family, especially with strangers; where there is need, meet it and meet in return the coming of the kingdom of God.

When tax collectors came to be baptized and asked John what they should do, he didn’t miss a beat: “Collect no more than what the law allows.” Soldiers likewise, when they were still wet from the Jordan, heard this challenge: “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.”

Wouldn’t you love to see God send John the Baptizer to Washington, to our members of Congress and then down to K Street for a chat with the lobbyists?

Fact: John knew his place, knew his role to be an agent of change. He was not the One, capital O, to be believed-in, trusted for all time as Savior and Messiah. John made it clear that this anointed One was coming, and John wasn’t worthy even to wash his feet. Which is a way of saying what Paul communicates to that little gang in Ephesus: What you hear first when you are baptized in Christ is not what you must do or must stop doing; first, you hear what God in Christ is doing for you, and that is giving you the very Spirit that unites the heart of God with the heart of Jesus, the very Spirit that makes Jesus who he is. Out of that incalculable gift flow all sorts of ethical promptings and passions, yet what is primarily happening in baptism is that God is giving God’s own self to people; and out of that inestimable gift flow spiritual gifts, spiritual powers, and these are what unite people to comprehend and practice not their own self-invented missions in life, but to imitate the great mission of God, to restore all people to unity with one another and with God.

Paul has a shorthand way of summing-up all that by asking, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” “We’ve never heard of that,” they replied. What lies behind Paul’s question is his confidence that his calling, his part in the mission of God, is to make sure that people aim high enough—and deep enough—in identifying who it is they are to emulate, and what it is they are to copy.

Into what then were you baptized? Into an association of file-sharers who say the same prayers and sing the same hymns and copy cultural customs that they consider to be holy?

If we’re tempted to think that Koptimism misses the mark of religion, let’s keep making sure that our association in the name of Christ aims higher and deeper. Let’s consider more critically the cultural copying we do in the name of being Episcopalians, and put to the test of God’s central mission our beautiful liturgy, our comfortable words, our familiar agendas and ways of doing things, saying things, accumulating things.

Because, in case we haven’t noticed, the world is not beating a path to our door. And, judged by how we’re inclined to spend our time and our money, the path the church beats towards the world is too often paved with good intentions, and our GPS too often programed to keep us on familiar pathways while the central mission of God mandates our embrace of unfamiliar ways to reach, say, twenty year olds.

Perhaps what persuaded the Swedish government to recognize their newest religion was the sharing. Maybe the Koptimists have it right, not about copying being a sacrament, but about sharing being the foundation of religious life. In our me-first world, sharing what is valuable is exactly what we all most need to emulate and excel in. Baptized into the life of Jesus Christ, we are called to share what we value more than files, more than second coats and surplus food. We are called to share the Holy Spirit, the faith that is in us, and the central mission of God.

The church that equips her people to do this sharing copies the Christ, and beats a broad path to the world.

Word Into Silence: Three Christmas Homilies

2012-01-03T06:08:00.000-08:00

Three Christmas homilies are grouped here, from Christmas Eve 2011, Christmas Day 2011, and the Feast of the Holy Name 2012. Each relates to Dom John Main’s rich little book, “Word Into Silence” (Continuum, 2005).

I. Christmas Eve

Readings for Christmas Eve include Isaiah 9:2-7, Titus 2:11-14, Luke 2:1-20

‘Tis the season to give a gift. And it’s no secret that giving a gift may be its own reward. We are gratified when a loved one’s delight, a receiver’s pleasure, shows us we’ve gotten it right. We have it on high authority that it is more blessed to give than to receive. Many an offertory in many a church has opened with that message, the pastor hoping it will be taken to heart… but inherent in the story of this holy night is the deeper truth that without mindful honest appreciative receiving, a gift gets tossed out, the baby with the bathwater.

We all get gifts that we struggle to receive. Each Christmas, a dear friend sends Diana and me a cd, usually a recording of esoteric music that has spoken to his heart. Sometimes, it doesn’t ring our bells, and that cd finds its way onto a shelf but not often into the player. I will admit that when that slim package arrives, I wonder what century it will take me back to, and do I really want to go there? It is not always easy to receive a gift mindfully, openly, appreciatively.

I suspect that Christmas comes to many of us in a like way. We think we know what to expect, and while we’re willing to be surprised we tend to play the disc as background to our own busyness. If there are surprises given with the gift, if there’s something that would be of inestimable value to us, some movement, some sweet harmony or graceful passage of light, we may not notice it. We play the disc, judge that it is much what we thought it would be, and shelve it for another year.

To receive anything mindfully, openly, appreciatively, I might have to trust that the giver knows me and might have a clue about what will benefit me—perhaps what I like, but likelier what I could rise to and learn from and try. After all, friends who keep feeding us the same-old same-old don’t help us grow.

Consider, then, what God gives on this holy night. In a time of protracted war and recurrent terrorism… at a place where displaced people occupy a few square feet they temporarily call their own as they face a system that shows no care for them… in the cold of a night with no fire burning but the stars above… at the crossroads of ancient animosities and culture wars… and imbedded with sentient beings clucking and neighing and mooing their truth that all creation waits with eager longing… in just these ways that seem so slim in hope, in this fullness of time God empties the treasury of heaven into the womb of Mary and there is born not an alien being but one who shows us who and whose we are.

My Advent reading of Benedictine Dom John Main has been helping me appreciate what God gives. God gives us this child Jesus who will show us that we are called to the same awareness, the same knowing, the same union with God that he himself cherishes. Here is John Main’s language:

“When he sends the Spirit into our hearts, Jesus transmits to us everything that He receives from the Father. He withholds nothing, neither any secret or intimacy of personal love. By His very nature He is impelled to give all of Himself, and the power, the urgency of the love-impulse radiating from the Father make it impossible for Jesus to retain any area of special privilege, of non-communication. The building up of the Body of Christ is precisely the consuming desire of Jesus to flood every part of our human consciousness with His Spirit. Nothing can prevent that desire from being satisfied except man’s own unwillingness to receive, to acknowledge, to awaken to this gift of God’s personal love.”

There is the heart of the Christian mystery. To be given Jesus is to be given not a crèche figure to hold, but the very life of Jesus. To be given Jesus is to be given God, not ideas about God packaged as a creed to end the matter, but God to know and love and experience as the beginning and end of all our material being.

John Main’s slim little book is titled, “Word into Silence,” and his purpose is to get us to pray without words, occupying silence because there, he says, we are saved from superstition and from cynicism because there, he says, we find a personal inner balance, a spiritual self-control that emanates from the self of Jesus.

The centering process of silent prayer, he says, is the awakening of our own spirit to the Spirit of Jesus. It cannot be received like a packaged cd sent from outside. “Our awakening is, in itself, the awareness of our participation in the life of God, of God as the source of our personhood, the very power by which we are enabled to accept God’s gift of our being. It is therefore a free response, an utterly personal communication, a free acceptance.”

Imagine God’s delight when we receive this gift on this holy night mindfully, openly, appreciatively.

(The passage from Main comes from pages 45-46.)

II. Christmas Day

Readings for Christmas Day include Isaiah 52:7-10, Hebrews 1:1-4, and John 1:1-14

The four Gospels present the arrival of Jesus in two different ways. St. Luke and St. Matthew tell us the familiar Christmas story, with Luke providing most of the splendor. Luke tells of the birth of Jesus as if he were filming the event for viewing in 3-D. Without Luke, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas.

St. Mark and St. John don’t seem to know the story of Jesus’s birth. The first glimpse of him they give us is at his baptism, when he is a grown man. But about John’s version that we have heard today, it’s truer to say that the first way he speaks of our Lord is to present him as the Word, the Word of God, in one place we hear that this Word is God, at another that this is the divine Word of wisdom as if a personal presence accompanying God at the creation of the universe, the Word that in time becomes flesh, fully human, full of grace and truth. All this John gives us in the first 18 verses of chapter one, the Prologue. Without John, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas.

A prologue is an opening speech or poem spoken at the start of a play, setting the stage for the action. In competitive cycling, a prologue is a short time trial before a race, to identify a leader.

How does John’s majestic poem set the stage for his telling the big story of our leader Jesus?

This Word, this aspect of God’s nature that became flesh in Jesus, is not like the words that we use to speak to one another, or the words that we cannot find to express a mystery, or the words that endlessly lead to more words heaped word upon word in argument or fight or debate or research. The Word that becomes flesh cannot be the words that come pouring out of a singer’s mouth on our i-Pods, or tumble out of our High Definition TVs. Nor can the Word be like those words Jesus told his friends not to babble with, thinking that more or fancier or bigger or better words could influence God to hear them.

What this Word is we’ll find suggested in the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon, where what that writer calls Wisdom is described in a way we can imagine John nodding his head at in agreement. Here it is: “…a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, the image of God’s goodness.” (Wisdom 7:26, paraphrased)

Can we trust human words? In some cases, yes. When two people stand in the presence of their families and friends and declare their will to live together in the covenant of marriage, being faithful to the other as long as both shall live, they trust the integrity and intention of the words, “I will.”

When I know I’m not the one to complete a task that means the world to me and I give that task to someone else to do, I must trust that person’s word when she says, “I will do it.”

In my Advent reading of a little book by Benedictine Dom John Main, I was caught up in his description of what it means to trust. “To trust another is to renounce self and place your centre of gravity in the other.”

What Zen wisdom that is! In whatever trusting life calls on me to do, I don’t lend my hope to the person I’m trusting: I invest it, I give it over, and in that movement from my control to their control, I place my center of gravity in the other.

This is what Christmas calls us to do with God. And there is the heart of the Christian mystery. To be given Jesus is to be given not a crèche figure to hold, but the very life of Jesus who holds us, Jesus who is “the reflection of eternal light, the spotless mirror of the working of God, the image of God’s goodness.” To be given Jesus is to be given God, not ideas about God packaged as a creed to end the matter, but God to know and love and experience as the beginning and end of all our material being. God to trust, placing our center of gravity in God in that movement of self-control that is prayer, not to pray in a babbling of words but to pray without words, occupying silence because there we are saved from superstition about words and from cynicism about words. And there we find a personal inner balance, a spiritual self-control that emanates from the self of Jesus.

This is what Christmas calls us to do with God: to place our center of gravity in the most trustworthy Word. This is not an exercise in words: it is a wordless standing in the light, allowing perfect love to hold our off-centered hearts into centeredness, welcoming truth that awakens us to freedom, to love.

(The passage from Main is found on pages 45-46.)

III. Feast of the Holy Name

Readings for the Feast of the Holy Name includes Numbers 6:22-27, Galatians 4:4-7, and Luke 2:15-21

Last night, a wedding happened here. Elizabeth and Mikal made vows to each other, in the name of God and in the company of a hundred or so of their friends and family. Names were central to their entering the covenant of holy matrimony. First, I called them by name as I asked them to make their declarations of consent to have one another as husband and wife. Then they named each other as they made their vows to take and receive one another from that day forward, until they are parted by death.

Before naming the partner, each began his or her vow with the words, “In the name of God,” and then named himself or herself as the agent of the vow. Clearly, names are important to covenants that unite people.

And this day in the Christian year calls us to start the calendar year focused on the holy name of Jesus. We’re told that this name came to him not by Mary and Joseph thumbing through a book with a title like “What Shall We Name Our Baby?”, but by the archangel Gabriel announcing that headquarters had already chosen the name for this baby: Jesus.

Jesus is the English form of the latin Iesus, starting with an I, transliterating the Greek Iesou which gives us the abbreviated monogram that looks like IHS, the Greek e resembling an English lower-case h.

The original Hebrew form of the name was Joshua, or more fully Yehoshuah, a name that mean “God saves.” This name was pretty common in the 1st century. The historian Josephus, chronicler of the 1st century, mentions nineteen people named Jesus. While it’s natural for us to revere that name, the Spanish-speaking world is right not to have retired that number. Keeping Jesus in circulation as a popular name recognizes the fact that God selected a name just as down-to-earth as Henry, or Joe, or Samuel.

The readings we’re given today may be the shortest in the year. Aaron’s priestly blessing, the most ancient benediction we know, is described as the way to put God’s name upon the people. As you consider your own part in the priesthood of all believers, imagine what a whole new year gives you by way of opportunity to bless people you work with, live near, struggle with, admire, know well or barely know. Put God’s name on every person you face, and see how blessing flows, both ways.

Psalm 8, one of my favorites, sketches in awe the whole created order, complete with moon and stars, sheep and oxen, birds and fishes, exclaiming that God’s name is exalted in all aspects, all species, all spheres, all ecosystems, all climates, all continents. Encyclopedic and all-embracing is to be our comprehending love and active stewardship.

St. Paul weighs in, addressing God with a most intimate name, Abba, an Aramaic word meaning “father”, but some would say its meaning is closer to “Dad,” perhaps even “Daddy”, and is meant to be a term of endearment. Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Our Father…” (though the word there is the Greek “pater”). Writing to the Galatians, Paul says that God’s Spirit, moving so intimately in the human spirit, liberates us from slavery (whatever has us in its grip), frees us, changes our status to become children of God, heirs of God, bearers of God’s likeness.

My preaching this Christmas has been shaped by reading in Advent the little book “Word into Silence” by Dom John Main. It is a book about prayer, wordless silent prayer in which we turn our whole being towards the Other. He capitalizes the O in Other, as if giving God another important name.

Fully facing the otherness of God, he says, we develop our capacity to welcome the otherness of our neighbor. As we let God just be, so we learn to let our neighbor just be, not to manipulate her but rather to reverence her. For this reason, Main calls prayer “the great school of community.” In prayer, we discover “the true glory of Christian community as a fraternity of the anointed, living together in profound and loving mutual respect. Christian community is in essence the experience of being held in reverence by others and we in our turn reverencing them.” Some of us, on entering church, genuflect. Perhaps we should practice that towards one another, a sign of recognizing the holy in one another, in keeping with what Main is saying.

“This reverence for each other reveals the members of the community as being sensitively attuned one to the other on the wavelength of the Spirit, the same Spirit that has called each of us to fullness of love. In others I recognize the same Spirit that lives in my heart, the Spirit that constitutes my real self. In this recognition of the other person, a recognition that remakes my mind and expands my consciousness, the other person comes into being as he really is, in his real self, not as a manipulated extension of myself. He moves and acts out of his own integral reality and no longer as some image created by my imagination. Even if our ideas or principles clash, we are held in unison, in dynamic equilibrium, by our mutual recognition of each other’s infinite lovableness, importance, and essential unique reality.”

There’s a vision of church for the new year. There’s a conception of our baptismal covenant, from when the cross of Jesus was signed on our forehead naming us his. And there’s an understanding of how we practice the priesthood of all believers so as to bless all people we encounter, putting God’s name to worthy purpose.

(The passage from Main is found on pages 78-79 of “Word Into Silence”.)

Conveying the Treasure of God

2012-01-03T06:05:00.000-08:00

Scripture for the 4th Sunday of Advent includes II Samuel 7:1-11,16; Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38

The angel Gabriel is a busy fellow. Chief messenger of God, legend also claims that he is guardian of the celestial treasury. As such, I expect we can say that Gabriel is the patron saint of parish treasurers; but I would have thought that God might be above needing a treasury, so let’s take this legend as reminding us that Gabriel got to announce the transfer of God’s greatest treasure from heaven to earth, Jesus, the very Word and will and way of God.

That we have two archangels side by side, Gabriel and Michael, in the windows of our east aisle is intentional and serves the purpose of memorializing Amos Lawrence Hopkins, a Williamstown native who fought in the civil war (hence Michael, captain-general of the hosts of heaven and patron saint of soldiers). After the war, Hopkins became Administrator of Railroads for the entire country, a trustee of Williams College and a member of this parish’s first building committee. (So we can blame him—or give him credit.)

If Michael stands guard as a man of action memorializing another man of action, why is he paired with Gabriel? Remember that Hopkins was in charge of getting the trains to run on time. That takes money and communication, and both are said to be Gabriel’s turf.

While Michael is vested in red of sovereign power, violet of passion and suffering, and gold of sacredness, Gabriel is done out in blue, the Virgin Mary’s color and the color associated with truth, and he’s holding lilies, Mary’s flower. It’s as if his gig in Nazareth left its mark on him forever.

Before he announces to Mary the news that made her weak in the knees, Gabriel the truth-teller makes sure Mary is grounded in truth by reminding her, “The Lord is with you.” This anchors in truth what is being asked of Mary. God does not require without making able. Responsibility is met by grace and exceeded by grace, transforming what feels like obligation into what is privilege.

But Mary is human, entirely human, and Mary is young, very young, and the timing is all out of joint. Gabriel speaks suddenly of conceiving and bearing and birthing and naming, but at that very moment Mary is engaged but not yet wed, and far from settled. She’s temporarily a displaced person, thanks to the new tax program of Emperor Augustus that put families on the road to return to their ancestral towns for a census. Parents hearing the news of pregnancy usually rejoice and start imagining what color to paint the nursery. “We haven’t even slept together,” protests Mary.

And then… and then. Gabriel reaches into the treasure of God and teaches Mary to recognize how in this moment of truth it is up to her whether to spend her heart and soul on the debit side of the ledger, dwelling on all the impossibilities and finding all the reasons to resist what is asked of her, or to invest her heart and soul in the receipts side of the book of life and recognize all that is positive: the favor of God, the power to conceive, a son already named by God, a throne on which he will sit, the Holy Spirit who will work intimate power within her… for nothing will be impossible with God.

She makes her choice: “Here am I,” she exclaims, diving into the deep end of the pool of God’s treasure, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord. Let it be. Let it be… Let it be with me according to your word.” And with that assent the mystery of incarnation takes hold within her, and the history of redemption is written no more in the terms of law and its commands, but in the language of love unearned and undeserved, grace, the amazing movement of the treasure of God’s love through the womb of Mary.

The Christmas pageant we shall see this afternoon features a number of dwelling places: an inn where there is no room, another inn where Joseph and Mary hear of a poor substitute, the only vacancy remaining in Nazareth, a manger, a cattle shed (or, some would say, a cave). But the prime real estate at the heart of the pageant will be the place within Mary, the mansion her body makes for the Son of God. In her is fulfilled Nathan’s prophecy that we heard earlier, “…the LORD will make you a house…”

So our collect on this fourth and final Sunday of Advent asks God to wipe clean and sweep out and hose down our conscience, our ethical capacity, our moral vision, our reason for being, our mission purpose, that the real estate of our lives may become Jesus’s home.

May you and I and many be open, this Christmas, to the transforming love, the treasure, of God. And may this treasure free and spark our ethical energy, our moral vision, our faithful purpose, so that the earthen vessels of our lives convey divine treasure to this world.

Elemental Change

2011-12-01T09:13:00.000-08:00

Scripture for the 1st Sunday in Advent includes Isaiah 64:1-9, I Corinthians 1:3-9, and Mark 13:24-37

Our readings today are rich with images of transformation. Isaiah speaks of the visitation of God as if it were fire kindling dry wood, causing a pot of water to boil. God’s movement among us results in elemental change: chemical reaction ignites, physical states change, the unshakeable status quo is shaken, and no one is beyond being affected by what is beyond human expectation. All people may insist on their own ways, but all people are, says Isaiah, like clay on the wheel of a master potter, being shaped by a hand they do not see.

Mark’s Gospel shows Jesus foretelling fearsome transformation of our universe, everything we take for granted acting in opposition to what we expect: the sun to be darkened, and good night, moon! Stars will fall from their places, and the ordering of heaven will become a great swirling cataclysm, as God claps hands to, what, reverse the Big Bang? Clear the decks? However it’s described, this elemental change gathers from the four winds all of God’s people for the ultimate homecoming. And they must be awake and ready for that moment known only to God, or else they’ll miss it.

Which makes it sound as if there’s something God’s people must do at that moment. What is it?

Must they know a secret handshake? Have enough money? Own enough stuff? Know enough answers? Have accomplished enough… accomplishments? Been sufficiently generous?

No. According to Mark’s little parable, God’s people simply must hear the knock on the door signaling that the master of the house has come home and it’s time to throw open the door and welcome him.

That’s a good lesson for a baptismal Sunday. The elemental change that awaits Kimberly Rose this morning requires a pot of water, and the divine energy that touches it and will touch her is the spark of the Holy Spirit that will animate her transformation from being only a child of Eve and Adam (aka Ali and Mitch) into being more: child of God, member of Christ’s Body, inheritor of the kingdom of God.

And in line with Mark’s little parable, what qualifies Kimberly for this changed status that is so beyond human expectation? Nothing that she has done, and nothing that we will have done except to have heard the desire of God to pour out the abundance of divine love, amazing grace, upon this little girl, and to have co-operated with God to throw open the door of this moment for God to come home in her.

That is not where her transformation ends. It is where her elemental change begins. Yet, by the Church’s theology nothing more can ever qualify her for her place at the heavenly banquet. That place will have been set for all time and beyond. It will be for Kimberly to claim her place in the heart of God, and it will be for us, her family and her church family, to model for her what spiritual alertness is, what keeping awake is for, and what allows a good night’s sleep secure in the keeping of God.

These readings given to us to hear on the first day of a new season, Advent, deal in change and transformation. What do they give us for the journey through Advent?

Isaiah invites us to wait for God, because God works for those who wait for a keener timing than their own. This goes hand in glove with Mark’s parable, doesn’t it? Mark urges us to keep alert, keep awake as we experience two dimensions of time, one the kind a clock can measure—and in that kind of time we do the work and love the people we are given—while the other dimension of time is outside and beyond what a wrist watch can measure. It is from there that God works. To be sensitive to God’s time is the interest of both Isaiah and Mark. Mark announces that heaven and earth will pass away in the ticking-down of days and months and years, but the words of Jesus will not pass away. Though spoken once in ordinary time, they are spoken from the heart of God, from beyond time, and so the words of Jesus cradle us, nurse us, stimulate us to gladly do right and remember God in all our ways (to use Isaiah’s language). Our readings today give us the invitation—or is it the demand?—to read and ponder over and savor the Word of God in Advent. Little guide books are waiting for you today, on the back table, to help you do that.

On a day of baptism, we’re reminded of our crucial and central responsibility, to expose Kimberly to the words of Jesus who is the Word of God. On these few and fast days of Advent, we need reminding of how crucial and central it is to each of us that we expose ourselves to this Word, this same hearing of what Jesus says, so we may gladly do what Jesus does and be sensitive to all who knock on our doors in ordinary time, and be alert to the God who gives birth, aware of the shaping work of the master potter, and become more adept at recognizing the touch on our hearts of the one who owns the house we occupy.

Yearning for Unity

2011-11-21T09:33:00.000-08:00

Scripture for the Last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King Sunday, includes Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24; Ephesians 1:15-23; and Matthew 25:31-46

The most divided house in America, the United States Congress, was considering last week whether to approve a spending bill that will prevent a government shutdown. Buried in that thick document is one line that defines pizza as a vegetable. You know I’m not making this up. You know this not because of anything you know about me, but because of what we all know can happen in Congress.

The bill’s language would confirm current government policy, which is that two tablespoons of tomato paste spread on a slice of pizza constitutes one vegetable serving. The Department of Agriculture, pushing healthier food for children, has sought a stricter provision, that food must contain half a cup of tomato paste to qualify as a vegetable serving. A spokesman for the American Frozen Food Institute says that this would make it impossible for schools to serve pizza.

The director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, has offered her opinion that pizza ought to be served in school cafeterias with a vegetable, not count as one.

Jon Stewart had his way with this imbroglio: At a time when a congressional super-committee is supposed to be agreeing on spending cuts to the tune of a trillion dollars or more, what our divided government may be able to agree upon is… that pizza is a vegetable.

From another divisive setting, we heard this week that Morgan Management is suing the Town of Williamstown and the State Attorney General’s Office, asking the court to declare that the damage done by Tropical Storm Irene was an act of God.

Of these two astonishing developments, this one stuns me more.

If Irene was an act of God, goes the legal argument by the owners of The Spruces mobile home park, then an act of God has caused the mobile home park to cease. I’m not making that up, either. If the park has ceased, then Massachusetts law —which is extremely clear about the obligations of mobile home parks, inconveniently clear for Morgan Management-- Massachusetts law would no longer apply, and Morgan would be free to walk away from Williamstown with no further responsibilities to its tenants.

And one more painfully divisive experience was felt last week, this in the campus community to which we belong by more than neighborly affinity. Words of racial hatred were scrawled on a wall inside a Williams dormitory last weekend, generating a crisis which, thanks to bold initiatives and wise judgment by students and administration, has become the opportunity for truth-telling. Such incidents have happened before, and may happen again. But what may be unique about this one is that the moment was seized, classes cancelled, and 1500 campus members sat on Chapin lawn, allowing the truth-telling to sink deeper than usual, perhaps deeper than ever, and deep is where it must go to reach those depths where bias and learned hatred linger. A gentle drizzle anointed the crowd near the end of that historic gathering, as if heaven were trying to cleanse us all.

See how many instances of divisiveness can be found in our human community, constantly impinging on our daily life. We yearn for unity, long for what breaks down walls that separate us so we may find what binds us all together in perfect freedom and mutual responsibility. We’re hungry for the antidote to paralyzed government, social segregation, and poisonous words.

And along comes today’s Gospel, the summation of Matthew’s teaching about the return of Jesus Christ in glory to set right a world gone wrong. In recent weeks, he has reported several relevant parables of Jesus—wise and foolish bridesmaids whose one task is to be ready when the bridegroom comes, estate managers entrusted with the master’s wealth investing it well or poorly—and now he is done with parables that tease our minds, and instead spreads out before us an apocalyptic vision unlike any in the other Gospels. But, like the parables, this astonishing mural of the end divides people, sheep from goats, some rising to eternal reward, others being cast into the outer gulags of perdition.

Slim pickings for us who yearn for unity. What’s going on in all this division?

For one thing, the first-century church was pulled in two directions by the question, Where is Jesus? One answer is that he has ascended to heaven, and from there will come again to judge the living and the dead. This is the answer given by the gospel-writer Luke at the end of his Gospel. But there is no ascension in Matthew’s Gospel; rather, his closing scene has the eleven disciples gathered around Jesus on a mountaintop, where he tells them, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Jesus is here with us.

But as we see in today’s portion, Matthew crosses the aisle and agrees that there will be a day when Jesus returns to decisively complete his victory over the realm of evil. As year gave way to year and decade to decade, Matthew’s church yearned for something more than the quiet hiddenness of Jesus’s promised presence (had that come to feel like slim pickings?). Surely Christ’s definitive triumphant return would come in a way seen by all, and surely it would happen soon.

Matthew speaks of Jesus Christ as King, sitting on a glorious throne, from which he will admit the righteous to the kingdom of God, the reign of perfect justice they’d long prayed daily would come on earth as in heaven. Perfect justice, of course, is a very sharp sword; and what it will cut away is the demonic this-worldly tyranny of Jesus’s opponents, the counter-kingdom opposed to God’s reign. Listen to my favorite Methodist commentator, Eugene Boring:

“The two kingdoms that are confused and interwoven in the ambiguities of history now stand disclosed at the end of history. There are only these two kingdoms: the Son of Man with his angels and all the blessed righteous, and the kingdom of God prepared from eternity stand on one side; the devil and his angels, the accursed, and the destiny prepared for the devil and his own stand on the other. The kingdom of God is disclosed as the only true kingdom… ultimately only God is King.”

So welcome to Christ the King Sunday, the nickname of this last Sunday in the long season of Pentecost when it seems the Church has no more imagination than to keep numbering its Sundays after Pentecost—this year 23 of them—but oh yes, we must imagine.

Shaped by the realities of his time, Matthew imagined this cataclysmic end of history that would soon close the curtain on a culture of violence and greed, and throw open the long-veiled reign of God’s justice.

Two thousand years later, we can imagine cataclysmic endings, the human race having invented several ways to end life as we know it, one by nuclear technology harnessed to the cause of war, and one by toxic excess in the name of greed. We need to imagine God’s setting-right of a world gone wrong, and it isn’t hard to imagine that in order to unite the human race there must be divided from human community the counter-forces of racial hatred, violence, and greed.

But don’t give up on the pressing need to imagine a dénouement that frees people to find unity, rather than a judgment day that perpetuates division? How does Matthew’s vision of setting the world right help us 21st-century believers? There are three ways.

First, he reminds us that Jesus Christ is the basis for any setting-right that you and I are called to do. We hear that in all the titles of honor given him: Son of Man, Shepherd, Lord, King. And if we are to represent him faithfully in a world where people of other religions—and people of no religion—have different bases for the reconciling work they are called to do, we must remember and practice the basics: to treat others as we wish them to treat us, to be merciful peacemakers with pure hearts, and to act less as teachers and more as learners. All these are Jesus-traits that Matthew urges us to value and imitate, because Jesus Christ is the basis for the reconciling work we have to do.

Second, Matthew says something more astonishing than anything we have heard recently, and again I’ll let my Methodist commentator say it: In Matthew’s apocalyptic vision, God’s “criterion of judgment is not confession of faith in Christ. Nothing is said of grace, justification, or the forgiveness of sins. What counts is whether one has acted with loving care for needy people. Such deeds are not a matter of ‘extra credit,’ but constitute the decisive criterion of judgment… the ‘weightier matters of the Law.’” To say that Christ is King is to say that his ethics rule.

Third, Matthew makes his whole end-time vision depend on his deep belief that between first and second public appearances, Jesus Christ has never left us. The righteous have no idea that they have fed, welcomed, clothed, and visited him—but we must catch the point that he has been there all along, embedded in these least of our brothers and sisters, his brothers and sisters. Or is it more accurate to say that he is alive in the force-field of loving care between the righteous and the least; and he was there in the void between the self-absorbed and the least. One could even say, true to Matthew’s words, that Jesus Christ has been detained indefinitely among the poor and excluded, willingly and strategically imprisoned with the most vulnerable until the time comes for heaven to set things right on earth.

Isn’t it intriguing, this not-knowing, not-recognizing that shrouds Christ in anonymity? And this strange agnosticism is true equally for the righteous and for the self-absorbed and unresponsive. The first do not know what they have done, and the second have no clue what they have failed to do, until he comes again in public display, disclosing the hearts of all. And, until then, doesn’t that suggest the vocation of the Church, to hold him up so clearly that hearts do open?

We really must imagine what it will take to make right this world gone wrong. Here today, Matthew tells us. He seems to long for division of the human race, and this could cause us not to listen. But if we are to play our part and do what we can, what we must, to help people find their unity with one another and with God, we need Matthew’s wisdom.

And, in a nutshell, it is this: Jesus Christ is our basis for action. Action is required. Self-giving love is that action, and Jesus Christ is right there, in the giving and the receiving.

(M. Eugene Boring’s commentary on Matthew in volume 8 of “The New Interpreter’s Bible” was useful in the preparation of this sermon.)

Investing Well

2011-11-21T09:03:00.000-08:00

Scripture for the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost includes Judges 4:1-7; I Thessalonians 5:1-11; Matthew 25:14-30

I realize that our collect says that all holy scripture has been written for our learning, but I have no idea what to do with that portion of the Book of Judges. It introduces us to Deborah, a prophetess who functioned as one of the great judges of ancient Israel. I’d thought at first that this passage might be setting us up for a series of readings about her, but not so. It’s a one-off reading that must have depths I haven’t plumbed and applications I haven’t imagined, but darned if I know where to go with it.

Our psalm, however, has a certain currency to it. “…for we have had more than enough of contempt, Too much of the scorn of the indolent rich, and of the derision of the proud.” That sounds as if it comes straight from the Occupy Wall Street movement. I’d judge the popularity rating of that sharp-edged verse at about 99%...maybe 100.

It’s an interesting companion piece to Matthew’s parable of the talents. On the face of it, there’s something cold and steely about this parable, enough to make me wish I could avoid dealing with it. But I’ve struck out on Judges and haven’t found St. Paul’s words to the Thessalonians ringing my bells, so let’s see what we find in this parable.

Rather than re-trace it from the get-go, let’s visit the bottom line. Three estate managers have been handed portions of a wealthy man’s property, to invest and trade upon while he takes the grand tour. He has judged how much to entrust to each, based on their working history. I presume that the one surprise this keen capitalist had on his return was to discover that the fellow he trusted least, the manager from whose skills he expected least, under-performed even the low water mark of their working history.

The Bible commentator tells us that a talent is a large sum of money. Do you have a calculator on your smart phone? Take the wages of a day laborer (let’s say it’s minimum wage, $7.25 an hour, so multiply that by eight hours: $58.00) then multiply that by fifteen years of daily labor (a Jew would not work on the Sabbath, so let’s say six days a week would yield $348.00, multiply that by 52 weeks and we have $18,096, multiply that by 15 and behold, a talent on our terms might be in the neighborhood of $271,440.00. That’s serious money.

I’ve got to say that this story reminds me of our last Finance Committee meeting here in the parish. We have a very sharp committee, and they’ve wisely diversified, placing the management of the parish’s longterm assets in several sets of hands. And there’s one that keeps underperforming. Though I can easily picture us indulging in some judgmental language, I’m not sure we’d go so far as to call that manager wicked and lazy, and I’m positive that, even if the committee decides to remove parish assets from his stewarding, they won’t expect to throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

So what’s with the intensity of the master? Where does all this feeling come from?

From the start, don’t we know that this parable is going to speak about something beyond its literal terms, that while the story is cast in the language of estate management, it’s really about something more, much more. Jesus tips his hand right at the outset, “The kingdom of heaven will be like this…” he says.

And isn’t it intriguing that the word “talent” should carry more than its weight in gold? The commentator tells us that this double meaning wasn’t there in the first century— that stands to reason, since the coincidence occurs in English, not in Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek. As a result of the wide circulation of this story, the word “talent” came into the English language in the Middle Ages as a term meaning God-given abilities, gifts, graces. In the first century, the talents in this story were money on the barrelhead.

But that doesn’t mean that money, wealth, investment, stewardship in this parable represent financial or commercial property. A parable is always an earthly story with a heavenly meaning; or, as the great Bible scholar C. H. Dodd puts it,

“At its simplest, the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.” (C. H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom)

Any Bible scholar would urge us to notice the context in which the Gospel-writer, Matthew in this case, locates the parable. We’re right on the heels of last Sunday’s parable of the ten bridesmaids, which we saw addressing not so much wedding customs as the second coming of Jesus Christ in glory to set right a world gone wrong.

That’s the immediate neighborhood of today’s parable, and it is where it is because Matthew wants his hearers to wrestle with a hard question: In the between-time after our Lord’s first coming and before his return, what ought good and faithful believers be doing with their lives?

A divided first-century church, under pressure of persecution by Roman imperial forces, may have made several answers to Matthew. Some thought what mattered was being theologically correct and pure in that waiting time, keeping your hands clean and your eyes on the prize. Some may have had little idea how to wait for God’s final act on the world stage except to be passive and cautiously watch what happened, but disengaged and in a place of hiding. And some were positive that faithfulness meant strict obedience to the clear instructions of the law and the prophets, following the old rules regardless of all the flux and flow of severe change all around. But there’s yet one other answer that some Christians would make.

Before going there, let’s be sure we’ve been adequately teased. What is that enormous wealth which the master has entrusted to us stewards?

It isn’t money. Remember what can happen to IRAs and endowments, and recognize that this wealth that Jesus bestows upon us is not fragile or fickle or flimsy: it has an eternal weight of glory about it, it is kept in the heart and not in the bank, it grows not by hoarding it but by giving it, putting it to use. We have been given the contents of the vaults of heaven, the love that will not let us go, the hope of eternal life, wisdom that teaches us to sing in harmony with God, unlimited partnership with God in the new creation. We’ve been given certainty and confidence in our place at the table of perfect community. Sacraments, scriptures, prayer, mission, passion, eternity.

What are we to do with this wealth as we await the return of Christ in glory? The one other remaining answer made by many in that first century world was to exercise responsibility, take initiative, run risk that would help God establish the priority of Jesus’s love, Jesus’s values, Jesus’s radical and iconoclastic egalitarianism right here and now on earth as in heaven. Such is what this parable shows two of three stewards doing, and being affirmed for doing, while one is reamed-out for what he has allowed fear and anxiety to do to him, to his freedom and his integrity. Each manager has been free to decide how to use the gift of time and opportunity during the master’s absence, how to live in his stead, by his vision; and yet just two of these three have claimed that freedom and made decisions. The third has dug a hole, a grave, and tried to bury in it the way, the truth, and the life.

But he has apparently never accepted these powers, these gifts, as his. Hear how he blames the master for his own problem of fear. He hasn’t discovered the inner nature of gift and opportunity that animates the new life of grace: “Here you have what is yours,” he grumbles, unaware of what is his own.

We could still ask, why the intensity, the deep feeling that the master expresses, banishing this third steward to outer darkness. And a responsible handling of the Word of God most likely requires us to test the spirit of such rejection and exclusion. Is this the spirit of the kingdom of God? Or might it be the partisan spirit that a divided society can display when leaders don’t lead, the anger that surfaces when some try so hard and others walk away from their responsibilities?

Have we been teased enough by this parable? Enough to see a symbolic case study in the creation not of financial capital, but of social and spiritual capital? Teased enough to ask ourselves what we are generating for God, for the world, for the kingdom of Christ, from the vast wealth that has been entrusted to us?

(M. Eugene Boring’s commentary on Matthew in “The New Interpreter’s Bible”, volume 8, was helpful in preparing this sermon.)

Controversies, Round Three

2011-10-27T06:54:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 19th Sunday after Pentecost includes Deuteronomy 34:1-12; I Thessalonians 2:1-8; and Matthew 22:34-46

Last Sunday, it was taxes. Today, it appears to be philosophy. In that first controversy, the question was whether it was lawful for an observant believer in God to pay taxes to the emperor (who thought he was God). Here, the question is which commandment—not out of the ten, but out of the 613 that composed the legal system of Israel in Jesus’s day—which was greatest.

