Scripture for the 18th Sunday after Pentecost includes Exodus 32:1-14; Philippians 4:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14
When I meet monthly with residents of our local nursing homes to celebrate the holy eucharist, I usually read the Gospel for the coming Sunday. It’s often my first encounter with a text I’ll be preaching on, a few days later. Maybe.
But not this time around. I chose instead Paul’s little sermon to the believers at Philippi. In my snap judgment, those frail but courageous sisters and brothers at Williamstown Commons, circled round in their wheelchairs, had been battered enough by life without having to make sense of the raging violence in Matthew’s chilling parable.
Whether I could then avoid it today remained to be seen; but for sure I could bring them a brighter dose of good news through Paul’s message about the peace of God and the God of peace.
At both nursing homes, I can count on the residents wanting to sing a favorite hymn. At Sweet Brook, it’s “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” At Williamstown Commons, it’s “Amazing Grace.” If all we did at these services were the singing of their one favorite hymn, they’d likely wheel out of that room satisfied that they’d heard and sung good news that day.
Though I always announce the page number in their large-print hymnal (#93 for What a Friend, #4 for Amazing Grace), these folks don’t need the book for these hymns: By and large, they have the words inside them. Whether or not their eyesight lets them read the page, they know the words: “I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.”
And on the heels of that hymn, Wednesday, came today’s collect: “We pray that your grace may always precede and follow us, that we may continually be given to good works.”
What is amazing about the Christian concept of grace is the omnipresence of this love which we neither deserve (says our Prayer Book catechism) nor recognize (most of the time), nor even desire (said our collect last Sunday) because we are too busy desiring otherwise: desiring stuff, success, satisfaction, relief, stimulation, release, admiration. What a list we have! What amazing goals! Maybe those are our favorite hymns: What a List We Have… Amazing Goals, How Sweet the Sound that Spends my Soul on Thee…
And along comes our 2015 stewardship appeal with the question, “What do you most need—or most need to let go of—as you walk the path in life?” Each of us is invited to lay stones in the path we’re building here in the center aisle, and let these stones represent your answers to that question.
This living metaphor of an expanding path is meant to take this community into closer communion with God, lead us to the table of new life, then aim us out into the world that needs us to give ourselves to good works. It is a foot path, not a highway; what it requires of us is not to see how fast we can get somewhere and how much we can accomplish, but to keep putting one foot in front of the other, moving deliberately (and gently, as Paul instructs the Philippians), letting go of worrying our way forward, choosing instead to pay attention to grace. Grace before us, grace behind us. Grace ahead of us to know the way, show the way, and meet us on the way. Grace following us to heal the damage we don’t intend to commit but do, grace to recognize by hindsight the gifts to be grateful for, grace to remember what we’ve learned.
So… what can we learn from Matthew’s little parable from hell? For one thing, never take a passage of the Bible out of its context. Remember that grace is behind us, and requires using our rear-view mirror to recognize it for what it is. Backspace just a verse or two and hear how chapter 21 ends (in Eugene Peterson’s “The Message”): “When the religious leaders heard Jesus’s parables, they knew he was aiming his words at them. They wanted to arrest him and put him in jail, but, intimidated by public opinion, they held back. Most people held him to be a prophet of God.”
Then today’s portion begins, “Jesus responded by telling still more parables.” He did not back down from the hostility he met. He countered it with a return volley.
This story of the wedding banquet presents his answer—or is it Matthew’s answer? Or is it the early Church’s answer?—to the question, “Who is it who are gathered into the embrace of God’s grace? Who is it who walk in the light and wisdom of God? Who are the enduring people of God faithful to God’s steadfast covenant love?”
The answer given in this tortuous parable is: Not the people who say that they are the heirs of God’s grace and favor, but the people who show that they are, by how they act. Not the ones who talk the talk, but the ones who walk the walk.
The action desired by the king in this story (so we can read the allegory to mean it is the action God wants) is that all should come to the wedding banquet he has set for his Messiah, the anointed one who embodies love and achieves justice by righting the ancient wrong.
Those who were first invited were expected to come because they would have identified themselves as heirs of God’s grace and favor—but they refuse to come, preferring their own busyness as they pursue stuff, success, satisfaction, relief, stimulation, release, admiration. What a list they have!
And those who finally do come may not yet have appreciated the generous impulse behind the invitation, and so they have not discovered their responsibility to allow grace to shape their generosity. In the language of today’s collect, they are not given to good works.
The fellow who is singled out for not dressing up appears to be made an object lesson—but we scratch our heads and wonder why. Reach for a commentary, and you learn that the proper dress, the wedding robe, stands for the new life of good works which is meant to be our response to the Gospel of grace. I’ll bet that first-century hearers of this story would have instantly thought of the plain white tunic, the simple shift worn by men and women and children when they were baptized.
“How did you get in here without a wedding robe?” asks the king. The only demand made by Jesus, (as it was by John the Baptist before him), is that we must intentionally turn from evil and towards God, from oppression to freedom, from greed to grace, from violence to peace—in order to enter the kingdom of God, repentance is the doorway.
This fellow has slipped- in some other way. It won’t work. To borrow other New Testament language, he has not worn the fine linen of righteous deeds. He is speechless when confronted because, having done no good works, there is nothing, and no one, to speak for him. He has not put on the Lord Jesus Christ.
We really have to work hard, to get the marrow out of the bone in this Gospel. I can’t think of a Gospel I’d rather not have to preach on, ever again.
But in times as violent as ours, let’s not rush to erase the struggles our first-century forebears had as they welcomed the gracious invitation to the wedding banquet while having to navigate a brutal world. So do we.
The central message of this crusty parable, if we can set aside the sputtering rage of conflicting ideologies, is that God invites us to a wedding banquet: this is one of Jesus’s favorite ways to describe the spiritual life and the purpose of religion. To be human is to be invited into the intimate and joyful community of a wedding banquet, where what is expected is intentional delight and love devoted to, and shaped by, that pulsing love at the center of the party, at the head table. Wow! So that’s what church is for!
And while we’re understandably turned off by intimidation (and this parable’s little cup overflows with that), we all can stand a dose of the message that God calls us not just to show up and sing our favorite hymns, but to repent of all those desirings that point our path not towards God but away; and to repent of the collateral damage we do. And freed by God’s grace in Jesus Christ, make way for the Spirit to move us to be given to good works, making known a gentleness that this world yearns to see (and so do we), making do with less worry and more of the promised peace of God so that the God of peace may reign on earth.
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Our Cross Is Green
Scripture for the 16th Sunday after Pentecost includes Exodus 17:1-7; Philippians 2:1-13; Matthew 21:23-32
From the files of campus security at Williams College: "Friday, September 12, 2014,4:22 p.m. St. John’s Church: Officers received a report that students were climbing the exterior of the church. A Williamstown Police Department officer also responded. Officers identified four students who had already packed up their pads and climbing equipment and were about to leave. They admitted to climbing the church. Officers explained that for safety and liability reasons, as well as private property rules, they are not allowed to climb the church.”
There was a collision of authorities. “By what authority are you climbing this church?” ask the officers of the law. “By what authority are you telling us we cannot?” might have been a cheeky reply. We know what we’re doing. We’re good at it. And climbing the church is a whole lot more exciting and challenging than the climbing wall at the Field House…”
Who knows, maybe one of those students tried that confrontational approach, hence the listing of reasons—three of them—mentioned in the blotter.
I don’t know. I wasn’t at this end of our buildings that day at that hour. I was diligently at my workstation, attempting to work out with fear and trembling my sermon for that weekend. Darn it all! I missed all the action!
There’s a confrontation of authorities going on in Matthew’s Gospel today. Jesus has carried his itinerant ministry into the sacred precincts of the temple in Jerusalem. The clergy and Vestry are not pleased. They’re used to calling the shots. Nobody climbs their walls without permission. And this Jesus is, in their eyes, a nobody.
“Who gave you authority to heal the sick, feed the hungry, illuminate the blind, speak publicly to women and poor people and tax collectors and sinners? Huh? Who?”
Cheeky Jesus replies, “I will also ask you a question; if you tell me the answer, then I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?”
Ooh. That’s hitting the ecclesiastical authorities right where it hurts. Though the Gospel writers do not blame the religious leaders for John’s imprisonment and beheading—the political powers and principalities of Herod’s household get the blame for those perversions of justice—nonetheless, the grassroots spiritual, religious, and ethical movement that John blazed across Judea was every bit as threatening to the temple as the Jesus movement had become. Now Jesus, who held John dear and willingly submitted to his kind of baptism, Jesus now makes the righteous squirm.
Because the city is watching, listening. The walls of that temple have ears and eyes, as countless ordinary people come and go, climbing the rules of temple sacrifice, enriching the coffers of organized religion, in its collaboration with the Roman imperial forces of occupation. These same common people had flocked to the frontiers where John conducted his open-air preaching and baptizing, and here now Jesus is pressing the authorities to admit their choice to collude with the enemy rather than welcome a prophet from God.
The weak-kneed spokesmen for security at all cost answer, “Well, we’ll never know, will we?” Such proper Anglicans, these fellows. I can imagine a longer version of this story, one Matthew decided not to waste ink or vellum on, where the Archdeacon clears his throat and says, “On the one hand…” And the Canon Theologian interjects, “While on the other hand…”
So… if he can’t get a straight answer from the establishment, whom do you imagine Jesus addressing when he asks, “What do you think? What do YOU think?" Had he turned away from the quislings and now spoke into the great stairway filled with pilgrims in from the countryside, as he pitches to them his little parable?
About a man with two sons, whom he asks to go and work in the vineyard. “No way,” answers the first. “Sure, Dad,” answers the second. Then the parable does a pirouette, and the first son reconsiders his refusal, changes into his work clothes, and off to the vineyard he goes. At the same time, the glib promiser gets wrapped up in a video game and pretty soon it’s suppertime.
“Which of these two did the will of their father?” asks Jesus. I think it’s from the stairwell that we hear, “the first one!” Then I imagine Jesus turning back towards the champions of security to deliver this stinging message: “The truth is, people of the street are closer to the kingdom of God than you fearful souls afraid to think new thoughts lest the whole house of cards come tumbling down.”
Ouch. Just as this parable is aimed at us all, so is this warning that would have us avoid the closing of our minds.
The religion of Jesus Christ is not shy about the Ouch factor. He who “humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” teaches us to “look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”
As we look to the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, we see him high above the altar nailed to a cross, and the cross has about it the most astonishing characteristic. Do you see what I mean? It’s green. Why doesn’t that make us stop in our tracks and refuse to budge until we deal with it? His cross is green. It is the tree of life. It is God’s Yes to the world’s defeatist No. It is the color of hope. It is the band in the rainbow that binds our Ouch to the great Passion of God in Jesus. While you and I must deal with the pain of working out our own salvation with fear and trembling, that green is God at work in us, the grace enabling us “both to will and to work for God’s good pleasure.”
Whatever authority we find attractive and trustworthy—the authority of a political leader, the authority of a movement, the authority of a scientist, the authority of the Bible, the authority of our own experience—the grace of Christ’s green cross rises above them all. And the only answer from us that God finds authoritative (according to our parable today) is not what we say or what we think, but what we do, when we let our action be shaped by the grace of God already at work in us. And when our obedience resembles the obedience of Jesus Christ, should we be surprised if there is an Ouch factor? No. Nor should we be afraid of it.
A famous moment of conflict appears in our reading from Exodus, reinforcing the same message. No water. The Hebrew refugees, rescued from their bondage, are trekking across the desert and have run out of water. “Give us water to drink,” they chant in the direction of Moses. Or else.
“What shall I do with these people?” prays Moses to God, as those many tens of thousands (some scholars say three or four hundred thousand) voice their complaint. God instructs Moses to go on ahead of his people, take a few elders along, take in hand his walking stick, and demonstrate leadership.
Detailed instructions of exactly how are apparently not as important in the great scheme of things as is trust. We aren ‘t told whether it’s sooner or later, but this little scouting party reaches Horeb, where there is a wadi, an Arab name for a rocky watercourse, a wet riverbed in rainy season, dry as dust at other times—and perhaps this was a time soon enough after rainy season that there was water to be had by digging down around that rock.
This was not magic. This was work. This was working out their salvation in fear and trembling. This is the work of leadership. Some of the rabbis insisted that this rock at Horeb followed the Hebrew people on their journey until they crossed the Jordan and found the Promised Land. St. Paul, in one of his letters, gives a gloss on that story by announcing his belief that the rock at Horeb was Christ. Christ, the one who enables the holy digging of salvation. Christ, who is with us, always and everywhere, persuading us to not fear challenges and conflicts, even the global-scale challenges that confront us now, for he is already there, at work in the crisis, calling us to discern his work and join him in it.
Last Sunday, countless congregations and communities sent leaders on ahead of the rest of us, to the Peoples’ Climate March in New York. Two members of our parish community, Robin and Margie, were among the 300,000-400,000 marchers who gathered along Central Park West. At Steering Committee last week, Robin described how well organized this was, with marshals in green shirts directing marchers to drinking water and bathrooms. Funny, isn’t it, how meeting the needs of Water In and Water Out are so central to human security?
Robin told us how she marched with people from Bangladesh, where the rising ocean level threatens the very existence of that nation. The Ouch Factor of climate change in the poorer oceanic countries is truly one of sheer survival. St. Paul’s admonition to look not to our own interests, but to the interests of others was brought home as the World Summit at the U.N. revealed the fear and trembling of developing nations, and exposed basic questions such as what constitutes security in the face of climate change and how do nations help one another respond to insecurity?
As marchers made their way through those city streets, at an appointed moment the marchers stopped—an impressive accomplishment for 300,000-400,000 people (Moses would have been impressed)—and for two minutes of silence marchers raised their hands in the ancient posture of prayer, wordless, “as if the whole city went silent,” Robin said, ended by the tolling of church bells.
To what end? And by what authority will human change rise to meet the challenge of climate change? By the authority of action that is shaped by grace, that throbbing green in the cross of Christ. And if such action trains people to a finer care for the earth and all its life-forms—more room for grace, less room for greed—if such action transforms our understanding of security and insecurity, then we will become freer, better at hearing God’s Yes.
From the files of campus security at Williams College: "Friday, September 12, 2014,4:22 p.m. St. John’s Church: Officers received a report that students were climbing the exterior of the church. A Williamstown Police Department officer also responded. Officers identified four students who had already packed up their pads and climbing equipment and were about to leave. They admitted to climbing the church. Officers explained that for safety and liability reasons, as well as private property rules, they are not allowed to climb the church.”
There was a collision of authorities. “By what authority are you climbing this church?” ask the officers of the law. “By what authority are you telling us we cannot?” might have been a cheeky reply. We know what we’re doing. We’re good at it. And climbing the church is a whole lot more exciting and challenging than the climbing wall at the Field House…”
Who knows, maybe one of those students tried that confrontational approach, hence the listing of reasons—three of them—mentioned in the blotter.
I don’t know. I wasn’t at this end of our buildings that day at that hour. I was diligently at my workstation, attempting to work out with fear and trembling my sermon for that weekend. Darn it all! I missed all the action!
There’s a confrontation of authorities going on in Matthew’s Gospel today. Jesus has carried his itinerant ministry into the sacred precincts of the temple in Jerusalem. The clergy and Vestry are not pleased. They’re used to calling the shots. Nobody climbs their walls without permission. And this Jesus is, in their eyes, a nobody.
“Who gave you authority to heal the sick, feed the hungry, illuminate the blind, speak publicly to women and poor people and tax collectors and sinners? Huh? Who?”
Cheeky Jesus replies, “I will also ask you a question; if you tell me the answer, then I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?”
Ooh. That’s hitting the ecclesiastical authorities right where it hurts. Though the Gospel writers do not blame the religious leaders for John’s imprisonment and beheading—the political powers and principalities of Herod’s household get the blame for those perversions of justice—nonetheless, the grassroots spiritual, religious, and ethical movement that John blazed across Judea was every bit as threatening to the temple as the Jesus movement had become. Now Jesus, who held John dear and willingly submitted to his kind of baptism, Jesus now makes the righteous squirm.