In-between these two controversies occurred another that we don’t get to hear, in this year’s unfolding of Matthew. That one was engineered by the Sadducees, a Jewish sect of wealthy landowners who were conservative souls for whom only the Torah, only those first five books of the Bible, carried canonical authority. Pharisees believed that God was revealing both divine nature and divine agenda progressively, gradually over the centuries—a rather modern view. Not so the Sadducees, whose controversial question for Jesus was a conundrum about a woman whose husband died, whereupon his brother dutifully married her (in keeping with Torah), and when he died his next brother married her, and on it went through all seven brothers. When she died, whose wife would she be in heaven? Behind that testy question lurked the Sadducees’ resistance to believing there is a heaven (they accused the liberal Pharisees of dreaming up that newfangled idea), and their enshrining of the law which included a provision that a brother should marry his own brother’s widow.

Today we observe the third in Matthew’s series of controversies. Each has a potentially toxic question, meant to trap Jesus into making an unfortunate public statement—the kind that get made in American presidential primary debates—which could then be used against him, as also happens in American presidential primaries. Each of these controversies shows Jesus to be a master of ju-jitsu, using the incoming force to unbalance his adversaries, harnessing the moment to press his own message.

If the Roman coin has the Roman emperor’s face on it, it’s already his, so let him have it. Pause. And give to God what belongs to God.

That poor woman is no one’s wife in heaven: in the resurrection, everyone belongs to God, no one is defined by their earthly relationships. She is herself in the resurrection, precious to God.

And which commandment in the law is the greatest? In all these controversial questions, Jesus is being tempted to play a win-lose game, allowing his interrogators’ either-or way of thinking to dictate his response. Jesus takes this exclusionary thinking and flips it to demonstrate best religious practice: the inclusive win-win approach of both-and thinking.

“’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment.”

Pause.

“And a second is of identical weight and priority: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang (depend, swing) all the law and the prophets.”

What’s going on here was brought home to me by reading Miroslav Volf’s new book, “Allah: A Christian Response” in which this Yale theologian answers a contemporary controversial question: Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?

Carefully, in rewarding explorations of both religious traditions, he builds his answer, which is Yes. What’s to be admired about his approach is his insistence that worship primarily occurs outside sanctuaries. Jesus’s summary of the law that we hear in today’s Gospel defines worship, locates worship, as happening in our neighborhoods and among our global neighborhoods. Volf applies a bit of ju-jitsu himself as he gets us asking his question, “Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?” realizing that “worship” simultaneously speaks to the realms of prayer and liturgy, on the one hand, and the domain of ethics and behavior, on the other—as two hands of one body.

And it is in the category of behavior and moral vision that Volf reminds his reader that Jesus commands his followers to love their enemies. He finds that message in the Qur’an as well, but he does not dance around Islam’s sharper edges, posing the question whether loving the enemy is equally central to both religions.

But to call that great challenging command central to Christianity is to have to admit that there is theory and there is practice, the two often poles apart.

And so as not to leave Judaism out of the picture, let’s recognize that this morning’s passage from Deuteronomy, while sounding like a graphic travelogue, is actually the geography of hostile takeover. The promised land is also the stolen land, the vanquished land, and while the Hebrew Bible presents the story in terms of God fulfilling his covenant promises, a point of view that Christianity has by and large agreed with, we can be certain that Arab Christians will not swallow that sugar-coated version of history.

Which is to say that all three Abrahamic faiths have lots to answer for. And the answering the world requires, the answering that God requires, will be demonstrated by obedience to that second commandment, the one that calls us to love our neighbors as ourselves, even when, especially when, they are also our enemies. This is where we show who is the God we worship.

Such love, reaching across battlefields and checkpoints, broken families and shattered economies, divided nations and conflicted loyalties, can move and have its being only because such love is God in action among us and through us. “Almighty and everlasting God,” we prayed in our collect, “Increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and charity (“caritas”, the love that must show itself); and, that we may obtain what you promise, make us love what you command.”

Are your spiritual practices—are mine—opening us to these gifts, these powers of God?

Are we open to our worship of God calling us, equipping us, requiring us, to love and do what God commands, in the neighborhoods of the one world our one human race occupies?

Raising Our Sights

2011-10-20T14:23:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 18th Sunday after Pentecost includes Exodus 33:12-23; I Thessalonians 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-22

Treachery seeps out from these few verses of today’s Gospel. The Pharisees represent the established church of their day. They claimed to be champions of God, but if you’ve read this far in Matthew you know that the Pharisees have already decided that Jesus must be put to death. All the nice things they say as they cozy up to Jesus cannot hide the truth; they are remembered as being agents of evil. They appear to seek our Lord’s wisdom and to welcome dialogue with him, but in fact they are spiders weaving webs of words to trap Jesus into making unfortunate public statements that will be used against him.

The issue they pick is just as controversial today as it was twenty centuries ago: taxes. Specifically, a census tax, a head tax imposed by the Roman emperor in the year 6 of the Common Era, when Judea became a Roman province. Over the next sixty years, this tax—insidious because it taxed a person simply for being, for breathing, for walking the earth in a certain place—this tax fanned the flames of nationalism that would erupt in the Zealot movement that ignited the disastrous war of the years 66-70, when the Roman army sacked Jerusalem, obliterated the great Temple, viciously stamped out resistance, reoriented Judaism from the sacrificial cult of the Temple to a religion observed in the safety of the home, and dispersed the early Christians to the four points of the compass.

As Matthew sets the scene, there are Pharisees and Herodians present in this encounter with Jesus. Herodians were open supporters of the Roman rule of Judea, and paid the tax willingly. Pharisees were crowd-pleasers, in principle resenting and resisting the tax—but not to the extent of public resistance like that of the radical nationalists, the Zealots. By having two of these three parties present, Matthew sets the stage for doubling the likelihood that Jesus will put his foot into quicksand. By having the Herodian tax-advocates present, we may hear the suspicion that Jesus would put his foot down in the camp of the Zealots and urge tax-resistance. He surprises them all.

The Roman tax could be paid only with Roman coin. That’s where the rub came for the Pharisees: on that coin was the image of the emperor, and an inscription that made the emperor sound as if he were divine. Pharisees and Zealots found that blasphemous.

Jesus seems coolly detached from all the hubbub about images and inscriptions. He asks for a Roman coin because he doesn’t have one. Look who does: one of the Pharisees. There is the moment of truth, and we might miss it. It’s the Pharisees who make a public pitch bemoaning this tax and that blasphemous tax coinage, but it is the Pharisees who have the coins in their pockets. They are part of the establishment. They are on the take, supported by state sponsorship. Jesus calls them hypocrites and in that instant proves his point when he asks them to show him the money.

Jesus doesn’t have a coin like this in his pocket. He’s holding a foreign object as he asks, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” “The emperor’s,” they answer.

“Well, then, it’s already his, so let him have it.”

Pause.

“And let God have the things that belong to God.” Already they belong to God, so let God have them. In the words of a hymn, “All things are thine, no gifts have we, Lord of all gifts, to offer thee; and yet with grateful hearts today thine own before thy feet we lay.”

The Pharisees and Herodians want to weave their web out of talk about taxes. Jesus uses their fixation as a springboard to higher, deeper, keener stewardship. Just as Jesus proves himself master of this situation of malicious encounter, so he teaches us not to be victims of circumstance, but to aim higher and deeper, determine our allegiance to what we do believe and value, not sink in the mire of blame and criticism and complaint.

What is it we say, There are only two sure things, death and taxes? But isn’t it clear that Jesus calls us not to live down to the lowest common standard of what we’re obligated to give, but to live up to our own best standard of what we want to give?

No, he doesn’t offer clearcut guidance. He raises our sights. He sets us free to decide, beyond what we’re against, what we’re for-- and to behave in keeping with what matters most.

What are they not protesting? That question has been asked about demonstrators in scores of locations around our country in the movement known as Occupying Wall Street.

At the corner of Wall and Broadway in Manhattan stands Trinity Church. The Rev. Daniel Simons, priest for liturgy, hospitality, and pilgrimage at that parish, has walked through the protestors’ encampment daily. Listen to his comments: The protestors “are choosing extreme action to make a point. They are the injured knee with torn ligaments that is screaming in unbearable, inarticulate pain. The knee doesn’t know how to fix its tear, but it knows how to draw attention to a problem that affects the whole (body). They have drawn attention by the means they have.”

Every so often, thanks to social networking, larger demonstrations happen. If the encamped protestors appear a bit raggedly disorganized and drifty, Simons observes how normal the participants appear in these larger demonstrations. “There are students and teachers and priests and ironworkers and office workers. They actually have a pretty clear and focused message: There are deep but resolvable cracks in our system of governance, which has artificially rigged the possibility of extreme profit at the expense of the greater good. The most articulate spokesmen identify a single, most pressing need for action…” which is federal regulation to restore firewall between investment banks and commercial banks, preventing investment banks in the future from gambling with their depositors’ money held in commercial banks created by those investment firms.

Wherever is this sermon going, you may wonder. The screaming knee that Fr. Simons observes daily in his neighborhood is drawing attention to what we’re all aware of, what we’re all affected by, and what most of us are waiting for Someone to do something about—and the bottom line is that we have as a society abdicated responsibility which we must reclaim. This reminds me of what we see in today’s Gospel: Jesus raising our sights, calling us to decide what we are for, modeling for us how spiritual clarity lets flow the energy by which evil may be mastered.

Remember how sharply divided the people are in that Gospel: divisions among Herodians, Pharisees, nationalists, and Jesus-followers appear headed toward explosive controversy.

In many American parks and public squares, a them-and-us kind of thinking appears in the protestors’ chant, “We are the 99 percent!” If that’s “us”, then “they” are the profiteering one percent whom we can blame for making us suffer. And where will that approach get us?

Not very far, says Fr. Simons. “We are all complicit in creating (and resolving) what ails us… We are the 100 percent.”

Jesus reveals how God sees in human beings their radical equality. Though the Pharisees are hypocrites and flatterers, they are right when they say that Jesus teaches the way of God in accordance with truth, shows deference to no one, and does not regard people with partiality. They discover how right their estimation of him is only when they are sent away shaking their heads in amazement.

One last word from Fr. Simons: “I write and preach regularly that in God's economy there is only an ‘us,’ and whenever we fall back to us-and-them thinking, we are contributing to a powerful but failed system that Jesus came to tip into collapse. Jesus in his Resurrection, steps beyond death and creates a new dimension. There is no retribution for his killers, how could there be? – he has just stepped into larger life where the only message can be: ‘Come on, join in the party.’ Any act of scapegoating-- it's their fault; this one is to blame -- feeds the old death-bound beast. Making something new is making something together - receiving something together from a God who gives all.

And one last word from me. Jesus does not explain how to draw a line between our allegiance (our trust, our support) that we are obliged to give to civil government and our allegiance to God. Jesus does not explain how we are to distinguish between what belongs to Washington and Boston, and what belongs to God. Jesus expects us to give to God in ways that bear the likeness of God: generously, freely, sacrificially, without complaint, and for the good of the whole “us” loved radically by God.

(I found M. Eugene Boring’s commentary on Matthew helpful in preparing this sermon; it’s found in volume 8 of “The New Interpreter’s Bible. Fr. Daniel Simons’s comments were published by Episcopal News Service.)

The Basics: Water, Spirit, Honesty

2011-09-29T07:33:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 15th Sunday after Pentecost includes Exodus 17:1-7; Philippians 2:1-13; Matthew 21:23-32

What is more basic to life than water? You might hear that question rising from our first reading—and from the daily news, national and international (even extra-terrestrial, as we keep looking for evidence of water on the moon as an indicator of life).

Migrating Israelites were looking for water to slake their thirst during their long seasons and years of wandering in the wilderness, searching for a new homeland. Thirst, profound thirst, did not bring out the best in them. Leaving Egypt, these Hebrew refugees had had a uniquely profound experience of water: as our psalm announces, God “split open the sea and let them pass through; God made the waters stand up like walls.” At that moment they knew without a doubt that God was with them.

But we witness a different moment in today’s portion from Exodus. These were not avid campers. These were folks who liked hot and cold running water. These were people many of us can relate to. They even asked a very modern question, “Is the Lord among us or not?”, indicative of how hard a pendulum can swing from facing too much water and so much grace all at once, to facing the absence of water and a strong sense of abandonment on a march through the desert. Even religious faith appears to hang on what’s in your canteen at the moment.

In this story of the migration of God’s chosen people, God keeps accommodating their needs, but only when those needs reach the proportion of crisis. It’s as if first the President must declare a federal disaster, then FEMA moves in. But in this story, the President, Moses, feels even more helpless than his people. They’re an organized mob. He’s surrounded by their anger. He’s the one who now most must behave as if the Lord is among them. He cries out to God, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me!”

There’s a passage that evokes sympathy for presidents.

The back-story in Exodus is how God loves Moses. God may have a demanding way of showing that love, but greater than the burdens placed by God on the shoulders of Moses is the power, the grace, the spirit with which God endows him. So at this critical moment God prompts Moses to surround himself with some of the elders of Israel (not to go it alone) and to lead that angry crowd to a certain rock at Horeb. “Take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing in front of you. Strike the rock, and let the people find evidence that I am among them.” There and then, as the psalmist sings, “God gave them drink as from the great deep.”

A legend sprang up among later rabbis, how that rock followed the Hebrew people throughout the rest of their journey. Perhaps they meant the memory of it never left them, but the tale they told for imaginative refreshment was that the rock went with them: a wonderful sacramental answer to the peeving question, “Is God with us or not?”

And if you think that’s an astonishing legend, you should hear what St. Paul makes of it in one of his letters: “And the rock was Christ!” I’m not making that up. That is what Paul said, perhaps his way of declaring that Jesus Christ is the living water of God, constant in its flow to keep alive the wandering, the thirsty, all whose resources are dried up.

May countless Somali refugees, fleeing drought and famine, find him with them in their desert migration. And victims of drought in the American Southwest, their homes in ashes after wildfires, may they find him in their desert.

Meanwhile, we in the Northeast are awash as rivers rise and super-saturated air shows us what monsoons can do to a settled way of life. If three days without water can kill a person, one day of a tropical storm making landfall can devastate the vulnerable parts, the vulnerable people, of a community.

What is more central to life than water? Spirit. That is one truth we discover, after a disaster. When a river overflows its banks, neighboring victims experience a flooding of anxiety, a drowning of hope, a washout of energy, the components of depression. As spirit sinks in people whose homes were submerged, the supportive spirit of the wider community helps carry them.

This is what St. Paul talks about when he writes to the church at Philippi, in a different crisis, a time of persecution when the emperor’s men imprisoned and executed Christians who refused to treat the emperor as if he were a god and not a man. Listen to the simple but powerful dimensions of spirit that Paul names and commends among the Philippians: encouragement… consolation… love… sharing…compassion… sympathy…unity… humility… By these spiritual powers a community comes together, people look beyond their own interests to the interests of others. As if defying gravity, people learn to regard what is best in others, what unites them, not separates them. A common mind emerges, and it is one of self-emptying service; it is the mind of Christ.

This is not only Paul’s experience in the first century: it is ours in this community in this 21st century, on the heels of a hurricane.

More central to life than water is spirit. But our hierarchy of values is not yet complete. We take Jesus’s little parable to heart: Honesty is also central to life.

Jesus turns the tables on an argumentative gaggle of clergy in the temple. They try to corner him into naming the authority by which he heals and teaches. What are your credentials, they ask him. Who gave you this authority?

He replies to their question with one of his own. It is designed to put them in a bind. His question takes them right into the muddy waters of the Jordan River. He has stood there, but they have not. Countless other people have stood there, experiencing the baptism of John the Baptizer, an open-air ethical-spiritual revival movement that would have given those temple clergy the heebie-jeebies. But now, when Jesus asks these establishment figures whether John baptized by divine authority or just by his own will, these men cannot answer Jesus. They don’t believe for a moment that God would utilize the outspoken loose-cannon unordained likes of John the Baptist—but they won’t say so in public because they fear alienating the residents of Jerusalem and Judea, in whose eyes John was popular.
When these men refuse to answer Jesus, he refuses to answer them.

But he does tell them a parable, a pithy little story designed to tweak their imagination enough to wonder what he meant by it.

Two sons of one father. The father approaches one son and orders him to work in the family vineyard. “I will not,” this first son sasses back; but later he changes his mind and goes to work.

Then the father says the same to the other son. “I go, sir,” he answers, but he does not go.

“Which of these boys does the will of his father?” asks Jesus. “ The one who contradicts his father but then acts to honor his will, or the one who claims to honor his will but never acts?”

That’s easy, answer the temple clergy, “The first.” But it’s not so easy, is it? Of what does honesty consist? Action, not talk. Remember the touchstone question of Micah the prophet:

“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 tens of 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

A similar message is remembered on the lips of the prophet Amos:

“Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
--Amos 5:23-24

Jesus drives home his point. Honesty is the paramount value of the spirit, honesty is required in the kingdom of God. But Jesus finds more honesty among tax collectors and prostitutes than among the established religious community.

It takes honesty to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, placing of first importance what matters most, letting go of the rest. It takes honesty to recognize our need for God. And honesty to recognize that God is at work in us, making us able to see and make our best choices, avoiding the worst. Perhaps that gives us a working definition of honesty: It is the courage to choose what is best, what is true.

Honesty is of paramount importance now as our nation struggles with recession, as too many leaders appear to be bent on trapping one another in corners, turning tables on one another—even at the expense of such urgent business as funding FEMA.

Honesty is needed in this community as we come to terms with what is happening at The Spruces—for mobile homeowners to discern what is in their own best interest, for Morgan Management to come to fair terms with respect to their own future and the future of the residents, and for our wider community to recognize how best to support Spruces residents, and respond to the urgent need for additional affordable housing that is both adequate and safely located.

It may be that we feel like the psalmist who cried, “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck!” But we are here today to affirm that Jesus Christ is the living water of God, constant in its flow to keep alive the thirsty, to renew all who think their resources are dried up, to support us all and teach us how to carry one another.

Letting Grace Rule

2011-09-21T07:38:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 14th Sunday after Pentecost includes Exodus 16:2-15; Philippians 1:21-30; Matthew 20:1-16

When was the last time you were queued up in a long line, and someone cut ahead of you?

How did you react?

At the Post Office, it’s a small thing… at least if there are two clerks behind the counter, I wouldn’t lose more than a minute or two of my day. I could handle that.

But what if, at the end of the line, there isn’t enough to go around? What if everyone in line believes there’s free beer (or a limited number of something even more desirable), to the first however-many reach that counter? What if it’s Black Friday at Best Buy? Or the customer service desk at Delta Airlines, after a cancelled flight?

Then we might see some passion stirred, anxiety felt, and anger rising—as happens in our Lord’s parable of the laborers in the vineyard. More accurately, it is a parable of a generous landowner. We’ll get there in a few moments, but at first blush it looks like there’s more heat to be had if we get in line with those workers.

The early-birds have put in a full day’s work, bearing “the burden of the day and scorching heat,” and it was with a strong work ethic and a keen sense of how much they could earn that day that they had set their alarm clocks to get them out on that street corner, ready for the landowner’s first drive-by in his pick-up truck.

Imagine their shock when they witness the last shift, the johnny-come-latelies who hadn’t shown up until five o’clock in the afternoon, called out first to get paid, and get paid the very same wage that the early-birds had computed on their pocket calculators! “What is happening here?” they ask one another. “Are we going to receive more than we expected?”

When they do not—when they receive the same wage, each and every shift the same wage—their shock turns to anger. Shift by shift that anger grew as they saw no discrimination: each was paid the same. And when the first crew received their wages, they grumbled against that landowner. You bet they did. What screwy kind of way was this to do business?

Here’s where we’d better recognize that this parable is primarily about the landowner, not so much the workers. “I am doing you no wrong,” he says to the early-birds. “Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last (shift) the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”

Feel the heat as the lesson of this parable is taught: “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” As often as we’ve heard that saying, and recognized it as somehow central to Jesus’s message, and perhaps admired it as being about justice… have we appreciated how painful a lesson this can be?

At the same time, this landowner had it in mind to ease the pain of the last shift. Who were those who were last? “Because no one has hired us,” they answer, when the landowner asks, “Why are you standing here idle all day?”

They are unemployed. Not lazy sleep-abeds… they’ve been at that street corner all day, waiting for their chance, daring to believe (even at five p.m.) that there might be an opportunity, and they’re ready to take it. That approach to job-hunting may seem passive to us, but in those days (as is still the case in many places in our own country) day laborers gather at certain street corners in what is truly a buyer’s market. Taken simply (and parables are meant to be taken simply), they were unemployed through no fault or shortcoming of their own. There just weren’t enough jobs. And not enough landowners who cared to go out of their way to give workers a break.

Why did they need a break? Beyond the unemployment rate, were there more reasons? It’s still taking the parable simply to imagine certain age-old factors: that this last shift included some who were physically or mentally challenged, some who didn’t speak the dominant language, some who couldn’t provide a proper form of identification, some who were very young, some who were old. Some forms of discrimination just don’t change much, do they?

At the heart of this parable is a landowner who is generous. He is not capricious: every single one of those workers went home adequately paid in keeping with the handshake made upon hiring. No, that approach would never agree with union guidelines; and that’s because there’s a higher passion at work in this story than the power of earning. The power of grace is pulsing through this parable.

The Prayer Book defines grace as “God’s favor towards us, unearned and undeserved.” There’s the rub, there’s the source of the heat in this parable: the arithmetic of grace is not the calculation of earning. The landowner is a champion of grace. The landowner is God. And when you queue-up at God’s table, there is enough to go around to all. There is abundance.

Our Sunday menu of readings often shows us how the scriptures speak to one another. Today that story from Exodus, manna from heaven, quails falling into the stewpots of starving refugees, drives home the nature of God as we meet God in the Bible: generous, gracious, merciful, passionately devoted to finding the lost and saving the endangered.

With that in mind, our parable asserts that it is the power of grace, not the power of earning, that makes the Kingdom of God go ‘round. Christian Socialist Vida Dutton Scudder said it ever so much more elegantly and boldly. Writing before and after the first World War, she scolded American Christianity for carelessly depending on a generally affectionate God and practicing “a domestic religion… calculated to make life pleasant in the family circle—but curiously at ease in Zion,” by which she meant avoiding all agonies of social conscience and all agonies of the inward life.

In 1894, as a brand-new professor at Wellesley College, Scudder attempted (with little success) to stir up the faculty to protest a large gift from the Rockefeller family because it was tainted money, gotten through unjust competition and unfair labor practices. She put the Episcopal Church (and Wellesley) on notice that her agenda for the Church and for the Academy was to move people beyond philanthropy and beyond social reform, and on to social transformation, changing the structures of society that cause poverty. In Vida Scudder’s view, everyone needs transformation: socialists and capitalists, religious and atheist, workers and landowners.

It’s customary to understand today’s parable as talking about religious transformation. The early shifts represent the law and the prophets, the last shift are the johnny-come-latelies of the Jesus movement, the parable showing an evolution that brought even non-Jews to the abundance of God’s table. But for Scudder, this wouldn’t be enough. This wasn’t where she felt the heat of our Lord’s teaching. His gospel must speak to present-day society.

And any attempt at transformation that would apply Christian principles to social and industrial and political life, limited only to a spiritual sphere, would contradict the sacramental philosophy of Christianity. Hear her own words: “The very point of the great truths radiating from the Incarnation (of God in Jesus Christ) is that one harmonious law runs through all spheres of being, wherever the grace of God controls the world; and since our business is to regulate earthly dealings by this divine law, we have no right to deny economic significance to this parable (of the landowner and the workers in his vineyard).”

I take her to mean that we are obligated to labor on so as to make sure that the last are put first, even at the expense of a good deal of grumbling by the first as they get asked to pay higher taxes and to reconsider why they need more of a daily wage than do the poor. And that the last should be put first is not a matter of allowing them to cut in line: it is a matter of ushering them to the front of the line. It is a matter of stitching up the many holes we’ve torn in the safety net that Vida Scudder and her generation stirred this nation to create in the last century.

That’s the kind of talk that generates heat and pain, isn’t it? Without that, thinks Scudder, there will be no transforming of anyone.

I want you to hear one more passage of her own thought, this from her 1921 book “Social Teachings of the Christian Year”: “We are not allowed to forget that our industrial system virtually says, Cursed are the poor, Cursed are the meek… Christian manufacturers, instead of giving unto the last as unto the first, are likely to buy their labor as cheap as they can get it, and are often disposed to fight a living wage to the finish… The permanent contradiction between Christian morals and world morals is a puzzle, and a permanent disgrace.”

Our parable today, being timeless, is perfectly well-timed to be heard in a great and global recession, and well-suited to be considered in a presidential election year. At its heart is the one harmonious divine law that with God, grace rules; and our obligation is to see that it does—to run our shop, school, parish, family, personal life in ways that emulate the landowner’s commitment to engage and advance all who need a break, emulating the practice of generosity that starts in the abundance of God and causes us to recognize that in addition to the bottom lines of profit and losses there is in business a third bottom line: responsibility for transforming society, letting grace rule.

(Vida Scudder's words are cited in Richard H. Schmidt's "Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,2002. Schmidt's essay on Scudder was useful in the preparation of this sermon.)

Shattering of Illusions

2011-09-13T06:26:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 13th Sunday after Pentecost includes Exodus 14:19-31; Romans 14:1-12; and Matthew 18:21-35. This Sunday marked the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

"O God, Our Hearts Were Shattered"

A hymn written for the tenth anniversary of 9/11

“O God, our hearts were shattered On that horrendous day;
We heard the news and gathered To grieve and then to pray.
We cried to you and wondered, "Where did the violence start?"
The world as we had known it Had just been torn apart.
We heard of those who perished — Of heroes' sacrifice.
We paused again to cherish The gifts of love and life.
We worried for the future; We hugged our loved ones then.
We cried, "Can peace be found here?" "We can't let terror win!"
Some sought to answer terror The only way they knew —
With anger toward the stranger And calls for vengeance, too.
Yet this is not your answer, Nor what you would create.
May we live toward a future Where love will conquer hate.
God, give us faith and wisdom To be your healing hands;
Give open minds that listen To truth from all your lands.
Give strength to work for justice; Grant love that casts out fear.
Then peace and not destruction Will be the victor here.”
- Carolyn Winfrey Gillette

“O God, our hearts were shattered.” They really were. In those first moments, newscasters speculated that perhaps it was a small plane that had hit the first tower, perhaps a dreadful accident. Explanation and motivation were imagined in their very simplest terms.

But as distracting moments gave way to mesmerizing endless minutes upon minutes, the enormity of that fateful morning came clearer and clearer to us. Our minds and hearts were dragged kicking and screaming to face what was unimaginable beforehand. Even battle-hardened veterans had never seen the ravages of war enacted like this on the soil of our homeland.

Metaphors never behave themselves perfectly. For a heart to shatter, it must be made of what is hard and brittle, and that’s where this metaphor falls short. Though we know that hearts break, we also know they bleed, they tear, they hurt when injured directly; and, when indirectly they experience the suffering of others, hearts move in compassion towards the injured.

We have seen such compassion recently, with residents of the North County giving generous neighbor-to-neighbor gifts to temporarily shelter homeless residents of The Spruces. People have gone far out of their way to volunteer their time, their strength, their talents to help their neighbors, here and in battered communities in Vermont and flood-soaked New York and Pennsylvania. Compassionate hearts have resulted in smalltown markets giving away their inventory rather than letting it go to waste, back-country inns putting on free community-wide meals, restaurants and food coops providing meals for shelter guests, flood victims wading over to help a neighbor whose need seems greater than their own. What a country we live in! A land of big and open hearts.

However the metaphor may work about hearts shattering, we know that Illusions shatter. What is false and inaccurate breaks under the pressures of reality, and that happened on this day, ten years ago, when a nation that assumed itself safe and unassailable discovered how vulnerable its open society is. And while we know ourselves a big-hearted people taking care of our own, what happened ten years ago today shattered the illusion that America is globally admired. We had met such hatred before, in smaller doses; but never before, such committed bitterness.

The ultimate shattering of illusions comes when we become like our worst enemies. Violence begets violence, and bitterness breeds bitterness across battlefields. Injury also triggers injury across any fault line that divides people whose calling is to be united in one body: houses of congress, religious denominations, extended families, all can have the worst brought out in them. In fact, we mark today a decade of increasingly deepening challenges to what is best in the human race: the building of peace and the practice of forbearance and the charity of generous respect.

But if we think this has been a tough ten years for us humans, this must have been a really tough decade to be God.

Each religious franchise is convinced that God is fighting for them, and they are fighting for God. I wonder if God wouldn’t like to take some white-out to some portions of the Hebrew Bible, and the Christian testament, and the Qur’an. Today’s portion from the Book of Exodus might be a candidate: how much delight do we expect God takes in being known as the clogger of chariot wheels and the tosser of soldiers into the sea?

Is it not the more consistent message of holy scripture that God is merciful and expects us to show mercy to one another? So we hear Jesus aim his parable today, when that king reminds his incorrigibly selfish servant that he who has received his master’s mercy ought to show mercy to his fellow servants.

And isn’t it the consistent theme of what we treasure in scripture that the worship God desires is neighbor loving neighbor, especially when it’s hard and costly to do so? And that we are to love, not hate, our enemies?

I know, even so we get our Lord’s parable at the cost of a tag line about this king having that wicked servant tortured until he repays every penny of what he owes. And, even worse, Matthew claims that Jesus himself then threatened his hearers, “And so my heavenly Father will also do to you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” I fear that could be a hard and brittle heart, don’t you?

But perhaps we can hear one or two disciples suppressing laughter in the background (“Aw, go on—he doesn’t mean that!?” “Does he?”). But if you propose that we build a healthy theology on this text taken at its face value, will you forgive me if I imagine God reaching for the white-out?

Because the deepest shattering of our illusions in this past decade has revealed to us our need for the Word of God to restrain us from, not permit, torturing our adversaries as a means to a higher end.

And in the end, says St. Paul today, each of us will be accountable to God. There is another consistent message in holy scripture: each person is responsible for what he or she builds in life, creates in life, chooses in life. We can blame political parties for distorting the truth. We can blame religious traditions for distorting God’s truth; but in the end we are, each of us, responsible for our choices, accountable to God for our behavior.

And so it is mighty important to know who God is in mercy, justice, and love—and so take our bearings for the living of this next decade from the God who is.

In the long run, it is good for us to have our illusions shattered. Then what is finer and truer can take their place.

What will that be?

Perhaps a finer, truer engagement with Islam, a deepening of interfaith understanding and solidarity? I pray so.

Perhaps a humbler walk in the world for America, less the superpower harvesting the world, more the agent of change who is willing to change, ready to learn? Let’s hope so.

Perhaps an open society reclaiming the vision of being open to all who bring good will and good work to the table? Let’s help that happen.

In the long run, the illusion we most need shattered is the one that tells us repeatedly that people of another nation, another religion, another sex, another sexuality, another ethnic group, another income level, are inherently, ultimately, essentially different from us. That people from the other side of our issues, or people from another part of our globe, are really much other than we are.

“Some sought to answer terror The only way they knew —
With anger toward the stranger And calls for vengeance, too.
Yet this is not your answer, Nor what you would create.
May we live toward a future Where love will conquer hate.
God, give us faith and wisdom To be your healing hands;
Give open minds that listen To truth from all your lands.
Give strength to work for justice; Grant love that casts out fear.
Then peace and not destruction Will be the victor here.”

This Week the Cross is Red

2011-09-07T14:33:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 12th Sunday after Pentecost includes Exodus 12;1-14; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20

Perhaps you too found it ironic and perverse that a destructive hurricane should be named Irene, from the Greek “eirene”, peace. Irenic it was not. Lives were lost, property damage was devastating, and just when we might have thought the storm was losing its punch, it battered our neighbors in Vermont to an extent beyond our imagining—except for some in this room, who have seen it.

While that was a surprise, it was no surprise that the Hoosic River rapidly flooded, overflowing its banks, and, at The Spruces, even the berm. What followed was the inundation of that mobile home park, 229 homes becoming uninhabitable, at least for now. An estimated 270 residents have been left homeless. We thank God that the angel of death passed over that place: no lives were lost, and for that safe evacuation we can thank Williamstown’s Fire and Police Departments, Village Ambulance personnel, and Brian Grady and his Harper Center colleagues who went door to door.

Town Health Inspector Jeff Kennedy, Town Manager Peter Fohlin, Board of Health members, and town Select Board members, among them Jane Allen, worked tirelessly to triage emergency relief. Red Cross volunteers had been deployed to the Northeast before the storm hit, and they hit the ground running when this disaster happened, quickly opening a shelter at the elementary school.

With school opening the next day, the shelter was moved here (because Jane Allen asked if we could help, and I was sure I knew how you would answer that question). On hand to greet the shelter folks on Monday night were Margot Sanger, Robin Lenz, Polly Macpherson, Tim and Jo Sunn, and I. What we learned instantly was how prepared Red Cross volunteers are, what clear focus they have on their work, and from what great distances they come to perform it. Sue and Harriet drove that big red and white truck all the way from Omaha, arriving just before the storm. Another volunteer had come from Ohio, one from Arkansas, another from Green Bay, Wisconsin, yet another from Mapleton, Iowa, and others from nearer-by in the Northeast. This crew of seven or eight (it was hard to count them, they seldom stood still long enough) are among seven hundred Red Cross volunteers deployed to the Northeast last weekend.

If you stopped by during the week, you noticed intriguing electronic equipment out front and in the lower hallway before Barbara’s office. This was a high-tech emergency communication center manned by six local members of the Amateur Radio Emergency System, among them local educator Kevin Hartmann, who estimated that each of the six had put in forty hours this week monitoring communications from around the Northeast.

Meanwhile, our own Gail Burns was rolling up her sleeves at her workplace, the First Congregational Church, and from Monday morning on Gail and her boss, The Rev. Carrie Bail, have done an outstanding job matching donations with residents needing help. She issued vouchers from the Northern Berkshire Interfaith Affiliates for gasoline, food, and shelter. She distributed gift cards to local stores as she received them from townspeople walking in. She matched displaced residents with townspeople wanting to sponsor them for a few nights in a motel. She kept track of offers of available rooms in homes. If you see Gail, give her a hug.

Here at the shelter, nighttime guests have been few, no more than three on any night, though as many as 19 have sat around the tables at dinnertime (dinners have come spontaneously from local kitchens like Chef’s Hat and Wild Oats), and others have come and gone, perhaps referred on to the disaster assistance service center at the elementary school, open 9 to 4 daily, with representatives from FEMA, the Massachusetts counterpart MEMA, the Red Cross, and housing officials, all ready to give information and register residents needing help facing their loss. It’s expected that personal counselors will also be there this week.

On the heels of the flooding, Spruces residents went to stay with friends and families, dispersing them to the four winds. Genie Smith is staying with Eilleen Drummond. Matt Emerson, Melissa Keil, and little Sydney Rose went to Melissa’s family in Hinsdale. And many, thanks to Gail, went to local motels. Some were given beds at Williamstown Commons. I believe Sweet Brook took some. Sweetwood was preparing to welcome some. Displaced residents with pets have been bunking-in at town hall with their animals (what a sight that must be!), since animals aren’t allowed on-site at Red Cross shelters. Some residents with pets have slept in their cars with them. And I hear that already some people have chosen to relocate to other mobile home parks or apartments in North Adams.

The question so many are asking is, When can residents return to their homes? All have had an initial inspection and each mobile home evaluated. Four have been declared “off limits”, forty have been called “unsafe”, and all the rest “restricted”. There isn’t an encouraging adjective among those words! They are words meant to describe what kind of access owners have to their homes. Most are expected to be repairable, but repairs can’t start until the park’s infrastructure, such as underground electric lines, gets evaluated and fixed—so the uncertainty lingers.

And in that interim a mountain of needs must be met. With apology to St. Paul, we will need to mobilize to make provision for the flesh.

Volunteers are needed to staff the interfaith emergency response center at the First Congregational Church, giving Gail a needed rest (she worked yesterday and will be at it again tomorrow). Volunteers will greet displaced residents, lend an ear and a heart, write vouchers, and answer the phone. Like the assistance center at the elementary school, this office will be open weekdays from 9 to 4, weekdays at least.

Clothing needs to be collected and made available to residents. Members of the Community Bible Church will sort the clothing you bring to the bins on the porch here, and make them available at their facility. We’ll need help delivering bins from here to there.

Non-perishable food and toiletries that you bring to the bins here on the porch will go to a distribution point, probably St. Patrick’s Church. We’ll need help with that delivery.

As long as the shelter here remains open, hot meals at night are a blessing: the signup poster at the font includes this opportunity, if a small cluster of friends want to tackle meal preparation together.

Residents need help cleaning out their homes. Perhaps you’d like to help Matt and Melissa when they tackle theirs, and help Genie when she says it’s time, or offer your services as needed by someone you don’t yet know, who needs you. Yesterday, the new Muslim Chaplain at Williams mobilized twenty students for this work.

With those five examples in mind, you might find it easy to understand that with this kind of parishioner involvement being asked in ten or a dozen or more congregations this weekend, coordination is a must.

We discovered that quickly at Thursday’s emergency meeting of the Interfaith Clergy Association (which includes the chaplains at Williams). It didn’t take us long to see one smart answer, and we’ve hired Robin Lenz to coordinate the congregations in their relief efforts, and to be in daily communication with several local entities—Red Cross, Town Hall, Harper Center, Spruces Tenants Association, Interfaith Affiliates, Northern Berkshire Community Coalition—to ensure that information about needs and available resources flows. A few of us are seeking special funding sources for Robin’s stipend—it will not come from money given to help residents. In the meantime, Robin says our credit is good—and we say it’s a good thing, Robin, that you came home.

Love your neighbor as yourself. So St. Paul sums up what God expects, what God is pleased by. At a time like this, love must put very tangible help in hands that need it. I’ve named several ways, and you know I’m going to name one more.

Raile’s Bowl at the pulpit is open today to receive gifts in the form of paper bills and checks (made payable to St. John’s Church, earmarked Bowl), and a glass vase in front of the lectern will receive pocket change. It’s right that both of those receptacles are so near the spots from which God’s Word is heard, each Sunday, so that God’s Word is done, each Monday through Saturday. None of this money will go to overhead expenses; all will directly benefit our neighbors, those whom we are to love exactly as we want to be loved.