Because the city is watching, listening. The walls of that temple have ears and eyes, as countless ordinary people come and go, climbing the rules of temple sacrifice, enriching the coffers of organized religion, in its collaboration with the Roman imperial forces of occupation. These same common people had flocked to the frontiers where John conducted his open-air preaching and baptizing, and here now Jesus is pressing the authorities to admit their choice to collude with the enemy rather than welcome a prophet from God.
The weak-kneed spokesmen for security at all cost answer, “Well, we’ll never know, will we?” Such proper Anglicans, these fellows. I can imagine a longer version of this story, one Matthew decided not to waste ink or vellum on, where the Archdeacon clears his throat and says, “On the one hand…” And the Canon Theologian interjects, “While on the other hand…”
So… if he can’t get a straight answer from the establishment, whom do you imagine Jesus addressing when he asks, “What do you think? What do YOU think?" Had he turned away from the quislings and now spoke into the great stairway filled with pilgrims in from the countryside, as he pitches to them his little parable?
About a man with two sons, whom he asks to go and work in the vineyard. “No way,” answers the first. “Sure, Dad,” answers the second. Then the parable does a pirouette, and the first son reconsiders his refusal, changes into his work clothes, and off to the vineyard he goes. At the same time, the glib promiser gets wrapped up in a video game and pretty soon it’s suppertime.
“Which of these two did the will of their father?” asks Jesus. I think it’s from the stairwell that we hear, “the first one!” Then I imagine Jesus turning back towards the champions of security to deliver this stinging message: “The truth is, people of the street are closer to the kingdom of God than you fearful souls afraid to think new thoughts lest the whole house of cards come tumbling down.”
Ouch. Just as this parable is aimed at us all, so is this warning that would have us avoid the closing of our minds.
The religion of Jesus Christ is not shy about the Ouch factor. He who “humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” teaches us to “look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”
As we look to the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, we see him high above the altar nailed to a cross, and the cross has about it the most astonishing characteristic. Do you see what I mean? It’s green. Why doesn’t that make us stop in our tracks and refuse to budge until we deal with it? His cross is green. It is the tree of life. It is God’s Yes to the world’s defeatist No. It is the color of hope. It is the band in the rainbow that binds our Ouch to the great Passion of God in Jesus. While you and I must deal with the pain of working out our own salvation with fear and trembling, that green is God at work in us, the grace enabling us “both to will and to work for God’s good pleasure.”
Whatever authority we find attractive and trustworthy—the authority of a political leader, the authority of a movement, the authority of a scientist, the authority of the Bible, the authority of our own experience—the grace of Christ’s green cross rises above them all. And the only answer from us that God finds authoritative (according to our parable today) is not what we say or what we think, but what we do, when we let our action be shaped by the grace of God already at work in us. And when our obedience resembles the obedience of Jesus Christ, should we be surprised if there is an Ouch factor? No. Nor should we be afraid of it.
A famous moment of conflict appears in our reading from Exodus, reinforcing the same message. No water. The Hebrew refugees, rescued from their bondage, are trekking across the desert and have run out of water. “Give us water to drink,” they chant in the direction of Moses. Or else.
“What shall I do with these people?” prays Moses to God, as those many tens of thousands (some scholars say three or four hundred thousand) voice their complaint. God instructs Moses to go on ahead of his people, take a few elders along, take in hand his walking stick, and demonstrate leadership.
Detailed instructions of exactly how are apparently not as important in the great scheme of things as is trust. We aren ‘t told whether it’s sooner or later, but this little scouting party reaches Horeb, where there is a wadi, an Arab name for a rocky watercourse, a wet riverbed in rainy season, dry as dust at other times—and perhaps this was a time soon enough after rainy season that there was water to be had by digging down around that rock.
This was not magic. This was work. This was working out their salvation in fear and trembling. This is the work of leadership. Some of the rabbis insisted that this rock at Horeb followed the Hebrew people on their journey until they crossed the Jordan and found the Promised Land. St. Paul, in one of his letters, gives a gloss on that story by announcing his belief that the rock at Horeb was Christ. Christ, the one who enables the holy digging of salvation. Christ, who is with us, always and everywhere, persuading us to not fear challenges and conflicts, even the global-scale challenges that confront us now, for he is already there, at work in the crisis, calling us to discern his work and join him in it.
Last Sunday, countless congregations and communities sent leaders on ahead of the rest of us, to the Peoples’ Climate March in New York. Two members of our parish community, Robin and Margie, were among the 300,000-400,000 marchers who gathered along Central Park West. At Steering Committee last week, Robin described how well organized this was, with marshals in green shirts directing marchers to drinking water and bathrooms. Funny, isn’t it, how meeting the needs of Water In and Water Out are so central to human security?
Robin told us how she marched with people from Bangladesh, where the rising ocean level threatens the very existence of that nation. The Ouch Factor of climate change in the poorer oceanic countries is truly one of sheer survival. St. Paul’s admonition to look not to our own interests, but to the interests of others was brought home as the World Summit at the U.N. revealed the fear and trembling of developing nations, and exposed basic questions such as what constitutes security in the face of climate change and how do nations help one another respond to insecurity?
As marchers made their way through those city streets, at an appointed moment the marchers stopped—an impressive accomplishment for 300,000-400,000 people (Moses would have been impressed)—and for two minutes of silence marchers raised their hands in the ancient posture of prayer, wordless, “as if the whole city went silent,” Robin said, ended by the tolling of church bells.
To what end? And by what authority will human change rise to meet the challenge of climate change? By the authority of action that is shaped by grace, that throbbing green in the cross of Christ. And if such action trains people to a finer care for the earth and all its life-forms—more room for grace, less room for greed—if such action transforms our understanding of security and insecurity, then we will become freer, better at hearing God’s Yes.
Saturday, September 20, 2014
As Many as Seven Times?
Scripture for the 14th Sunday after Pentecost includes Exodus 14:19-31; Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35
As many as seven times?
It doesn’t take long for the first-century Gospels to present the good news that conflict is not an alien force to be ducked or denied. Last Sunday, we heard our Lord instruct that first generation of disciples (and all subsequent generations) to deal with it head-on.
“If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. .. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses… a section of Matthew’s Gospel that ends with the promise, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
Yes, but how often are we to practice this approach with the same individual? As many as seven times?
How many times does an organ student or a trumpet student practice scales?
No, not seven times, but I tell you, seventy-seven times. Or, as the ancient texts of Matthew have it, seventy times seven. That’s a lot. Just ask the mothers of the organ student and the trumpet student… It takes a lot of practice to get good at anything, doesn’t it?
And isn’t there a poet who writes about practicing the scales of love? Isn’t that precisely what any covenant calls us to do? Covenanted love between two people, the kind that marries two lives into one lasting partnership, provides daily opportunity and daily requirement to sing the scales of love, to get in tune with one another. The baptismal covenant we renewed here last Sunday likewise provides endless opportunity (and, most fortunately, the grace required) to grow not just up but into the full stature of Christ.
From that perspective, whoever counts has not yet forgiven, has chosen rather to keep track of the offences, and not give way to the uncalculating, incalculable grace, the power that undergirds our covenants.
What makes a covenant different from lesser agreements and contracts we enter is that a covenant—at least as it is understood in a spiritual context—entails God, involves God, a power higher and far greater than the human beings involved in the agreement. There is always promising in a covenant—two people pledge fidelity to one another, an individual at the font pledges (or parents and Godparents pledge their intention to help their child be able one day) to trust, love, and follow Jesus Christ. There is always a plural nature to covenant, that two-or-threeness that Jesus promises. And truly, what is most promising about our covenants is not what we bring to them, but how God helps us keep our covenants. The Book of Common Prayer doesn’t expect us to promise fidelity by responding, “Sure, I’ll do that!”, but by responding, “I will, God being my helper.”
So when we screw up in our covenants—and who among us does not?—we count not just on what’s in the human buckets that we bring to the relationship but on what’s in God’s deeper well of mercy and grace, where the bucket can never hit bottom.
Unconditional love is not what we bring to one another in our relationships, but it is what undergirds and frees our best practices with one another.
Even in the face of death? St. Paul answers that question about how far the baptismal covenant extends, and how durable it is: “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” Unlike your next car, or your next ipad, the warranty on God’s love does not expire, ever. And you can’t buy this unconditionality: it is sheer gift of God. And it is the Word that wants continually to be made flesh, in our marriages and our families, in our church and in our world; so it requires practicing our scales.
I don’t find unconditional love in the parable Jesus tells today. The king is an eye-for-an-eye sort of fellow, perfectly ready to punish anyone who crosses him. In fact, his final version of justice exacted against one of his slaves involves torture. I wussed out when I read the story this morning and brought to you the paraphrase version from “The Message”. If you followed it in the New Revised Standard Version, you heard Jesus promise similar punishment to anyone who fails to forgive a brother or sister from the heart. I’m confessing to you that after four decades preaching it’s still well above my pay grade to make good sense of that troubling promise. Bible scholars assure us that this gruesome piece of theology belongs to Matthew and not to Jesus, but still…
It’s overkill in the cause of a theme worth considering. Jesus appears to say that it is futile for us to ask for forgiveness if we are not willing to forgive. This is the point of his parable, isn’t it? The man who owes much is saved, along with his family, from going to the auction block, because his plight reaches down deep into the well of the king’s pity. I imagine a great shockwave moving through that royal audience, as people wonder what’s come over their king, who has just acted in a most extraordinary uncharacteristic way. Perhaps he surprised even himself, taking a chance on someone who has run out of chances, someone who has screwed up bigtime.
That describes the first debtor. 10,000 talents at that time would exceed the yearly tax revenues from Syria, Phoenicia, Judea, and Samaria combined. That number is meant to sound fantastic (the way a million dollars used to sound to us). His debt is uncountable, and more to the point, unpayable. This is no household slave: this is upper management, or upper mismanagement. This is a first-century Bernie Madoff.
And then this debtor puts the screws on a lowly household slave who owes him about three months’ wages—one serious crisis-worth of borrowing, you might say. “Pay what you owe!” growls the first debtor, as he seizes the second by the throat. Both these men are slaves, in the great scheme of things equals; but it’s as if the first debtor looks upon the second as if he belonged to a different race (and perhaps he did), and the lack of fellow-feeling is shocking. Though their debts are dramatically different, the words of their prayer, their desperate hope, are identical. “Have patience with me, and I will pay you.” Words that paid off for the major debtor fail to stir his pity for this lesser debtor, and the next sound we hear is the clanging shut of the prison door.
Big mistake. Picture all this happening in the public square, where eyes and ears noticed it all. Both debtors are slaves, and their fellow slaves, appalled by the betrayal they have witnessed, report it to the king. The dissonance of the big debtor’s latest screw-up grates against the scales of compassion; his outrageous demand topples the scales of justice.
That common sense binds the moral perception of slaves and king. By failing to forgive the small debtor with even a single note of the mercy that had been sung to him, the big debtor forfeits his future. In Matthew’s Gospel, the Lord’s Prayer reads, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Those are the scales to be practiced.
There’s one scriptural voice I haven’t mentioned yet. Moses.
We heard today the foundational story of the covenant binding Israel to God. What happens to the Hebrew people at the Red Sea is not just a dramatic rescue of slaves: It is an equally dramatic transformation of their status from slaves to free men and women. This was neither simple nor magical.
Not simple in that as slaves they had a predictable life, one they were reluctant to leave. They knew what to expect. In later seasons, during their wanderings as refugees in Canaan, they would grumble against Moses because at least in those old days back in Egypt they had leeks and onions and garlic in their stewpots. They had to give up what they knew. The institution of slavery is pernicious in its fostering co-dependence across generations, addicting slaves and masters to The Way Things Are, reinforcing worst habits, worst practices that glued the system together.
Their transformation was not magical in that the Hebrew slaves had to choose to reach for freedom. What faced them at the Red Sea was certain death, or so it looked. Pharoah’s horsemen closing in on them, what choice did they have but to enter the sea?
Elie Wiesel writes of this moment, “Yet, according to one commentator, Moses suddenly ordered everyone to a halt: Wait a moment. Think, take a moment to reassess what it is you are doing. Enter the sea not as frightened fugitives but as free men and women and children! And everyone obeyed. They paused in their rush toward the sea. And Moses turned to God with a prayer. But God reminded him that this was not the right moment to pray: Tell the people of Israel to hurry! And the people, united as never before, swept ahead and crossed the Red Sea, which drew back to let the Jews go through. When they had passed, those same waters rushed back and swallowed up the Egyptian troops, their chariots and horsemen, with great loss of life.”
The Exodus story shows that our survival depends on how we behave, how we act; and that in turn depends on what we believe about ourselves.
What is required of us in this day is to practice our scales of forgiveness and mercy, finding the harmonies that will help center us as we face conflict with courage and hope. And, as we face a hostile sea of threats and challenges, recognize the urgent call to claim freedom from slavery to the old brutalities and futilities, even the familiar status quo, freeing us to take our part in God’s fulfilment of promised grace.
From Matthew’s first century to our own twenty-first, people of faith have believed that God’s passion, compassion, and purpose extend well beyond church, synagogue, and mosque. On into the marketplace, the workplace, the courtroom—in short, on into civic life on all frontiers where conflicting values and visions constitute sharply divided beliefs about what justice demands and what love requires.
We cannot speak for synagogue or mosque, but for twenty centuries the church has been shaped by the Bible’s understanding that the common life of the faith community is given to us by God so that we may learn those scales of mercy and become tuned to the harmonies of peace. What we do here is meant to have influence and bearing there on the social frontiers of our wider, broader world.
There, where debtor nations struggle in futility, as unpayable debts curtail domestic growth. And here, where a new Gilded Age ensures not a tide that raises all ships, but a rising tide of personal debt, bankruptcies, and pay disparity.
May the God of covenant faithfulness preside here and in every congregation, that what we do, and who we are, be shaped by what we believe about ourselves.
(I have paraphrased from Elie Wiesel’s “Messengers of God”, Summit Books, 1976, pp. 191-194. I found M. Eugene Boring’s commentary on Matthew helpful, in Volume VIII of “The New Interpreter’s Bible.)
As many as seven times?
It doesn’t take long for the first-century Gospels to present the good news that conflict is not an alien force to be ducked or denied. Last Sunday, we heard our Lord instruct that first generation of disciples (and all subsequent generations) to deal with it head-on.
“If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. .. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses… a section of Matthew’s Gospel that ends with the promise, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
Yes, but how often are we to practice this approach with the same individual? As many as seven times?
How many times does an organ student or a trumpet student practice scales?
No, not seven times, but I tell you, seventy-seven times. Or, as the ancient texts of Matthew have it, seventy times seven. That’s a lot. Just ask the mothers of the organ student and the trumpet student… It takes a lot of practice to get good at anything, doesn’t it?
And isn’t there a poet who writes about practicing the scales of love? Isn’t that precisely what any covenant calls us to do? Covenanted love between two people, the kind that marries two lives into one lasting partnership, provides daily opportunity and daily requirement to sing the scales of love, to get in tune with one another. The baptismal covenant we renewed here last Sunday likewise provides endless opportunity (and, most fortunately, the grace required) to grow not just up but into the full stature of Christ.
From that perspective, whoever counts has not yet forgiven, has chosen rather to keep track of the offences, and not give way to the uncalculating, incalculable grace, the power that undergirds our covenants.
What makes a covenant different from lesser agreements and contracts we enter is that a covenant—at least as it is understood in a spiritual context—entails God, involves God, a power higher and far greater than the human beings involved in the agreement. There is always promising in a covenant—two people pledge fidelity to one another, an individual at the font pledges (or parents and Godparents pledge their intention to help their child be able one day) to trust, love, and follow Jesus Christ. There is always a plural nature to covenant, that two-or-threeness that Jesus promises. And truly, what is most promising about our covenants is not what we bring to them, but how God helps us keep our covenants. The Book of Common Prayer doesn’t expect us to promise fidelity by responding, “Sure, I’ll do that!”, but by responding, “I will, God being my helper.”