Who Do We Think We Are?

2011-08-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 10th Sunday after Pentecost includes Exodus 1:8-2:10; Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16:13-20

This has been a summer of stories from the Hebrew Bible. If you like the romp we’ve taken through the Book of Genesis, you can give the credit to the new table of readings adopted by the Episcopal Church, the Revised Common Lectionary, an ecumenical system intended to increase the likelihood that many Christian denominations are hearing more or less the same portions of scripture today, and to increase the number of scriptural options the local congregation gets to hear.

So, if you don’t like the increased exposure to ancient patriarchal stories that tend to beat the one drum of how the chosen people Israel came to be, then you can blame that on the Revised Common Lectionary. I could be braver about that, and admit that from that lectionary’s options I’ve made the choice this summer to expose you to readings of Torah rather than more customary portions from the prophets.

And I’m sticking to Torah as we ride today from the first of the five so-called Books of Moses, Genesis, to the second, Exodus. We fled like refugees with Jacob from Canaan to Ur of the Chaldees then migrated with him and his abundant new family back again to Canaan. We followed Joseph into slavery in Egypt, watching him rise to royal rank as deputy to Pharoah, and in time be reunited with his squabbling vindictive brothers and their aged father Jacob, whose name was also Israel.

Jacob and Joseph cycles done, today we enter the cycle of Moses stories. They start at a time when “a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.” The extended family of Israel in Egypt had multiplied like loaves and fishes (you thought I was going to say rabbits), to a point where Pharoah felt threatened by the rising number of resident aliens in his land. He depended on their manual labor—they were the field workers, brick-makers, pyramid-builders, and nannies helping to hold Egyptian society together (does this sound familiar?). But Pharoah worried that Hebrew loyalty might not be counted on. I wonder if he knew how astute an observation that was theologically, for their loyalty was invested in their God, not in their Pharoah.

So he summoned his advisors to develop oppressive policies. I imagine the Pharoah’s police were authorized to demand a photo ID whenever they encountered someone they thought might be one of them. It doesn’t sound as if Pharoah’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deported Hebrews back to Canaan: Pharoah had no intention of losing slave labor. But they surely made it hard for the Hebrew people to have a life. In fact, Pharoah ordered the termination of health care for resident aliens: the Hebrew midwives were ordered to kill all male children born to the daughters of Israel.

Loyalty is exactly what those Hebrew midwives showed! They let those boy babies live, claiming to the authorities that Hebrew women were so vigorous that they gave birth before a midwife could arrive. And because they honored God, we’re told, God gave those midwives families (I wonder if those bold ladies whom even Pharoah couldn’t mess with didn’t create nursery shelters to keep those little boys alive).

Thus enters Moses. The man who will one day part the waters of the Red Sea to free his people enters their bondage borne upon the waters of the Nile. As the story of Joseph required his being lifted from the well where his brothers had dumped him and then sold him into slavery, so the story of Moses has him escape slavery by being lifted from the Nile, and by royal hands. You can see that Moses has a rather enchanted story, sung over many centuries to extol both the goodness of God and the superiority of the Hebrew people who could outmaneuver Pharoah’s repressive ways.

That the first five books of the Bible are known as the Books of Moses tells us how important this baby boy would be. Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace laureate and interpreter of Judaism, describes Moses in ways that resemble how Christians may see Jesus: “Moses, the most solitary and most powerful hero in Biblical history… Moses, the man who changed the course of history all by himself… After him, nothing was the same again… His passion for social justice, his struggle for national liberation, his triumphs and disappointments… his requirements and promises, his condemnations and blessings, his bursts of anger, his silences, his efforts to reconcile the law with compassion, authority with integrity—no individual, ever, anywhere, accomplished so much for so many people in so many different domains.”

And yet, of all the patriarchal figures we’re meeting this summer, Moses is the one who least needs to hear St. Paul’s warning “not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think…” He is shown constantly questioning his own qualifications, retreating from center stage because he doesn’t speak well in public, is subject to abrupt changes in mood, doesn’t always play well with others. “And yet. Were it not for him, Israel would have remained a tribe of slaves. Living in the darkness of fear…” says Wiesel.

“Who do you say that I am?” asks Jesus today. Moses asked a similar question of God, with each seemingly impossible demand God made of him in that long struggle to deliver Israel from Egypt. He asked it also of his countrymen, as they expected the impossible of him, while shamelessly rejecting his authority and tempting him to despair.

“Who do people say I am?” asks Jesus. Students of Matthew’s Gospel might say, “You are the new Moses,” for Matthew draws so many parallels between the two men that you can hardly miss his point.

Both Moses and Jesus are known through the gifts of God’s Spirit emanating from them, freeing the people around them, blessing the world through them.

Guess what? The same is true of you. Paul teaches us that today: “We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us…”

Who do we think we are?

Who does God believe we are?

As Christians, we answer those questions from out of our spiritual practice. Our praying, our worshiping, our life in community, our stewardship of resources, our outreach and mission, our reading and study (especially of scripture) teach us who we are: on a good day, gift-bearers, Spirit-emanators, liberators, blessers. And on many a day, unqualified to lead, unaware of what God is doing around us, more conformed to the values of the world than transformed by renewal, sometimes just about able to get up, show up, and cope. We know Moses had those days. Jesus must have, too.

But such lean days are within our spiritual practice. Learning from our summer patriarchs, the very name Israel means “the one who struggles with God and prevails” (though not in any hurry). And, we could add, struggles with faith, with hope, with love. Hand in hand, our summer Gospels have revealed the Christ who is with us not only on good days, but throughout stormy ones as well.

Who do we think we are? Who does God believe we are?

Gift-bearers in a culture of scarcity. Spirit-emanators in a society splintered by blame and abuse. Liberators in a time when many are in paralyzing bondage to fear, and in repressive reaction to fear. Blessers in an apathetic world.

Some days more than others, we know who we are and we do what God’s grace and gifts enable us to do. Each day, our spiritual practice reminds us whose we are, and draws our attention off ourselves and onto movements of grace and gifts within the one body of Christ in which we are members one of another.

All this knowing and doing and reminding and drawing and belonging are gifts and signs of Jesus Christ and we have them entirely because of who he is and what he does in all who recognize him, all who trust him.

(For Elie Wiesel on Moses, see his "Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends", Summit Books, 1976. Quoted material is from pp. 181-183.)

Throwing the Life-line

2011-08-19T11:45:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 9th Sunday after Pentecost includes Genesis 45:1-15; Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32; Matthew 15: 21-28

My father crossed the Atlantic in 1908 at the age of two, with his mother and sister, in steerage. His father and older brothers had come across from Scotland earlier, and I assume that once they had found work, it was time for the family to reunite in the new world.

What caused them to emigrate was never discussed in our family, but for sure it was hardship, not enough to go around, a chronic lack of work, poverty. I have from my father some of the precious things they brought with them: a punch bowl—a punch bowl, for heaven’s sake!—and a set of dessert plates with spaces in the rims for threading ribbon. These people were going to have a life again! Had these been wedding gifts? They’re in surprisingly good shape, once carefully packed in that steamer trunk, kept now for nearly a century on one set of shelves after another, silent reminders of a great and challenging journey compelled by hard times. Reminders, too, to be ready to celebrate, once good times came.

For a family, such a momentous move may come seldom. But if you could imagine time-lapse photography capturing all the movements of migrating humanity, from the beginning til now, planet earth would seldom be still. Some of those migrations would be massive, like the one going on now in East Africa, as Somalia empties itself one way into Kenya, another into Ethiopia, both of those nations increasingly desperate to stem the tide and bring pressure upon Somalia to take care of its own (which it won't, perhaps can't) or, failing that, to press other nations to intervene and locate new camps within Somalia.

Meanwhile, this famine respects no national borders and asserts itself as a regional disaster. None of its fleeing refugees will be carrying punch bowls or dessert plates, though we pray that they will see good days again, sooner than later. As they flee, they are barely able to carry themselves. People in many nations are feeling the distress of hard times. The peoples of East Africa are in the hardest of times, and we do right to keep plugging away, week by week, gathering our gifts in Raile’s Bowl, multiplying those gifts by matching dollars through our mission funding, and helping three world-class organizations do good in our name, the World Food Program, Doctors without Borders, and the International Rescue Committee.

Famine is the back-story of the Joseph saga coming to us from the Book of Genesis. Last week, we watched his brothers sell Joseph into slavery after that youngest upstart brother with the big ego had pressed their buttons one time too often. By the hindsight of a couple of decades living through the disaster of his own hard times, Joseph tells those same brothers, “It was not you who sent me here, but God…” And “here” was Egypt, where Joseph, by his talents and gifts and sheer chutzpah, had become like a father to Pharoah, a royal advisor to the king who was treated like a god.

Joseph, poster-child of resilience and making-the-best-of-a-bad-situation, impresses his masters by his natural talents, charm, and efficiency. Promoted and placed in the household of Potiphar, a royal officer, Joseph runs afoul of Mrs. Potiphar who is attracted by his physical beauty and then quickly frustrated and embarrassed by his principled rejection of her campaign to seduce him. This lands Joseph in jail, where he shows his stuff by correctly interpreting the dreams of two of Pharoah’s key servants imprisoned for displeasing their king. Meanwhile, Pharoah himself struggles with the meaning of mysterious dreams, so Joseph makes his mark as a psychoanalyst to the king, interpreting his dreams.

Joseph goes from strength to strength and glory to glory, and soon he is put in charge of the royal response to a massive famine in the land. Wisely, Joseph stockpiles foodstuffs while he can, filling Pharoah’s warehouses. The famine worsening, people line up at those warehouses for relief. When they can no longer pay with money, they pay with the deeds to their land, and, as the famine reaches yet deeper and wider, they indenture themselves as slaves to Pharoah.

Presiding over this national disaster is Joseph, Joseph the Just as Jewish tradition remembers him. Instituting a national system of slavery is far from just, but at its primitive best the story has Joseph saving the lives of the Egyptians and matching the inexorable collapse of that economy with the unifying order of central authority.

All of which is back-story to what is foremost throughout the Book of Genesis, the birthing of the nation Israel and God’s fulfillment of the promises made to Joseph’s paternal forebears, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob/Israel, to settle them in a land, and to bless the world through them.

Though veiled, that fulfillment is happening before their eyes. Joseph has been a blessing to Egypt, serving its Pharoah and saving its people. And with that regional famine afflicting the land of Canaan where Joseph’s family of origin were still tending their sheep and claiming the land as theirs, the only way they would survive was by migrating south to Egypt where the food was, and where—who could ever have guessed it?—Joseph of the mighty ego, rejected by his brothers, had been given such power that he could welcome as resident aliens not just his father and brothers and families, but all their tribal counterparts who would have ridden the coattails of this miracle and been rescued from poverty. So down from the hill country they came in their donkey carts, their punch bowls and dessert plates packed for the journey. One day, generations hence, their descendants, numbering in the many thousands, would follow Moses out of Egypt and across to Canaan, into what they would call the promised land. The witness and message of the Bible as a whole, both Hebrew and Christian testaments, is, as Paul says today, that “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”

And universal, international, multicultural, so these readings suggest today. To fulfill the covenant promises made to Israel, God is at work in Egypt, to bless Egypt. In our Gospel, Jesus the Messiah blesses a Canaanite woman and recognizes that this crossing of boundaries helps fulfill his mission to serve and save the house of Israel.

She and Jesus cross two boundaries to have this encounter. He is a Jew from Galilee to the north, she a Gentile from the coast, from what was in ancient times Canaan, the original “promised land” that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob/Israel colonized. This is an Arab woman who approaches Jesus. The first step was his, as he crossed from his country to hers. Culturally, just as great a step is taken as a woman speaks in public to a man, and the man replies.

Though he doesn’t, at first. She has shouted across all the gulfs that separate them (race, sex, religion), begging him to intervene on behalf of her tormented daughter. Jesus does not answer.

“Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us, just like that!” the disciples tell him. Perhaps when he sees how closed they are to her, he opens to her, crossing that gulf with thin words—like when a sailor on a rescue boat throws a lifeline to a boat in distress, he hurls a heavy knot (it’s called a monkey’s paw) wound around a stone and tied to a light line that the receiving sailor can pull across. At its far end is the heavier lifeline that will pull to safety.

“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. It isn’t fair to take bread out of children’s mouths and throw it to dogs.” That’s about as thin a line of compassion as a man can toss.

“You’re right, Master, but beggar dogs do get scraps from the master’s table,” she says, catching that monkey paw in mid-air. She realizes that his replying means that he is opening to her, and she will not miss this moment. She will pull that thin line, and pull, and pull until that strong secure lifeline is in her hands. Subtly, he rises and opens to her the moment… to which she decisively rises, and in her bold appeal for God’s help, Jesus recognizes the same gracious God who has ordained his bold mission.

“For the love of God is broader than the measure of the mind; and the heart of the eternal is most wonderfully kind,” we sang, moments ago. That’s what our readings today announce.

And they challenge us to complete the verse: “If our love were but more faithful, we should take him at his word; and our life would be thanksgiving for the goodness of the Lord.”

Today’s Bible voices urge us to step across the boundaries of nations, look across the gulf of race and class, and gain from East Africa fresh perspective on our own relative distress, and from our own relative abundance throw the lifeline.

Keys to Metamorphosis

2011-08-08T11:41:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 8th Sunday after Pentecost includes Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28; Romans 10:5-15; Matthew 14:22-32

Our exposure to scripture this summer has featured the series “As Jacob’s world turns.” His saga, rife with treachery and deceit while also rich with perseverance and faithfulness, now rolls into the Joseph saga, featuring Jacob’s favorite son. Yes, batten down the hatches: we’re in for two or three more weeks of patriarchal stories.

Like the story of Jacob and his brother Esau, Joseph’s cycle of stories begins where brothers have become enemies. You would think that Jacob might have learned to avoid favoritism: it was his being the apple of his mother Rebekah’s eye that helped set the stage for a whole generation of trouble. But Joseph is the brightest star in his father’s sky, because Joseph is the son of Jacob’s first love, his deceased wife Rachel, “the son of his old age,” as we heard today.

That creates a whole nest of angry brothers. Do you remember the musical, “Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”? While the other boys, the older brothers, got their clothes at J. C. Penney, Jacob took Joseph to Ralph Lauren.

Having reached the ripe age of seventeen when we meet him today, he can’t be expected to be the soul of discretion. Add to this the fact that he’s a dreamer—literally, he’s his father’s boy, for you remember how Jacob was visited by God in a dream, way back when. Joseph’s dreams predict his own bright future, and while a more circumspect young man might have kept those nocturnal visions to himself, Joseph is neither endowed with humility nor likely to pass up an opportunity to announce to his his brothers his superiority. The natural results of such self-celebration we heard today. They hated him.

There’s no one better than Elie Wiesel to comment on the patriarchal stories of the Book of Genesis. He offers an overview of the Joseph saga, and says that what this story is all about is “man’s capacity for transformation. The tale of Joseph is the tale of a metamorphosis—no, a series of metamorphoses.

“First, a family metamorphosis: a favorite child falls victim to his own prerogatives.

“A social metamorphosis: a poor immigrant becomes a huge success in his adopted country,” Egypt.

“A political transformation: a servant turns activist and changes the socio-economic policy of the land,” as Pharoah’s Egypt struggles with severe famine.

“A philosophical or artistic metamorphosis: the slave turns into a prince,” the stuff of opera and drama.

“And finally, a purely Jewish metamorphosis: a young refugee, without friends or connections, builds himself an astounding political career culminating with his accession to the post of chief royal advisor,” right-hand man to the Pharoah.

“No wonder,” says Wiesel, “that in our traditional literature Joseph is the object of passionate admiration bordering on worship. Here is a Jew whose tribulations had a happy ending, who owed his success to no one, who imposed his ideas on hostile surroundings thanks only to his natural gifts, who transformed exile into a kingdom, misery into splendor, and even humiliation into mercy. He was indebted to no one and that made him a free man, a man free to do whatever he chose.

“…Abraham is respected and admired; Isaac is pitied; Jacob is followed; but only Joseph is loved.

“…Abraham was obedient, Isaac was brave, Jacob was faithful. Only Joseph was just.”

All this transformation, you recall, happened in the land of Egypt, a nation we watch changing before our eyes today. Let’s pray that the Mubarak trial will help the people of Egypt hear a calling to a finer purpose than revenge, will help that nation metamorphose out of violence into peace, out of corruption into justice. If not, the future of a free Egypt could be in peril.

The transformation of a people is underway also in our Gospel today. Crowds play a role in the birthing of a new social order: we have seen that in Egypt, and there has been a large crowd in an open place in our recent portions of Matthew’s Gospel. Last Sunday, Jesus gave his disciples the greatest challenge they had ever faced: feeding a hungry crowd that numbered in the thousands. He also gave those disciples the best object lesson ever: When faced with an impossible task, generously model the first step towards the remedy, then trust God to be at work among the people. We have seen a similar model at work in this Arab Spring: at its start, handfuls of protestors boldly, generously, modeled the first step toward remedy, trusting God to be at work in the people. Risky, for sure. So, it seems, five thousand men (not counting women and children) were fed.

It is fresh from that public demonstration that Jesus despatched his worn-out disciples to get some rest, away from the crowds. Fishermen that they were, the twelve took to their boats. Jesus climbed a steep hill for his solitude, and from that vantage point he kept an eye on the twelve, and noticed their emergency, how a storm was engulfing them. And while I have no pet theory about what happened next, I see the point: that Jesus is the Messiah who is forever with his people, right in the thick of all the changes and chances and storms of this mortal life.

Following his own model from the feeding story, Jesus generously models the first step towards the remedy, then trusts God to be at work among the people. He walks toward them, calls out to them when their terrors multiply at the very sight of him and they mistake him for the Grim Reaper. He urges them to take heart and not be afraid—not that feelings should be denied, but that fear distracts people from the metamorphosis they must make. Trust, only trust, will focus them on that transformation.

Peter, always first among the twelve (first to get it, first to flub it), does what he sees his Lord doing: he will lead his brothers through this crisis. Jesus agrees: “Lead, Peter, come.” And his first steps are God at work in him. Then Peter notices the wind. The force that makes him lose balance. The distraction that breaks his focus. The opposition. The distance yet to go. The improbability of it all. And it sinks him. And his next step is God at work in him: “Save me!” he cries, honestly, openly, while simultaneously Jesus reaches out his hand and catches him, all of a moment.

“You had it right in those first steps,” I hear Jesus say to him. “More of those, next time. And remember to choose who and what you pay attention to.”

There are keys to proper metamorphosis, as disciples, as nations, as people of God: Trust God to be at work in first steps. Lead by generous modeling of the first step, trusting God to be at work in the people you lead and serve. Pay attention to whomever, whatever, wherever you recognize the call of God to originate. Let distractions sink around you, as you keep balance. When you lose balance, reach for the hand that reaches for you.

And, to do justice to Joseph today, shed all illusions of superiority. We’re all in this metamorphosing of the human race together, and the sooner that religions and nations cease believing that they are called by God to be exceptional and exclusively special, the sooner we may be free to know and love and serve the one God who works in people’s transformation, meets people in their throes of change, steadies people for the work of metamorphosis (the reaching-out), and calls people to lead.

(For more of Elie Wiesel on Joseph, find his book "Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends", Summit Books, 1976. The quoted material here comes from pp. 139-141.)

Resources of Heaven, Known on Earth

2011-08-01T14:03:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 7th Sunday after Pentecost includes Genesis 32:22-31; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:13-21

On the main stage of scripture this summer has been the drama of the Jacob saga from the Book of Genesis. He has tricked his brother Esau out of his inheritance rights, then fled the country both to escape Esau’s wrath and to find a wife. Make that two wives, we saw last week, and a tribe of children (make that twelve tribes, in time), all of which was indeed a long story covering twenty years and a major humbling of cocky Jacob.

Now it is time for him to return to the land of Canaan, the new and so-called Promised Land which Jacob’s grandfather Abraham and father Isaac and their generations had been settling, claiming as given to them in the providence of God. At a deeper level, these stories are about the creation of the nation Israel. We heard this morning the pivotal story of Jacob being renamed Israel. For God’s promises to be fulfilled, Jacob/Israel must be reconciled with his brother Esau, who occupies the land.

Burning in Jacob’s memory is his brother’s hot anger at being deceived, twenty years ago. Is it typical of some of our fears that we don’t give other people credit for having changed since we last offended them?

The context for our portion of the story today is this. Every creature making up Jacob’s world is in caravan approaching the border: his two wives, their maids, all the children those several women have brought into the world by him, goats, sheep, camels, cows, bulls, donkeys, and assorted servants. Many hundreds of animals and dozens of people are encamped at a place called Mahanaim, as Jacob gets his act together.

He sends emissaries to Esau, with a prepared speech alerting Esau to what he doubtless already knows: Jacob is coming with an entire village of family and retainers, and wants to find favor in Esau’s sight.

Something is lost in transition here. Jacob’s agents hightail it back to report that they found Esau, “and he is coming to meet you, and four hundred men are with him!” Nothing is said about what was said in their encounter with Esau, leaving Jacob to fill in the blanks.

Is it human nature that, in the absence of knowing, fearing takes over; and in the presence of a guilty conscience, fearing multiplies? Jacob, greatly distressed, reverts to type (he is a prototype Episcopalian) and first, before praying, problem-solves… and then prays. He divides his caravan into two companies, hoping to cut his losses if Esau attacks.

Then he prays, “I am not worthy of the least of all the steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed this Jordan; and now I have become two companies. Deliver me, please, from the hand of Esau, for I am afraid of him; he may come and kill us all, the mothers with the children. Yet you have said, ‘I will surely do you good, and make your offspring as the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted because of their number.”

The next day, Jacob selects a present for Esau: two hundred female goats and twenty male goats, two hundred ewes and twenty rams, and on it goes (you get the idea)—we’re talking a major financial stimulus package. Again, emissaries are rehearsed for a speech to Esau. Jacob sends this whole bleating, mooing, whinnying parade on it way, and, before settling down for the night, says, “Perhaps he will accept me.”

But this night, Jacob will not be settled. He rises and sends on its way all that remains of his caravan across the ford of the Jabbok, an eastern tributary of the Jordan River. He is left alone. But not alone. A lot remains to be settled, and Jacob wrestles with all his life. He wrestles not just with his issues: it is an actual opponent he fights. The other half of his long-divided self? Even when Jacob is at his lowest, he does not give in. His adversary pleads, “Let me go, for the day is breaking, and a far more important thing must happen…”

“Not unless you bless me,” stammers Jacob. And in the exchange that follows, Jacob emerges with a new name, Israel, the one who strives with God and with humans, and prevails. Jacob has been struggling with God, and wins God’s blessing. That, says the story, is the story with the nation Israel.

There is quite a struggle going on in our Gospel today. One crowd after another presses in on Jesus for his blessing, his healing, his teaching. He has to escape, for his soul’s health. He takes a boat. They follow by the land route. His heart melts at their neediness.

Is it to protect him—or to protect themselves—that his disciples interrupt his flow of compassion, tap their wristwatches, cast a disapproving look around the barren landscape, and say, “This place is a wasteland. There’s no time left in the day. Send these people away to the villages before the stores close—or we’re going to have a catastrophe on our hands!”

“They need not go anywhere. They need you to feed them.”

“But… but…”

“Yes. And, and… Bring to me here the food you have.” In John’s version, a child provides the loaves and fishes. Here, it must be the disciples who empty their pockets, and among them is barely enough to feed the twelve. “Take no staff for your journey, no money, nothing extra,” they quote him to one another under their breath. “Of course that’s all we have.”

And yet it is not all they have. So many ages ago, Jacob dreamed of a ladder uniting heaven to earth, announcing that the resources of heaven are available on earth, not because they are earned or deserved or even recognized, but because it is God’s nature and desire to give.

So it happens on that hillside. What happens? They balance the budget between what they have and what they need. Jesus takes the little that came out of those abstemious disciples’ pockets and makes a big deal of that bread and fish. He takes them into the public eye, gives God the eye, blesses the problem of not-enough by breaking it open to public scrutiny, and reveals how this is simultaneously the solution, the giving that he models for the disciples to do, and they in turn model for each person in the crowd to do, each person who has (tucked away in unabstemious pockets—no one told them not to be prepared) sharing with each who has not.

There’s much to be learned at the new Neighborhood Center food pantry in North Adams, on Eagle Street. Stuart, Cynthia, Rich, perhaps others of you too, can tell stories like some I’ve heard: how community members come with so little, need so much, get what’s available to be shared, then come back a couple of weeks later with something they want to share, like supermarket coupons they can’t use. And how, at the end of a Wednesday the shelves are bone bare, but by the time next Wednesday rolls around the shelves are full again—the up-front volunteers may not know how that happened, while the back-room crew of shelvers know just where that food came from, having unloaded the Food Bank truck that someone’s giving has paid for, and having emptied the shopping bags of nonperishables from local donors. And it’s all amazing and very Godly.

No less now than two thousand years ago, Jesus’s disciples are called to feed the crowds. Those in whom the Messiah is glorified are given the Messiah’s work to do. That may be at the Neighborhood Center where, last Wednesday between 9 and 2 one hundred families were served, lined up along Eagle Street waiting their turn. And it will be in the refugee camps of Kenya and Ethiopia and in the chaotic nation of Somalia, where hundreds of thousands, the vanguard of millions, are in danger of death by starvation.

And it will be in Washington, where it is given our elected representatives to deal with national debt and credit, to model abstemiousness without failing to feed the hungry, without creating yet more hungry, and without passing the bill to our children and grandchildren.

What ever became of Esau and Jacob/Israel? Since this isn’t appointed to be read next week, let me tell you:

“Now Jacob looked up and saw Esau coming, and four hundred men with him. So he divided the children among Leah and Rachel and the two maids. He put the maids with their children in front, then Leah with her children, and Rachel and Joseph last of all. He himself went on ahead of them, bowing himself to the ground seven times, until he came near his brother.

“But Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept. When Esau looked up and saw the women and children, he said, ‘Who are these with you?’ Jacob said, ‘The children whom God has graciously given your servant.’ Then the maids drew near, they and their children, and bowed down; Leah likewise and her children drew near and bowed down; and finally Joseph and Rachel drew near, and they bowed down. Esau said, ‘What do you mean by all this company that I met?’ Jacob answered, ‘To find favour with my lord.’ But Esau said, ‘I have enough, my brother; keep what you have for yourself.’”

Then there follows a very civilized exchange: “No, I insist!” “Oh, I couldn’t possibly.” “No, I urge you to accept…” And so Esau did accept, and did what was wanted by Israel, the man (the nation) of problem-solving and of prayer.

May such a good reconciliation be achieved in Washington tomorrow, an outcome that models giving, forgiving, sharing, and the acceptance of responsibility.

God the Heart-Searcher

2011-07-26T08:57:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost includes Genesis 29:15-28; Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Though I won’t spend much time on the adventures of our friend Jacob today, how can I let that first reading go by without making a few observations?

Jacob the deceiver, Jacob the trickster, has been outclassed, outgunned, by his Uncle Laban, the brother of Jacob’s mother Rebekah. Jacob has fallen head-over-sandals for Laban’s younger daughter, Rachel. Jacob agrees to seven years’ labor (oh, what love will make a fellow do) as a kind of dowry for Rachel. Those years seemed but a few days because of his love for her.

Meanwhile, on a lower plane of life, Laban has spun a web of deceit. First, he gets Jacob drunk at the wedding feast. Add some poor lighting and the strategic use of a veil, and when morning comes and Jacob rolls over in the marriage bed, he finds it was Leah he had married!

When Jacob objects, Laban plays his final hand by claiming that local custom prevents marrying the younger before the older.

“Complete the week of this one, and we will give you the other also in return for serving me another seven years.” Doesn’t it make you want to scream? Imagine Jacob’s outrage… and helplessness. “Completing the week” means staying the course with Leah, making her his wife by honoring the customary bridal week of celebrations. So Jacob agrees, and at the end of that week Laban gave Jacob Rachel in betrothal—in essence Jacob emerges with two wives, though it will cost him a second term of seven years’ service to Uncle Laban.

The story has a preposterous side, doesn’t it? Remember that these Genesis stories have two levels. One is the surface story about the legendary individuals of Israel’s past, a family album of the chosen people. The other level is rather like a survey course: these stories help explain Israel’s becoming a nation. In that larger story, Jacob will be renamed Israel (stay tuned, next Sunday) and will be the progenitor of twelve children, twelve tribes, eventually clustered in two geographical units, a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom. Today’s installment can be seen as explaining that two-state division: Jacob had two wives (not to mention their handmaids, who also bore him children… but that’s best left for another day).

What makes us want to scream is how Leah is violated by her father’s elaborate deception. She knows she is not loved by Jacob in the way that he loves her sister, but she is consigned to that loveless future. In the full story, God will hear her lament and, while Rachel remains childless for some time, Leah bears several children, establishing her security and her influence. The point of God’s blessing her with children appears to be that God is also peeved with her male oppressors.

But, as we saw last Sunday, all this deceit and violation is in the raw material, the messy stew, the pottage God gets to work with, and it does not diminish God’s covenant love and faithfulness towards God’s people. Redemption works its way across the years and generations. Jacob, for instance, finally gets a taste of what he dished out to his brother Esau. Now he knows, with a wounded heart.

And God is the heart-seeker. That is how St. Paul describes God in today’s second reading, and that I would like to explore.

There is knowing, and there is knowing. Jacob’s saga teaches us this. He knows what he wants (a wife and family), so he sets out on a journey to get what he wants. That journey requires him to know himself, to know the full complexity of human nature, to know an intimate struggle with God, and, rising out of all these intimate knowings, to return to his alienated brother Esau with a new capacity for knowing him.

In St. Paul’s Letter to the Church at Rome, he teaches that all we need to know about the Church—its God-given nature and mission—is learned by knowing Jesus, the Messiah sent by the love of God to liberate creation from the bondage, corruption, misery, and injustice that were known to characterize the world in that first century. That these traits still describe the world is evident from reading the morning’s news… which tells us that the Messiah’s work is still underway, or, to put that another way, Paul tells us in his letter that in the resurrection life that believers are given in Christ, those who share the glory of the Messiah will have the world entrusted to their care. The Messiah’s work is still underway through God’s people.

To know the Messiah is to know the Church, and the Church is charged with knowing the world. That’s an awful lot of knowing. Refreshing to me is the opening verse from Paul today: We do not know how to pray. We see and feel the suffering of the world and what Paul told us last Sunday is so true: the creation seems subjected to futility and in bondage to decay. Then he said, The creation is groaning, yes--but groaning in labor pains, for God has enfleshed God’s own love in the Messiah Jesus to make him what Paul today calls “the firstborn within a large family” of people who are being conformed to the image and likeness of Jesus.

In that first-century world, the fast-growing religion was the Caesar-cult that claimed the emperor’s divinity, winning people to that belief by sending into all communities images of Caesar and building temples to house those images. Bishop N. T. Wright comments on this: “Paul states that God’s purpose is for Christians to be ‘conformed to the image of God’s Son.’ They are to be image-bearers, forming the Temple of the living God, the people through whom in the present as well as in the future it is to be made known that the God of Abraham is the only God, that Jesus, God’s Son, is the world’s true Lord, and that one day the world will be liberated from its present slaveries, as Israel was from Egypt, to be the true Empire in which justice, peace, and freedom will make their home.”

Knowing how to bring all this about might be an emperor’s way to proceed, but God, says Paul, is prepared to work with our not knowing even how to pray for all this to come about. Bishop Wright says, “Paul holds together… the intimate prayer that knows exactly what to call God (Abba, Father—we may wish to add Mama, or its Aramaic equivalent) and the groaning prayer that has no idea what to ask for or even what words to use. Prayer itself is a matter of both knowing and not knowing, of security and insecurity, of ‘having nothing yet possessing all things (2 Corinthians 6:10).”

In Paul’s words, God is the heart-searcher. Out of God’s heart comes that Spirit that unites us to God by working deep within the human heart, and there we learn not so much how to pray, but to love God. Once more, Bishop Wright: “This hints at something deeper than merely praying in the way God wants or approves; God’s own life, love, and energy are involved in the process. The Christian, precisely at the point of weakness and uncertainty, of inability and struggle, becomes the place at which the triune God is revealed in person.”

This knowing, this loving of God, engages us (mind and heart and will and senses) in what Paul calls the working-together for good of all things. Bishop Wright insists that our New Revised Standard Version of the Bible gets it wrong in translating, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God…” as if this were a law of the universe. The New International Version, he says, has it right: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him…” I take that to mean that if we are willing to engage with God on terms of love, then we will discover God working with the raw material, the messy stew, the pottage of our lives in ways we could not know apart from God’s covenant love and faithfulness.

Paul asks and answers five questions, starting with, “If God is for us, who is against us?” “No one” is the apostle’s answer to that and to each question. Typical of these questions is the third, “Who is to condemn the people of God?” The answer is again, “No one.” But if the words are not read carefully, they can be misleading: “It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.” Not “It is Christ Jesus who will condemn us,” but “he in particular will not condemn, for he has perfectly embodied the love of God.”

For many years, a very dear and feisty lady, Fran Chaffee, taught Sunday School here. She taught all her children to memorize the closing words of Paul today: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Nor shall we be separated from the call of God to embody that love in the world.

Our medical missioners will return from Bolivia in two weeks freshly convinced of that.

Doctors Without Borders and other NGO workers aiding Somalian famine victims in the refugee camps of Kenya and Ethiopia embody that love, whether or not they ascribe it to God.

Interfaith volunteers here in the North County do also, as they help people suffering from food insecurity.

And in more ways than we can count, including the intimate orbits of families and friendships, God’s people are privileged to embody that love which is the ongoing work of the Messiah to liberate the creation from its slaveries.

(Bishop N. T. Wright's commentary is found in Volume X of "The New Interpreter's Bible", Abingdon Press, 2002.)

God Counts on that Rat Jacob

2011-07-20T07:48:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 5th Sunday after Pentecost includes Genesis 28:10-19a; Romans 8:12-25; and Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Here’s another parable about seeds. Last week’s was tame. Turn this one into a movie, and call it “Seeds of Wrath”. Give it an R rating for faith-based violence. And we think the Qur’an condones violence?

This exchange is said to have been between Jesus and his disciples who have gathered with him after another of his public appearances before a large crowd. The disciples ask Jesus to explain the parable he used in speaking to the crowds, a parable that does not, on the face of it, sound as violent and raging as the explanation he proceeds to give the twelve. Maybe this is like the coach and team meeting in their locker room at half-time in a high-stakes game where the score is tied, venting together over the tactics of the other team and fanning the flames that will burn that other team right off the field.

Maybe. And we need to hear it… why? It helps us in our spiritual practice… how?

In our summer education series, Sundays @ 9, we’ve started identifying a few edgy questions relating to our spiritual practice, and we hope to share with one another what we’re learning on those raw edges. For example, I named a question today that I struggle with: How to read the morning paper with an open heart, not shutting down in horror as my eyes move from the dismemberment of a child to the murder of a family by a step-son, to the discovery of fresh mass graves in South Sudan, to the latest installment of the saga of budget politics in Washington. How do I pray through a reading of the news of the day?

Or do I react to what I cannot control, and lapse into an old narrow range of emotions, retreating from a world evidently divided sharply between bad people and good people? Is my experience of the morning news preparing me to be the publican in the temple (Lord, I thank you that I am not like other men…) or to find common ground with the troubles of others? Am I secretly finding solace of the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-variety, or can I find a way to pray the news as I read it, recognizing how grace is needed, is already at work, and may call me to care, not retreat?

I’m not proposing to talk more about that today. Come to Sundays @ 9 if that question interests you, but notice how the question itself may relate to today’s Gospel. Reacting to current events can bring a person to see the world in black and white terms, sharply cast between good people and evil people, and evidently can tempt even the religious to imagine horrific final solutions.

Sometimes we can understand why. Christians were being brutally persecuted near the end of the first century, when Matthew wrote. Hungering for justice, the early Christians were powerless to achieve it. But they could take a grim comfort in the conviction that God would have the final word, some day. In the meantime, their words were laced with fire and brimstone in the language of apocalypse and Armageddon.

By contrast to that black and white view comes today’s portion of the Jacob saga in the Book of Genesis. This is what I would like to talk about, because in Jacob we see how it simply doesn ‘t work to divide the human race into categories of good and bad. As we saw last Sunday, Jacob is a rat, a deceiver, a trickster—and yet there he is in the Mount Rushmore of Hebrew patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. His twin brother, Esau, you will not find so remembered and celebrated. Yet it was by cutting in line, taking advantage of the gullibility of his brother and the vulnerability of his aging father, that Jacob gained his prominence.

It was also by being his mother’s favorite, which may tell us how matriarchal a society these forebears actually had. She favored Jacob because of her two sons he was the refined one, the reflective one, the man who would maintain home and family, the thinker, the creative one, the artist. Her husband Isaac favored their son Esau, a skillful hunter, the son who could lead by the strength of his arm and be in charge of homeland security.

Remember that these great Genesis stories are allegedly about individuals, but certainly about the nation Israel. By the time we are done with Jacob’s saga this summer, we will see that he is renamed Israel, showing that all the struggles we see him pass through constitute what it means to be Israel, the nation. But that’s yet to be revealed. Stay tuned.

Today’s installment sets Jacob on a long journey. It will last twenty years. What prompts it? Dread of his brother, Esau; recognition that Esau’s strong arm will come down on him if he stays in town. But also Jacob knows it’s time to do the patriarchal thing and find a wife and raise a family. By the time we complete his saga, he will have had tricks played on him resulting in his having two wives, and a correspondingly large number of children, but again I’m fast-forwarding…

Now, running away from much, so much that he is truly a divided man, and one who frankly doesn’t call much upon God but tends to create his own solutions (as we have seen), now Jacob stops in a certain place to camp for the night. There was something about this place that suggested a good campsite, but there was nothing noticeable to suggest it might be holy ground, no stone pillars erected as was done in those days, no sign advertising divine worship at 8:00 am and 10:00 am.