So when we screw up in our covenants—and who among us does not?—we count not just on what’s in the human buckets that we bring to the relationship but on what’s in God’s deeper well of mercy and grace, where the bucket can never hit bottom.
Unconditional love is not what we bring to one another in our relationships, but it is what undergirds and frees our best practices with one another.
Even in the face of death? St. Paul answers that question about how far the baptismal covenant extends, and how durable it is: “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” Unlike your next car, or your next ipad, the warranty on God’s love does not expire, ever. And you can’t buy this unconditionality: it is sheer gift of God. And it is the Word that wants continually to be made flesh, in our marriages and our families, in our church and in our world; so it requires practicing our scales.
I don’t find unconditional love in the parable Jesus tells today. The king is an eye-for-an-eye sort of fellow, perfectly ready to punish anyone who crosses him. In fact, his final version of justice exacted against one of his slaves involves torture. I wussed out when I read the story this morning and brought to you the paraphrase version from “The Message”. If you followed it in the New Revised Standard Version, you heard Jesus promise similar punishment to anyone who fails to forgive a brother or sister from the heart. I’m confessing to you that after four decades preaching it’s still well above my pay grade to make good sense of that troubling promise. Bible scholars assure us that this gruesome piece of theology belongs to Matthew and not to Jesus, but still…
It’s overkill in the cause of a theme worth considering. Jesus appears to say that it is futile for us to ask for forgiveness if we are not willing to forgive. This is the point of his parable, isn’t it? The man who owes much is saved, along with his family, from going to the auction block, because his plight reaches down deep into the well of the king’s pity. I imagine a great shockwave moving through that royal audience, as people wonder what’s come over their king, who has just acted in a most extraordinary uncharacteristic way. Perhaps he surprised even himself, taking a chance on someone who has run out of chances, someone who has screwed up bigtime.
That describes the first debtor. 10,000 talents at that time would exceed the yearly tax revenues from Syria, Phoenicia, Judea, and Samaria combined. That number is meant to sound fantastic (the way a million dollars used to sound to us). His debt is uncountable, and more to the point, unpayable. This is no household slave: this is upper management, or upper mismanagement. This is a first-century Bernie Madoff.
And then this debtor puts the screws on a lowly household slave who owes him about three months’ wages—one serious crisis-worth of borrowing, you might say. “Pay what you owe!” growls the first debtor, as he seizes the second by the throat. Both these men are slaves, in the great scheme of things equals; but it’s as if the first debtor looks upon the second as if he belonged to a different race (and perhaps he did), and the lack of fellow-feeling is shocking. Though their debts are dramatically different, the words of their prayer, their desperate hope, are identical. “Have patience with me, and I will pay you.” Words that paid off for the major debtor fail to stir his pity for this lesser debtor, and the next sound we hear is the clanging shut of the prison door.
Big mistake. Picture all this happening in the public square, where eyes and ears noticed it all. Both debtors are slaves, and their fellow slaves, appalled by the betrayal they have witnessed, report it to the king. The dissonance of the big debtor’s latest screw-up grates against the scales of compassion; his outrageous demand topples the scales of justice.
That common sense binds the moral perception of slaves and king. By failing to forgive the small debtor with even a single note of the mercy that had been sung to him, the big debtor forfeits his future. In Matthew’s Gospel, the Lord’s Prayer reads, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Those are the scales to be practiced.
There’s one scriptural voice I haven’t mentioned yet. Moses.
We heard today the foundational story of the covenant binding Israel to God. What happens to the Hebrew people at the Red Sea is not just a dramatic rescue of slaves: It is an equally dramatic transformation of their status from slaves to free men and women. This was neither simple nor magical.
Not simple in that as slaves they had a predictable life, one they were reluctant to leave. They knew what to expect. In later seasons, during their wanderings as refugees in Canaan, they would grumble against Moses because at least in those old days back in Egypt they had leeks and onions and garlic in their stewpots. They had to give up what they knew. The institution of slavery is pernicious in its fostering co-dependence across generations, addicting slaves and masters to The Way Things Are, reinforcing worst habits, worst practices that glued the system together.
Their transformation was not magical in that the Hebrew slaves had to choose to reach for freedom. What faced them at the Red Sea was certain death, or so it looked. Pharoah’s horsemen closing in on them, what choice did they have but to enter the sea?
Elie Wiesel writes of this moment, “Yet, according to one commentator, Moses suddenly ordered everyone to a halt: Wait a moment. Think, take a moment to reassess what it is you are doing. Enter the sea not as frightened fugitives but as free men and women and children! And everyone obeyed. They paused in their rush toward the sea. And Moses turned to God with a prayer. But God reminded him that this was not the right moment to pray: Tell the people of Israel to hurry! And the people, united as never before, swept ahead and crossed the Red Sea, which drew back to let the Jews go through. When they had passed, those same waters rushed back and swallowed up the Egyptian troops, their chariots and horsemen, with great loss of life.”
The Exodus story shows that our survival depends on how we behave, how we act; and that in turn depends on what we believe about ourselves.
What is required of us in this day is to practice our scales of forgiveness and mercy, finding the harmonies that will help center us as we face conflict with courage and hope. And, as we face a hostile sea of threats and challenges, recognize the urgent call to claim freedom from slavery to the old brutalities and futilities, even the familiar status quo, freeing us to take our part in God’s fulfilment of promised grace.
From Matthew’s first century to our own twenty-first, people of faith have believed that God’s passion, compassion, and purpose extend well beyond church, synagogue, and mosque. On into the marketplace, the workplace, the courtroom—in short, on into civic life on all frontiers where conflicting values and visions constitute sharply divided beliefs about what justice demands and what love requires.
We cannot speak for synagogue or mosque, but for twenty centuries the church has been shaped by the Bible’s understanding that the common life of the faith community is given to us by God so that we may learn those scales of mercy and become tuned to the harmonies of peace. What we do here is meant to have influence and bearing there on the social frontiers of our wider, broader world.
There, where debtor nations struggle in futility, as unpayable debts curtail domestic growth. And here, where a new Gilded Age ensures not a tide that raises all ships, but a rising tide of personal debt, bankruptcies, and pay disparity.
May the God of covenant faithfulness preside here and in every congregation, that what we do, and who we are, be shaped by what we believe about ourselves.
(I have paraphrased from Elie Wiesel’s “Messengers of God”, Summit Books, 1976, pp. 191-194. I found M. Eugene Boring’s commentary on Matthew helpful, in Volume VIII of “The New Interpreter’s Bible.)
Friday, September 5, 2014
Blazing, But Not Consumed
Scripture for the 12th Sunday after Pentecost includes Exodus 3:1-15; Romans 12:9-21; Matthew 16:21-28
Today a burning bush catches the attention of Moses. This is back when Moses was a shepherd in the hill country of Midian. Wait, you may say: Only last Sunday, Moses was just a baby, discovered by Pharoah’s daughter in his basket among the bulrushes. See how much can happen in the space of a week!
The lectionary skips the part where Moses, raised as a prince in Pharoah’s household, steps in between two of his Hebrew peers who have come to blows over something, and Moses, not knowing his own strength, kills one of them. From that moment, Moses became a fugitive who found sanctuary across the border. He had a record. He would not pass a CORI check.
Yet God aims this pyrotechnical recruiting drive right at Moses. That’s what it is. The refugee Moses is happily resettled, and that status quo is about to go up in flames. So to speak.
God will call Moses to risk return to Egypt, to the royal court he had fled. God will call Moses to gain the trust of his own people, the Hebrews, who never quite knew what to make of him, especially after that incident. God will call him to be their champion before Pharoah, going toe to toe with that powerful figure in whose house Moses had been raised a princeling.
No one would have been more surprised by all this than Moses.