Or pm, as in this case. God comes to Jacob in a dream. Elie Wiesel, writing about this story, poses the question, Why is it that often the Bible tells stories in which God appears to a person, often a man, in his dreams? Because that is when a person is completely alone. And if that person has a Type A personality, it is in the liminal state of sleep that God might have a fighting chance to be noticed.

That Jacob’s dream is so rich and full may witness to what his mother Rebekah knew, that he was a reflective person, receptive not just to things seen and touched, but to their inner spiritual meaning.

And is there a hint that Jacob, on the lam, needs to be alert even in sleep, perhaps explaining why he’d lay his head on a stone?

But on to the dream: a ladder is set up on the earth, reaching to heaven. A stairway, a ramp, would be better translations, says a commentator. A dramatic message is given: we on earth can count on the resources of heaven. And they flow to us not because we earn them or even know enough to ask for them. They come because God wants them to come. They come as gift.

Gift and grace are therefore the foundation of the covenant love binding humanity to God and binding God to the human race. And that whole historic monumental relationship depends, at this juncture, on God’s trusting a deceptive and tricky man, Jacob. “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you,” says God to Jacob.

Jacob may not expect it to take twenty years for that return. He thinks he’s going to Haran, his grandfather’s homeland, to find a wife from among the extended family. Nothing about this will be simple, as we shall hear next Sunday and the Sunday after. And it will all contribute to the birthing of the nation Israel, called by God (according to the Genesis story) to settle in the land of Canaan that has been gradually claimed by the generations of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, one settlement at a time.

Arab peoples have a very different narrative to tell, one that explains their claim to the land. The current events we agonize over, thousands of years later, still swirl around the collision of these stories.

Whether it may be Palestinians and Israelis facing their future, or Democrats and Republicans negotiating fiscal responsibility, it does not work to vilify opponents and paint the world black and white. God counts on Jacob. Jacob must face Esau. It is in face of the full complexity of human nature that our baptismal vows require us to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving each as we love ourselves, respecting the dignity and worth of each person. We do not get to consign people to hell for their treachery, because we answer to a God who can utilize even treachery to achieve evolution towards a high global purpose.

We don’t have to like that, but it is part of the biblical message.

It is the revelation of Jacob’s dream, Jacob’s ladder, and Jacob’s God: that right where we are, the raging waters of current events eddying around us and the day’s news being what it is, right there (not just right here) is holy ground where God is to be recognized, known, loved, and obeyed. And our calling is, like Jacob’s, to take each stone on which we fitfully sleep and set it up as a monument to grace and pardon, a reminder that God is in the place with us and calls us to a miracle: the turning of stumbling blocks into stepping stones.

Who Will Lead?

2011-07-11T07:49:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 4th Sunday after Pentecost includes Genesis 25:19-34; Romans 8:1-11; Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

In reading the Gospels, context is everything. Matthew sets his familiar parable of the sower and the seed in the context of a sharp question: Who will lead the people of God in the next generation?

Jesus is surrounded by great crowds. He is a celebrity, admired by many, fascinating to many, magnetic in appeal. His parable takes a needle and pops that bubble, revealing that flashy popularity has little bearing on his question. Many will turn out to hear him and have their hearts warmed. Many will flock to him to experience the thrill of a movement, an event, something happening. But who will understand? Who will bear fruit? Who will last? Who will lead?

Our Lord’s short public ministry heightens the drama of this question. He’s on the radar screen of Israel just a short three years at most: it’s a brief run because of all the toes and clay feet he stepped on in that career of his. The Gospels dwell on the question What will happen when the religious hierarchy sets him up and imperial Rome snuffs him out?

You can say that this critical question is the Church’s question. Matthew’s Gospel dates from the period 90-110 in the Common Era, let’s say 60 years after the events it narrates. Some three generations separate today’s seaside sermon and its passing through pen and ink onto the parchment of Matthew’s Gospel. Still a burning question is Who will lead the Church into its future? The early Church attracted sizeable numbers to its community, both Jews and pagan souls of one stripe or another who found something admirable, something appealing, in the message and mission of Jesus Christ, his sacramental presence in the believing community, and his spiritual presence in believers.

But it takes many Christians to change the light bulb of leadership, to pass the torch to the next generation, to lead a movement that depends not just on the waters of baptism and prevenient amazing grace but also on blood, sweat, and tears for inspiring and overseeing the hard work of being the church in the world.

And let’s update this profile. Ask the nominating committee of this (and any) parish, and you’ll find the same critical question being asked, nearly two millennia later: Who will our leaders be?

It’s a question that can be asked in anxiety or in faith.

Matthew and Mark and Luke, three out of the four Gospel writers, make it clear that this question has been urgent and central to Christianity from the start, and answering it in faith essential. As any nominating committee labors over its task, let them hear this Gospel and recognize what powerful company they’re in! He too confronted the leadership question, revealed it to be central to, not antithetical to, the spiritual life, and did so by telling a parable, The Sower and the Seed.

We’ve essentially heard it twice today, once on its own and a second time by explanation. The same seed (the Good News of the reign of God on earth) fell on four different patches of earth. Some fell on a path, and if human feet didn’t crush it, birds came and ate it. Some fell on rocky ground (this must have been in New England) and while this seed sprouted quickly, that rocky ground dried out fast when the sun rose and, roots being shallow, these seedlings withered. Some seed fell among thorns, and you can picture what happened there: choked. Other seeds fell on good soil—and in a basically desert climate, good soil couldn’t have been easy to come by, must have required work and sacrifice to irrigate and cultivate—and behold, payday: these seeds brought forth grain (“…first the blade, and then the ear, then the full corn shall appear; grant, O harvest Lord, that we, wholesome grain and pure may be…”), in varying degrees of bounty.

We observed at “Sundays @ 9” this morning that while the poor soils get described by a long list of words or phrases (rocky, thorny, no depth, shallow roots), just two words apply uniquely to the good soil: understanding and bearing.

I hadn’t noticed that before. Nor that the parable throws us a few surprises. Seed sown on the path in the parable is sown, according to the explanation, “in the heart.” Seed sown on rocky ground is when the hearer receives the message joyfully. Come again? Don’t those sound like successful landings?

But no. The heart is apparently such an open place that birds of the air can swoop down and snatch what the heart holds (paradoxically, perhaps especially what the heart tries to hold onto too tightly).

And that rocky ground can resound with joy (aren’t we told somewhere that if we forget our Savior’s praise, the stones themselves will sing?), but even joy doesn’t cut the mustard, doesn’t sink our roots into the nourishing depth of understanding and bearing—and doesn’t weather the storms of trouble and persecution that have uncanny ability to disillusion people of faith and make us anxious skeptics.

This parable rises out of an urgent question. What critical question might the parable, in turn, inspire you to ask regarding your own spiritual practice?

I hope it’s how do you cultivate a receptive place within yourself to accept the seed, the message, the knowing of God, the transformative opportunities God presents. Without openness to God in the present moment, the seed does not sprout and mature to understanding and bearing.

You may want a more practical answer to that question, now in this sermon. But while I’m going to disappoint you on that score, I can suggest you come to “Sundays @ 9” this summer, where we’ll be considering just that kind of question: how to cultivate within our lives receptive places for the seed.

And until you arrive at your own answer to that question, I recommend treasuring the insight of St. Paul, shared with us today in his Letter to the Romans: “To let your mind be preoccupied with the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” He reminds us that, despite all the media messaging that barrages us, we who are baptized into Christ are not only in the flesh; we are also in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in us.

There is the rich deep ground of our being that we may cultivate, work, turn over, sink roots into, depend on, and rest upon.

And there is our baptismal birthright, not to be traded away for anything.

Pulling Together

2011-07-05T13:26:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 3rd Sunday after Pentecost includes Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67; Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

It’s good to see young Isaac in a much better place in life than he was last week. Amazing, really, what the passing of a week will do. Or, in the Book of Genesis, the passing of a few patriarchal chapters. Last Sunday, he was bound and strapped to a crude altar on a mountaintop in the land of Moriah, and his father, Abraham, was poised with a dagger ready to offer his son’s life in sacrifice to God. From young Isaac’s victimized viewpoint, this was not going to be one of those mountaintop experiences you get to narrate in your spiritual autobiography. However one tells last Sunday’s Isaac story, it’s Abraham who gains the insight (namely, that the chosen people he will lead must not let their values be shaped by the old prevailing cultures around them, but will listen to and obey the mind and will of God)—but as important as that sounds, Isaac must nonetheless have been traumatized on that mountain.

So it’s good today to hear about Isaac welcoming Rebekah into his life, thanks to social networking of an ancient type. A trusted servant had been sent back to the ancestral homeland to find a wife for Isaac. This servant returned with Rebekah, a relative of Isaac, and it was clear that she was everyone’s idea of a perfect choice. The portion we heard today, part of a longer spinning of the story, is meant to witness to the fact that when the key players listen to and obey the mind and will of God, great choices get made: the choosing God does is implemented by the choosing that the key players do.

These Genesis stories are telling the story of the founding of a nation, Israel, and of its being chosen out of the many nations to be a light to all nations, its covenant relationship with God having formed and shaped the nation’s heart and mind and will to listen to and obey God. That was the vision.

The reality, as Matthew reminds us, is that wisdom is vindicated by her deeds. The Hebrew Bible presents an archive or scrapbook of the many times Israel’s actions modeled her high calling, and the many times when she failed.

A son of Israel, the apostle Paul, commenting on his own failures to demonstrate faithful covenant love, said that he could delight in the law of God in his inmost self, but simultaneously see in his makeup, in his own little constellation of human contradictions, another law at war with the law of his mind, making him captive to the law of sin, and therefore a wretched man.

I can’t read his words on this Independence Day weekend without hearing them offer a wrenching description of what may happen to a nation, as well as to an individual. St. Paul’s fearless self-exposure was meant, I expect, to suggest that this law of internal contradiction can land a nation in the same pickle that he found himself in: stuck, caught in the quicksand of willing what is right but not doing it.

That’s an apt description of what’s befalling our own nation. Our two-party system is paralyzed. We can will what is right but we cannot do it. We can elect leaders whose will we agree with, but we then watch them sink in the quicksand of that partisan war in our members that runs concertina wire down the center aisle of Congress.

Our Gospel portion today ends with words meant to be heard by the fed-up and the burned-out.

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

For me, that’s the Christian Gospel in a paragraph. It conveys wisdom hidden from the wise and intelligent and revealed to infants, and I take that to mean that we should consider sending our elected leaders to kindergarten for revelation of what they most need to know. Like why that center aisle in Congress is the most important spot in the house, the frontier of the promised land, the negotiating space where we need there to be a rush from both sides to tear down that wall… and stay there, in the aisle, not returning to those seats of power until the real work is done.

“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” The yoke is an invention that harnessed one easily-defeatable ox to another ox, creating the collaborative strength needed for carrying heavy burdens. That yoke is what is symbolized by the stole wrapped around the neck and shoulders of clergy, a constant reminder that it takes teamwork to pull-together for the good of the Church and for the good of the world.

And where the good news dwells in that metaphor of the yoke is in the identity of the one to whom you are yoked: Jesus Christ himself is the burden-bearer right next to you, alongside you, closer to you than breath itself. Even if it’s ox-breath.

Weary leaders, weary voters, all who are weary need to learn the lesson that our yokemate is gentle and humble in heart. To truly work in tandem with Christ, in tandem with Lady Wisdom if you prefer to see it, our pace and manner and style will require new discipline, new ways of acting, and new ways of resting.

As much as I love this Gospel text, I stumble on its final promises, “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” I sometimes recite this Gospel when I administer communion in a crisis, like in a hospital CCU or some other tough setting where I’m traveling light. How can I dare to speak of an easy yoke or a light burden when life itself may be in the balance? The person in that bed may be facing a long rehab period and many demanding changes…

Just the right moment to hear that the burden-bearer in the other half of the yoke is going to do the heavy lifting that will lighten the burden, and to hear the Christ claim the whole of the relationship by calling it “my yoke.”

May the grace that we can hear in a pastoral application of this great Gospel text become clear to all who could benefit from its political potential: the good news that cooperation across the most surprising lines and divides may bring exponential easing of burdens, even what St. Paul yearns for: rescue from this body of death, freeing the body for new life.

Tested: Sudan, Abraham, Us

2011-06-27T08:45:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost includes Genesis 22:1-14; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42

The worldwide Anglican Communion has been called to make today a day of fasting and prayer for the people of Sudan. The timing of this call relates to several things. July 9th will mark the official separation of southern Sudan from the north. In these days leading up to that milestone, United Nations commissioners are making strategic decisions that will affect the transition, and UN peacekeepers are being put in place to monitor that transition. All of this is against a background of growing tension over unresolved disputes, not the least of which is who owns the oil that lie below the land, especially along the border between north and south.

So we shall pray, and at least symbolically honor the call to back up prayer with fasting by serving at our coffee hour today only that cup of cold water mentioned in Matthew’s Gospel. That may seem such a token effort, but let it remind us that we are in fact one global family: how the independence of Southern Sudan gets realized matters to all people, as does the resolution of disputed land, and oil, and water, and human rights, in all places.

What is being tested in Sudan is what can be built of hope and courage and a passionate desire for those basic freedoms that we in this country will recall and gratefully celebrate in just a few short days. Perhaps if we pay attention to what July 9th means to the people of Sudan, we will find our July 4th observance more meaningful than ever.

Elizabeth Williams tells me that displaced southerners—like Anglican Deaconess Mother Raile Daffala, who visited us years ago and gave us this powerfully apostolic bowl that keeps gathering our gifts for the world—as she and her extended family and the millions of southern Sudanese who have fled the violence in their homeland now consider returning, they face the grim fact that there is virtually nothing there. It is said that in an area as large as Alaska, not a building remains standing. Roads are in severe disrepair, agriculture disrupted, institutions gone.

This moment in the lives of displaced southerners is not so much an entrance into the promised land as it is their standing in the shoes of ancient Abraham and Sarah, hearing the call to leave whatever they now have and set out on a desert journey into the unknown. This is not exiled Israel returning to its homeland with the blessings of the government where they had resettled; northern Sudan is hostile to division. Nor is it in the mold of our own revolutionary story, patriot farmers and tradesmen and established householders defending their homesteads from tyranny: the people of south Sudan have little, and those who will return will return to nothing but the land and its resources, their rights, and their responsibilities. And, they trust, the support of the free world.

What can be built will be found through the testing of these days and months and years.

In our first lesson today, a famous, even infamous, passage, Abraham is being tested.

The Bible trains us to think of Abraham and Sarah as pioneers, founding figures like George and Martha Washington, representatives of the new. But in fact Abraham and Sarah also represent the truly ancient. They go back to times when people believed they were required to ritually sacrifice their children to ensure the success of some great venture or the security of a new settlement or the building of a new defense tower.

We could hear this difficult story as telling how Abraham’s obedience to God was being tested on that mountain, whether Abraham valued, loved, feared God enough, with an undivided heart, enough that he would follow through with this dreadful call to sacrifice his only child, whether Abraham believed and trusted God enough to keep taking one desperate step after another up that grim path. Another way of seeing this testing is that God was designing an experiment to learn if Abraham was ready to sever himself from that primitive culture of child-sacrifice, and so prove himself worthy of his being chosen to lead God’s yet greater experiment of forming the heart of a nation to listen for and treasure the mind and will of God.

This second way of hearing this grim story is reinforced by the unmistakable message that it is Abraham’s obedience that is being tested. Obedience to what? To the prevailing culture of the day, or to the mind and will of God? At the root of our word obey is a form of the Latin “audire”, to hear. To what is Abraham listening? What message is he hearing?

By the story’s end, he hears and finds the good news of the free gift of God. An unfortunate ram caught by its horns in a thorn thicket provides the life that is to be sacrificed. The demanding nature of God that drove him up that mountain is transfigured, revealed to be a gracious nature that in and of itself provides the way to freedom and new life. This outcome is so close to the heart of the Christian Gospel that this story is one of those appointed for use at the Easter Vigil, when the Church catches its breath at how far God goes on our behalf: in Christ God is the sacrificed victim. The earth shakes on Good Friday not as special effect, but as sign of the profound shakedown of the old order as the new creation takes hold and fills the void.

Poets have taken an interest in this story of transition between old and new. Delmore Schwartz in his poem “Abraham” has the patriarch say,

“…the boy (Isaac) was born and grew and I saw
What I had known, I knew what I had seen, for he
Possessed his mother’s beauty and his father’s humility,
And was not marked and marred by her sour irony and my endless anxiety.

Then the angel returned, asking that I surrender
My son as a lamb to show that humility
Still lived in me, and was not altered by age and prosperity.

I said nothing, shocked and passive. Then I said but to myself alone:
‘This was to be expected. These promises
Are never unequivocal or unambiguous, in this
As in all things which are desired the most:
I have had great riches and great beauty.
I cannot expect the perfection of every wish
And If I deny the command, who knows what will happen?’”

That’s as far as I’ll read—enough to suggest this poet’s view of Abraham cynically arguing himself into an obedience that sounds superstitious… not a high view of a hero. More like a self-interested man, a frightened man.

Our hearts are with Isaac, as the story goes dark around him. He was rescued from death, but not from trauma. That is caught in a poem by another 20th-century American, Bink Noll:

“When Isaac watched his father strain back
the ram’s head, its throat separate and bleed,
evisceration, and fat turn to smoke,

not he had heard any angel speak
but felt sharply where the rope still cut,
how his own neck cracked, his own flesh burned…

Then the poet appears to say in his own voice,

“How we sons lay awake to ponder
the misery of such divided men
to whom the patriarchal lies come true.

My son shall not watch me in a fury
of faith take fire to the altar where
I sacrifice nothing I cherish.

Then, as premonition and description of what the poet dreads,

“He may feel my hands grab like priest hands,
his eyes may die in the brightness
that I have meant obedience entire.

So much I walked with my mad Abraham.”

I think we’re meant to catch the message that, as indignant as it makes us, we are not above repeating what this poet calls the madness of Abraham.

One last poet drives this home, Wilfred Owen, himself a sacrificial victim in World War I, about which he writes in “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”:

“So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.”

Owens imagines Abraham failing the test, refusing to listen, perpetuating the violence. And this Abraham is the governing power of each war-making nation that refuses to sacrifice its own pride.

No wonder we struggle with this story. It puts us squarely in the ancient sandals of Abraham.

We have seen how he is tested. How the peoples of Sudan are tested. We all are tested, day by day, to see what can be built of us, by us, set upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone. May it be a holy temple acceptable to God, shaped not by prevailing culture but by the mind and will of God that we are called to hear.

(The poems quoted can be found in Chapters into Verse: Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible, Volume 1, edited by Robert Atwan and Laurance Wieder, published by Oxford University Press, 1993)

The Knottie Trinity

2011-06-24T06:46:00.000-07:00

Scripture for Trinity Sunday includes Genesis 1:1-2:4a; II Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20

Let’s see: Trinity Sunday… Fathers’ Day… Trinity Sunday… Fathers’ Day… ? Trinity Sunday and Fathers’ Day?

Sure, both can be our subject today, and this is eased by an overlap with that first member of the Holy Trinity: Father.

And a father—any father—will serve as an illustration of what the doctrine of the Trinity says, and doesn’t say. Dan, for example, is a father. He is also a son. And he is also a friend.

I know you rounded those first two corners with me: Dan as father, and as son-- both identities echo the first two natures of God. You were expecting something to parallel the Holy Spirit, and what I gave you is friend. Three weeks ago, when I last preached, I brought to our discussion of the Holy Spirit, third person of the divine, Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the traditional names Advocate or Counselor, his preference: Friend. One who knows you so well that it comes as second nature to stand up for you, champion you, guide you with the personal attention, affection, and fearlessness of a natural coach.

So the same man stands as a father, a son, and a friend. These are three of his natures, and each helps make him who he is.

To further the analogy between the multiple identities of Dan and those of God, we’d need to speak of those three natures of his as three persons, for that is what we say of the Trinity.

And that’s where some mischief creeps in. Take “three persons” literally and you not only make God sound like a committee, but also wrap the whole of God in flesh and blood, reducing the spiritual to the physical. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity invites us to see God enfleshed in Jesus Christ, but the personhood of God the Father and of God the Spirit is not about fingernails and hair follicles. That God has three persons takes us into the realm of metaphor, which is the province of language.

For this, I needed a classics consultation. So I emailed both partners of our parish classicist couple, Amanda and Chris, with this question: Do I recall correctly that the Latin word “persona” has a special use in theater? Within hours, Chris emailed from Kansas, where they’re visiting family. His answer was Yes: In Roman theater the masks (worn by actors) were called “personae”, and very early that Latin word takes on the meaning of “character”. Chris offers to help us out here, so I’ll quote him: “Without looking into the history of ideas about the Trinity, I would guess that the term personae was used to communicate that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three different appearances/aspects of the same unitary divine nature—three characters played by the same actor. But I dimly recall that the Church fathers spent a lot of time arguing about the doctrine of the Trinity…”

Indeed they did. And if you want to sample what came of those arguments, our Book of Common Prayer has in the wayback a section titled Historical Documents. And there you’ll find the late 4th-early 5th-century Creed of Saint Athanasius. Let me give you a taste of it.

“…We worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;
Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.
For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit.
But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is all one, the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.
Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Spirit.
The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, and the Holy Spirit uncreated.
The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.
The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Spirit eternal.
And yet they are not three eternals but one eternal.
As also there are not three uncreated nor three incomprehensible, but one uncreated and one incomprehensible.
So likewise the Father is almighty, the Son almighty, and the Holy Spirit almighty.
And yet they are not three almighties, but one almighty.
So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God;
And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.”
Whew!
That’s not the whole of the Athanasian Creed, just 14 of its 44 verses, well more than twice the length of the Nicene Creed, perhaps five times the length of the Iona Community Creed we will use today. Yes, there’s a reason you may have never heard of it. But it’s worth hearing this ancient text insist that what the doctrine of the Trinity does not say is that we worship three Gods.

What it does say is that there is one God engaging humanity in three ways, three ways-in to the character of the divine, three ways to relate to God.

One way is best expressed by the creative love that gives life as does a father, a mother, and binds that life in covenant love, compassion, mercy, and justice. To relate to this first person of the Trinity is to open ourselves to those same powers being formed in us.

A second way is best expressed by the Word made flesh, love enfleshed in the one who walks with us, Jesus the Christ, the Son of man and Son of God. To relate to this second person of the Trinity is to dare grow up into his likeness.

And a third way is best expressed by the Spirit that animates and transcends the physical, freeing creation to enjoy, worship, and serve its maker and redeemer. To relate to this third person of the Trinity is to entrust ourselves and one another to the wind that fills our sails, and to trust the still calm when for a while our sails are empty.

To say that these three personae are like the character masks of Roman theater could be misleading. The purpose of the Holy Trinity is not the masking of God, but the revealing of God, each revealing something more of the essential character of God. On the other hand, perhaps the notion that there is one actor behind these three character masks of God, one reality that each expresses in its distinct way, honestly says what we know: that God is often experienced as a hidden presence, is always a mystery to be known in mystical ways, and, when all is said and done, there’s an awful lot we do not know.

The one God engages us in three ways. Three ways-into the divine. Three ways to relate to God.

The Holy Trinity speaks to our minds, and seeks our hearts.

I was reminded of that as I prepared this sermon, and kept hearing a fragment of a poem: “Batter my heart, three-personed God…” was all I could remember. I looked it up, and there it was: one of John Donne’s nineteen Holy Sonnets.

I was drawn into three of those poems, and will print them here. You who love the King James Version of the Bible may enjoy the Elizabethan language of these poems—and, when a word stumps you, just wonder over it.

For example, in the third of these sonnets Donne calls the Trinity “knottie.” Isn’t that a wonderful word? It echoes his prayer in the first of these poems, that God would break the knot that ties us, betrothes us, to false gods. Christ frees us, then binds us to the one true God by tying the knot between our souls and the Holy Spirit in baptism.

So, if you’ll read these poems now, you’ll bring this sermon to its close. Notice that in the knottie language of the third sonnet we’re told what comes of God being made like man: by his Passion, Jesus Christ gives us the spiritual wealth by which we reclaim life that would otherwise be lost to us.

From John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets”

XIV

Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend,
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd , and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely I love you, and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee, untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

XV

Wilt thou love God, as he thee? then digest,
My Soule, this wholsome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by Angels waited on
In heaven, doth make his Temple in thy brest.
The Father having begot a Sonne most blest,
And still begetting, (for he ne'r begonne)
Hath deign'd to chuse thee by adoption,
Coheire to his glory, and Sabbaths endlesse rest;
And as a robb'd man, which by search doth finde
His stolne stuffe sold, must lose or buy it againe;
The Sonne of glory came downe, and was slaine,
Us whom he had made, and Satan stolne, to unbinde.
'Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.

XVI

Father, part of his double interest
Unto thy kingdome, thy Sonne gives to mee,
His joynture in the knottie Trinitie
Hee keepes, and gives to me his deaths conquest.
This Lambe, whose death, with life the world hath blest,
Was from the worlds beginning slaine, and he
Hath made two Wills, which with the Legacie
Of his and thy kingdome, doe thy Sonnes invest.
Yet such are thy laws, that men argue yet
Whether a man those statutes can fulfill;
None doth; but all-healing grace and spirit
Revive againe what law and letter kill.
Thy lawes abridgement, and thy last command
Is all but love; Oh let this last Will stand!

Make Way for the Advocate

2011-05-31T13:47:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 6th Sunday of Easter includes Acts 17:22-31, I Peter 3:13-22, and John 14:15-21

At Wednesday’s eucharist at Sweet Brook Care Center, I thought I’d test the currency of the word Advocate. “What is an advocate?” I asked, hoping the question might launch a seat-of-the-britches nursing home homily, but fearing it might just as likely sink it.

Scanning their faces, I thought “Note to self: think twice about starting out with a question like that,” when, clear as a bell, from the front row, the person directly in front of me, came this voice: “It’s someone who stands up for you, speaks for you in front of a magistrate.” Thank you, Joan.

From there it is a graciously short reach to grasp the barely-imaginable good news announced by Jesus: that in whatever trials we will face we will be represented, defended, counseled, by One whom God the Father will send to us.

If you’re a fan of the Christian Year, you know what season comes next. You also know that this One Jesus promises is the Holy Spirit, the very energy of God that we will celebrate on June 12th, the Day of Pentecost, and keep celebrating the following Sunday, Trinity Sunday, when we need our fingers to count the ways we and God encounter one another.

And if this One who will represent, defend, and counsel us sounds too airy-fairy to grab hold of, or to be able to embrace us, it might help to hear Lutheran re-voicer of scripture Eugene Peterson speak not of the Advocate, but the Friend (capital F) who will always be with us.

I find appealing the growing trend to speak of this Spirit of Truth, this third person of the Holy Trinity, as feminine in nature. That’s not a modern or novel idea; it rises from the period between Old and New Testaments, when the Wisdom literature of Israel personified Lady Wisdom, and subsequent Christians found it easy to imagine that this Lady Wisdom, said to be present at the creation of the universe, could be that Spirit of truth promised by the Christ who, according to the Gospel-writer John, was also present at the creation.

So indulge me, and argue with me later. I’m picturing the Advocate, the One sent from God with all the energy of God to defend, represent, and counsel us, as any one of an array of compassionate but tough, gracious but gritty female attorneys who could, even for a moment of fantasy, serve us metaphorically. Name your pick: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Martha Coakley, Sonja Sotamayor, or that passionate, intense, persistent and very hot Assistant DA on Law and Order (you know the one?). I’ll bet you can do a better job generating a list of candidates, but let’s not lose our focus…

Which is that when any one of us is in a time of trial, and must face any number of things that could go against us, for us and for our salvation stands one who speaks for us, who knows us better than we know ourselves, and whose role it is to speak the deepest truth, so moving the whole proceedings from the courtroom of fear to the sanctuary of faith.

Our scriptures today bear witness to what that deep truth is.

The concept of conscience is brought to us in the First Letter of Peter. By classic definition, conscience is the voice of God within us. By equally classic distortion of religion, that voice is quick to accuse and judge us guilty. But Peter speaks of conscience as if it were a sanctuary to be kept clear and open for the reconciling love of God to work on our behalf. Even more, he reminds us that baptism’s saving power is how it roots conscience in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This takes conscience to a deeper place than right and wrong, innocent and guilty. The resurrection takes us to the purifying place where all that is human is bathed and renewed in all that is God, all that is limited in the limitless, the mortal in the eternal, the wounded in healing.

The deep truth the Advocate speaks is not that we are guilty, but that we are loved. I believe this good news is just as revolutionary and transformative in our 21st century as in our New Testament’s first century, and just as urgently needed to be heard. It is news that brings our souls to a new springtime, and frees the human will to love as boldly and generously as God in Christ loves all.

And there is Christianity’s best claim on our allegiance. That the voice of God-in-us calls the human race not to pour out more blood, sweat, and tears on more altars whether public or private, but to respect the dignity of every human being and learn to live up to the full stature of Christ, not live down to the common denominators of fear, greed, blame, and self-serving power.

Which brings us to our lesson from the Book of Acts. There we find the apostle Paul, a Jew trained in the rabbinic model of religious argument, reaching out to philosophical Greeks in their great city, Athens. He presents credentials meant to open Greek ears, the talent to carefully observe and reflect upon the phenomena of life. He says little judgmentally about the various shrines he must have seen, shrines that glorified those traits that made the Greek gods what they were, displaying those attributes by the art of craftsmen in gold, silver, and stone. But he implies that these various altars and shrines required endless offerings by human hands, and I think we hear, barely below the surface of Paul’s words, his inner conviction that what he saw was idolatry, the worshiping of something human or manmade as if it were God, and it isn’t.

But he sits on that judgment and rather deftly addresses these Greeks as a religious audience in a religious way about religious matters, looking for a religious response. And like any good commencement speaker (and it is very much a commencing that Paul intends), he uses a local site layered with legend to catch the attention and open the minds and hearts of his audience.

Somewhere in Athens, he has found an altar with the inscription, “To an unknown god.” For Paul, this is like finding the gene in the genome that opens the future to new life, restoring the wholeness of the body. He is able to use this evidence to remind the Greeks that by their own light they have recognized that there is more to the divine than they know, and Paul names this the Creator God who made the world and everything in it, all nations, all people. (This is, you know, how Israel described God.) Here is an altar that shows recognition of religion as claiming something much more than tribal or nationalistic or idolatrous allegiance. Here is a religion that may be of the mind and of the heart and of the will. And Paul intends to ride this horse right into the corral of Jesus Christ, and hope someone follows him (a small number do, and so a Christian congregation is born in Athens).

He builds a sympathetic case. This God who has made the very web of life has planted in us the desire to know him, the urge to search for God “and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us.” This may sound less like Paul the Rabbi and more like Paul presenting himself as a philosopher like Socrates, while in fact being true to his calling to be a winsome truth-teller like Jesus.

The point Paul drives home in Athens is the same he makes in Corinth and Rome and every other city he visits: that the one true God has not left us comfortless, has not left us to our own devices to find truth and to know the Holy One. God has taken on our human flesh in Jesus of Nazareth and by his resurrection has completely revealed this Jesus as the Christ so that through him the world may be set right, one person, one household, one community at a time. “In him we live and move and have our being,” wrote an unnamed Stoic philosopher; and to this Paul says, “Yes, and now it is up to each person to enter that truth, lay claim to it, make the astonishing discovery that what God says to each is not ‘I judge you,’ but ‘I love you,’ and thereby frees each person from the ancient way of blame, frees each person for the new life of self-giving love.”

Such is the freedom we claim today for Nicholas and Diego. What is truly ours to claim is a joyful responsibility to introduce these boys to a religion of the heart and mind and will, one that will have more appeal than the altars of 21st-century gods of gold, silver, stone, success, technology, sensation, and violence—all the powers that fall far short of love. Religion can fall far short of love, too, and what we wangt for Diego and Nicholas is a dose of St. Paul’s insight that by our own best light there is more to know of God than we yet know.

We, their families, their Godparents, their Church will fulfill our responsibility best by deeply hearing, receiving, and treasuring the Advocate, the Friend, the relentless voice of love that frees us to be agents of the very energy of God.

Planting Good Seed in a Time of Terror

2011-05-10T09:57:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the third Sunday of Easter includes Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Psalm 116: 1-3, 10-17; I Peter 1:17-23; Luke 24:13-35

I find this Gospel story from the road to Emmaus deeply satisfying.

To start with, it presents Jesus Christ as our companion in pilgrimage. We’re always on our way somewhere, and so is he. There will be times when he comes near us and journeys with us. We may or may not notice him, recognize him. He may or may not help us recognize him: he may play us on the line the way he did those two disciples. They were hooked in dialogue with him, but he kept on feeding them all the line they needed to swim in great figure eights under his boat until, exhausted, they’re landed and he pulls out of their pitiable mouths the sharp hook of their grief and frees them.

I know, I just turned that into a fish story. You don’t have to hear it that way to find it satisfying.

But it’s that disconnect between the disciples and their familiar teacher that’s so fascinating, isn’t it? He draws near to them, but he sees no spark of awareness in their eyes, which are glassed-over by pain and loss. Is he unrecognizable because of his three days of torture, assassination, and harrowing of hell? Could be, though Luke doesn ‘t invite us to go there.

Quite simply, Jesus calls them out of their tomb by a most superficial question, “What are you talking about?”

Then comes the delicious moment when they answer, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who doesn’t know?”

“Know what?” he plays along.

Then comes the part that later must have caused these two to slap their foreheads: they lay it all out to him, what he has just gone through, and along the way they drop a few clues about their own short-sightedness. They call him a prophet, not the highest opinion of him in the circle of their peers (Peter, early on, knew that he was the Messiah, the anointed one of God). They tuck in their own disappointment (“But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” in other words the Messiah) as if he had somehow flunked the test. And their report of astonishment at the announcement by the women that his tomb was empty reveals how little these men had been paying attention to the promise of God, that justice and lovingkindness will prevail on earth as in heaven.

So, in perfect segue, Jesus upbraids them. “You seem to think that God has failed, that because you are in pain and grief, this suffering of the Messiah should never have happened. How foolish you are! How slow of heart to believe the deep truth of the prophets! Salvation comes in the shadow of judgment. First the Messiah takes on the full freight of human flesh, including suffering and death; then, having crossed through those perils, he is able to lead the human race into his own freedom. You’d rather have it some other way, would you? Like, God aiming the turret gun of his tank right at the imperial throne and blasting the powers of oppression to smithereens? That is so old, so lame, don’t you see that? These three dark days show God suffering with you, for you, to build in you a power that will leave human violence in the dust, the power of spirit and truth transcendent over terror and all that terror teaches.”

This Gospel could help us consider the recurring headline of this past week, America’s finding and killing Osama bin Laden. I’m not sure I can explain why, but I find these two disciples good companions as I try to make sense of what has happened. Maybe it’s because their story brings into focus a powerful history of suffering that can be told in different ways, from very different points of view, and on that road to Emmaus those viewpoints are brought into dialogue. And much to the point, that dialogue reveals two distinctly opposite understandings of power. Our Lord Jesus facilitates this dialogue and enters it fully. So must we.

You could say that the disciples enroute to Emmaus represent everyman and his instincts. You could also rightly say that they were representatives of the Church in its very first generation. In a sense, Luke the Gospel writer operates somewhat like a journalist, thrusting a microphone to the mouths of these men on the street.

Had a reporter done that to me last week, as happened doubtless to countless religious representatives around the world, with the question, “How do you respond to the killing of Bin Laden?”, I think I might have said—and still will say—that I am torn between the requirement of justice, satisfied that it finally caught up with this mass murderer, and on the very terms which he himself required by his outlaw way of daring us to find him. And, on the other hand, tearing apart that satisfaction is my certainty that if this midnight raid fulfills any holy scripture, it is that they who live by the sword will die by the sword.

Painfully, I have to apply that to us as well as to Osama bin Laden. When I do, I recognize that by spilling his blood we have forged one more link in the ancient chain of retribution, and that chain, now heavier by one more (and universally known) act of violence, weighs down the whole human race in bondage to the power of the iron fist. A verse of our psalm today echoes eerily when cast in the present tense, “ The cords of death entangle us; the grip of the grave takes hold of us; we come to grief and sorrow” as violence begets violence.

In a more perfect scenario, Bin Laden would have been captured, and perhaps killed nonetheless, by operatives of a Muslim nation, not by armed Americans; and with that, the ancient chain could have had its last link snapped apart, the otherwise endless dynamics of blame snuffed out, and the glory of martyrdom denied this man of violence. But we know too well that the Pakistani army would have no part in that dream scenario. Quite to the opposite, they appear to have been playing both ends of a game that resembles more a nightmare of deception and treachery.

It’s truly impressive how our intelligence community and our Navy Seals broke through the subterfuge and found the engineer of 9/11.

We’re discovering that there are differing narratives about what happened in that midnight raid. One early telling of the story suggested that a very different outcome was attempted, capturing Bin Laden rather than killing him. We’ll never know whether that could have resulted in more—or less—deterrence of terrorism.

We’re surely hoping that intelligence gained from computers seized in the raid, and what may be learned from Bin Laden’s wives, will hasten the disintegration of Al Qaeda. But I can’t help thinking that what I know about crabgrass gives me useful metaphors for understanding Al Qaeda: even with the measures I take to counter it, that pest is going to spring up along borders and will flourish in tricky patches that will keep its seed blowing in the wind long after I’m gone. In addition to countering it, my best intelligence tells me to plant good seed, healthy, hearty, desired grass in the thin spots where, otherwise, poverty ensures a new generation of trouble.

Translated out of the garden and into the world, that would be pre-emptive counter-terrorism that counts less on the iron fist of military action and ratchets-up our resourcing of intelligent foreign aid, out-of-the-box diplomacy, and imaginative re-envisioning of person-to-person initiatives like international youth exchange (though perhaps it’s we older adults who ought to be exchanging with one another, less likely to be mistaken as special operatives or spies) and what a 21st-century version of a Peace Corps would look like. There must be other examples of planting good seed, and we need to find them.