So watch out! If this story captures your attention, it might become more than just a snapshot of the ancient past… You may experience God calling you to take a risk, make a major return, confront a person, a power, a problem.
If Moses had taken a selfie at this moment—before the voice was heard, I mean— how would you imagine his expression? I’ll go with “puzzled”. But there in the pulsing heart of that fire, what is that shape that emerges, that presence asserting itself? When he sees this animating force expressing itself, Moses hides his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
“Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” Is there a shortage of heavenly personnel, that God has to micro-manage the details of self-manifestation? Wouldn’t you have expected a host of underlings to announce the etiquette of engagement with the divine? All we’ve got here is one angel who appears to be tongue-tied, for he says not a word. Perhaps he’s an angel-in-training. God alone speaks.
As of that moment, the bush plays no more of a role in this story. Its one purpose was to draw Moses’ eye. With that accomplished, God’s voice claims the stage.
Notice the verbs in what God says. I have seen: I have seen the misery of my people. I have heard: I have heard their cry. I know: I know their sufferings. I have come: I have come down to deliver them from their enemy, and to bring them up to a good and broad land.
In the Holy Eucharist, key verbs describe the love that pulses like living flame at the table of new life: On the night he was betrayed, our Lord Jesus took bread. He blessed the bread. He broke the bread. He gave the bread into the hands of his disciples. Those are the verbs of familiar action, salvation action, in the redemption accomplished by God in Jesus Christ.
The verbs we hear from the burning bush—I have seen, I have heard, I know, I have come—might be called the key verbs in the redemption history of Judaism. They pertain to many a story in the Hebrew Bible, for they describe the nature of God who is all-embracing, all-engaging, all-compassionate, all-committed to creation.
And biased. The Hebrew Bible makes no apology for its claim that Israel is the chosen nation, Jews the chosen people; and, as today’s reading makes clear, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites simply must move over and play dead—worse yet, become dead—in the advance of the Hebrew refugees into the land of milk and honey. Is all this bias from God? Doesn’t it come from the human heart and mind? This exclusivism continues to bedevil the politics of the Middle East. And while we can expect the New Testament to insist upon a new inclusivism, we know all too well that our own religion has often earned the teacher’s report card with the comment, “Does not always play well with others.”
“Blazing, yet it was not consumed.” God needed the burning bush no longer, but a preacher is reluctant to let go of it.
Take Paul’s letter to the Romans and lift up just the verbs that constitute his vision of apostolic Christianity: Outdo… be ardent… rejoice… be patient… persevere… contribute… extend… bless… weep… live in harmony… associate… claim wisdom modestly… take thought… live peaceably… leave room for God… feed… give…overcome evil… heap burning coals on the heads of your enemies.
I like that last one. Not, I hope, in a perverse way, but for its jujitsu approach to mutual transformation: the generous care, the wondrous love, the amazing grace that St. Paul exhorts us to practice puts, at the same time, our enemy in a surprising and unexpected place, and us in equally uncharted waters. Mutual transformation demands starting with radical equality. These uncharted passages of new birth are waters of baptism—seeking and serving Christ in all persons, loving neighbor and enemy as we love ourselves; respecting the dignity of every human being.
The bush was blazing, yet not consumed, because the energy of God is boundless, limitless, creative, and mysterious. The burning coals of service, respect, and love will, in like manner, not consume us because they are the energy of God at work in us, and God knows how to renew them—renew us—in perfect sustainability.
This is the lesson learned by the first-century Church: That all the bold apostolic doing and being summed up by all those verbs would be made possible for them by the power of the God’s Spirit. This is the same lesson Moses would come to grasp—though it forever felt as if it has grasped him.
It is the lesson that all our scripture lessons point to, prepare us for, draw us to, call us to dare trust… and follow.
Today a burning bush catches the attention of Moses. This is back when Moses was a shepherd in the hill country of Midian. Wait, you may say: Only last Sunday, Moses was just a baby, discovered by Pharoah’s daughter in his basket among the bulrushes. See how much can happen in the space of a week!
The lectionary skips the part where Moses, raised as a prince in Pharoah’s household, steps in between two of his Hebrew peers who have come to blows over something, and Moses, not knowing his own strength, kills one of them. From that moment, Moses became a fugitive who found sanctuary across the border. He had a record. He would not pass a CORI check.
Yet God aims this pyrotechnical recruiting drive right at Moses. That’s what it is. The refugee Moses is happily resettled, and that status quo is about to go up in flames. So to speak.
God will call Moses to risk return to Egypt, to the royal court he had fled. God will call Moses to gain the trust of his own people, the Hebrews, who never quite knew what to make of him, especially after that incident. God will call him to be their champion before Pharoah, going toe to toe with that powerful figure in whose house Moses had been raised a princeling.
No one would have been more surprised by all this than Moses.
So watch out! If this story captures your attention, it might become more than just a snapshot of the ancient past… You may experience God calling you to take a risk, make a major return, confront a person, a power, a problem.
If Moses had taken a selfie at this moment—before the voice was heard, I mean— how would you imagine his expression? I’ll go with “puzzled”. But there in the pulsing heart of that fire, what is that shape that emerges, that presence asserting itself? When he sees this animating force expressing itself, Moses hides his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
“Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” Is there a shortage of heavenly personnel, that God has to micro-manage the details of self-manifestation? Wouldn’t you have expected a host of underlings to announce the etiquette of engagement with the divine? All we’ve got here is one angel who appears to be tongue-tied, for he says not a word. Perhaps he’s an angel-in-training. God alone speaks.
As of that moment, the bush plays no more of a role in this story. Its one purpose was to draw Moses’ eye. With that accomplished, God’s voice claims the stage.
Notice the verbs in what God says. I have seen: I have seen the misery of my people. I have heard: I have heard their cry. I know: I know their sufferings. I have come: I have come down to deliver them from their enemy, and to bring them up to a good and broad land.
In the Holy Eucharist, key verbs describe the love that pulses like living flame at the table of new life: On the night he was betrayed, our Lord Jesus took bread. He blessed the bread. He broke the bread. He gave the bread into the hands of his disciples. Those are the verbs of familiar action, salvation action, in the redemption accomplished by God in Jesus Christ.
The verbs we hear from the burning bush—I have seen, I have heard, I know, I have come—might be called the key verbs in the redemption history of Judaism. They pertain to many a story in the Hebrew Bible, for they describe the nature of God who is all-embracing, all-engaging, all-compassionate, all-committed to creation.
And biased. The Hebrew Bible makes no apology for its claim that Israel is the chosen nation, Jews the chosen people; and, as today’s reading makes clear, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites simply must move over and play dead—worse yet, become dead—in the advance of the Hebrew refugees into the land of milk and honey. Is all this bias from God? Doesn’t it come from the human heart and mind? This exclusivism continues to bedevil the politics of the Middle East. And while we can expect the New Testament to insist upon a new inclusivism, we know all too well that our own religion has often earned the teacher’s report card with the comment, “Does not always play well with others.”
“Blazing, yet it was not consumed.” God needed the burning bush no longer, but a preacher is reluctant to let go of it.
Take Paul’s letter to the Romans and lift up just the verbs that constitute his vision of apostolic Christianity: Outdo… be ardent… rejoice… be patient… persevere… contribute… extend… bless… weep… live in harmony… associate… claim wisdom modestly… take thought… live peaceably… leave room for God… feed… give…overcome evil… heap burning coals on the heads of your enemies.
I like that last one. Not, I hope, in a perverse way, but for its jujitsu approach to mutual transformation: the generous care, the wondrous love, the amazing grace that St. Paul exhorts us to practice puts, at the same time, our enemy in a surprising and unexpected place, and us in equally uncharted waters. Mutual transformation demands starting with radical equality. These uncharted passages of new birth are waters of baptism—seeking and serving Christ in all persons, loving neighbor and enemy as we love ourselves; respecting the dignity of every human being.
The bush was blazing, yet not consumed, because the energy of God is boundless, limitless, creative, and mysterious. The burning coals of service, respect, and love will, in like manner, not consume us because they are the energy of God at work in us, and God knows how to renew them—renew us—in perfect sustainability.