In an age when religion divides the peoples of the earth more and more sharply, followers of Jesus must freshly hear “the things about himself in all the scriptures”, paying close attention to those which make our hearts burn within us, never being surprised when these involve the breaking of bread, the sharing of resources, the open hand of what the apostle calls “genuine mutual love” which wields a surprisingly more resilient and liberating power than the iron fist.

That this is true is not because we wish it were, but because, as Jesus reveals to his roadside disciples, and as the apostle echoes, the God who created the universe “judges all people impartially according to their deeds,” and counters the futile ways inherited from our ancestors by extending to all the precious self-offering of Christ, freeing us to be “born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring Word of God.”

Finding the Easter Power

2011-04-27T07:04:00.000-07:00

Scripture for Easter Day includes Acts 10:34-43; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-18

There’s a lot of violence behind that story of Easter Day. Did you hear it?

Brave Mary Magdalene rose early, before the sun, to face an awful walk to the graveyard where her dearest friend’s body lay freshly buried after his horrifying death by crucifixion. A shocking violent death for a sweet man, Jesus, whom she loved. That violence claimed a part of her, in the way that trauma leaves its mark.

She trembled when she saw the enormous stone, not where it should be, covering his grave, but rolled away. To her, this meant that more violence had come—but from where? From those same brutal imperial soldiers who had beaten him, bullied him, done the unthinkable to fasten his body to the beams of a cross? Or was this new violence from the earth, an earthquake shifting that great stone?

Brave Mary Magdalene had not let the darkness before dawn keep her from his side, but now she ran to find Simon Peter and the other disciples, of whom she was one. By then she’s describing this new violence as human: they have taken the Lord—we don’t know where!

Quickly, before the sun’s rising could expose them to the iron fist of the emperor’s men whose only care was to snuff out every life that could disturb the emperor’s peace, quickly now Peter and John ran to that graveyard to be sure Mary had the right spot, to see for themselves if they must suffer the loss of what peace it gave them to know where he lay.

Their quick daring of danger showed them how right Mary was. Then they saw more than what she described: Jesus’s burial shroud lay discarded on the floor of the tomb, as if Jesus had shed those long bands of cloth just Friday wrapped around him, like a great luna moth erupting from its chrysalis.

As yet they did not understand. St. John the gospel writer tells us that: they had not yet shed their own tight grasp and recognized what God was doing (which was what God had long promised), not yet opened their minds and hearts to dare believe that death could not stop Jesus from being with them always.

These men were only so daring. Now, fast, they ran back into hiding before they could be scooped up as rebels to be crucified. But brave Mary Magdalene remained by his grave.

Weeping. Through those tears, she peered into the tomb, and where the men had seen discarded linen, she saw two angels in white. Were her tears distorting what she saw, or were those cleansing tears what it took to reveal the more the others missed? The angels ask her why she’s crying. Does she wonder whether angels aren’t as sharp as they’re thought to be, that they ask her this? Or is it that she can’t yet hear their message, “You don’t need to cry any more,” as if the ears of her heart need freeing, like the eyes of her mind.

Something makes her turn around. Something is reflected in the eyes of those angels. Or someone…

Standing there is Jesus, but she doesn’t yet know this, her eyes are still washed in her tears; but it’s her hearing that he engages as he asks the angels’ question again (Why are you weeping?) and adds his own, “Whom are you looking for?”

The best she can make of what she sees is that he must be the cemetery gardener, so, sensibly, she asks for his help in finding Jesus. Then, by one word, in one rush of breath as Word becomes flesh, Mary’s ears of the heart are freed as she hears him call her, “Mary!” In this story, that is Mary’s tipping point, opening all her senses to receive what is happening.

She does not move backward in time when she utters her one word, “Teacher!” By that word, she tells him that she recognizes him and trusts what is happening now. To make sure that she moves forward with him, Jesus teaches her the new footing of their love: Do not hold on to me in the old way— from now on I live within you, I live among the open-hearted community of believers, and I live in the world to love it into what it will become as God’s new creation, through you.

Brave Mary Magdalene, first disciple to follow Jesus beyond fear of death, into new life. In her tears, she encourages us to be honest with our feelings. In her staying close to Jesus, she teaches us patience and courage in asking the questions that will show us who he is. In the opening of her senses to recognize him, she shows us how conversion of life is our becoming open to the tender gracious forever-open heart of God, the source of a power so different from the sort that emperors and armies have-- lasting, creative, peace-making, and open to all who are willing to receive it.

There is a lot of violence in our world today. This world needs many more open hearts to move with Mary’s bravery to find the Easter power that is stronger than the iron fist.

Seer and Seen

2011-04-05T05:42:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 4th Sunday in Lent includes I Samuel 16:1-13; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41

Sight is a theme that unites our readings today. Sent by God to find the next King of Israel, the prophet Samuel must first clear his eyes of tears so he may see. His grief over the failure and decline of the current King Saul still finds him crying. Everything is a blur. God appears to lack compassion, urging Samuel to snap out of it and get on the road that will lead him to Jesse the Bethlehemite; it is one of his sons God has chosen to become King. There is where we see divine compassion: knowing that King Saul is in breakdown, God will not allow Israel to be a flock without a shepherd.

This assignment lands Samuel at a sacrificial ceremony where the elders of Bethlehem are gathered. Samuel ritually cleanses Jesse and his assembled sons so they may attend the feast, and as he examines the first of them, presumably the eldest, God interrupts with a puzzling lesson on the subject of seeing.

“Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected this one; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

One by one, I suspect in descending birth order, seven of Jesse’s sons pass before Samuel, and, in each case, Samuel says, Nope.

“Are all your sons here?” Samuel asks Jesse. “Are you holding back on me?”

“All my sons who amount to anything are here,” we might imagine Jesse answering, with some surprise. “Each of these has proven himself, one way or another. One handles his sword like it was an extension of his arm. Another shoots his spear with deadly aim. This one handles public speaking with the ease of an actor. Over here is my business wizard. They’re all born leaders. I’m not so sure about the youngest boy. Number eight. He’s keeping the sheep. That seems to suit him. Kind of a puzzler, that boy. Don’t know what to make of him.”

“Send and bring him,” orders Samuel, “for we will not sit down until he comes here.”

David was not expecting to attend the sacrifice. He couldn’t have been dressed, even washed, for the occasion. The smell of the sheepfold had to be about him, as in he came from the fields.

You might want to look at David in this next to last window in the west aisle as you hear the author of I Samuel describe him: “Now he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome.” There is what another David, David Maitland Armstrong, American painter and stained glass designer of the Gilded Age, made of that description in 1896.

Is it a bit puzzling that after a cautionary lecture on not looking on the outward appearance, the four things we’re told about David is that he was young, ruddy, had beautiful eyes, and was handsome? Presumably, God looked on his heart and found qualities there that suited him for Israel’s throne (even if he would wreck a marriage and betray his most loyal soldier, abusing the authority of that throne).

“Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light…” writes the apostle to the Christians at Ephesus. Everyone has clay feet, things they’re ashamed of; all have sinned and fallen short of their God-given glory. But the Lord God, the one who looks upon the heart, in Jesus Christ sees each of us in the light of Christ’s risen glory. That light exposes everything about us, and exposes us to everything in Christ so that the apostle can say, “in the Lord you are light.” As we become fully visible ourselves by Christ shining within us, we learn how to see each other in his light.

The old darkness is palpable as Jesus’s disciples see a man who has been blind from birth. These same disciples will one day be seers of the resurrection and apostles who train others to recognize the Christ in all persons—but they are not yet there. They look at this man and see a plight that must be explained, they see a damaged life that they assume is punishment for someone’s having sinned. While we’re tempted to judge them as ignoramuses, in fact they’re showing a certain religious training that puts everything in dreadfully neat little boxes of explanation, an attempt to keep suffering and mystery at bay by believing that bad things happen to bad people, and good things to good people.

To my eye, the most important and most beautiful moment in this Gospel is our Lord’s answer to their obnoxious question, “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” “Neither! He was born blind, and God’s works will be revealed in him. It us up to us to do those works of God while we have light to see by. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” We hear a premonition of Good Friday there (“as long as I am in the world”), though from our vantage point we can rejoice that the light that makes us who we are will swiftly penetrate that darkness universally once and for all.

But at this moment on that Judean roadside, the difference between how Jesus sees this blind man and how his disciples view him is in sharp contrast, more dramatic than day and night. The way the disciples see him, they keep him at arm’s length. The way Jesus sees draws him to this man to touch him, first mystifying us with what looks like a ritual—or is it an example of folk medicine?—as he spits into the sand, makes a poultice of that mud, and spreads it on the man’s eyes. The very substance that you and I would go to any extreme to keep out of our eyes, sand, is what serves in this healing. Perhaps the one thing we understand is our Lord’s directions for followup care: go and wash. Go and wash in a certain pool with the name Siloam, near which was an aqueduct named Shiloah (meaning “sender of water”, a perfect description of an aqueduct). But John takes the pool’s name, Siloam, to mean “the One who was sent,” underlining in his story the nature and purpose of Jesus.

In other words, this is not just a healing. This is one more example of the perfect obedience Jesus shows to his God-given purpose, to restore our human nature to its intended divine likeness.

Which is to say that compassion is a power that extends exponentially, a gift that keeps on giving. The kingdom of God, the reign of God that is established in Jesus Christ, the new creation, can be understood as the global movement of his compassion apostolically sent by way of us. Here is one way to understand the astonishing vision at the heart of Christian baptism, that each of us is to grow into the full stature of Christ.

And it all depends on how we see the person we’re looking at. Jesus’s way of seeing—and it’s very much the way of the prophets announced by Samuel—is not upon a person’s appearance, stature, status, intellect, or curriculum vitae, but upon the heart, where the image of God pulses, however strong, however weak. In that seeing, the seer cannot be above the seen: they stand in radical equality as children of the Most High who dwells within.

But how can this blind man and this itinerant healer be called equal? One has no sight. Here, with this recognition, the seeing done by the disciples stops, arrested by the rules of a zero-sum game.

Neuroscientist Oliver Sacks helps us out. He writes about how, in the brain of a blind person, there is sensory redistribution. This person’s other senses are used by the brain to help compensate for what is lacking optically. Even the tongue, says Sacks, can be trained to gather stimuli that the brain can process as images.

There is a good starting point for disciples developing humane ways of seeing: let it start with awe at how the divine image is already pulsing within the person we would see. Our seeing of a person we could call disabled can begin with deep respect for how ably this person navigates life. Humane compassionate seeing starts with all that puts seer and seen on the same road.

Then what may mystify us is free to move through us. Into the spit, sweat, blood, and tears that compassionate action may require. To a stepping outside the box of what tradition approves, as we rise to obey what the divine image requires and accomplishes.

Suffering: From Kvetching to Compassion

2011-03-29T13:59:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 3rd Sunday in Lent includes Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42

Poor Moses. If we think that unifying Episcopalians is harder than herding cats, Moses has his tales to tell, and we hear one today. He’s trying to lead into freedom a multitude of Hebrew slaves, refugees from Egypt, and anxiety among them is running high. They complain about his so-called freedom that requires them to put up with lots of hardships, like having no water in the desert. They quarrel among themselves. They kvetch. I gather that’s not a Hebrew word, but a good Yiddish word that means to be a grumbler, moaner, sniveller, squawker, whiner, bellyacher, complainer, crybaby. Its root in high German means to squeeze, to pressure, and today we hear them putting the squeeze on Moses.

They’re just about ready to stone Moses, as if that would have been a good idea—Moses was their global positioning device, and without him they would have been really lost. Moses agonizes with God: “What am I to do with these people?” And God promises him that at Mount Horeb they will find a rock. Moses must strike that rock, and water will flow.

It is an ancient story from the rabbis that not only did those refugees find water there at that rock, but—you must put on your imaginations for this—that rock followed the Hebrew people throughout their long years of being homeless in the wilderness.

How do you imagine that? Everybody takes ten steps forward… they turn around, and the folks in the back row shout out, “Yep, it moved!” This sounds like the stuff of cartoons. Every time they break camp and resettle a few miles north, that rock is with them.

These rabbis loved to tell that tale to make their point that this is just like God, isn’t it? God with us, Emmanuel, whose amazing grace at just the right moment is so etched in memory that it follows—or leads—God’s people forever.

And sure enough, in one of his letters St. Paul dusts off that great old tale and reinterprets it by saying, “And that rock was Christ!”

That’s all he says about it… doesn’t explain himself…figures that if the elder rabbis could appeal to people’s imagination, so can he.

As we hear today’s Gospel story about a woman who comes to a famous well in Samaria, we won’t be too surprised to find Jesus there. Emmanuel is where the water is. “The water that I will give will become in you a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” Water saves the lives of refugees in the desert; water becomes the sacramental sign of salvation in Jesus Christ.

But let’s see if that rock is still following us. It is. What offers more solid footing than rock? Until it moves in its most massive way, tectonic plates deep in the earth sliding, falling, rising, squeezing the surface, grotesquely distorting whatever man has built on that surface, as happened in Japan two weeks ago. Seven hundred times more powerful than the big earthquake in Haiti, hundreds of aftershocks repeating the message that rock is not the most solid footing, after all.

In his Letter to the Romans that Jim read today, St. Paul says that we stand in the love that God has poured into our lives in Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit. Emmanuel, God-with-us in Jesus, the Savior with the wet feet, is the solid ground of our being. To walk in his love is to have peace, says Paul, not because we wish it were so but because God has made it so; not because we did anything to qualify for this change that puts us on firmer footing than rock. In fact, in Paul’s version of the Good News, when God acted on our behalf it wasn’t at some moment when the human race was at its best, but exactly when we were at our weakest, so anxious in our suffering, so anxious and kvetching that we were, says Paul, enemies of God, opposed to God.

It was then that Jesus Christ laid his life down to make the way of the cross to be the way of new life. I think of his strategic selflessness when I hear about the nuclear reactor workers in Japan harrowing that hell, standing in that breach, entering those deadly places to get water cooling those overheated radioactive components. They risk their health, they dare to live and die in hope that what they do will save the lives of countless people, their people, their children, their communities.

Peter Abelard, twelfth-century French philosopher, argued with traditional atonement theory that saw Jesus’s death on the cross appeasing a wrathful God. Abelard insisted instead that the purpose of our gazing upon the crucified Christ is to be so moved by compassion that we will recognize the power of selfless love and choose to bravely give such love when it is asked of us.

If God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving, why can’t he design the created order without human suffering? That’s a powerful question I’m hearing in the Foundations group. My hunch is that no answer will fully satisfy anyone asking this question.

Rabbi Harold Kushner tries. In his book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” he pulls apart the premises of that question. Freedom of will cannot exist if God knows all. The unbendable laws of nature that allow the created order to exist put the squeeze even on God. Not all-knowing, not all-powerful, nonetheless God is all-loving, all-encompassing, all-compassionate.

Let’s hear a different way of approaching the question. Suffering is indispensable to the human quest for wisdom. We must suffer into truth, suffer into mature human ripeness, suffer into blessing. That’s the thinking of Aeschylus, Greek playwright in the fifth century before the common era. He wrote plays for the festival of Dionysus, god of transformation, putting suffering on stage to cause the audience to feel empathy, to strengthen the bonds of Athenian citizenship and leave no one alone in his or her sorrow or suffering. He resolves one of his plays by appeasing the terrifying Furies, gods of wrath, giving them their own shrine and renaming them the Eumenides, the compassionate ones—as much as to say that citizens in a civilized society must make a place for suffering and darkness in their own minds and hearts, transforming primitive passions into a force for compassion.

“We boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” That’s Paul again.

His words could make us furious, if we hear him being dismissive and unfeeling. But I hear him building the case for compassion. Hope does not disappoint because hope is what keeps the doors of our hearts and the windows of our minds open, open to recognize pain and promise, need and opportunity. Hope is the spark of energy that makes me rise from the throne of me-first and give that place to someone else who needs my attention, my care.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all…

That’s Emily Dickinson commenting on hope not disappointing us. But if hope sings the tune without the words, there is the task of compassion: finding the words and the actions born of feeling, empathy, love, the strong ground on which we stand, the only firm ground on which we walk.

(Karen Armstrong’s book “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life”, Alfred A. Knopf, 2010, was very helpful to me in the preparation of this sermon.)

Facing Biblical Temptation

2011-03-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

Scripture for the 1st Sunday in Lent includes Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7; Romans 5A:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11

If you were here on Ash Wednesday, you heard about an initiative by two dozen Chicago-area Episcopal parishes. Each sent a team of lay and ordained leaders to offer the imposition of ashes at public transit platforms. “Ashes to Go” is the name they gave to the project. One parish led the way last year. They placed ashes on the foreheads of 37 strangers. By that arithmetic, organizers this year hoped to reach hundreds.

Ashes can be administered in a variety of ways. The standard approach has the officiant make the sign of the cross in ashes on the recipient’s forehead, saying, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” That may or may not be the best Good News the Church can impart. I prefer to say to people, “Remember that your body is dust, and to dust it shall return; and remember that you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” I think that message reflects a more faithful Christian anthropology.

Poor attendance at Ash Wednesday services prompted last year’s action. As did a desire to bring the church out into the public square—and what’s more public than the transit system? One might add, what’s a more vulnerable and guarded moment in a person’s day than the commute to work?

Simultaneously, student ministry groups at the University of Northern Illinois and Northwestern University in Evanston brought Ashes to Go to Starbucks at their student unions.

Tunnel City Coffee, anyone? Paresky snack bar? Stop and Shop?

I’m thinking that religion in the public square could become a fraught issue. If we admire our Episcopal compatriots for their chutzpah, how comfortable are we with a free-market approach, any and all religions conducting their rites on public property or in workplaces and facilities giving permission? I’d guess the blogosphere could barely contain the arguments, pro and con.

Our own Diocese is one of several that offer outdoor liturgy. The Rev. Christopher Carlisle, our Missioner for Higher Education, in teamwork with a Lutheran pastor and a UCC minister, has launched Cathedral in the Night, a portable outdoor church setting that uses lighting to create holy space, and has the purpose of engaging students and young adults in reaching out to community residents in need or crisis. The debut took place in January on a side lawn of St. John’s, Northampton, notwithstanding the thermometer reading of five degrees. If this venture reminds you of the outreach of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Boston, offering eucharist to homeless people on the Commons, I believe it’s meant to.

The church that lives unto itself will die by itself. The church that does not engage children, youth, and young adults creatively, on their terms and in their public spaces, neglects Jesus’s call to let the young come to him.

The church that does not locate itself in the community where people are hungry, unemployed, unwell, unsheltered, rejects Jesus’s call to find him and love him where he is. The church that lives unto itself will die by itself, having deprived itself of the true passion of Christ for making right a world gone wrong.

Later in this service today, we will thank God for showing us concrete instances of divine justice being made real in the world. Tahrir Square was on my mind when I chose that prayer. I’m not sure I always know what people mean when they call a contemporary event biblical, but that’s exactly what I want to call that improbable, inspiring, wondrous rebirth of a nation that is so wanted by so many that they have demonstrated multiple gifts of the Spirit of God. Can we imagine a holier liturgy than what happened near that public square, culminating in a moment on the Friday of Rage when soldiers swiveled their tank turret guns from facing into the square, aimed at the people, to face the presidential palace where Hosni Mubarak would soon be dislodged? True biblical justice requires the beating of swords into ploughshares (and tanks into who knows what); but turning a turret gun into a lever that lifts a people from bondage is biblical enough for me.

In Tahrir Square, Muslims turned east to pray. Coptic Christians encircled their praying compatriots, to protect them. To meet the requirement that hands be washed before prayer, the demonstrators rubbed the paving stones of the square to let the grit of sand clean their hands (the prophet provided that option somewhere in the holy writings of Islam, that where water is lacking, sand will suffice, an eminently practical leeway for desert people).

Is there much difference between that sand and those ashes we employ in the cleansing of hearts that Lent invites? The next state of this year’s palms from Palm Sunday will be the ashes of next year’s Ash Wednesday, evidence that the Spirit transforms, and the universe wastes nothing.

Matthew’s story of our Lord’s temptation, however, reminds us not to take for granted either the Spirit’s work or the universe’s bounty. If this story, worn smooth by the wind-devil of annual familiarity, if this story doesn’t convey to us how Jesus could have scrubbed his whole mission, could have lost the leverage of his forty days’ fast, could have blown it all by a poor choice, a false choice, then let’s hope the desert sand roughs us up enough to reconsider what we’re hearing.

The tempter waits to the 41st day—likelier, night—to attempt to mislead Jesus, whose body is so weakened because he is famished: he joins the countless millions victimized by famine. While we think of famine as what happens when the rains and the crops fail, famine is more often what happens when tyrants neglect their people, re-routing daily bread to private accounts. Jesus chooses to know what it is to be famished. And in that natural state of fixation on food, he hears the tempter offer him a way out, a way to regain strength for his mission: command some stones at hand to become bread. “If you are secure in your identity,” hisses the serpent, “use your power for yourself.”

I borrow the serpent not so much from the first lesson as from Nikos Kazantzakis’s “The Last Temptation of Christ”, an astonishing book. In the film, it is a viper that rises to this conversation with Jesus, suggesting how the conversation, the temptation, is ultimately an interior one. The serpent is the presence of very real threat, but the words project our Lord’s own struggle with the nature and purpose of his power and his mission. This story is replete with a devil and a host of hovering angels, but let’s reject the temptation to externalize this drama and realize that the war is being waged within.

Delusion and hallucination transport Jesus to the highest turret of the temple in Jerusalem, the very place where his days will end, the place where true dangers lurk. Again, the tempter appears in this premonition of the final temptation that Jesus will face when the devilish mix of organized religion and imperial power will set him up for what they hope will be his fall. “If you are certain about your relationship to God, don’t you imagine yourself immune from death?” hums the voice that would mislead.

As he handled the first temptation, so Jesus reconciles this second one by asserting what he knows of God. These temptations are like shifting winds filling the sails of a small boat on a vast sea: the sailor navigates by sighting the pole star, the guiding principle.

And it makes sense that the third temptation requires a very high mountain. The dominant spirit in human life is revealed there. God is encountered on mountaintops in so many religions. Pride, hubris, motivates climbing as well. Americans can’t be the only nation to think of themselves as a city built on a hill, a light shining on a mountain. From a high place boundaries blur and imperial pretensions extend. Such is this third critical question Jesus must face: is his kingdom of this world?

Today, biblical temptations face the people of Egypt. At first, in the early days of their revolution, Egyptians took care of one another across social divides. Not only did Coptic Christians encircle Muslims to guard them while at prayer; Muslims encircled Coptic churches, when threats were made to attack the Christian community. But this past week, both Christians and Muslims have yielded to temptation, and at a time when security forces are few, violence has flared between the religious communities and lives are being lost in chain reactions of violence, perpetuating ancient feuds.

In our own country, a congressional investigation of Islam tempts some to generalize, judge, and blame. Legislators are tempted to balance budgets on the backs of the poor. Some are tempted to demonize collective bargaining as a quick way to turn stones into bread.

In Japan, an untold number of people may be tempted to give in to despair in the wake of such massive violence in nature. A catastrophic earthquake demolishes the most basic security we take for granted, that the earth will support us. To call this calamity biblical is a misnomer. What may be called biblical in this national tragedy will be the rising of its victims from the ashes, the inspiration of courageous leaders, the compassion that will care and carry, the hope that will dare navigate the future by spiritual powers that are the gift and work of God.

And each of us faces temptations to make a poor choice, a false choice, a wrong choice. In Matthew’s story of Jesus in the desert, his interior struggle culminates in the sudden appearance of angels waiting on him. Hidden in the swirling burning sand that roughs us up is God who, our collect tells us, knows the weaknesses of each of us. What we are able to find in our temptations is God, at work in a mighty way to set right a world gone wrong.

Exposed to Blinding Light

2011-03-08T09:47:00.000-08:00

Scripture for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany includes Exodus 24:12-18; II Peter 1:16-21; and Matthew 17:1-9

Poets have the opening words in this sermon today. First, Wendell Berry, who now lives in a milder climate than ours but, as you’ll see, knows the lay of our land:

Through the weeks of deep snow
we walked above the ground
on fallen sky, as though we did
not come of root and leaf, as though
we had only air and weather
for our difficult home.
But now
as March warms, and the rivulets
run like birdsong on the slopes,
and the branches of light sing in the hills,
slowly we return to earth.

“We walked above the ground on fallen sky…” That makes me think of an elderly person I visited, who couldn’t seem to retrieve the word “snow” and kept speaking about “the white, the white…”

Emily Dickinson is the second poet I bring with me today:

A Light exists in Spring
Not present in the Year
At any other period—
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.
It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows upon the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay—

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.

You will have understood already that it is the dazzling white light, and the suddenly bright cloud in Matthew’s story of the Transfiguration that deserve to be approached by verse.

But if I were to write a poem about light while it is still winter, I would write about something that might surprise you, and that is the danger of being suddenly blinded by glare on winter-wet roads. That happened to me on Cole Avenue one day in early February. I’d just turned in from North Hoosac Road, and as I ascended the rise of the bridge I saw it start, as if a massive paintball had exploded onto the pavement, radiating in all directions. As I came down the decline, brilliant impenetrable blinding light washed everything everywhere and for about four or five seconds I was traveling witless, unable to see if the road was clear for me to proceed, equally clueless if it was safe to pull over. All I could do was keep moving, slow down, and trust. Then, as if all that radiance had been sucked down a drain, it disappeared, like the Wicked Witch of the West.

This gives me a new way to appreciate the experience of Peter, James, and John. I now believe they were terrified, helpless, then relieved. And I can imagine how that felt.

My few moments of winter danger draw me into this Gospel in a fresh way. When I hear that Moses and Elijah appeared to them, iconic representatives of the Jewish law and the Hebrew prophets, what I hear now isn’t the stock commentary, that these two old-timers summed up all that Jesus would fulfill. Rather, I hear Moses and Elijah summing up the risks, the dangers, inherent in leading people and representing the future.

Elie Wiesel helps us appreciate Moses. Having gotten all those Hebrew slaves out from under Pharoah’s tyranny, having led them out of Egypt into Canaan, having witnessed at every turn one hair-raising miracle after another, each uplift gave way to letdown, as Wiesel puts it: “This people he had chosen never gave him anything but worries. There was no pleasing, no satisfying them. Forever complaining, grumbling, protesting, missing the stability—however precarious, even miserable—of the past… Moses’ chosen people showed no faith, no joy in being partic ipants in the making of history… Poor Moses, who had dreamed of inspiring them, elevating them, transforming slaves into leaders, fashioning a community of free and sovereign men and women. Here was his dream—broken, shattered. His people, unchanged, were still absorbed in their sordid intrigues and in-fighting. They had seen God at work and had learned nothing. They had witnessed events of cosmic importance and had remained unaffected. They were already doubting God’s presence in their midst. They were already doubting their purpose, their very memory.

“And when God said to Moses, ‘Your people have sinned’—Moses replied with a sudden display of humor: ‘When they observe Your Law, they are Your children, but when they violate it, they are mine?’

“In spite of his disappointments, in spite of his ordeals and the lack of gratitude he encountered, Moses never lost his faith in his people.” But it sure can be a risky thing, downright dangerous, to lead people and to represent the future.

Elijah knows it, too. Do you remember the time when he alone faced 450 prophets of Baal who were in the employ of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel? A blinding light figures in that story, too: in a life-or-death contest, lightning came down from heaven to consume the offering Elijah laid on his altar, while the altar prepared by the prophets of Baal was a non-starter. Then Elijah is said to have single-handedly slaughtered every one of those 450 false prophets. No wonder he became a fugitive, wanted dead or alive. He is remembered for appearing in a flash and disappearing just as fast. It is a risky and dangerous thing to lead people and to represent the future.

What kind of conversation is going on within this trinity of Jesus, Moses, and Elijah? Are the old-timers witnessing to Jesus, encouraging him by reminders of the divine energy that made them able to endure? Are they coaching him as he faces the certain dangers before him, hazards that will mark his Lenten journey to Jerusalem, and Gethsemane, and Golgotha, and the garden tomb?

And is Jesus getting in some pointed questions of his own, such as, “Moses, you led God’s people to a land of milk and honey which they took by the edge of the sword, colonizing Canaan in the name of Israel’s God. Violence begets violence, and here we are with the sharp blade of Rome’s emperor at our throats. How am I to build God’s kingdom that is not of this world?”

Though neither of these ancient worthies had much to teach him about the beating of swords into ploughshares, they must have talked long into that night of the steady faithfulness of God shining brighter than the sun, the moon, the stars. They must have made that night glow retelling the ancient truth that God empowers whomever God calls, God’s ample grace exceeding all the risks, all the dangers.

The content of this conversation is the new creation God is building, reordering, in this world by the life and death of Jesus and the resulting transfiguration even of death. Imagine the letdown when Peter, James, and John finally find their tongues…

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.

“Lord, it’s so good to be here!” So dazed, he has no idea where “here” is…

“We’ll make three shrines to capture this moment, one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah…” What do men do when they’re overwhelmed, but retreat to their workbenches and build something?

Their true place, their honest task, will be found in just a moment, right after a bright cloud has overshadowed them and from that cloud a voice has been heard, “This is my Son, marked by my love, bright with my delight. Listen to him.” They fall to the ground, or, in Berry’s language, return to earth. There they feel the touch of Jesus and hear him say, “Get up and do not be afraid.”

Let this Gospel shape your resolve to keep a holy Lent. You who come from root and leaf, not just air and weather, understand the touch of ashes crossing your forehead as your being marked by God’s love. Look for light in the gift of these Lenten days and nights, to find your true place, your honest task—to listen to the Christ who is worthy to be trusted, whose touch and word we need, “Get up and do not be afraid.”

Wendell Berry's and Emily Dickinson's poems appear in "Earth Prayers from Around the World", HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. Elie Wiesel's characterization of Moses is found in his "Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends", Summit Books, 1976.

Turn the Other Cheek

2011-02-21T12:27:00.000-08:00

Scripture for the 7th Sunday after the Epiphany includes Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18; I Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23; Matthew 5:38-48

On these late Epiphany Sundays we’re hearing Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, piecemeal, not all at once. Our Lord’s social vision is deeply challenging, and hearing it in installments may give us all we can handle at one sitting.

Hearing verses from Leviticus, the law book of Israel, helps us gauge how novel Jesus’s teachings were—and were not. To borrow language from St. Paul, Jesus is both laying a fresh foundation—I find his insistence on loving our enemies boldly revolutionary, don’t you?—while he’s also building on the ancient foundation of enlightened Jewish law. We hear an example of ancient inspiration in the command not to harvest all the square footage of a field: leave some for the poor. Like loving your enemies, not claiming every square foot you’ve got coming to you might be called unnatural. But this shows how law can breed in us finer instincts and a higher nature.

Today’s portion of his sermon shows Jesus tearing down an ancient keystone that he declares unworthy of any further obedience, and that is the standard of retributive justice, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Once upon a time, that had been a step up the evolutionary ladder from wild unrestrained revenge. But here, two thousand years ago, Jesus declares it uninspiring, not suited to undergirding his social vision, inadequate to describe and advance the Kingdom of God.

Notice how Jesus reaches into the gutter of ordinary violence to find inspiring standards for human behavior. And if I’m not mistaken, he implies—without saying it, but it’s there between the lines—it may be pillars of society, and it may be the emperor’s soldiers, who are the worst evildoers. Any thug can strike you on the cheek, but Jesus’s hearers would instantly recognize the heavy hand of the wealthy who would sue a poor farmer, unashamed to sue the pants off him (or, in this case, to take his coat), and the even heavier hand of the emperor’s finest, soldiers who ran roughshod over people in the street. Those armored keepers of the Pax Romana were authorized to press ordinary people into carrying soldiers’ packs and commandeered supplies one mile, and they surely weren’t above making that two miles.

“Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.”

Mary Gaitskill has a fiction piece in the last New Yorker, a chilling tale of a now responsible citizen who as a teenager cultivated fantasies of domination, twisting him to try what he was thinking. Stealing a pistol from his friend’s home, he hitchhiked one day and was picked up by a woman who fitted his fantasies (older than he’d wanted, forty or so, but still good-looking). Adrenaline rushing his system, he pulled out the pistol and threatened to shoot this woman if she didn’t drive him to a certain place. Instead, she instantly pulled over, looked him straight in the eye, and said, “Go ahead. I’m ready.” Pointing to her forehead, she ordered him, “Put it right there.” Opening her jacket, she directed him, “Or there. Come on, honey. Go for it.”

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go, for the boy. He felt power draining out of him, lost his nerve. “Get out of my car,” the driver said to her dangerous passenger, “You’re wasting my time.”

There’s more to that story, more than I need to tell you. You may find it surprising that I’ve told you what I have—and I have because I can’t help seeing it as a powerful variation on the expected passive stereotype of what it means to turn the other cheek. In this story, the author creates a turning of the cheek that saves a woman’s life. Though she is left a victim of assault, she has wielded authority in a potent compliance that resists an evildoer by disarming his mind. In a moment of life or death, this woman chose life.

No, I’m not forgetting that Jesus commanded his disciples not to resist an evildoer. But I’m sure that he did not have in mind this woman’s dilemma. I expect he was asking his disciples to reject the insurgency of the Zealots, the super-patriots who would turn every struck cheek and commandeered cloak and forced second mile into an assassinated Roman soldier or a murdered Jewish collaborator. You may recall that Zealots appeared in the crowds around Jesus, even in the circle of his disciples were one or two who had, or still had, the Zealot in them. Jesus put them on notice that zeal which becomes hatred, zeal which becomes violence, cannot advance the Kingdom of God.

Every day for weeks now, we have watched tens and hundreds of thousands of zealous people demonstrating in the public squares of Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, and Libya, walking along the razor-edge, on one side their peaceful protest, on the other military and police response.

Images from Egypt show persevering demonstrators bandaged from yesterday’s wounds, ready again to run the same risk, turning the other cheek, day after day. This turning is not passive: it is powerful, a matter of life and death, and its results are changing the very course of history.

And we hold our breath, praying that what results from this courageous confrontation makes for peace and not a swapping of one tyranny for another.

We might do well to take from Jesus’s prompting to not resist an evildoer the message that in the present whirlpools of social upheaval we should suspend judgment that could label certain parties and factions as evil. It will take all emerging parties and factions to create a democracy in Egypt. In as long-settled a democracy as our own, we struggle to love our political opponents and social adversaries, but we know it is the right struggle to reach across congressional aisles and to hold our elected leaders to look beyond their own narrow partisan interests and make responsible decisions for the common good of us all.

And what Jesus holds us to is spoken in that breathtaking call, “Be perfect, as your God is perfect.” If ever a word needs opening-up, it’s that English word “perfect”. The Greek word it wants to translate is better heard in the phrase “all-embracing”. Be all-embracing, as your God is all-embracing.

There is the social vision of Jesus. It describes how he calls both church and state to be, though I believe the reign of God he advances cannot be contained in either church or state. The reign of God embraces all, requires all to practice a revolutionary love of enemies, opponents, and adversaries. To resist the evil of treating people as evil. To perfect an embrace that turns the other cheek with courage and potency that reaches the mind, and changes it.

Mary Gaitskill’s story “The Other Place” appears in the February 14th-21st , 2011 issue of the New Yorker

A Rector's Annual Report

2011-02-21T12:00:00.000-08:00

Nearing the point of twenty-five years as Rector, I find that looking ahead draws me to see several key questions we need to raise, consider with openness to the wisdom of God, and answer.

We have a remarkable staff, talented, open-hearted, adventurous, and committed to the mission of St. John’s that brings them face to face with an ever-changing procession of people belonging to the parish, to our wider communities, and from beyond. Each person in that daily procession through our various portals (glass doors, red doors, e-mail, telephone, snail-mail) carries a need, a gift, a hope, an opportunity.

Key questions for staff and for all parish leaders is, How do we discern our part in response to people’s hopes-requests-offerings so that our response strengthens their faith, their practice, and their ministry? How do we avoid the disservice of over-performing that causes people to depend too much on us, not enough on God and themselves and the supportive community? And how do we avoid the opposite risk of under-serving the people God gives us, the people to whom we’re not yet listening, the people of whom we aren’t aware, the people to whom we don’t know how to respond?

That cluster of questions leads to another. Who are the “we” who respond? Twenty-five years ago, St. John’s still had an organized (though ageing) pastoral care team and a “prayer chain.” Though the Women of St. John’s (at one time a source of volunteer service) had disbanded, the parish culture and economy still yielded enough volunteerism to quickly rally for a funeral reception or to provide meals when a family needed them.

If volunteerism used to be given in cup-fulls or baskets-full, it sometimes seems that it’s by spoonfuls that it’s available now. Let’s avoid a spirit of complaint about this. We’re blessed by parish leaders serving in youth ministry, bringing communion as lay eucharistic visitors, leading evening prayer or leading Bingo at Sweet Brook Care Center, sitting on the Vestry and various committees, singing in choirs, overseeing parish life as wardens, and taking important initiatives in the congregation and in our wider communities. But how do we build our capacity for response to the needs and hopes and opportunities that people bring to us?

And how shall we build that capacity among all our generations, in particular young adults? That question tips this discussion towards information technology. In 2010, we made real strides, utilizing Constant Contact to develop e-mail communication, starting a process for envisioning IT needs in our future, and launching a handsome new Website, a big step forward and outward—though, in a glass-half-full-half-empty way, we’re bumping into limitations that we’ll need to address in a future overhaul, right about the time our children tell us we must replace those ancient pictures of them from 2009! A key question is how to keep moving the parish into social networking. Age is giving me wisdom to know that our younger parish leaders are the teachers we need to show us virtual portals to throw open.

In the face of all that’s new, in2010 we re-discovered the appeal of two age-old church activities—eating and singing—which, when combined in our Singing Suppers, have filled the upper room monthly on Friday evenings, mixing all our generations while building our appreciation for music old and new, music as our elders like it (out of the Hymnal) and music as our kids like it in Worship Outside the Box. A key question: How shall we support and develop this model (and others) for deepening parish community through what might be called ultimately informal “liturgy?”

I’ve saved for next-to-last the subject of our buildings. We saw great progress in 2010—or should I say that we’re all eager to see the results of that progress, and soon?—with the completion of extensive structural repair in the lower room and the near-completion of its renovation, along with re-situated and renovated adjacent bathrooms, and, just to their north, a room which we’ll use temporarily as a robing room until, in time, it may become part of a new church kitchen.

Think of that! The question, of course, is how do we get there? And by how circuitous a route, as we weigh the relative priority of major maintenance projects that seem to cut in line, like deteriorating front steps. Our key questions will be when and how to put our shoulders to the wheel of raising funds to continue our campaign to bring these buildings into the 21st-century.

The text on the cover of these reports urges us, “…like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house…” (I Peter 2:5) Building a community is why we’re here. A final key question we have to answer is how do we understand and build membership in St. John’s Parish? We recognize membership by participation: people join us by their choices, and we respond to them in what might be called a dance of inclusion. While that model respects the integrity of the seeker, doesn’t it make us sound passive? We’re fortunate that people keep appearing, but rather than waiting for the dance to begin in the sanctuary when newcomers find their way in, let’s picture the dance beginning out in the wider community when one of us invites a friend or neighbor to come with us to a service, a concert, or a Singing Supper.

However it is that a person steps into the dance of this congregation, we understand that vital signs matter more than formal credentials. But how do we honor Anglican tradition that values the sacramental act of being formally confirmed or received into membership in this branch of Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church? In an age fascinated by spiritual wings, how do we give witness to the value of religious roots? In an age when denominational identity is felt to be less important than vital signs, how do we present the case for being confirmed or received at the hands of the Bishop?

He comes for that purpose on Sunday, May 22nd. His visitations are not frequent, about once every other year. Might it encourage you in your faith and practice and ministry to confirm your faith, be formally welcomed into the Episcopal Church, renew your baptismal vows in his presence? If that feels like a key question for you to answer, I’d like to know it.

I am grateful to and for so many people, what they do, and who they are, within this congregation. I’ve alluded to them, in this report, but not by name—there are just too many to attempt that. I’ll make one exception. In each of the years I’ve prepared a report like this, I’ve expressed my gratitude to Diana, my wife, and I’m not about to stop. The words of a great psalm tell me why. She restoreth my soul. She maketh me to slow down and enjoy those green pastures. She is with me to comfort me, and causes my cup to run over. I am very fortunate.

In this report, I’ve named key questions that I believe we must answer. Did you hear one that draws you to help us consider it? I’d like to know. Will you tell me, or any of our Vestry members, if there is one of these key questions for which you’ve got energy, care, and calling? As I see it, these questions point us to our work in these next several years.

1. How do leaders respond to people, to truly strengthen them?

2. Across our generations, but especially with young adults, how do we build our capacity to respond and lead?

3. How do we keep moving St. John’s into effective social networking?

4. How do we support and develop models of building community?

5. When and how do we resume our campaign to renew our buildings?

6. How do we vitalize membership?

Where's the Evidence?

2011-02-04T08:36:00.000-08:00

Scripture for the 4th Sunday after the Epiphany includes Micah 6:1-8, I Corinthians 1:18-31, and Matthew 5:1-12

I wonder why Jesus went up that mountain.

Because it was there? If that means for the thrill of it, I don’t think so. This wasn’t Mount Rainier. It wasn’t Mount Greylock. It wasn’t even Pine Cobble. I may be wrong, but I think we’re talking Stone Hill.

Was it to purposely thin the ranks? When he saw the crowds, did he judge that it was time to cull out the sensation-seekers, the circus crowd, the gawkers and the hawkers? Is Jesus asking, “Let’s see who’s willing to exert themselves?”

Perhaps he needed some critical distance. If what he saw was a crowd that would engulf him, how could he address them? “Maybe,” said someone at the Sweetwood eucharist last Monday, “up that mountain was a natural amphitheater where he could be seen and heard.”

Once there, he sat down (the ancient posture for preaching and teaching, one that levels speaker and audience, unlike a pulpit) and “his disciples came to him.” When he spoke, he “taught them.” The disciples appear to be his audience.

But wait: what became of that crowd? He’s talking to them, too, above the heads of that team of leaders.

This reminds me of the President giving the State of the Union address. There, fanned out in front of him, were modern equivalents of former fishermen, tax collectors, and zealots (some of them not necessarily former). The President appeared to be talking to them, but we too were his audience. At times, President Obama utilized his up-close audience, like that moment when he looked out across the chamber at all those mixed couples practicing bipartisan cohabitation and, speaking at the same moment to them and to us, said something to the effect that we need Congress to exert more than experimental seating plans in order to truly work together for the nation’s good.

I believe simultaneous communication not unlike that is going on in this Gospel. Jesus has arrayed in front of him his cabinet, his joint chiefs, and while he teaches them he speaks also to the crowds.

I’ll use Eugene Peterson’s “The Message” to help us listen in.

“You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and God’s rule.

“You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.

“You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are— no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.

“You’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. God is food and drink in the best meal you’ll ever eat.

“You’re blessed when you care. At the moment when care flows from a full heart, you find yourselves cared for.

“You’re blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.

“You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family.”

And in each case, at each teaching, he’s able to point to his disciples as evidence of what he means. Now, what follows is not by Eugene Peterson. I’ll take the rap for this. I’m imagining Jesus presenting his disciples as evidence of what he means. Scattered among the Beatitudes I hear asides like these.

“I’m sending these little ones into the world like lambs among wolves, to heal the sick and feed the hungry and raise the dead—they live at the end of the rope where it has to be less of them and more of God.”

“Each of these salty souls has left what is familiar: parents, home, career. You know them: it’s a small world around the Sea of Galilee, these are your neighbors, though they’re not at the corner tavern so much these days. How do they look to you? They’ve had to let go of a lot, but ask them how they balance their losses and their gains.”

“Radically equal, leveled by love, these agents of mine are learning to set a table for all, poor and rich, influential and marginal, female and male, old and young. And God is the menu. Soon they’ll show you! How many are you? Four thousand? Five thousand? Keep your eyes on these twelve…”

Mountains were known as holy places, front lines of encounter with God. Jesus has gone up this one to shape a new culture, one that appreciates how things are not always as they seem, how in fact God sets our expectations upside-down and inside-out, causes us to reconsider old assumptions and see with fresh eyes evidence that is all around us.

In that first century, God’s evidence included twelve disciples who may have thought they were the inner audience as God’s own anointed servant Jesus addresses the state of the union between the earthly and the heavenly. But they are actually Jesus’s Exhibit A, imperfect incarnations, examples, evidence of his meaning before a much wider audience.

In this twenty-first century, we the baptized are just as needed if the world is to see evidence of what Jesus means.

On the mountainside, a metaphor of the Church’s calling: to be gathered at the feet of Jesus, listening; and simultaneously to be proof to the world, letting his Word become flesh in us, allowing ourselves to be recognizable evidence of what he means.

Aiming Higher

2011-01-17T10:18:00.000-08:00

Scripture for the 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany includes Isaiah 49:1-7; I Corinthians 1:1-9; and John 1:29-42

Did you watch President Obama’s address at the memorial for the victims in Tucson?

Without seeing what came before and after that address, without context, it was hard for me to appreciate the crowd’s energy level. It sounded more like a rally than a memorial service. And when our President arrived at that podium, his sober expression only sharpened the contrast with that wired crowd. I guess that’s what you get when 27,000 Arizonans gather in one place, and that place is a sports stadium.

As a colleague said to me last week, it’s an old saying from the world of architects, “The room always wins.”

Or maybe that electricity is what you get when those 27,000 Arizonans are upset. Angry that their city, their state, should gain this notoriety and draw such attention from around the world. Indignant that these good people—a nine-year-old charmer, a judge’s judge, two sweet old ladies, a retired construction worker and pastor, a bright young congressional intern—should lose their lives, and many more should be injured, including a fearless, dynamic member of Congress.

And irritated that the State of the Union is so troubled that this United States representative couldn’t do her job of listening to her people without an eruption of violence that simply doesn’t belong in a civil society.

Not that we have one. But we want one. And who wouldn’t agree with the imperative President Obama gave us, that we must create a civil society, and it is up to us to do it. And who would argue with his motivating us by asking that we create an America that nine-year-old Christina and Judge Roll and Gabe Zimmerman and all the other victims would be proud of?

No arguments came out of that address, nor should they have; he did a masterful job of honoring the fallen, recognizing their families’ pain, transcending the vitriol, and prescribing healing.

But there are arguments that must be had, before that civilizing can be won.

Few in Washington want to advance this argument, but we need gun control legislation at the federal level. Gun control is considered the most toxic political issue of our time. What is more truly toxic and lethal is the availability of assault weapons, the availability of automatic ammunition magazines that achieve rapid-fire unrelieved slaughter, and our unwillingness to figure out how to keep handguns out of the hands of people known to be in trouble with the law, and people known to be mentally unstable. There needs to be an argument made that these restrictions can be made at the federal level without eroding a constitutional right to bear arms, or a state’s right to regulate.

Arguments need to be had about treatment of people with mental illness. We must make treatment available and affordable and effective, and make our social treatment of people with mental illness more humane. And we must debate the role of law to mandate treatment and to monitor that mandate.

And we’ve got to discipline all our arguments so that we debate principles and have dialogue about issues, not attack or incite people who stand on the opposite side of our arguments, issues, and principles.

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I speak with power and claim to understand mysteries, and if I am so confident that I say to a mountain ‘Jump,’ and it jumps, but don’t have love, I’m nothing.”

Without love, we are nothing.

That scripture is not appointed for today, but it is needed for today.

And in the Gospel we have today, one detail may be full of God. John the Gospel-writer is going to great lengths to explain the relationship between Jesus and John the Baptizer. Enough attention, enough air time is given to this to suggest that the first-century Church had divisions and partisan spirit in it. Perhaps for a time, perhaps for quite some time, followers of John and disciples of Jesus did not see eye to eye, did not recognize the necessity or the opportunity for bipartisan cooperation.

Here, two disciples of John the Baptizer hear him admire and elevate Jesus. “One of the two who heard John speak and followed Jesus was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother… He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, “ …You are to be called Peter.”

There’s the detail I mean. Andrew and Peter, two who play big parts in the public ministry of Jesus and the apostolic foundation of the Church, they first were disciples of John the Baptizer. At least Andrew was, and it was through him that Peter entered the orbit of Jesus.

The Jesus movement builds on the John-the-Baptist movement. John’s message of repentance and ethical behavior is where Jesus’s Gospel starts but does not stop: Jesus proclaims Good News based not on what people must do, but on what God does and who God is. John tells people what they should do. Jesus inspires people to be all that God gives them to be. John brings people to accept that they are freed from their sins; Jesus invites and summons and sings his love-song to people, causing them to comprehend, to reach for and grasp, all that God frees them for.

Andrew and Peter and countless others who will be celebrated and remembered for how they lived positive, creative, generative lives in destructive dangerous times—right across the centuries to The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—they show us lives built on forgiveness and responsible ethics, and the need to aim higher, the awareness that more is needed for God’s will to be done on earth as in heaven.

In his address, President Obama helped us see ourselves as good people. He told us of our courage as he honored Daniel Hernandez, the young intern who cradled Gabby Giffords after she was shot, running to her, not away; and Bill Badger and Roger Salzgeber and Patricia Maisch, the spunky seniors who helped disarm Jared Loughner.

The President affirmed our readiness to embrace challenge as he described this trait in young Christina and her role-model, Gabby.

He deftly wove the textures and colors of our rich tapestry of national identity, as he honored what was shown to be bright and beautiful about each of the victims of this savage attack by one disturbed young man who seems to have felt no stake in the society he would destroy.

Now more is needed: more than the courage of the few, our own courage and appetite for challenge are needed, and will be ignited as we, like Andrew and Peter and Martin, open ourselves to the call of Christ and the work of the Spirit, to see and speak and serve truth.

Like Andrew and Peter and Martin, we must aim higher.

A ten-year-old boy in Tucson said, “Gabby has opened her eyes. Now we have to open ours.”

Flow On, Jordan

2011-01-17T07:07:00.000-08:00

Scripture for the first Sunday after the Epiphany includes Isaiah 42:1-9; Acts 10:34-43; and Matthew 3:13-17

I have never seen the Jordan River, but my trusty “Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible” tells me that the Jordan Valley, down which the river runs, lies in a deep rift in the earth’s crust which is part of the same line of weakness that, much farther south, shows itself in the Great African Rift cutting deep into East Africa.

Let’s put that in our tool kit for understanding the baptism of Jesus. It happens right where the earth is weak, in a depression that cuts across international boundaries, linking peoples and cultures of many lands.

Of course, we know that the Jordan River figures in Israel’s history, from the primitive times of Father Abraham to the bloody conquest of Canaan, where the river was the last obstacle to be surmounted before the Israelites crossed over into what they called the promised land, Moses dying on one side, God not permitting him to set foot across the Jordan, passing on that leadership to Joshua. In subsequent generations, in one military campaign after another, the Jordan River will be a strong line of defense.

America has the Potomac, and the Mississippi, Old Man River. In Israel, the psalmist sang, “There is a river, whose streams make glad the city of God…”

And for our toolkit today, the Jordan figures in the miracles of the prophets Elijah and Elisha. Remember how Elijah, before his ascension to heaven, took off his cloak and struck the water with it, causing the river to divide, allowing him and Elisha to cross on dry ground (a reprise of the Passover, when another body of water flowed into the oral history of Israel).

When Naaman, commander of the army of neighboring Syria, at odds with Israel, sought out Elisha for his healing power, it was to the Jordan that the prophet sent him to bathe. To be cured of his leprosy, the enemy had to swallow his nationalistic pride, sputtering all the way about how, back home in Damascus, they had the Pharpar, a river sparkling clear, not like the dirty muddy waters of the Jordan.

So look where it happens, the baptism of Jesus. It was there at the Jordan where John the Baptizer emerged from the wilderness like Elijah, and, like Elisha, prescribed a cure—but for moral illness, not physical—calling all sorts and conditions of people to come and bathe in the muddy waters of the Jordan, and confess their greed, their violence, their toxic values, their missed opportunities, their misplaced passions…

And there, on the fault line traversing the Indian and African Plates, at that symbolic place still soaked in the bloody encounters of Israelites and Canaanites, there on holy ground and holy water with a great cloud of patriarchs, matriarchs, and prophets swirling in the collective memory of these crowds pressing in to claim the healing, to be slapped by the ethical challenge, of John…

There is where Jesus receives his first and forever mission, to bring forth justice to the nations, to open eyes that are blind, to bring prisoners out of their dungeons, to declare new things.

“The voice of the LORD is upon the waters,” we heard the psalmist sing.

Not far from the Sea of Galilee is Nazareth, Jesus’s home. Fed by the Jordan, that little sea and the cities all around it would be where the early months of Jesus’s public ministry took place. The watershed moment in his career, if it wasn’t the baptism we celebrate today, was at Caesarea Philippi when he confronted his disciples with the question, “Who do men say that I am?” And yet more to the quick, “And you, who do you say I am?” And Peter answered, “You are the Messiah sent from God!” And all this happened at the most eastern source of the Jordan. And down the east side of that valley he walked, teaching, healing, freeing, disturbing, revealing the equality and the dignity of all people.

For the last time he crossed the Jordan at Jericho, and from there embarked on the final chapter of his public mission in Jerusalem, the mission he received from John, from God, that day, knee-deep in the silty Jordan. To roil the waters of unexamined privilege until they give way to justice. To calm the waters of chaos, until they rise to swallow him. And then to wait until God is pleased to give new voice to the Word from deep within the belly of the grave, and then to rise to new life in us who are baptized into his Name.

For our tool-kit to understand his baptism: notice the great leveling that goes on between John and Jesus as they face off in the Jordan. John insists, “I need to be baptized by you! And do you come to me? This all feels wrong.” And Jesus insists, “It must be this way now, trust me.” Jesus will not let John keep a hierarchical world. All things are being made new; even John, as full of light as he is, must think new thoughts, must move beyond his old categories that could keep him from growing.

The New Testament remembers John for having summoned people to a baptism of repentance for forgiveness of their sins. John’s insistence that he isn’t qualified to baptize Jesus—or is it that Jesus doesn’t qualify as a sinner?—either way, misses the point of the new creation that God is about.

As the breaking of a mother’s water is the sign of new birth, what is breaking open here in the Jordan is radical human equality. John was already midwifing that birth. All sorts and conditions of people were drawn to that river, compelled by John’s vision of justice being theirs to accomplish (“Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.”) He was wakening in them a power to transform a brutal and selfish world, first freeing them from their failures, then freeing them for their responsibilities.

Jesus receives this baptism at John’s hands. As he comes up from the water, there is given to him a vision of the Spirit of God coming down like a dove and alighting on him. He hears a voice, yet the message is for us: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

In two ways the message is for us. We need to hear God say who Jesus is. And we need to hear God say who we are, because of who Jesus is. We need to hear God singing this lovesong over every person we meet. We need to hear God singing this lovesong to us, one by one. “You are my daughter, my son, beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

In the new creation in Jesus, God puts us on a surer foundation, more secure even than the freeing power of forgiveness of sin. God puts you, God sees you, God declares you God’s own, beloved, a source and a recipient and an agent of God’s pleasure.

You may or may not find in today’s Gospel all that I am claiming. You will find it in the baptismal covenant that unites us to God in Christ. In our collect we prayed for grace to keep that covenant.

Such keeping requires, for sure, the keeping of vows. Required, also, is keeping close the moral commitment and the divine mercy of John the Baptist’s vision.

But first and forever, keeping the covenant of our baptismal standing with God requires that we dare to hear God’s passionate favor spoken to us, person by person, and to hear that Word being formed over each person we meet, leveling us in radical human equality in keeping with Jesus Christ.

Make Way for Wonder

2011-01-04T13:13:00.000-08:00

Scripture read on the 2nd Sunday after Christmas Day includes Jeremiah 31:7-14; Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a); Luke 2:41-52

In the children’s service on Christmas Eve, the shape of what happens is predictable. The words of the Bible lessons, the carols, the step by step setting of the Crèche, all are familiar. And roomy enough to contain an occasional surprise, a moment when the expected moves over to make room for wonder.

You who were here that evening may have noticed any number of such moments, but the one that made me stop in my tracks and simply watch it happen was when the three kings were set, with their camel, in that middle window.

We know better than to place them at the Crèche, that night. We’re Episcopalians, and we know that if we don’t take them the long way ‘round, we won’t have Epiphany, and we like our seasons.

This parish custom of moving the magi from place to place, from one window to another, sometimes to the piano top, until they reach Bethlehem on the twelfth day and their mission is realized, this custom has its risks.

Not unlike their real journey, there are slippery slopes along the way. Specifically, that second window from the front, where the sill tips down towards the aisle, not unlike the slope of a sand dune—but minus the traction.

I believe it was there, one Christmas in the 90’s, that the camel fell. Not the one we have now (a hardy breed made of resin), but the original plaster one that came with the set, brought from Italy in the 1920’s. With a great crash he fell, and when we went (with sadness) to sweep up the pieces, we found that the impact had broken away all that was camel from an older figure at the core of the camel, and behold, that was a kneeling angel.

You didn’t need to squint and imagine it was an angel: it was a very convincing angel that hadn’t come out of the mold quite right, and instead of being tossed in the trash it was built upon, slipped into the camel mold as its base. It was a Depression-era camel, nothing wasted.

Well, I tell you all that to set the stage for this Christmas Eve. I don’t recall who set the first wise man in place that night—just that it was our soft king, the one Paula Consolini made to replace yet one more casualty of a Christmas past. Then a second king was brought, and the camel (the new technologically improved camel) was made to fit an increasingly crowded window-sill, in light of the candle that had to be navigated around.

I was watching the progress at that window because the next move was going to be mine, to lead a prayer for peace. I counted magi and got to two, then my eyes were drawn to the font, where I saw the journey of the third.

He was in David’s hands, David who is blind and who, holding that third king, could feel every fold in his robe, the gold bands at his biceps, the braids of his hair and that jeweled crown, and, clutched against his chest, the golden jar of myrrh. David had the king in much the same grip, and by his busy fingers he knew, I expect, more about this figure than you or I will ever know.

Up that west aisle he came, step by step, squeezing by the folks in folding chairs, guided by his father behind him, his father with a hand on each of his son’s shoulders, talking him along each step of the way, coaching him through a careful perfect landing in the tightest of spots, the royal entourage tucked in just as tight as being seated in coach.

I don’t know how many of that Christmas Eve multitude saw what was happening. I knew it was the most important action I was likely to see that night, so I just watched it happen. Perhaps some thought something was wrong—but something was very right.

In that respect, this surprising moment shared some features of St. Luke’s story of Jesus in the Temple, as a teenager. This scene is caught in that same middle window on the west aisle, Louis Comfort Tiffany’s image of Jesus in dialogue with the elders. See how his arm is raised, making a rhetorical point.

Yes, we have fast-forwarded twelve years from Bethlehem in the twinkling of a Sunday. Mary and Joseph have brought their son to the big city for the festival of Passover, and now they’re heading home to Nazareth. In caravan as a large group of travelers, Joseph and Mary hadn’t had a sighting of Jesus for the better part of a day, but they trusted him and assumed he was farther back (or ahead) with family and friends in that caravan.

But they were wrong, and they quickly acted to right that wrong by searching for him until they found him. When they did, it was not quickly clear to them that something was very right. This was unclear to them as they saw him sitting with the older men who taught the laws and interpreted the holy writings of the Jewish people.

Child, why have you treated us like this? They ask him, as soon as they catch a private moment with him. Didn’t you know we’d be worried sick looking for you?

Mother, father, why would you worry, and where else would you look but here in my Father’s house? His voice is guiding me, I can hear him. I am in his hands, as always—I feel them on my shoulders.

Now, the joke is on me. I chose this Gospel for today among three that are provided in our new common lectionary of readings. The other two are about the three kings, and when I saw the option of this Gospel I thought, “This would be new and fresh, hearing this story on the Sunday nearest the Epiphany,” as if magi, camel, and star were feeling dated, shopworn, and stale. I wasn’t expecting to talk about the arrival of the kings.

So instead we have the arrival of Jesus where he belongs, in the Temple where he will have a lifelong argument with the powers of religion that will not see or speak truth.

We are not told what questions Jesus and his elders were debating, this day in the Temple when his parents find him, but it’s not far-fetched to imagine that those distinguished teachers were defending the dignity of the Temple, while Jesus was defending the dignity of human nature made in the likeness of God. That those teachers were describing the superiority of properly educated, correctly believing, and righteously behaving religious people… while Jesus was describing the mission of God in lovingkindness restoring all people to unity with himself.

Joseph and Mary were familiar enough with formal education to sense what was wrong, seeing their son seated not at the feet of his elders, but among the teachers. Three days had passed in anguish for Mary and Joseph, choking back panic as they couldn’t find him. Those same three days had fired the mind and heart of the teenager from Nazareth who couldn’t get enough of this encounter, listening, questioning, answering, inching his way in from the edges and up from the floor and onto the benches of open debate, fingering timeless issues of law and justice, mercy and faithfulness, showing in those three days how he knew those matters more intimately than venerable worthies three, four, five times his age.

We’re left with the impression that his parents could not explain the intensely clear vision of their son. But in a world where the apple does not fall far from the tree, it could be that Mary and Joseph could not explain, either, the refusal of religious teachers to see and speak truth. Instinctively they must have felt danger mounting, relieved (for now) by they return to Nazareth and a semblance of normalcy, giving them time to treasure and puzzle-over these things, especially their son’s intuitive grasp (as if God had his ear) and their child’s courage (as if he had, on each shoulder, the guiding touch of a father’s or a mother’s hand).

Questions for the new year:

What coaching, what guidance, will you welcome?

Will you listen for the whisperings of God, or have you ruled them out?

Will you move with or against the pressures of wisdom and love?

Becoming Children of God

2010-12-29T09:28:00.000-08:00

Scripture read on the 1st Sunday after Christmas includes Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Galatians 3:23-25 and 4:4-7; John 1:1-18

Today, St. Paul tells us that God became a child in a manger so that you and I might become children of God.

And today, St. John tells us that all who receive Jesus, who believe in his name, are given power to become children of God.

Who says it’s so important to act like an adult?

“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of God.” That’s Jesus weighing in on the question.

Change how? This question seems to dance throughout our readings today.

Recover our ability to play. Adults play to compete, and I doubt that’s what Jesus has in mind for the skill set needed in God’s kingdom. I also doubt whether children need to be taught to compete—they come by it naturally—but the kind of play adults might recover for God is marked by imagination, simplicity, making do with what’s at hand, delight, self-expression, and openness to one another.

Recover our ability to play. And realize the importance of our senses. Seeing and feeling color and texture and form. Smelling the frankincense, letting the myrrh drip through our fingers. Vibrating our voices in song and appreciating music made by others. Hearing one another. Listening in silence. Moving and reaching in rhythms of sharing, giving, receiving.

Recover our ability to play. Realize the value of our senses. And rely less on analytical thought. Not that it’s unneeded in the kingdom of God—it’s surely needed in ordering the life of the Church, and in understanding the faith of the Church, and in achieving the work of the Church to bring justice and peace on earth. But adults practice compulsive analysis, while the central power of a child is impulsive trust. Which of these powers leads you to God?

Recover play. Realize senses. Rely on trust. And recognize true wealth, replacing money and things with roots and wings. That’s from the old Shaker saying that there are just two lasting gifts that our children need, roots and wings. If a pot of gold and a retirement plan lie at the end of the rainbow for adults, for children it’s belonging that balances them for becoming, exploring, and engaging life.

Recover play-- organize less.

Realize senses-- let them illuminate words and thoughts.

Rely on trust-- value questions more than answers, reach answers through the heart.

Recognize true wealth-- and share it.

The Love Song of God

2010-12-29T09:21:00.000-08:00

I wonder if you recall reading about a proposal that a new generation of astronauts may have to be willing to accept the ultimate mission of landing on a distant planet without any prospect of returning to earth.

The general drift of this concept is that soon we’ll have the technology to get you there, but we don’t yet have the know-how to get you back. We’ll get you there so you can lay claim to some portion of this vast new territory, start a base of operations, and conduct amazing experiments (one of which is you), but we can’t get you back. We know lots of ways to support you, but at the start it’s going to be you and a brave new world.

Whereupon a political wag was heard to comment, “We already have this system in place. It’s how we send a President into the Oval Office.”

Does that harrowing job description of a future astronaut help us comprehend the mission Jesus accepted in being born of Mary? “Thou didst leave thy throne and thy kingly crown when thou camest to earth for me,” sings a 19th-century carol, when space flight couldn’t have been imagined. The carol evokes a sense of exile: does Jesus come to earth to be strategically stranded like that future astronaut?

Theologians among you will recognize that this comparison doesn’t work. An earthling on Mars would be an alien invasion. An earthling on Mars doesn’t belong there. The incarnation of God in Jesus is not the result of an extra-terrestrial mission injecting alien life into our world; it is the result of our world groaning in travail, yearning for healing, reaching for reconciling love, birthing in new creation. Jesus doesn’t come from heaven: Jesus comes from a fertilized egg in Mary’s womb; and while tradition explains this as miracle by the Holy Spirit overshadowing Mary, that spiritual “how” doesn’t contradict the physical “what” that we hear in the opening chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. There we find a long genealogy showing Jesus to be descended from wise Solomon and charismatic David and obedient Abraham—and it is Joseph’s genealogy, it is his seed that generates Jesus.

In the definition battled-out at the Council of Chalcedon in the year 451, the “Definition of the Union of the Divine and Human Natures in the Person of Christ,” he is said to be “truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body; of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood…”

Jesus Christ is like us in all respects, except that he is not exiled from God, not stuck in sin as we tend to be (though he knows what such exile feels like, he has gotten so close to the margins we have crossed). Reading again from that 5th-century definition: In him are held together, perfectly blended, “two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation… coming together to form one person and subsistence…one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ…”

I never thought I would be using the words of the Chalcedonian Definition in a Christmas sermon, but they eloquently express what I’m trying to say: Jesus is not an alien stranded in another world than his own: he is the most truly native son of earth, fulfilling the mind of its maker. Which means that his mission is to draw into unity all things, all people, all the created order into unity with God in himself.

The stranded astronaut, to the contrary, divides the planet he invades by claiming a portion of it as his, belonging to his country. He is exiled from earth but carries with him the earthbound sin of claiming what is not his to own.

As this is not the way of Jesus, how will he gather into one a fractured creation? By claiming what is his to own, his truth resonating with what is true in us, his love recognizing what is love in us, his mercy reaching to renew our integrity, his wisdom building with the wisdoms of diverse humanity, his self-giving encouraging and inspiring the generosity of all brave hearts.

Here is good news, sung like a lovesong from God, to all who carry in their bodies, minds, or hearts wounds from being exiled from home…, exiled from innocence…, alienated from God…, alienated by religion…, separated from a loved one (or a once-loved one)…, disillusioned by politics…, all who feel they are refugees from a dominant culture…, strangers in a changing world…

He knows all about our exile. He comprehends it all. He is at work there, on those frontiers of our own alienations, offering sanctuary, offering repair, offering renewal in his own body and his own Spirit and in the community that bears his name.

Here is good news, sung like a lovesong from God. How shall we sing back?

Our Longing, God's Longing

2010-12-29T09:18:00.000-08:00

Scripture for the 4th Sunday in Advent includes Isaiah 7:10-16; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25

Christmas (twelve days) and Advent (four weeks), even when combined, are the shortest seasons in the church year. So short… and yet they are all about longing. Our longing, and God’s longing.

What are you longing for? Go ahead: say it out loud!

Light in a dark season? Warmth in the cold? For Christmas Day to come? For Christmas Day to be over? For all the clutter of a material holiday to disappear? For your loved ones to be happy? For you yourself to feel joy?

Are you longing for God?

What is God longing for? If answering that question is central to our experience of Advent and Christmas, the material clutter of the holidays will not reveal the answer. We’ll have to step back from the Christmas tree with hands in the air, leave the crime scene of the kitchen, silence the computer’s siren seductive last-minute shopping opportunities, and go take a walk. If it’s on a star-bedazzled night, we might look up and dare to hear the answer: What God longs for, God whose name is Emmanuel, is to be with us.

How many times have you looked up, looked out a hospital window, raised your eyes from a graveside to see through tears darkly, in your solitude searched the heavens and asked, “God, where are you?”

And to think that simultaneously God yearns to be with us! Such a disconnect just sharpens the edge of the Collect we prayed: daily God visits us to hum near our ear the lovesong of heaven, shaping in us both conscience (the voice of God within) and consciousness (awareness of God, reverence for life), and it is for us to prepare more and more a place for the Christ God sends. Sharpened by this short sweet season is the Prayer Book’s lesson that the mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.

Our Christmas observance, in church and at home, should advance this mission. Our Christmas celebration can be the lovesong we sing to God, what we send our children home humming after their pageant is performed, the music of the spheres globally repositioning us, preparing us to slough off the skin of an old year and find ourselves new.

With Jesus Christ at the center of it all, no wonder Matthew’s Gospel, the very first page we meet in the New Testament, is all about who Jesus is and how God comes to be with us in him.

We’re given only the second half of Matthew’s first chapter. Do you recall what’s in the first half? Yes, all the begats. That we don’t get to hear all those generations today suggests that our church elders may have thought there isn’t enough time in Advent for that kind of thing.

But the question of who Jesus is gets answered in part by a genealogy covering forty-two generations in three sections with fourteen generations in each. The first starts with the Hebrew patriarch Abraham and goes fourteen generations to great King David. Then come fourteen generations from Solomon to the time of the disaster, the sixth- century BCE, when Israel’s leading citizens were forced into exile by the Babylonian emperor. In the last section of this genealogy, fourteen generations bring us Joseph “the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.”

This genealogy says that Jesus sums up the longing of God to be with his people in a faithful servant, obedient like Abraham, charismatic like David, wise like Solomon.

This genealogy also says that Jesus sums up the human longing of God’s people, and will carry in his own body the pain and suffering they know in their exile from home.

And this genealogy does a surprising thing. Unusual for a Jewish author of that time, Matthew includes women, a surprising selection of women. Tamar, a Gentile, tricked and seduced her father-in-law, then bore illegitimate twins. Rahab, another Gentile, once worked as a prostitute. Ruth also grew up as a pagan Gentile, and Uriah’s wife Bathsheba committed adultery with charismatic King David. Not a few of the men listed had unsavory pasts. This genealogy says that Jesus had some pretty shady ancestors.

I’m guessing that most of us have a family tree with some dodgey characters in it, and perhaps some births out of wedlock. Guess what? So does Jesus. And who can miss Matthew’s carefully-crafted message? When he says, “Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way…” he means that God works equally well outside, as well as inside, what we mortals called traditional. God is free to make choices.

A similar point is made when Matthew tells us about Joseph, to whom Mary was betrothed. By tradition, that put them beyond engagement in a formal way that could be dissolved only by divorce. That a betrothed woman was pregnant would be understood as meaning (so long as her betrothed had been behaving himself) that the child did not belong to the husband-to-be. In a strict adherence to tradition, Mary would have been charged with adultery.

But Joseph, being a just man, was not willing to expose her to public disgrace. Or to expose himself? Sure. He must have wanted it all to go away, as in that stage of grief when it hurts so much you lose your imagination, your awareness that you have choices.

Then came the dream. In deep sleep, Emmanuel hums the Christmas message, “Do not be afraid… Do not be afraid to stay the course, to face the world with courage you do not know you have, for there’s something at work here that exceeds all that you long for. But it takes you for it to happen. It takes you making certain very good (and likely very hard) choices.”

What is it about Joseph that is so useful to God? It is that he did not react according to the law when he decided to protect Mary from humiliation and punishment. His sense of justice exceeded the justice of law. This will be the constant message of Jesus in Matthew, that God is shaping in us a higher and finer sense of right and wrong than the standards of the world, the ways of business, and the traditions of culture. God is shaping in us awareness of choices, and the ability to welcome such grace as will show us our best choices.

This higher and finer sense is what we want for Julian, whom we will baptize this morning. We want his senses free and clear to recognize that in the adventure of life there is available to him more than he can desire or pray for, God with him humming in his ear the lovesong of heaven, shaping in him conscience that will seek justice exceeding law, and consciousness that will revere and love and reveal to him his very best choices.

Protecting the House

2010-12-01T08:36:00.000-08:00

Scripture for the 1st Sunday in Advent includes Isaiah 2:1-5, Romans 13:11-14, and Matthew 24:36-44

The rule of thumb in Advent is the same one you hear when you travel by air: When the oxygen masks drop overhead, fasten your own before attempting to help the person next to you.

With that in mind, visit the table near the font and find a good resource for yourself as you step into a new year (that’s what the Church says we’re doing today) and as you face the daily choice, either to ride the escalator that takes you to every floor of the Christmas Extravaganza (from Santa’s lap on the mezzanine all the way up to the credit office, top floor), or to walk and wait and breathe and enjoy and encourage a sweet short season that opens you to the reason we shall celebrate the Christ who comes.

And while you’re selecting a good resource for you, look for something you might give to a friend. Who knows, maybe it will give the two of you something fresh to talk about, some fresh air to breathe together this Advent (whether you’re reading the same daily meditations, or different ones). Who knows?

We notice a lot of not-knowing in today’s Gospel. A decisive moment for the universe is near, but no one (not even Jesus) knows exactly when. Jesus teaches that this sharp turn will affect everyone, and he likens it to the ancient story of Noah and the flood, when Noah’s family obediently (if reluctantly) prepared for the rising of the sea, while just about everybody else partied on, or plodded on, knowing nothing until Noah entered that crowded ark and the flood waters rose.

There is in that ancient story more than a hint that people didn’t want to know anything that confronted and challenged their expected daily routine. The partiers wanted to party and the plodders wanted to plod, and it was nobody’s business to sound any alarms. Don’t try to regulate our partying, those partiers might have shouted. It’s not government’s business to interfere with our plodding, argued the others.

Meanwhile, animals were getting restless. Horses pawed the ground, bees looked lost, burrowing creatures skittered uphill—they all knew, they all showed it.

Rain splattered everywhere like a legion of catapults, and still the wise species did not know, except for Noah the awake, Noah the aware.

And that’s all we need from that primeval story. Jesus doesn’t give us all of it, just enough to show us how tempting it is, in anxious times, to bury your head in your party (or in your plodding) and know nothing except what entertains and justifies and comforts.

Quickly he reaches for another metaphor. What’s coming, he says, will separate people from one another, will divide friends and neighbors, fracture society. Imagining this needn’t be like in science fiction, an invasion of body snatchers. Two people could be watching the news, one on PBS, the other on Fox. Are they both seeing one and the same world? Or one will be watching Dancing with the Stars, the other Frontline. One will be here, one will be there, not unlike living on two different planets! One person’s reality is not real to the next: it all depends on to what, and to whom, you’re paying attention.

Two women will be in the workforce, working as they have, side by side, for many years. Suddenly one is laid off. Losing her job, she is taken into a parallel universe of unemployment compensation on which she and her dependents cannot rely, because society is coming apart at the seams of its old safety nets.

Thinking globally, as we approach World AIDS Day, 33.3 million people are living with HIV, including 2.5 million children. Last year, 2.6 million people became newly infected with the virus. 1.8 million died of AIDS.

In keeping with our Gospel’s insistence on awareness, consider two people living with HIV, one in this country, the other in one of the sub-Saharan nations of Africa.

Both will need good nutrition. Eating well can help each of these two people prevent or delay loss of muscle tissue, sometimes called wasting. Eating well can strengthen the immune system, reduce viral mutations, decrease infections and hospitalizations, and lessen the symptoms of HIV/AIDS, and the side-effects of anti-retroviral drugs.