This is the lesson learned by the first-century Church: That all the bold apostolic doing and being summed up by all those verbs would be made possible for them by the power of the God’s Spirit. This is the same lesson Moses would come to grasp—though it forever felt as if it has grasped him.
It is the lesson that all our scripture lessons point to, prepare us for, draw us to, call us to dare trust… and follow.
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Transformity
Scripture for the 11th Sunday after Pentecost includes Exodus 1:8-2:10; Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16:13-20
Our readings today invite us to consider the theme of power. Our collect of the day prays that the Church may show God’s power among all peoples. The Book of Exodus gives us a snapshot of the Egyptian pharaoh wringing his royal hands over the increasing power of an ethnic minority in his kingdom, the Hebrews. St. Paul, writing to the Church at Rome, urges a religion of transformation. Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel, gives to his Church the keys of the kingdom of heaven, a transfer of power that Christians continue to cite as being the font of the Church’s authority on earth.
Let’s take each of these, more or less in turn. The prayer that Christians, “being gathered together in unity by (the) Holy Spirit, may show forth (God’s) power among all peoples, to the glory of (God’s) Name,” expects a lot, doesn’t it? Sure doesn’t sound like a religion of navel-gazing… or a faith that fears rocking the boat… or an other-worldly spirituality.
Or, to use St. Paul’s language, a Christianity of conformity. “Be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect…” and then do it, urges Paul. That doing is apostolic Christianity.
And when Jesus passes into Peter’s hands the power, the authority, represented by the keys of the kingdom of heaven, you might see those keys as throwing-open any and every wall, obstacle, roadblock, and previously-imagined locked door between God and the human heart. It is all about mercy and forgiveness to loose people from paralyzing blame and crippling guilt and relentless futility and defeating self-absorption. It is all about binding people to a yet more excellent way that rejects violence, recognizes God in the alien and the stranger, practices generosity, and cheerfully acts on the impulse of compassion and insistence upon justice. Such strong stuff is the rock on which Jesus builds his Church.
Christianity may tell its own story as if Jesus invented his Church as sheer innovation. Not so. There was already a church, if by that you understand church to be the gathered people of God, gathered by God’s call, imbued with God’s gifts, summoned to do God’s work in the world. The established church that Jesus knew in the early decades of the first century was Judaism, the temple, the law and the prophets.
That church was founded upon the power of God. The Hebrew Bible attests to that, and today’s passage from Exodus makes that point. The pharaoh fears the growing power of the Hebrew community, but he hasn’t got a clue what power he’s dealing with. That hidden power is suggested in the verse, “But the more (the Hebrew people) were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread…”
And when the author of Exodus tells the sweet but near-tragic story of Moses in the bulrushes, the theme of God’s deep power is sounded in the innocent words of Pharoah’s daughter, who named that swaddled baby Moses because, she said, “I drew him out of the water,” playing with the meaning of his name—a royal Egyptian name co-opted by the Exodus author to remind every subsequent Jewish reader and hearer of this story—and every Christian reader and hearer, let’s add—to understand the name to mean, in its Hebrew form, “God has drawn us out of mighty waters.” Deliverance, rescue, salvation—the power of God at work to safeguard the vulnerable, lift up the lowly, transform falling into rising—this is what the rescue of little Moses anticipates, a greater deliverance that will be worked through the God-given power of Moses. And lest all this be lost on any hearers, this story happens on the banks of a river, and at a similar spot, the Red Sea as we like to call it, though the literal Hebrew is Sea of Reeds, Sea of Bulrushes, where mighty Moses will lead Israel through the parted waters to a promised land, the finest of Pharoah’s army in hot but futile pursuit, for their power is as nothing compared to the power of God.
Upon that foundation, the church Israel was built. Yet, by the time it came to Jesus’s generation, the might of God’s power had been fossilized, institutionalized, supplanted, by the mighty temple, the powerful priesthood, the demanding law, the domesticated prophets—much as the church Jesus built upon the rock of trusting faith and counter-cultural courage gets reduced, over and again, to the ecclesiastical politics that keeps dividing the Body of Christ, the edifice complex that keeps dominating church agendas, and lovely liturgies that have more to do with conformity than with transformity. (That’s not a word, I know-- but it ought to be.)
It will help us reclaim and show forth the power the world needs if we recognize that there is one God doing the building of one gathered humanity, one God endowing all life with the right gifts needed for binding and loosing, one God summoning us out of our locked enclaves, paralyzed governments, and close-minded sects, one God rattling the keys to remind us that he has placed them in our hands.
Last Sunday, our Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, called for prayer to be offered in all our parishes for the people of Iraq and Syria. She recommended the use of a prayer that we used then, and shall today, right after communion.
That is an appropriate moment because the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood unites us to the church in Iraq, whose ancient city Nineveh figures in the Hebrew Bible, and whose ancient city Mosul is the site of a monastery dating back to the 4th century. Before the Second Gulf War, one million Christians lived in Iraq. That number dropped to one hundred thousand by the time of this year’s Islamic State insurgency, and most of that number are now among the internally displaced people of Iraq, fleeing the Islamic State’s vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing. Caught in the same exodus fleeing from execution are the uncounted but likely greater number of Yazidis, a reclusive religious minority, and another religious minority, the Shi’ite Muslim Terkmen. Our communion today summons our compassion equally for all of them, and for all the 2.7 million displaced Iraqis and the 2.5 million Syrians who have fled the violent chaos there.
Episcopal Relief and Development has feet on the ground in Iraq, through the Episcopal Diocese of Cyprus and the Persian Gulf. Today we open Raile’s Bowl to collect donations for humanitarian relief for the people of Iraq and Syria. Your gift will be matched from the parish’s mission funds.
We may feel powerless in the face of sheer malignant genocide conducted in the name of religion. In its long and checkered history, the Christian church has stood accused and guilty of wielding such abusive power. Our scriptures hold our feet and our hearts to the fire of the divine power that gathers us, binds us to justice and compassion, looses us to freely use the gifts God has planted in us, and summons us to welcome and embody the transforming love of God in Jesus Christ.
Our readings today invite us to consider the theme of power. Our collect of the day prays that the Church may show God’s power among all peoples. The Book of Exodus gives us a snapshot of the Egyptian pharaoh wringing his royal hands over the increasing power of an ethnic minority in his kingdom, the Hebrews. St. Paul, writing to the Church at Rome, urges a religion of transformation. Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel, gives to his Church the keys of the kingdom of heaven, a transfer of power that Christians continue to cite as being the font of the Church’s authority on earth.
Let’s take each of these, more or less in turn. The prayer that Christians, “being gathered together in unity by (the) Holy Spirit, may show forth (God’s) power among all peoples, to the glory of (God’s) Name,” expects a lot, doesn’t it? Sure doesn’t sound like a religion of navel-gazing… or a faith that fears rocking the boat… or an other-worldly spirituality.
Or, to use St. Paul’s language, a Christianity of conformity. “Be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect…” and then do it, urges Paul. That doing is apostolic Christianity.
And when Jesus passes into Peter’s hands the power, the authority, represented by the keys of the kingdom of heaven, you might see those keys as throwing-open any and every wall, obstacle, roadblock, and previously-imagined locked door between God and the human heart. It is all about mercy and forgiveness to loose people from paralyzing blame and crippling guilt and relentless futility and defeating self-absorption. It is all about binding people to a yet more excellent way that rejects violence, recognizes God in the alien and the stranger, practices generosity, and cheerfully acts on the impulse of compassion and insistence upon justice. Such strong stuff is the rock on which Jesus builds his Church.
Christianity may tell its own story as if Jesus invented his Church as sheer innovation. Not so. There was already a church, if by that you understand church to be the gathered people of God, gathered by God’s call, imbued with God’s gifts, summoned to do God’s work in the world. The established church that Jesus knew in the early decades of the first century was Judaism, the temple, the law and the prophets.