Our two people living with HIV/AIDS need better nutrition than their neighbors have—let’s say 30% better if they’re adults, 100% better if they are children. In this country, better-than-average nutrition may be available. In sub-Saharan Africa? It’s unlikely. There, the rule may be that food goes to whoever is the wage-earner in the family, not so much the young, the old, or the sick.

Of our two people, the African faces at best a 50% chance of getting the anti-retroviral drugs he or she needs. The rule about food may apply to a family’s share of anti-retroviral drugs: if several members of the family need them, they will go first to the wage-earners, a harsh fact of life, a different reality from the American person’s experience.

What else gets in the way of drug therapy? In Mozambique, floods. In Zimbabwe, an unstable political and economic situation. In South Africa, public sector strikes. When society is fractured, people needing health care suffer. And the global recession has seen several western nations cut their financial commitment to equalizing access to drug therapy (though the United States, if I’m not mistaken, has kept on schedule with its aid).

“Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready…”

What is the house that we own, that we are to protect?

Is it a fractured nation, needing reunification and brave government?

Is it a society whose safety nets are in tatters, and its values as well?

Is it a global economy requiring worldwide purging of graft and bribery, insider deals and outsized pay disparity?

Is it our one world, comprising the well and the ill, the affluent and the poor, the seas rising on us all?

Is it the kingdom of God, the realm of light where we learn how to beat swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, technology freed to serve the new creation?

We also must be ready, freed, and prepared.

That he makes us able to be so is good news, telling us that he walks with us and before us, that his grace will meet us and equip us.

But he needs us, and needs us to be ready.

On What Do We Stake Our Lives?

2010-11-16T13:18:00.000-08:00

Bible portions read on the 25th Sunday after Pentecost include Isaiah 65:17-25; II Thessalonians 3:6-13; and Luke 21:5-19

As Christians, we stake our lives on what God has done for us in Jesus Christ, by the power and grace of the Holy Spirit.

But something about that claim seems limited if it’s put in a past tense, and if we claim it’s only for and about us. Isn’t it truer, worthier, and more exciting to stake our lives on what God is doing for the world in Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit?

Next Sunday will be Christ the King Sunday, when the Church contemplates and celebrates the reign of Jesus Christ on earth. A King? What sort of king is he? A King? Such an antique title. But there it is, throughout the New Testament: the Kingdom of God is proclaimed, announced, preached as a new ordering of life that is near, but not yet here.

Today the prophet Isaiah helps us anticipate this question, What is God doing for the world? “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.” The promised king, the promised kingdom, and what it means to be citizens of that kingdom are all about joy.

Isaiah shows us why. Justice. Mercy. Lovingkindness. Peace. Of all these powers is God’s kingdom built. In that kingdom fully realized, these powers will show themselves tangibly in the incidence of infant mortality (zero), the extension of life expectancy (to one hundred), affordable and sustainable housing and agriculture safe from foreclosure and the depredation of enemies. Enjoyable work with meaningful purpose, children’s futures secure from the ravages of war, peace so pervasive that nature is no longer red in tooth and claw. And the relationship between God and people so open that nothing gets in the way of calling and answering, speaking and hearing.

Oh, sign us up!

No, no, don’t analyze it, don’t critique it—imagine it! Can you sketch a finer version of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? Sure, it sounds unmanageable on a limited planet—but listen to the mind of the Maker, at least according to the prophet Isaiah.

The experiment in democracy that we call the United States of America seemed barely imaginable or manageable, just more than two centuries ago. Now we know it’s only unmanageable.

All the more reason, then, to listen to the mind of the Maker. If we’re going to experience unmanageability, let’s do it for the highest good. If we’re going to take any passage in the Bible literally, why not this one from Isaiah?

And as the report from a bipartisan committee on abolishing our national debt dramatizes our unmanageability, let it also remind us that creating a new order is God’s work. At least to the extent that our vision for national and international life is to serve God’s passionate purposes of justice, mercy, and peace; at least to the extent that we want our national and international life to implement God’s agenda published by the prophet Isaiah, we can be working hand in hand with God.

So I’d better bridge the two testaments, and make clear my case that what God is doing for the world in Jesus Christ is that reordering of life into a new creation that Isaiah sketches. You will recall that it is often Isaiah whom Jesus quotes, as in his very first sermon (“for he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor… to proclaim release to the captives… to let the oppressed go free…”) Such is the kingdom Jesus proclaimed and preached, the kingdom he could best describe and recruit for by means of parables that got people wondering and imagining what it meant to them, what it required of them. Such is the kingdom Jesus realized by healing sick people’s bodies and minds; consorting with and promoting poor people, uneducated people, children; confronting the arrogant and the narrow-minded; provoking the backward-looking; stimulating hope among the neglected and the nearly-disappeared. Such is the kingdom he died for, to root it for all time in the ground of our being and to free it for all times and places by putting its seed into the hands of ordinary women and men and children, calling them to sow that seed by humble potent acts of faith and hope and love, always multiplied by the divine Spirit that dwells within and hovers over the whole creation.

As Christians, we stake our lives on what God is doing for the world in Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit. We accept and honor and try to meet God’s call to sow the seeds of the kingdom by humble potent acts of faith and hope and love. God’s new creation must be the Church’s first and constant passion. The Church must not mistake itself for that new creation, or that kingdom, but must be its servant in the world. The Church must not assume it is the only theater in which God is acting, for the world belongs to God, and all that is within it. And the Church must not rely on money, or professionals, or real estate, or committees, or canon law, or tribal customs, or magic, or the same people all the time to meet God’s call to serve, and to sow the seeds of the kingdom in the world.

“Unless the LORD builds the house, their labor is in vain who build it.” Those are lyrics to a song sung in ancient Israel several hundred years before Christ, and they mark the truth of the Church.

Meanwhile, the Church is going through a whole lot of deconstruction. Even familiar houses of prayer are closing, right and left.

The Methodist congregations in North Adams and Williamstown have voted to merge, and have put both church buildings on the market, intending some day to build on the border between towns a flexible, sustainable church center.

St. Mark’s in Adams and St. John’s in North Adams have begun two weekends of voting on a proposal to merge. Their approach will be to retain one of their two buildings, and let go of the other.

St. James’ in Great Barrington has left its historic buildings, after the collapse of a wall behind the altar. A non-profit corporation headed by a parishioner has purchased the property with the goal of creating a multi-use center, with the repaired sanctuary someday available again to the congregation on a leased basis, the congregation (it may be) a tenant with the landlord among its own.

And all across the land Roman Catholic churches that were for generations fix- tures in their communities have gone through mergings and closings.

Imagine how Christians who are experiencing such deconstruction may hear today’s Gospel: “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”

I expect that none of us would rush to join their numbers, and that each of us would find it painful to lose a house of prayer and friendship that has come to mean so much over the years. Such letting-go would put us on a sharp learning curve.

Put differently, the fact that so many of our neighbors are rising on that curve tells us that we must learn what they are learning.

And the lesson most worth learning is that as Christians, we stake our lives not on having a church building, or a professional staff, or a beautiful liturgy, or fabulous stained glass windows. We stake our lives on what God has done for us—and is doing for the world-- in Jesus Christ, by the power and grace of the Holy Spirit. And we open ourselves to God’s call to serve the new creation in the world, where God is at work, and where we are needed to sow seeds of the kingdom by humble potent acts of faith, hope, and love.

That call does not require a building, but that call must be heard in this place, and often. That call to serve in the world, in our own neighborhoods and workplaces, must be heard in our liturgy here so that a greater worshiping of God may be offered beyond this place, including such sweet harmony as must please God when marriages and families and friendships and relationships in workplace and campus life are recognized as sanctuaries where what is holy and what is human are treasured, strengthened, and renewed.

Defining and Revering

2010-11-16T13:04:00.000-08:00

Scripture appointed for the 24th Sunday after Pentecost includes Haggai 1:15b-2:9; II Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; and Luke 20:27-38

Those Sadducees irritate me. I can understand their need for rational religion, if that’s what caused them to argue that there is no resurrection. But when they construct a test case and build it out of the very belief they insist they don’t hold, they’re demeaning other people’s religion—as they do here, suggesting that belief in resurrection is absurd.

In this, they are like the anti-God writers today (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens) who tell their readers that only idiots believe in God.

Well, they have a point. The God they demolish in their books is a pretty silly cartoon of the God of Judaism and the God of Christianity. He is an old white man with a great long beard, alternately sappy and peevish, a figure like Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore in Harry Potter, but without his intelligence, his integrity, and his dry wit. The God Dawkins and Hitchens don’t believe in, I don’t either. They aim way too low, and write as if they haven’t read much theology.

In a like way, Sadducees and Pharisees and scribes in the New Testament all appear to have been trained in religious law, but to have no appetite for religious mystery. This encounter some of them have with Jesus today is just one more example of how narrow minds were persistent in the effort to trap Jesus, to catch him saying something that could be held against him in a court of law, or at least used against him as sound bytes in public debates and sabbath day sermons.

Don’t feel bad on Jesus’s behalf, however. He’s always up for a good theological brawl. And we’d never have heard of Saduccees and Pharisess and scribes if their presence in the Gospels didn’t advance the cause of Gospel-writers. These narrow legalistic minds are the perfect foils, sometimes just the right catalysts, for Jesus’s revelation of God.

The law mentioned by Sadducees today allowed a practice called levirate marriage, from the Latin “levir”, brother-in-law. Imagine a man who died without children. His brother was obligated by this law to take his brother’s wife and have children by her. Providing children in this way ensured the flow of property within the family, including security for the brother’s widow. You can find this law in chapter 25 of the Book of Deuteronomy in the Bible, and while you might not be motivated to look that up, you might find it interesting to read what the consequences were if the brother-in-law refused.

But let’s get ourselves out of the first century and back to the present. What might we make of this Gospel?

You might say that this little case study shows how absurd it can be, in any culture, to define a person by her or his relationship to someone else.

“In the resurrection… whose wife will the woman be? For the seven brothers had married her.” And if you were acting this as a skit, that last line would go on to include, “Har, har har!” Which is another reason these Saduccees irritate us, as they demean this woman, and for that matter these several brothers-in-law.

But don’t we have our own struggles defining ourselves and our nearest and dearest? Possessiveness is one form of struggle, and we see it when spouses try to clip one another’s wings or undercut one another’s growth, and when parents fail to cut the strings they’ve attached to their growing children’s freedom (and sometimes when grown children collude and don’t want those strings cut).

Another form of struggle is ours when change redefines relationship. A married person is suddenly single because of the death of a partner. In another couple, each becomes gradually single through separation and divorce. We may react to the demeaning priorities of the Sadducees, but divorce in contemporary America creates custody battles that treat children as if they were property.

And if we’re cataloging changes, the Great Recession keeps them coming, rippling into the future, as lost jobs, lost homes, lost illusions, and lost luxuries redefine who people are. Shift up (or down) from economics to politics, and wonder how the elections of 2010 may redefine who we are as a nation. Or may not.

In common to many of our definings and our redefinings is that, deeper within us than all our gainings and all our losings, is the core of who we truly are. With the memory of last Sunday’s baptisms still fresh, let’s remember that there is no purer sense of that core identity than what we discover at the font, where we stand revealed as children of God, members of Christ’s Body, and inheritors of the Kingdom of God; where we are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever; and where we receive the astonishing call to grow into the full stature of Jesus Christ, with the help of all his people.

In the light of all that, hear a slightly tweaked version of what Jesus said to the Sadducees: “Those who belong to this age define who they are in terms of their relationship to husband or wife or parents or children, job or profession, schools attended, political party or religious affiliation—all those empty spaces you fill in on an application. But those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection—those who know they’ve been accepted and can stop filling out the application—they aren’t owned, except by God, and they aren’t afraid of change, because they’ve done their dying, realizing they can’t own anyone, can’t control the lives of others however near and dear, heck, can’t control their own lives, and instead choose to entrust themselves and all whom they love into the care and keeping and transforming love of God.”

You may have noticed that Jesus ends his encounter with the Sadducees by pivoting and sinking a shot from half-court.

“And the fact that the dead are raised is shown by Moses himself, the great law-giver, in the story about the bush. That would be the burning bush, and I’ll bet that story isn’t your favorite because it’s so, well, non-rational. But there Moses faced the sheer mystery of who God is, and how God calls a person to grow. Telling the story, Moses speaks of God as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob—not defining God in terms of a bunch of dead people, but revealing how the dead are alive to God.

“And just as important in that story: when Moses tries to get God to define God’s self with a name, God answers, “I am who I am.”

And that’s not a bad model of self-definition for us all.

It requires reverence in response to the sheer otherness of God. And the role that reverence plays in our love of God teaches us, invites us, to respect the distinct otherness of each person we love.

And to recognize our own: that each of us is other than the multiple ways we are defined by our relationships. And it is there, at our core, that we encounter God in prayer, in silence, in conscience, and in reflection on our actual experience as children of God who are called to grow, and to revere that inner life that has less to do with law, more with mystery and grace.

What Are You Going to Be?

2010-11-01T14:42:00.000-07:00

Bible passages appointed for the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost include Habakkuk 1:1-4 and 2:1-4; II Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12; and Luke 19:1-10

It’s not often that we go to church on Hallowe’en. I know, Hallowe’en isn’t until tonight: its name means the evening before All Hallows Day, and All Hallows is a very old name for tomorrow, All Saints Day. On All Saints Day we remember all the people who have helped us see and know and love God, all the people whose examples have hallowed God’s name. We use that very old word in one form of the Lord’s Prayer: “hallowed be your name.” Our saints have shown us the holiness of God.

So, is anyone here going trick or treating tonight as a saint?

No? Why is that? Isn’t it more fun to pretend that you’re something dangerous and scarey? (What are you going to be, when you go out tonight?)

What happens when you put on a costume? It fills your imagination, doesn’t it? You reach to become something you were not, before you put it on. Your costume invites you to act as if you really were what you want people to believe you’re trying to be.

Now that gets me thinking about Zacchaeus. We learned several things about him in our Gospel today. He was the chief tax collector. He was rich. And he was not a tall man. And a fourth thing: he was not afraid to climb a tree. And a fifth: he wasn’t what people thought he was. A generous man lived behind the mask of a greedy tax collector.

I don’t know whether a chief tax collector wore an official costume as part of his job, but he might as well have. Everyone knew, everyone could see, what Zacchaeus did for a living. He took a lot of their money and handed it over to the hated Roman Empire that controlled their country. He was a ratfink. And nothing he could do would ever pretty that up and make people feel differently about him. You can’t make a leopard change his spots, people would have said about him. He’s definitely a ratfink.

If you’re under the age of eighteen, chances are good that you live in a world, Mondays through Fridays, where unpopular people don’t get treated very well. It doesn’t take much to become unpopular, does it? Look a little different, have a sweet and gentle spirit, have zero interest in sports, have not very much money, and poof, you’re at risk of being unpopular, and made fun of, even bullied. Interestingly, some of those same characteristics can contribute to creating a bully.

And if you’re over the age of eighteen, your world isn’t quite as brutal, but unpopularity is still a curse. There’s always pressure to conform, to do what others do and be like others are. On one hand, we talk a lot about respecting diversity. On the other hand, we tend to stay with our own kind, to not cross lines that separate our kind from other kinds, and to react to personal difference with blame and even hatred.

Zacchaeus was deeply unpopular. And he’s the one Jesus seeks out. Oh, that Jesus: he’s full of surprises!

Put this little story on the stage, and you’ll need a whole bunch of extra’s, people who were hoping, even expecting, that Jesus would come to their houses for dinner. Influential people, professional people, religious people, proper people… “Surely, he’ll want to spend the evening with me!” people. Popular people.

And to help us catch the message even better, St. Luke tells us that Zacchaeus was short in stature. “He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not…”

Children will find this easy to appreciate. Here in church, there’s always some bigger-than-life adult in front of you, whom you can’t see through. Go to read a lesson at the lectern, and you have to find a stool to stand on.

Wednesday, I read this Gospel at the eucharist at Sweet Brook Care Center. Every person in that congregation was in a wheelchair. They appreciated Zacchaeus’s perspective.

He took his situation in hand and climbed a sycamore tree. Appreciate what he did: In those days, it was considered undignified for a grown man to run in public, and a man of his importance would never climb a tree. Already unpopular, this man made himself a laughingstock, just to see Jesus.

And Jesus appreciated this. Jesus knew just what he was seeing. Jesus went and stood with the man everyone was ridiculing. “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.” This Jesus is full of surprises! He took that situation and turned it on its head, sending all those self-important people home empty-handed and grumbling, while he instead chose to make one new disciple.

When you listen to what Zacchaeus says to Jesus, you appreciate how God has been working on him for some time. “Half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor…” Who else ever says that in the Bible? Kings, actually, two or three I can think of, expressing such extravagant love for their queens that they pledge half their kingdom. By his generosity Zacchaeus expresses love and devotion, both to God and to neighbor. He gets it. He shows that he gets what it means to fulfill the law and the prophets.

“And if I have defrauded anyone of anything…”—and there’s a good chance he has; tax collectors in those days earned their reputation—“I will pay back four times as much.”

There’s an example for Wall Street.

An example of holy change, the hallowing of a life, one person’s salvation making life better for many people around him. That’s how righteousness works. No one had ever called Zacchaeus a righteous man, but that’s what he’s becoming through this new attitude to money (and to people), and what Jesus hears and sees is proof of what the prophet Habakkuk said, “The righteous live by their faith.” Faith is being born, faith is being shown, in Zacchaeus’s choices.

If he hadn’t made the choice to take those social risks, climbing that sycamore tree, would he and Jesus have found each other? Making that choice positioned him to grow in faith, in stature, in relationship with God and with his world.

So what kind of climbing and reaching do you need to do? I asked that question in a roomful of Sweet Brook residents, wondering if I wasn’t pushing the story a little too hard.

“Believe in God,” answered Owen from the back row. I told him I thought that was a great answer. “Go to church,” he said, moments later. Owen was on a roll.

In just a few moments, it will be your turn to answer. Pay attention to the baptismal covenant, appreciate how each answer you make to each of these questions I will ask is a tree worth climbing in order to grow in faith, in stature, and in relationship with God and with God’s reign of respect, lovingkindness, peace, and justice in this world.

It isn’t often that we gather in church on Hallowe’en. It isn’t often that one is baptized on Hallowe’en, and today three of our children will take that step. Zoë, Ava, and Benedict will become members of a family larger than their first families. Like their original families, their church family is blessed with people who will help them see and know and love God, people whose examples keep hallowing God’s name, saints we call them.

And as these children grow in their discovery of how God loves them, how Jesus stands with them, how the Spirit of God moves through them in love, they will find power to make choices in their sometimes brutal world, choices that can turn their world upside down and make it turn around right, like choosing to sit at lunch with a child who is alone, and choosing to confront bullying when they see it, and not giving in when the price of popularity is just too much to pay.

When the church was young, many centuries ago, long before there was a Hallowe’en, each newly baptized person would be given a plain white garment to wear. It was meant to remind them that when they were baptized, they put on the Lord Jesus Christ like a magnificent cloak, wearing his love in the world—sort of like Harry Potter’s cloak, but not to make them invisible; rather, to make Jesus’s love visible, the kind of costume that fills the imagination and invites one to become who he or she truly is.

Crossing the Chasm

2010-09-29T13:16:00.000-07:00

Bible readings for the 18th Sunday after Pentecost include Amos 6:1a, 4-7; I Timothy 6:6-19; and Luke 16:19-31

“If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”

That’s an odd way for a parable to end, in a religion that is known for its central claim that Jesus Christ rose from his grave. If we didn’t know better, we might think that St. Luke does not find the resurrection the single most compelling feature of Christianity.

But that’s not what we’re hearing. We’re hearing how hard it is to get the full attention of a cohort of people who are swept up in what the prophet Amos calls “the revelry of the loungers.” The rich, that is, who sing idle songs, anoint themselves with the finest oils, lounge on their couches, but do not care that the country is in ruins, and whole communities of people suffering from want of basic necessities.

It is very hard to get the full attention of the wealthy. They have people who do their bidding and insulate them from the workaday world. St. Paul, writing to Timothy, knows this crowd. Not just those who are rich, but “those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.”

Trapped, says Paul. We all know that the poor get trapped. Miners in Chile get trapped when mine owners don’t care about safety precautions. Villagers in Pakistan get trapped when landowners don’t care if diverting floodwaters this way or that way sends water into this village or that one. America’s working poor and unemployed get trapped when our society has no finer gospel to preach than “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!”

It’s very hard to get the full attention of the well-to-do. And, to keep us from thinking that all those scripture lessons today are talking to someone other than us, let’s admit that it’s hard to pay attention to God when we’re feeling at ease in Zion and secure on Mount Samaria, however those phrases translate in our lives: Hard to pay attention to God when we’re undisturbed in the Purple Bubble of this quiet valley. Difficult to hear the divine voice when every moment of the waking day is scheduled and accounted for. Downright challenging to respond to God when one portion of ourselves is drugged and sated and all tucked into satisfaction with life, leaving available only our randomly jangling dissatisfied nerve endings to be attentive to the world, and to be coaxed into prayer.

I mean to suggest that we find some sympathy for the rich man in Jesus’s parable. We may be related to him.

He has lived his lifetime without giving his best to the world around him, without giving his best to God, and without giving his best to the many Lazaruses at his door. What this rich man called best he kept for himself, to himself.

Until he died, and there was no more keeping.

But isn’t it rather wonderful that, by the terms of Jesus’s parable, after death there is still more learning to do? I don’t believe that was the majority view in the religion of Israel, where the prevailing belief is summed up in Psalm 88:

“Do you work wonders for the dead? Will those who have died stand up and give you thanks? Will your loving-kindness be declared in the grave? Your faithfulness in the land of destruction? Will your wonders be known in the dark? Or your righteousness in the country where all is forgotten?”

No, is the implied answer. So God must meet us in this life to set right what is wrong.

And God does that. Disguised, often, as Lazarus. Or coal miners in Chile. Or displaced villagers in Pakistan. Or our own neighbors in need of transitional assistance (at a time when we’re shutting down offices of transitional assistance because, well, other things matter more).

By the terms of this stunning parable, God doesn’t give up on us when we die. If you’re Lazarus, that’s good news: you discover that the heart of God is not what you’d feared from the inequities of daily life. You learn that there is a place set for you at God’s table, and you’re seated there, not on the floor beneath.

But if you’re the rich man, you might wish that learning did stop at the grave. You discover that abundance doesn’t pass through the eye of the needle with you. In fact, you discover that what filled you in your lifetime wasn’t real and lasting abundance after all. It was stuff, and your primary relationship to stuff, consumption, has fitted you not to be carried away by angels but to sink into the realm of consumption, Hades.

That there is torment there suggests that a lifetime characterized by consuming stuff prepares us to become stuff to be consumed. That’s a dramatic way to say that human beings have a higher calling.

St. Paul describes that calling twice in his letter today. First, “Pursue right standing with God, reach for faith, demonstrate love, practice endurance, show gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession…”

And later he describes the calling again: “Do not be haughty. Do not set your hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment… Do good… be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up the treasure of a good foundation for the future, taking hold of the life that really is life.”

Last Sunday, a portion of Luke’s Gospel prepared us to see a sharp distinction between the children of this age and the children of light. Different values distinguish them. Children of this age are known for keeping. Children of light are known for giving.

Their values create a firewall between the two cohorts, and it’s nowhere described more forcefully than in that verse today, “Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed…”, fixed by how lives have been lived.

In the after-death scene in our parable, that chasm cannot be crossed. Such bleak language is meant to drive home the message that in life, on this side of death, the deep gulf created out of conflicting values can be crossed, by choice; must be crossed, from keeping to giving, if we are to take hold of the life that really is life.

That such a simple basic lesson needs driving home by the prophet Amos, the apostle Paul, and our Lord Jesus Christ must go to show that it’s hard to get the full attention of the children of this age. And, truth be told, it’s hard to keep the full attention of the children of light.

What is required is that we pay attention to the world, where God is at work approaching the rich through the poor, and—when we have truly listened to Moses and the prophets and Jesus and Paul—God then works through what is rich within us, freed so we may give our best.

Commending a Dishonest Manager-- Huh?

2010-09-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

The Gospel for the 17th Sunday after Pentecost is Luke 16:1-13. R. Alan Culpepper’s commentary on that passage in “The New Interpreter’s Bible”, Volume IX, helped shape my thinking about this parable. Tom Friedman’s column appeared in the September 12th New York Times.

Are you hoping I will talk about that parable, or that I won’t?

I will, and in part because Tom Friedman told me to. Not personally, but his column last Sunday paved the way, when he referred to a problem “we have not faced honestly as we have dug out of this recession: We had a values breakdown—a national epidemic of get-rich-quickism and something-for-nothingism.”

I smell both in today’s Gospel. But let Tom finish his sermon first: “Wall Street may have been dealing the dope, but our lawmakers encouraged it. And far too many of us were happy to buy the dot-com and subprime crack for quick prosperity highs.”

Friedman reminds us that what made the Greatest Generation great, facing huge obstacles like the Depression, Nazism, and Soviet Communism, was their leaders’ fearlessness when it came to asking Americans to sacrifice, and that generation’s readiness to do the sacrificing, pulling together for the good of the country and earning global leadership the only way it can be earned, by saying “Follow me.”

By contrast, he writes, our generation’s leaders never utter the word “sacrifice.” “All solutions,” he says, “must be painless. Which drug would you like? A stimulus from Democrats or a tax cut from Republicans? A national energy policy? Too hard… For a decade we sent our best minds not to make computer chips in Silicon Valley but to make poker chips on Wall Street, while telling ourselves we could have the American dream… without saving and investing, for nothing down and nothing to pay for two years…”

Thanks, Tom. We hear you. Now it’s Jesus’s turn. And what is he saying in this parable?

What is a parable? C. H. Dodd answers that in his book, “The Parables of the Kingdom.” “At its simplest, the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.”

Jesus teases us into this story, not of household-level debts and management, but of large commercial dealings. Eight hundred gallons of olive oil, a thousand bushels of wheat. The first-century commodities market.

Jesus takes us to a deeper place, as well. A place of radical decision. It may sound like the slave market, when we hear him say, “No slave can serve two masters; he will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other.”

But it’s actually the very frontier of spiritual freedom to which Jesus takes us, when he insists, “In a like way, you cannot serve God and wealth.”

Think of all the times and places when he summoned working people to become his disciples. “Follow me,” he said, to fishermen in their boats, to a tax collector at his booth, to women in their front parlors and in their kitchens. And each time, he created a crisis, a moment requiring judgment, demanding response. You can’t give no answer in such a moment. It’s not an option to have no master. If you are silent at the frontier of spiritual freedom, then you have another master than Jesus and you have renewed your submission to being a child of this age and not a child of light.

In other words, to tease out the message of this parable, we must respect the firewall created between the people of this world and the people of the light, created by the choices they make. Those who belong to this age and those who belong to the light live among one another, they are called to respect and learn from one another, but they have very different values. One is content to drift among the rising and falling tides and currents of a market-driven world. The other is choosing to move with the mind and the heart of God—they may be erratic in learning these moves, may fail sometimes, succeed sometimes, but they try, they want, they practice a sharing of abundance, they value justice and mercy, they learn to roll with the mystery that the first shall be last and the last first, and, as we shall see, they learn to be resourceful.

Jesus locates his story in the business world, but he’s telling his parable to disciples whom he’s training in the ways of the Kingdom of God. To catch the sense he makes, we stand with the disciples on the children of light side of the firewall, and across that divide we watch the behavior of a shrewd manager and the business owner who is firing him. The message we take from Jesus, whatever it will be, respects that boundary, as he says to his little fledgling church, “Consider the behavior of this manager: his values are different from yours, but if you are as bold and decisive and resourceful in caring for the poor and preaching what is true and building human alliances in society, if you are as shrewd and effective in your calling as he was in the crumbling moments of his tenure, then your stewardship will make a difference .

There may be a world of difference between the impact, on one side of the divide, of those urgent words “Follow me” and, on the business side of that wall, the words, “You’re fired.” But in both cases, urgency requires bold and decisive choice. And in both cases, the hearer suddenly realizes that an old life has ended, and a new life requires change, fast and instinctual. Didn’t someone write, “New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth”? Oddly enough, both the summoned disciple and the fired manager find themselves in a thin place, in-between what was known and what will be, unchartered territory that each must suddenly navigate.

Okay, now we’ve put off this moment as long as possible. Why does the master commend the dishonest manager? It all depends on what you think the manager did.

Did he reduce the balance due from his master’s debtors by foregoing his own commission, sacrificing what would have been his, choosing to bank on another kind of wealth and indebtedness (call it goodwill or loyalty)? An interesting theory, but not based on any information Jesus gives us…

Or did the shrewd manager suddenly recall the ancient text in Deuteronomy that forbids Israelites from charging one another interest? This could have justified his reducing those debts to principal only. Is this a swift case of righteousness that put the master over a barrel, a canny chess move the owner could only shake his head at but couldn’t fight without losing face? An intriguing theory, but again nothing in Jesus’s telling leads us to it.

Or… is it, plain and simple as the parable states it, that the steward was cheating the master, and the master was rich enough that he could afford to notice more than the impact on his net worth. He experienced some collateral benediction from his debtors, for as long as those debtors thought the manager was still the manager, he acted with the full authority of the master. What he did glorified his boss, polished his reputation, earned him (who knows, perhaps for the first time) a good name—a new form of wealth, a new kind of net worth.

Such is a good parable, one that teases the hearer into active thought, and thoughtful action.

It brings home the fact that in the New Testament as a whole, Jesus has far more to say about how to deal with wealth than how to handle sex. If our churches occupied themselves proportionally, we could have more to say to our culture’s dishonesty, its devaluing of sacrifice, its get-rich-quickism, and its something-for-nothingism.

On the other hand, lest the Church get to sounding self-righteous, Jesus challenges the people of light to muster for God, and for the poor and the oppressed and the abandoned, boldness and shrewdness and decisive action that can be seen in certain people of the world, even the occasional dishonest manager.

Go figure.

Philadelphia or Bust

2010-09-01T13:54:00.000-07:00

Scripture heard on the 14th Sunday after Pentecost included Proverbs 25:6-7; Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; and Luke 14:1, 7-14

“Philadelphia.” This is the Greek word that appears at the opening of our 2nd lesson, “Let mutual love continue.” Philadelphia, love of the brethren (in its old translation). We need something roomier now: love of the brotherhood and sisterhood that we have in Jesus Christ.

“Mutual love” sounds a little calculating: You love me and I’ll love you. Eugene Peterson in “The Message” gives us, “Stay on good terms with each other, held together by love.” There’s still something transactional about “staying on good terms,” but I like the awareness that this staying power isn’t all up to us. Holding us together is a costly and generous love.

How costly and how generous is the point of the Gospel, the Good News. Unconditional, is the Gospel answer: love that cannot be earned or bought, love that must give itself fully. Such love is the subject of both our New Testament portions today.

Writing to a struggling church, the apostle who wrote to the Hebrews encourages what might be called fellow-feeling (another term we wish sounded roomier, to include the more empathic 51% of our population). We get the point: try walking in the other person’s sandals. For instance, pray for prisoners by imagining yourself locked in that same cell. Pray for torture victims by letting yourself visualize and feel their suffering.

In both instances it’s worth noticing that, in those days, this would not have meant praying for strangers. When this letter was written and read, Christians were being sent to prison and tortured just for being Christians. Prejudice worked its destructive way against the followers of Jesus, judging them to be dangerous to the nation, blaming them for putting the homeland at risk, seeing them as conspirators wanting to change the culture, outsiders with their own allegiances. Rather the way some Christians are treating Muslims, two thousand years later, here in America.

The prisoners and the tortured mentioned in the Letter to the Hebrews were fellow members of that struggling church. That bond of mutual love, philadelphia, held together both the imprisoned and the free in one brotherhood, sisterhood, and the apostle who writes this letter urges the free members to refuse to let prison walls shut out that brotherly, sisterly love. Imagine yourselves there, he says (with some irony, because they all could be before long); and now, in your freedom, practice fearless compassion as you sit next to the imprisoned and the tortured, in your mind’s eye and your heart’s imagining, and so pray from there, like that. Be part of philadelphia, mutual love, the unconditional love that holds the community together.

Luke’s Gospel brings us teachings of Jesus that answer the question, “How shall we do that?”, from another perspective, that of table fellowship. By his behavior at a Sabbath meal in a Pharisee’s home, and by his parable about a hypothetical wedding banquet, Jesus teaches the meaning of honor. In the Pharisee’s home, Jesus notices how the guests are colliding at the places of honor, presumably the seats nearest the host. To sit next to the President at a White House state dinner is a big deal indeed.

What’s ironic in this social occasion is that all the Pharisees are watching him closely. They’ve heard that he performs miracles, and they intend to see one. At the same time, he is observing them, how they play bumper cars getting at those choice seats. The miracle he has for them today is not what they expect. He wants to heal and convert their egos.

And to do it, he asks them to imagine a wedding banquet, a grander affair than the Sabbath meal before them. It’s no accident that he picks a wedding banquet. In the language of parables, a wedding banquet represents the coming Kingdom of God.

In that kingdom, all relationships are made right. Justice shapes all in that kingdom, where it will be revealed that God has fearless compassion for the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, the abused, and the oppressed. In the world as it is, the first are first and the last are last. In the kingdom as it shall be, things are different.

To that end, Jesus coaches his hearers—and not the Pharisees only, but also his own ragtag army of disciples who frequently fight among themselves over who is greatest—Jesus coaches his hearers to learn the ways of the kingdom of God.

Go and sit down in the lowest place, Jesus teaches. Then it may be that the host will come and invite you to sit nearer the head table, who knows? But if not, it is still good for you to sit in the lowest place by your own choice. So much better, says Jesus, appealing to their egos, than being told by your host, “I’m sorry, but you’re sitting in my mother-in-law’s seat, and you must move.” And by then, the only seat left in the well-packed pecking order would be way out on the back porch.

Does this explain why Episcopalians cluster more at the back of the church than in the front?

If what he teaches about a wedding feast were applied to our Sunday gathering—and why should it not, since the eucharist can be described as the wedding banquet hosted by God to honor his Son whose love for the Church is like the love of a bridegroom for his bride?— what might he want to teach us, as we choose where to go when we enter this banquet hall?

It’s natural that we should choose a seat that honors our own needs and comfort. When we’ve done that once, we may just keep coming back to that same seat (that’s very Episcopal, isn’t it?). But might Jesus teach a different way of entering the banquet hall? Might he invite you to look around to see who you feel drawn to sit with? I don’t know that that’s what he might say… who knows? I do know that this mutual love has a togethering purpose. Where we place ourselves can serve that purpose.

I wonder if he might say, “Wherever you choose to sit, be thoughtful of others. Move to the center of a pew, to welcome others around you without their having to climb over you. In that small way, remember that you are a host to the stranger, the visitor who may come to your pew. Set the tone by whatever gesture of welcome and respect that may honor the others around you.

I don’t know if that’s what he might say. Who knows?

But we do know that he teaches us to choose the lowest place.

Were those Pharisees (and am I? and are you?) ready to imagine where that would take them? They were guests, and they heard his parable refer to guests. But the lowest place at a banquet is at the door, washing the feet of the invited. And in the kitchen, cleaning the pots. And in and out through those swinging doors, busing dishes and waiting on tables.

Later in Luke, we will hear Jesus ask, “Who would you rather be: the one who eats the dinner or the one who serves the dinner? You’d rather eat and be served, right? But I’ve taken my place among you as the one who serves… Now I confer on you the royal authority my Father conferred on me…”

The royal, divine, authority to serve. In that passage late in Luke, Jesus tells his Church that he has conferred on us this Godly power to serve so we can eat and drink at his table in his kingdom and be strengthened to take up responsibilities among the congregations of God’s people. We are fed so that we may feed.

There is set for each of us a place at the head table. This one offers just a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. And the place is set for us here so that we may be strengthened to take the lowest place elsewhere, in the world, where we live.

You’re raising a child? Helping to raise a grandchild? You sometimes sit in lowest places.

You’re the caregiver to a spouse, a parent, a neighbor, multi-tasking to keep on your head all the hats you must wear? You are familiar with lowest places.

Are you working on your marriage, or a friendship, at real cost to yourself? You know what low places are, including those where forgiveness is needed.

You’re volunteering to help, organize, lead other people? You get what it is to serve.

And in recessionary times, you’re in a workplace having to do more with less, having to support colleagues without necessarily getting much support? Daily, you’re rising to the challenge of serving a brotherhood, sisterhood.

Mutual love, love of the brethren, philadelphia, faces deep challenges in our nation and our world. Togethering love must exceed the bitter divisiveness at work in our society. Before we attempt to export democracy, a bold, costly, and generous love must disarm the viruses that afflict us, heal the prejudices and phobias that aim to defeat brotherhood, sisterhood.

As we have it in Jesus Christ, that brotherhood-sisterhood is unconditional.

As we have it in the package of Christianity, that potential togetherness is broken and splintered by narrow thinking and tribal fears—as is sadly true of all the world’s religions.

We must practice our Christianity in full expectation that what we hear in the Letter to the Hebrews is true: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever,” and in full desire that his unconditional love bring forth in us and in our world philadelphia, togethering love.

The Miracle Is in the First Step

2010-08-23T14:21:00.000-07:00

Scripture appointed for the 13th Sunday after Pentecost includes Isaiah 58:9b-14, Hebrews 12:18-29, Luke 13:10-17

When I bring communion to people at home or in a nursing home, I normally bring with me the Gospel that we’ll hear in church on the next Sunday. So last week, I read today’s Gospel in two different places. One was at the monthly eucharist at Williamstown Commons, where a dozen to fifteen residents, most in wheelchairs, gather in the circle.

“Great,” I said to myself as I glanced ahead to this Gospel. “I’m going to read them this story about the healing of a woman crippled for eighteen years? How is that going to go over?”

The second place was in the apartment of a dear lady in an assisted living facility, where she spends much of her day in a wheelchair. The same question gripped me: “How is this going to be for her, and how is this going to be for me, to read this story to her?”

She got pretty fired up about that religious stuffed-shirt. She knows the passion Jesus has for the oppressed and the sick and the less-able. She said what a shame it was that someone who ought to know better would find fault with Jesus for helping a person on the Sabbath day.

I told her that I imagined telling the story a little differently. The setting is a big old Episcopal church— let’s call it the Church of the Heavenly Comforter. It’s high mass and the choir is singing the offertory anthem, when Jesus stops the show. He has spotted this woman inching her way up the aisle. Everyone’s eyes are drawn to her at one end of the nave, to him at the front, and back again.

He sees her. He calls her to come to him. He does not go to her. Some good churchfolk in the pews start muttering about that: “For heaven’s sake, he could at least save her all that trouble!” But no, he calls her over to him. Like God calling the Hebrew people over the Red Sea to freedom.

The miracle starts with her first step. Before he touches her, he encourages her, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” The journey up that aisle is hers.

When she reaches him, he lays his hands on her and she immediately stands up straight and praises God.

Even the hardest heart among God’s frozen chosen melts and tears are seen, sniffles heard. Not a few proper Episcopalians are thinking, “Good God, if he can do this for her, what might he do with me?”

And it is at this moment that the Rector goes to the microphone (to make sure that all his flock hear him), and harrumphs, “Anyone else desiring prayer for healing will please wait until communion, remain at the rail, and raise their hands like this—which is how we do it here!”

But that version lacks the power of the conflict that Luke captures. Worship in the Episcopal tradition need not exclude healing: we offer prayer for healing every Sunday. But in this Gospel story, the voice of authority says that healing does not belong on the Sabbath day. Any other day of the week is fine, but on the seventh day God is to be honored by doing no work at all.

That’s the argument that Jesus rises to refute. Hypocrisy, he calls it. “You’ll untie your donkey on the seventh day to bring it to the watering trough, won’t you? Here, a woman has been untied from spiritual and physical bondage. She is drinking deeply from the water of new life that I bring. How does this fail to glorify God?”

And at this the entire crowd in that house of prayer erupted in joy, which must have been the sweetest liturgy that place had seen in many a sabbath. The rule of “everything done decently and in good order” is helpful for keeping the donkey out of the sanctuary, but sad if it keeps the Spirit out, as well. And there, in that synagogue that day, the prevailing Spirit gladdened the hearts of all.

It’s worth noticing that Luke tells us that it was a spirit that had crippled that woman for eighteen years. By the slow working of spirit (attitude), a person can be disabled in illness. To say that is not to blame the sick person for being sick—that would be both untrue and perverse. But it is to observe that our human being is an interplay of body and spirit; so is our health. For example, the ordinary and occasional human work of grieving can become distorted into toxic depression, which takes its toll on the body. Luke, nicknamed the blessed physician, tells us that if it is by the path of spirit that chronic illness binds us, it is by the Spirit of God that we find freedom and well-being.

Would that this should mean the full healing of that brave and cheerful lady I visited, her rising from her wheelchair once for all. Would that the same happen a dozen times more, in that circle at the nursing home. The tears I saw in the eyes of one man there said it all: Would that this could happen to me. And the pain I saw in his face, and the pain I felt with him, brought home to me why I was skittish about this Gospel. This might happen. Of course it would.

Yet these are the very ones, less able than you and I (who may be taking for granted our ableness), these are the ones who recognize and value healing in its smallest steps and humblest forms. It will not be lost on them, if the Spirit of God meets them on their journeys up the aisle and simply renews courage (simply?), or reawakens initiative, rekindles a sense of humor, or sharpens perseverance, eases pain, ushers in a good night’s sleep, reanimates a relationship, or inspires forgiveness.

Healing takes many forms. No wonder, that so many of these should engage the spirit. According to the Good News we hear today, whatever healing it will be starts in the first step we take towards the One who stands at the head, at the heart, and calls; the One who respects the fact that the journey is ours.

The Political Act of Worship

2010-08-16T12:40:00.000-07:00

Scripture read on the 12th Sunday after Pentecost includes Isaiah 5:1-7, Hebrews 11:29-12:2, and Luke 12:49-56

I’ll venture the guess that most of us would prefer the company of Jesus the Good Shepherd, or Jesus the engaging parable-teller, or Jesus who washes the feet of disciples, than this fire-breathing, fierce truth-telling, unapologetically confrontational Jesus we meet today in the Gospel of Luke.

Heavy lifting for a summer Sunday, this kindling of the earth, this stressful baptism, this dividing of households, this accusation of hypocrisy.

You came to church to sing a song or two, feel reconnected to a cheerful sense of belonging, perhaps leave feeling better about yourself? I understand. Instead, we’d better figure out how to explain our singed eyebrows and that soot in our hair, the dazed look we may have as we go from here to whoever we’re meeting next. And won’t that be a challenge if it’s a spouse or a friend who isn’t in the habit of worshiping in church, and who wonders exactly why it is that we get up and make the effort?

Let me tell you one thing that this Gospel gives me. It helps me understand a statement I read, last week, by biblical scholar Paul D. Hanson: “Worship is the most political act in which a person of faith can engage!”

In the language of one of our lessons today, in worship we place ourselves where we will be surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses who will urge us to lay aside the past and the sin that clings so closely, and look to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.

“Worship is the most political act in which a person of faith can engage!” Hanson is arguing against an overly-private view of religion. When I first came upon his words, I thought, “Wow, that might surprise some Episcopalians…” Little did I know that his claim would be borne-out by the Word of God today.

In Luke’s Gospel today, Jesus asks the most political of questions: “You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”

An example. What do we make of the sharp fiery resistance to the building of a mosque and Islamic community center near Ground Zero? What is that about?

Another example. How do we understand the extremes of weather we’ve experienced this summer, all that steam heat, all those those sudden intense monsoons?

Here’s another. The Gulf Coast is reported to be healing itself after disastrous months of oil spill. Who is saying that, and why?

And one more. As free citizens of a democracy, we look to our elected senators and representatives to, well, represent and lead us. But they keep fighting against each other, producing very little and taking vast amounts of time and money to keep their fights going. What is that about? And why do we allow it?

I agree: enough, already. It’s a summer Sunday, for heaven’s sake; and it’s not as if, by raising these questions, I propose to answer them. But if we find these issues irritating, our Gospel today tells us that there is a holy use for irritation. Why not allow this fiery Jesus to gather up our irritations and use them for his purposes? Isn’t that what we see him doing, in Luke’s apocalyptic teachings?

Try to answer any of those questions I lifted from the daily news, and you’ll find yourself in a swirling vortex of opinions, reasons, ideas, and ideologies. Each issue will generate placards to hold and sound bytes to distort, and ideologies to defend or attack.

And that state of affairs in our present time helps me understand another statement I read recently, by theologian James Alison: “Ideology is what you have when you don’t have faith.”

He was commenting on the Church’s desire for sharply-defined doctrine, and rules, and clear boundaries. All of which, to his theological ear, has more to do with the closed-mindedness of ideology than with the open-heartedness of faith.

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen… By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.” So says the writer of the letter to the Hebrews, just verses before the ones we heard today.

And what we did hear was a series of astounding movie trailers, reminders of all the great action thrillers that fill the books of the Hebrew Bible, an impressive catalog of examples of faith in action, stories replete with blood and guts, sex and spies, wild animals, raging fires, sharp swords, you name it. Stories abounding with courage and perseverance, promises kept, suffering accepted, insurmountable obstacles overcome. All realized by the spirit, the attitude, the power, of faith in God.

Then a most astonishing thing is said. “Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.”

Not apart from us. Our practice of faith, sleepy-eyed us, we who may come to church with fairly low expectations (especially in summer), it is our faith in God and how we live it that is to complete, perfect, transform what has gone before us. We are to be part of the “something better” that makes the world better. We are to burn with the love of Christ that kindles, to recognize him baptizing with his presence all human experience, and to tell his truth which sets people free. We are to learn his way of looking into what irritates us, and looking beyond what is seen, into what is not visible but is of God.

And there we may see, in the question of where a mosque is situated, the deeper and most urgent question about reconciling love: Is there enough to go around? And, as we address the question of this particular building, will we insist that destructive prejudice be uprooted from our society?

And there, in the deep realm within and beyond what is seen, we may recognize, in the phenomena of nature, evidence that God calls us to a challenging stewardship that admits no easy answers. And evidence that, to support responsible stewardship of the earth, we must call on our elected leaders to lead.

“You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”

To run with perseverance the race that is before us, we look to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. When we do, sometimes we see the Good Shepherd, seeking and succoring his flock. Sometimes we sit at the feet of the story-teller who engages our imagination, and we enjoy that. At times, we find we’re having our feet washed and our priorities reordered by Jesus the servant.

And sometimes we meet this fire-breathing, fierce truth-telling, unapologetically confrontational Jesus we encounter today in the Gospel of Luke. He asks us to learn his way of looking into and beyond what is seen, into what is not visible but is of God. He teaches us to look into what irritates our status quo and discern what that’s really about. He asks of us not the closed-mindedness of ideology, but the open-heartedness of faith, a power that can transform what has gone before us, and make this world better.

Mixing Metaphors for the Kingdom of God

2010-08-11T13:03:00.000-07:00

Bible readings for the 11th Sunday after Pentecost include Isaiah 1:1, 10-20; Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16; Luke 12:32-40

St. Luke sure does know how to mix his metaphors. Purses for heaven. A bridegroom waiting on his servants. A watchful homeowner. “The kingdom of God is like this— and it’s like this—and like this!”

That’s how our Gospels read, in part the result of enthusiasm, and in part the result of how they came to be. Today’s portion is like a short string of pearls, one image follows another; and while each is different from the next, they’re alike in that they teach us about the reign of God on earth as in heaven. That is what strings the pearls. And Bible scholars tell us that the Gospel writers inherited these pithy teachings, short stories, brief parables, and little jewels of illustration from earlier collections of sayings of Jesus. Each Gospel writer assembles them somewhat differently. One Gospel has what another lacks. Details color the same story differently at the hand of St. Luke than in Matthew’s or Mark’s versions. It appears that this is how inspiration works when the Spirit of God moves with one purpose through the minds and hearts of diverse artists, to reach the imaginations and wills of many more diverse hearers and readers.

Each pearl on the string is a gift of good news. And, if it’s a pearl, it’s also a product of irritation, the result of what a creature can do with a grain of sand caught in its craw—or whatever that part of an oyster is that, like a womb, transforms a fleck of intrusion into a thing of beauty.

First, purses for heaven. “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” That would be, what, as opposed to selling us the kingdom of God? A silly thought, but how many times does Jesus have to say this to us, that we do not earn the love of God, we cannot buy or bargain for what comes to us as gift, grace, that amazing power of God that saves a wretch like me (and you)?

The reign of God, the kingdom of right relationship, is not for sale. But Jesus doesn’t hesitate to talk about money, does he? “Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.”

One cannot buy one’s way into the kingdom of God. But if one has too much in one’s pockets, too much on one’s mind, one may not find or fit through the gate (oops, another metaphor). So lighten the burden of whatever wealth you’re lugging around. Give it to the poor, because it is the purpose of God to promote and prefer and relieve the poor. By your giving, you stitch together a purse, so to speak, of generosity that represents your lasting values. Where your treasure is your heart will be also, so in this purse of yours is your very soul, your most valuable asset. What you give from this purse, you give to God.

By nature, the human animal fills a purse with his or her own efforts. By human nature, we decide how to spend or invest or give what is in our purses. By the divine nature that is in us, we keep the drawstring open, we see the whole of the purse coming from God and belonging to God, the whole of the purse an instrument of letting what matters to God matter on earth as in heaven. And what flows out of this purse we make of our values doesn’t just fall to earth (as money keeps doing); it also somehow rises to heaven, perhaps the way praise and adoration and gratitude rise. This “unfailing treasure in heaven” is not, I’m sure, a 401K personal account to retire into (not that we can count on retiring on our 401K’s). I expect it’s more a way of saying that by the choices we make, day by day, we come to resonate more and more (or less and less) with the grace and purposes of God.

Clear the screen. Here comes metaphor # 2. “Be dressed for action…” like those waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so they may open the door for him when he comes home. Alert, they recognize his knock. They expect him (and his bride? and the wedding party?) to require their services at an intimate post-banquet event (you know what weddings are like, one party blurs into the next), but no! Grateful that his servants have stayed at the ready rather than drift out to the edges of the banquet hall, that they have stayed alert to him and his needs, he slips off his tux jacket, ties on an apron, and invites those servants to his own table.

I have been to a lot of weddings, and I must say it’s hard to imagine the scene Luke’s Jesus sketches in this parable. There’s a clear firewall between who’s serving and who is being served. Of course there is: it’s all in the contract, all paid for and had better be delivered.

But that’s not how God’s kingdom works. As important as those twelve disciples were (and as self-important as some of them were), Jesus calls them his little flock (of relatively helpless sheep) and implies in this parable that they ought to think of themselves as servants, even slaves, simply doing their duty. And in the kingdom of God, the master is free to turn the tables and wait on his staff. The first shall be last, and the last first. The master Jesus is remembered in Matthew’s Gospel to have said, “Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

Now comes that third pearl. It starts with true irritation: a home has been broken into, and the homeowner was away at the time. It’s the point of this little saying to state the obvious: that if the owner knew the thief was coming, the owner would have returned home in time to be ready for him, alert to every sound in the night.

If by our animal nature we defend what is ours… if by our human nature we can tell it is time to prevent injustice… then it is by the nature of God that is in us to be ready to play our part in the emergence of God’s reign on earth.

To receive the gift of God, to take our places in God’s Kingdom, to own a Christian life, we must be ready to recognize and welcome Jesus Christ whenever he comes, at however unexpected an hour and in whatever surprising, perhaps irritating, a manner.

The prophet Isaiah prepares us for the fact that this may not happen in church, not in solemn assemblies and appointed festivals. He will come in the oppressed who need rescue, in the orphan who needs defense, in the widow who needs a friend. As we consider these scriptures today, he will come in the immigrant who arrives with an empty purse but a keen work ethic and a heart filled with hope. Through fear, we may be distracted from recognizing him, may not be alert, may mistake him for a stranger trying to steal his way into our home. But if this is the Son of Man who comes, he who teaches the value of loose purse strings will cause us to treasure the gift of justice and will teach us to keep our homeland as free as we found it.

Each pearl on the string of our Gospel today is a gift of good news. And, if it’s a pearl, it’s also a product of irritation, the result of what a creature can do with a grain of sand caught in its craw—or whatever that part of us is that, like a womb, transforms a fleck of intrusion into a thing of beauty, fulfilling the purpose of God.

Bearish on Chocolate

2010-08-03T08:44:00.000-07:00

Bible readings for the 10th Sunday after Pentecost include Hosea 11:1-11 (the basis for this opening prayer), Colossians 3:1-11, and Luke 12:13-21

Holy God, you call us to be yours.
You are to us like a nanny lifting us to her cheek,
like a father teaching us to walk,
a mother leading us with cords of human kindness, bands of love.
You feed us, you heal us.
You sigh in pain when we bend away from you and reject your call.
You roar like a lion to claim us, yet must wait for us to return,
trembling, like doves nearly sacrificed on the altars of false gods.
Your fierce anger flushes us in a flutter of wingbeats,
Free to rise, and choose.

Choice, a theme strong in our summer readings from Luke. Last Sunday, we heard Jesus pray the Our Father, teaching us to choose the Kingdom of God as the lens through which we see all our needs as they get met by the provident Spirit of God.

The Sunday before that, Mary and Martha, sisters from Bethany, showed us how the choice to know Jesus must come before the choice to serve him. “Teacher, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work while she sits at your feet, listening? Tell my sister, then, to help me!”

And do we hear an echo of that anxiety in today’s set-up? “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”

As he did with Martha, Jesus says to this fellow, “The choices you’re making aren’t getting you anywhere, are they?”

A Collect for Guidance in our Prayer Book asks God to “grant us, in all our doubts and uncertainties, the grace to ask what (God) would have us to do, that the Spirit of wisdom may save us from all false choices, and that in (God’s) light we may see light, and in (God’s) straight path may not stumble…”

One false choice this fellow makes today is to cast Jesus in the role of family court judge. This disgruntled brother is anxious. Jesus had to say to Martha, “You are anxious about so many things—one thing is needed…” Here is another anxious sibling, another trembling dove for Jesus to warn away from a false god’s altar. “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in how much you own.”

Like Martha, this man wants Jesus to vindicate him. “I need a judge!”

“No, you need a purpose that will wake up your soul and reveal your true choices.”

In a pattern that Luke uses often, an edgy little story is followed by a pithy little parable. Here, it is the story of a man’s good fortune in the marketplace that ultimately leads to his losing his life on the altar of a false god.

Did you read about Anthony Ward, the hedge fund operator in Europe who has set about cornering the world market in cocoa? In recent weeks he has purchased a quarter million tons of cocoa. That is an astonishing amount, enough cocoa to make 5.3 billion quarter-pound chocolate bars. It represents 7% of the world supply, and while that sounds like a small percentage, it’s enough to drive the price of cocoa even higher than its recent all-time high. This rich man shares an urgent need with the rich man in our parable, for he plans to stockpile all that chocolate, to hoard it, ensuring that prices keep rising until he decides it’s time to start selling.

“What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?”

Let’s not worry too much about Mr. Ward’s problem. Dubbed “Choc Finger” by the British press, Ward in 2002 made £40 million in two months after making a similar deal. He bought 204,000 tons of cocoa when West Africa was experiencing poor harvests and political instability, sat on it a while, then watched the price of cocoa increase from £1,400 a ton to £1,600 Cocoa prices have more than doubled since 2007, following increased demand from China and India, forcing chocolate makers to raise prices and in some cases to change recipes to use less cocoa. Boo…

Mr Ward has not made himself available for comment. He’s rather busy, building larger barns.

That pattern, of course, lies at the heart of our economic system, so who are we to condemn strategic investment? Isn’t it what makes the economic world go ‘round?

But, like most human pursuits, our economic choices require accountability to law and to good ethics. A new financial reform law out of Washington last month may help curb excessive speculation like Mr. Ward’s.

The ethical argument is made by the World Development Movement in a damning report last month saying that risky and secretive financial bets on food prices have deepened the effect of recent poor harvests. Volatile food prices make it harder for producers to plan what to grow, push up prices for consumers, and in poorer countries may spark civil unrest, like the food riots seen in Mexico and Haiti in 2008. 70% of the world’s cocoa comes from five countries-- Ivory Coast, Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria and Cameroon—some stable, some not. Investment banks like Goldman Sachs make huge profits by gambling on the price of foods, says World Development Movement Director Deborah Doane (interviewed in The Guardian), but only a few wheeler-dealers benefit from this kind of reckless gambling. The Fairtrade Foundation argues that these deals help hedge fund operators hedge, but small farmers cannot hedge, cannot take advantage of short-term price spikes.

“And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’” Like our contemporary Choc Finger, this fellow in the parable could likely have come to this conclusion years ago… but isn’t it the nature of greed not to recognize when enough is enough? And isn’t it the nature of greed to put personal security above social and global security?

We use the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible from the lectern, but you can’t beat how the earlier RSV catches the irony in God’s reply to the man who has just said to his soul, “Soul, you’re all set…” “But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’”

And that is a moment brought to you by the Planned Giving Ministry Team… whose members invite you to consider the moral drawn by our Lord, “So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.”

By nature, we lay up treasure for our children and grandchildren and others whom we love. By nature of the kingdom of God, the lens through which we see God’s purposes being worked out on earth as in heaven, we consider what it means to be rich toward God.

“The things you have prepared, whose will they be?” is a question we may answer in a legal document, a will or last testament which, if we’re thoughtful, we’ll draft and keep current as a responsible gift of lovingkindness to those who come after us. By our nature as children of God, we may choose to provide for the future of our wider family, the Church.

And by God’s nature in us, we may hear that question, “The things you have… whose will they be?” and recognize the power we have to choose to return some good portion to the poor who did not get all that great a share, the first time around.

I’m not suggesting that we wait for death to do our strategic investing. To be rich toward God, our present stewarding of our time, talents, and resources must be guided by the purpose of God, the bringing of justice and peace on earth as in heaven.

And that will happen as we worship at the altar of the God of truth, made known to us in Jesus Christ who is our life, who is all and is in all. His word, in story and parable, roars across two thousand years, stirring us doves to fly from the altars of false gods who demand blood sacrifice and give the world nothing but trouble, suffering, and war. His Spirit flushes us, free to rise and choose to be rich toward God.

Coachings in Prayer

2010-07-26T11:28:00.000-07:00

Readings for the 9th Sunday after Pentecost include Genesis 18:20-32; Colossians 2:6-19; Luke 11:1-13

Our readings today offer us coaching in prayer. What do we make of it?

Consider that gnarly story from the Book of Genesis, showing us the patriarch Abraham bargaining with the one holy God. The Book of Genesis is built of stories that claim to explain how certain things came to be, and you could say that here we’re encountering an ancient forerunner of the Jewish minyan, the quorum of ten required for public worship. It was the firm belief of the sages that wherever ten righteous children of God are assembled, either for worship or for the study of the Law, the Divine Presence dwells among them.

But look how we get there! God has heard the street reputation of two neighboring towns, Sodom and Gomorrah, where it was alleged that what would become for Israel the eleventh commandment, Thou shalt practice generous hospitality and respect the needs of the guest, was not being honored. God is on a reconnaissance mission to find out if this is true. But Abraham can see that God is loaded for bear, indignant enough to be ready to sweep away the residents of both towns.

Is God like this? Does God have anger management issues? Does God solve problems in the created order by wiping out the problem-makers? A lot hinges on these questions, which ask a larger question: When you pray, to whom are you praying?

Even by confronting God with his questions, Abraham (he is called in both testaments, “the father of us all”, so he’s asking on our behalf) appears to be sticking his foot in heaven’s door so as to nudge his way into revealing the true nature of God. Could Abraham have put his gutsy question, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” if he actually believed in an angry and violent God?

Isn’t this a story that feels like the outing of a merciful God? Aren’t we given the sense that in this primitive time God has a primitive reputation to defend? As if, to keep up with the other boys on the block, ancient deities of the thunder-and-lightning set, the God of Israel ought to throw his weight around in a like manner, bellicose in a zero-tolerance sort of way?

Until, that is, father Abraham comes on the scene. Drafted out of retirement by this very God, Abraham takes him seriously enough to relocate in old age, to father a child in old age, almost to sacrifice that child in obedience to this God. Oh yes, Abraham has every reason to rattle God’s cage and ask the question of theology and of prayer, “Who’s in there? Who are you?”

And to start with, Abraham will require that God be consistent. Our story today takes us into that arm-wrestling relationship between father Abraham and the one holy God, in such a charming tale as might lighten us all up enough to wonder, “Wait a minute: is this story about what God truly is like, or is it more about what humanity dares believe God to be? We might even say that this is one holy shakedown showing the evolution of theology and the evolution of humanity.

And it all culminates in a minyan, the ancient and still-honored tradition that places responsibility for so many people in the hands of so few: enough to save two ornery towns, says the story—if they can be found. Enough to carry the weight of the whole synagogue, the entire Jewish community, ten people willing to observe the sabbath together open the gates of the tabernacle for the Torah to be read and heard and honored.

On summer Sundays, we occasionally slide close to a sense of quorum, don’t we? How many Episcopalians does it take to carry a eucharist? I don’t know, but I do believe summer attendance helps each of us feel how important a decision it is to observe the sabbath together.

How many Christians does it take to claim the divine presence? Two or three, says Jesus, promising to be with us even in that close a quorum. Had Abraham known, he might have tried to talk God down further.

What I’d like you to see from Genesis is how the revealing of God’s nature also reveals human responsibility. That is our first coaching in prayer, this morning.

Now, “Jesus was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’”

John the Baptizer was an open air preacher who urged repentance at a time when the greedy rich were inspiring the poor and the merchant class to be greedy too. “Not so,” he told them: true life is not found in having. You have two coats? Give one to someone who needs it. You’re in a position of power? Don’t abuse it by soliciting bribes.” While we aren’t told how John taught his followers to pray, we can believe it featured human responsibility to meet and welcome the kingdom of God that John said has come near.

In the prayer that Jesus teaches, the kingdom or reign of God is one of the first concerns on his lips, but not until he teaches us to let prayer be personal. He wants us to hallow God’s name, to allow God’s holiness to be felt in our hearts. His focus on God’s name is like Abraham’s desire to know who it is he’s dealing with. And that name is deeply personal, Father. We may yearn also to call God Mother. Recognize here the same dimension of personal relation, as Jesus calls God Father. We see evidence in the Gospels that this got him in trouble with the high and mighty, who faulted Jesus for being so familiar with God (as if could Jesus could not have been familiar with God!).

You’ve noticed that Luke doesn’t speak of Our Father in heaven. That’s just one of several differences in Luke. Even the early Church had different ways of praying the Our Father--- worth remembering as in our time we pray it both one way and another.

Allowing, hallowing, feeling the holiness of God, we pray that God’s kingdom comes. There’s the theme of his prayer: the big picture, the deepest reality of God’s way that contantly breaks in on our many little ways, our many conflicting ways, our often aimless and wasteful ways. All else that we pray from here out must be consistent with the big picture of God’s way.

Give us each day our daily bread. And by the rules of the kingdom, teach us how to share it.

And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. Not, for Luke, “as we forgive those who sin against us,” but “for we are seriously practicing your call to forgive everyone who owes us anything.”

And do not bring us to the time of trial. When the new Lord’s Prayer was really new, I recall any number of people saying they didn’t like “trial”, and preferred “temptation.” What a headline that makes: “Episcopalians dislike trial, prefer temptation!”

Blame Luke. And credit Luke for talking straight in dangerous times when to be a Christian led to prison and often death. “Keep us useful to you, fruitful for you, this side of danger in these risky times.” But having started with “Your kingdom come,” we stake our lives on that kingdom mattering more than the dangers that could befall one of us, or ten of us, or fifty of us…but Lord, what if it were all of us who bear your name, your Spirit, and your presence? What would become of your kingdom if the forces of tyranny and greed and brutality swept us all away? We cannot imagine that being your will, you whose kingdom is within us.

Luke has no “Your will be done on earth as in heaven.” But the power of will is the subject of the parable and the teaching that follow. The persistent friend who gets what he wants not because of friendship but because of his tenacious will, his not giving up, his endless knocking on the door. “So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.”

By his coaching so far, Jesus counts on us to ask and search in keeping with God’s kingdom, God’s way, not in line with our own way. That persistent friend was setting a table of hospitality for a guest, not feeding himself.

And to crown his lesson on prayer, sharp questions: If your child asks for a fish, would you give a snake? If hungry for an egg, would you give your child a scorpion? Apply this to your relation to God: rather than be anxious that you might not get what you want, recognize when you are given what you need, most of all the Holy Spirit, the prime gift of God.

Our final coaching on prayer today comes from St. Paul writing to the Christians at Colossae. “Abound in thanksgiving.” He gives many reasons that cause our gratitude to God, but the apostle of many words puts in a nutshell the most important priority we have in prayer: “Abound in thanksgiving.” His many reasons are all about what God has done in Jesus Christ to simultaneously free us for, and root us in, love. He wants us to remember who and whose we are.

It may be that no words do that better for us than the Lord’s Prayer. One day last week, I sat with someone who has lived nearly 100 years, and has little memory left about what just happened, moments ago. When we prayed, and I opened with the words “Our Father,” the tabernacle doors flew open and the words of that prayer came from her lips with a consistency she can no longer muster for herself, but is alive in her, ready to rise.

Standing in the Mystery

2010-07-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

Among the readings for the 8th Sunday after Pentecost are Colossians 1:15-28 and Luke 10:38-42

It must have been fall when Mary Oliver wrote her poem “In Blackwater Woods.” Listen to its opening lines:

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment…

The poem gives voice to a bittersweet melancholic aching over the beauty of the moment that soon will dissolve into the change and loss of a season. And the poem ends:

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

That’s a poem I brought to a graveside in June, when Sherry’s family gathered in the College cemetery for the interment of her ashes. Mary Oliver, writing from the pain of her own deep loss in the death of her life partner Molly, has given us words that go to the heart of being mortal—words that recognize the pain of a family standing at the brink of a grave.

I’m judging that Oliver’s poem is a good place to start, as we consider the little family of Mary and Martha today. Each woman deals with her own mortality in a rather classical way. I wonder what happens when we see their story through the lens of that poem, and watch each of them holding something against her bones, knowing that her life depends on it, and then must let it go.

I celebrated the eucharist at Williamstown Commons on Wednesday, and read this Gospel there. In the circle were ten women and two men. I asked if they saw themselves as Martha, or as Mary. I got no takers, either time.

I wondered if this had something to do with where they are in life now, so I regrouped and asked, “What if we went back twenty years? Were any of you Martha when you were younger?’ That drew a smile from one lady.

Linda, from the activities staff, came in from the sidelines and tried her hand at it: “If Jesus came to your house, would you cook for him or wait on him?”

“Both!” answered Ruth.

Whereupon I, proper Anglican that I try to be, pounced on that moment of synthesis and agreed, “Yes, Jesus does need us to be both, doesn’t he? Both the activist and the contemplative are in us. We’re called to cook for him, and we’re called to sit with him.” (I didn’t think Linda had gone contemplative enough when she suggested that Mary had waited on Jesus: she had waited with him, in him, for him.)

So yes, this little story helps feed theology for two thousand years of teaching that we are saved, not by our good works, nor by our formulas and practices of faith: we are saved by God’s grace working through both faith and works, God’s goodness leavening the lump of both our believing and our serving, God’s Spirit shaping and reshaping us from the inside out and from the outside in.

The good news in this little story is that when our lives are completed, we aren’t going to be judged by how good we’ve been, either at cooking meals for Jesus or at developing our prayer life with Jesus. We’re shown in our second lesson today how we stand before God, and that is in the rich glory of a mystery, which is Christ in us, the hope of glory. We’re given the grace to stand before God, neither defining ourselves as Christian activists nor certified as Anglican contemplatives, but persuaded that Jesus Christ is in us and we are in him.

We stand in this mystery here at this table of new life, and we stand in this mystery at home in our kitchens, in our living rooms, at our workplaces, and in the great outdoors, in nursing homes, at graveside, at all times and in all places. What is expected of us, as we stand in this mystery, is that we be aware of what is being given to us, that we be alert to what is being asked of us, that we recognize the Spirit of God.

In our Gospel today, Mary’s doing fine at that, but Martha needs some coaching. The help she wants isn’t the help she needs. What she’s holding against her bones, believing that her life depends on it, is her work at the stove. It’s not all drudgery. This is part of her mortal life that she loves, feeding people, and she’s good at it. Her nature is to do. She’s at home in a culture of doing, and I’ll bet a whole lot of people around her depended on all that she did.

If I put myself in her sandals, I might need to admit that what I’m holding against my bones is my reputation as an in-charge competent person, and perhaps my high standards and demanding self-expectation. Don’t tell me I have to let go of my abilities and my standards! That’s not the help I want. I want someone to help me in-keeping-with my abilities and standards and expectation. Do I have to let go of those?

It would seem so, because Jesus is offering something more valuable, and more demanding, not what I want, but what I need.

And if I try to slip into the sandals of Mary, I’m receiving what I need as I sit with Jesus, who opens me to be all that I am, invites me into a culture of being that will keep renewing me all my days-- but the purity and intensity of these moments cannot last. What I’m hearing I will continue to hold against my bones, knowing that my life depends on it, but what I’m hearing calls me to active love, fruitful service, and, yes, to my sister, who has a proper claim on me. To act on what I know, it’s soon time for me to let go of this tutorial with the Teacher, and to get on with life in service to this larger life that he gives.

There is need of only one thing, we hear him say. Not contemplation, not action, but hearing the call, receiving the gift, recognizing the Spirit, exercising the freedom to choose, loving God in all and above all.

(Mary Oliver’s poem appears in her “New and Selected Poems, Volume Two,” Beacon Press, 2004.)

Praying for our Nation

2010-07-07T14:13:00.000-07:00

This sermon refers to scripture appointed for Independence Day: Deuteronomy 10:17-21; Hebrews 11:8-16; Matthew 5:43-48. Limited reference is made to the readings for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost: II Kings 5:1-14; Galatians 6:1-16; Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

The American Book of Common Prayer declares that July 4th, Independence Day, is a major holy day with its own collect and appointed Bible readings. We can assume that the English Book of Common Prayer does not see this day in that same glorious light.

When a major holy day falls on a Sunday, its observance is moved to the next available weekday. Sunday, being a little Easter, always trumps a major holy day. So to hear the Prayer Book’s message about this day, we’re going to use its collect as our post-Communion prayer. And I’m going to draw on its Bible readings, ones that we have not heard today-- not that we haven’t heard enough already, but because these others may help us answer a question I’m about to ask you: On this Independence Day, what do we pray for our nation?

First, from the Torah, the Book of Deuteronomy, comes this command to welcome immigrants: “For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords… who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt… Your ancestors went down to Egypt seventy persons; and now the LORD your God has made you as numerous as the stars in heaven.”

There, by the way, is the significance of those seventy disciples sent out by Jesus: they are the fledgling Church. Seventy people in the family of Isaac and Jacob were the seed planted in the sands of Egypt, becoming over many generations the enslaved Hebrew people who would shed their chains and settle in Canaan. Seventy disciples in the circle of Jesus were the seeds planted in the towns and villages of Israel, pioneers of the kingdom of God, curing the sick, breaking the demonic.

And few in number were our colonial patriots in this country who overthrew the tyranny of empire that sucked them dry; but these few became, through wave after wave of immigrants, as numerous as the stars in heaven.

And so, a first prayer for our nation now is that we not become short-sighted, mean-spirited, or fearful in our welcome of the stranger. As we draft immigration law, that we hear God’s command to love the stranger. In our parents or ancestors, we were once strangers. Let’s pray that we don’t forget that now.

Second, from the Letter to the Hebrews, appointed for July 4th, champions of faith are held high, leaders who “died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them,” people of character ready to sacrifice now for the sake of those who would come after them. Just the opposite of our cocaine-brain sucking dry the profits of the present, mortgaging the future for what can be enjoyed now.

And so, a second prayer for our nation is that we continue to choose to be free. A great American philosopher, William James, said that, “Lives based on having are less free than lives based on doing or on being.” Worthy of our freedom to do and be is the New Testament’s motto, “Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”

Third, from the portion of Matthew’s Gospel for Independence Day, “you have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, turn that around and win him over, not by disdain and violence, but by love… and so show yourselves children of the Most High.”

A third prayer for our nation is that we learn to stop breeding enemies, to be sparing in our labeling anyone as enemy, to remember that the God to whom we pray is an impartial God whose favor and judgment, just like sunshine and rain, fall equally on both sides of every boundary we draw.

A Memorial Homily For Sherry

2010-06-29T07:54:00.000-07:00

Monday afternoon, the day after Sherry’s death, her family sat down with me to consider what we would do today at this service. I had with me the usual resources I bring to such a moment: a hymnal, a prayer book, a volume of suggested readings. Into the room came Nicole, holding a slim clothbound journal. “I found this on Sherry’s shelf,” she said, “It seems to contain some of her favorite quotations.”

This was as if Sherry were still helping us.

In monasteries and convents, such a book is called a liber scintillarum, a book of sparks. Each person in the community might keep one to record words that have spoken with power and clarity, quotations not to be forgotten, discoveries fresh from experience. This was Sherry’s book of sparks. From it came the scripture portions we’ve heard this morning.

What ignites one person’s spirit may not set the next person’s soul on fire. That’s not the purpose of such a book. It’s to keep one’s own feet to the fire, to remember what it was that kindled the heart and mind and will. Even the book’s owner may not know what patterns emerge in these keepings of private contemplation, not meant for the public eye.

But as I handled those pages, as I glanced from entry to entry, I couldn’t help wondering, “How did these ideas, these visions, spark Sherry to be who she was and do what she did?”

And what I specifically had in mind was how she embraced her own experience, these past three months, so positively and courageously and without complaint. How did she do that? Just asking that question made me realize that Sherry had been doing exactly that over many years, not in this season only. To be in awe of how she handled these recent months is to remember one of her traits we most admired.

As we have heard eloquently today, there was so much to admire. Sherry was gifted at making friends, and keeping friends. And more, inspiring friendships around her, wherever she was. Her deep openness to her friends anointed each day of this recent ordeal with the oil of lovingkindness.

Death has come so soon to one so full of sparks. This may feel to be beyond understanding and, perhaps, beyond acceptance. For me, it does not help to assign this to the will of God. I believe we saw the grace of God in how swiftly and peacefully her circle was drawn whole, once it was clear that therapies were not working. And I am certain we saw the grace of God in her sweet courage, in how she treated us, how to the very end she kept drawing people in, how she soared on wings like an eagle.

And I am sure that we have seen, in the strength and tenderness and attentiveness of Bud and Erik and Cam and Nicole and Ethan and Elise, what grace can look like in action.

Our scriptures—Sherry’s scriptures—tell us today that action is what matters. She is in the book of sparks that each of us has collected in these years of our loving her. And I believe she has told each and every person here (and so many beyond, who cannot attend today) that each of us is bound into the great volume, the magnum opus, of her love.

I notice that, at the start of Sherry’s verses from the Book of Isaiah, stars appear in the night sky. God is said to bring out the starry host one by one, calling each by name.

To us, Sherry is a star.

It’s said that the minerals of our bones come from the far-flung dust of stars, one more testimony that nothing in our experience can be lost or wasted. Today we celebrate what rich life we have within us, among us, by the sparks of our friend, Sherry. Our tribute to her will grow as we keep finding ways to inspire friendship, keep treasuring old friends, keep introducing new friends in the making, keep relishing the stories that mustn’t be forgotten, keep including, keep drawing-in, keep sending sparks into the universe.

June 18, 2010
St. John's Parish, Williamstown, Massachusetts