That church was founded upon the power of God. The Hebrew Bible attests to that, and today’s passage from Exodus makes that point. The pharaoh fears the growing power of the Hebrew community, but he hasn’t got a clue what power he’s dealing with. That hidden power is suggested in the verse, “But the more (the Hebrew people) were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread…”
And when the author of Exodus tells the sweet but near-tragic story of Moses in the bulrushes, the theme of God’s deep power is sounded in the innocent words of Pharoah’s daughter, who named that swaddled baby Moses because, she said, “I drew him out of the water,” playing with the meaning of his name—a royal Egyptian name co-opted by the Exodus author to remind every subsequent Jewish reader and hearer of this story—and every Christian reader and hearer, let’s add—to understand the name to mean, in its Hebrew form, “God has drawn us out of mighty waters.” Deliverance, rescue, salvation—the power of God at work to safeguard the vulnerable, lift up the lowly, transform falling into rising—this is what the rescue of little Moses anticipates, a greater deliverance that will be worked through the God-given power of Moses. And lest all this be lost on any hearers, this story happens on the banks of a river, and at a similar spot, the Red Sea as we like to call it, though the literal Hebrew is Sea of Reeds, Sea of Bulrushes, where mighty Moses will lead Israel through the parted waters to a promised land, the finest of Pharoah’s army in hot but futile pursuit, for their power is as nothing compared to the power of God.
Upon that foundation, the church Israel was built. Yet, by the time it came to Jesus’s generation, the might of God’s power had been fossilized, institutionalized, supplanted, by the mighty temple, the powerful priesthood, the demanding law, the domesticated prophets—much as the church Jesus built upon the rock of trusting faith and counter-cultural courage gets reduced, over and again, to the ecclesiastical politics that keeps dividing the Body of Christ, the edifice complex that keeps dominating church agendas, and lovely liturgies that have more to do with conformity than with transformity. (That’s not a word, I know-- but it ought to be.)
It will help us reclaim and show forth the power the world needs if we recognize that there is one God doing the building of one gathered humanity, one God endowing all life with the right gifts needed for binding and loosing, one God summoning us out of our locked enclaves, paralyzed governments, and close-minded sects, one God rattling the keys to remind us that he has placed them in our hands.
Last Sunday, our Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, called for prayer to be offered in all our parishes for the people of Iraq and Syria. She recommended the use of a prayer that we used then, and shall today, right after communion.
That is an appropriate moment because the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood unites us to the church in Iraq, whose ancient city Nineveh figures in the Hebrew Bible, and whose ancient city Mosul is the site of a monastery dating back to the 4th century. Before the Second Gulf War, one million Christians lived in Iraq. That number dropped to one hundred thousand by the time of this year’s Islamic State insurgency, and most of that number are now among the internally displaced people of Iraq, fleeing the Islamic State’s vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing. Caught in the same exodus fleeing from execution are the uncounted but likely greater number of Yazidis, a reclusive religious minority, and another religious minority, the Shi’ite Muslim Terkmen. Our communion today summons our compassion equally for all of them, and for all the 2.7 million displaced Iraqis and the 2.5 million Syrians who have fled the violent chaos there.
Episcopal Relief and Development has feet on the ground in Iraq, through the Episcopal Diocese of Cyprus and the Persian Gulf. Today we open Raile’s Bowl to collect donations for humanitarian relief for the people of Iraq and Syria. Your gift will be matched from the parish’s mission funds.
We may feel powerless in the face of sheer malignant genocide conducted in the name of religion. In its long and checkered history, the Christian church has stood accused and guilty of wielding such abusive power. Our scriptures hold our feet and our hearts to the fire of the divine power that gathers us, binds us to justice and compassion, looses us to freely use the gifts God has planted in us, and summons us to welcome and embody the transforming love of God in Jesus Christ.
Saturday, August 23, 2014
Falling, Rising
Scripture for the 10th Sunday after Pentecost includes Genesis 45:1-15; Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32; Matthew 15:10-28.
The Episcopal Church expresses its dependence upon the Bible, its commitment to taking the Bible both seriously and joyfully, by a disciplined hearing of holy scripture each Sunday in the parish eucharist, and each weekday in the offering of morning and evening prayer.
Sunday by Sunday, readings are chosen—a text from the Hebrew Bible, a psalm from the Hebrew Bible, a portion from the letters (and other writings) of the Christian scriptures, and a portion of one of the four Gospels—chosen not by the pastor locally, but by the wider Church. And by “wider” I mean beyond the Episcopal Church, for the table of readings that we use here on Sundays has been set by a consortium of denominations so that Christian unity may be promoted.
And by language like “setting the table” I mean to acknowledge that in this holy meal that draws us together, it is not just bread and wine that are offered, but also the food and drink of ancient wisdom, pithy proverbs, puzzling parables, prophetic oracles, apocalyptic visions, compelling narratives of holy lives, poetic reach towards the transcendent, and the witness of amazing grace revealing the holiness of each moment of life.
The Word becomes flesh and dwells among us. Jesus Christ the Word made flesh shapes his likeness in us. The Holy Spirit hovers among us, dwells within each heart, her grace and wisdom nurturing from birth and baptism each soul’s growth into the full stature of Christ.
On a good day. I mean, that quick sketch of spiritual growth sounds way too smooth and easy, doesn’t it? But if I’m right in the claim that every moment is holy, no moment devoid of the grace of Christ and the presence of the Spirit, then at least we might agree that much of our spiritual growth is hidden, much of it eludes our understanding and analysis, and much of it seems to resemble (to recall our Lord’s summertime parables) a garden that requires a load of manure in order to do its yielding, and a healthy regard for the tenacity of weeds. And, to borrow from our late summer pilgrimage with Joseph, the favored child sold into slavery by his brothers, the gifted young man who went down into the pit, down into Egypt, down into Pharoah’s dungeon, only to rise to the pinnacle of power in ancient Egypt, we see presented the familiar human pattern that first you fall, then you rise. No death, no resurrection.
If the menu at our Sunday banquet is not only bread and wine but also the Word of holy scripture, there comes also at the start an appetizer, the collect of the day. A collect gets its nickname from its purpose, to collect all our attention deficits and invite the harnessing of our hearts and minds to the Word we’re about to hear.
These little treasures of prayer trace a bloodline that goes back to the 4th and 5th centuries, others from the middle ages, some from catholic missals, others from the Protestant reformers of the 16th century. These prayers sometimes have about them an air of Where’s Waldo, as they catch wind of a great theme that blows through the readings that day, and invite us to listen for it.
And often, as in today’s collect, there’s a gracious touch of catechism: we learn today that at the heart of the spiritual journey is thankful receiving of the redeeming work of Jesus, in particular the grace to follow daily in the steps of his holy life. That desire to follow him is what we bring to the equation of spiritual growth—and this collect makes it clear that we bring this desire not from obligation or guilt, but from appreciation and gratitude. And right from the get-go, the collect teaches us, the freedom we need to have this desire is itself a result, a fruit, of Jesus’s redeeming work. We love because he first loves us.
And it is for the replenishing of love that we come to this table that is set for us. The sabbath rest we choose by coming here repairs us from the week that was, prepares us for the week that comes.
This past week has been especially brutal. Vicious genocide in Northern Iraq. The ongoing pathos of unending violence between Israelis and Palestinians (neither side willing to feel pathos, empathy, for the other). And the shooting death of an African American teenager by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri.
Yet, with all this violence, nothing prepared us for the news, last week, of Robin Williams’s death. Patch Adams, Mrs. Doubtfire, Armand in The Bird Cage, Mr. Keating in Dead Poet’s Society, Air Force DJ Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning, Vietnam… Robin Williams long ago insinuated himself into my personal pantheon of gifted actors I admire. Beyond zany, able to slip from serious to crazy in the twinkling of an eye, when he was in role he could do anything, and he did, including tenderness, steadfastness, wonderment, fearlessness, quiet intensity, and, of course, crack-up antics.
Hearing that he had taken his own life, I wondered, “Why would someone who seemed able to do anything do that?” As if a talented actor, in particular a zany comedian, should be immune from despair. As if clowns don’t cry. It didn’t take me long to realize I should know better.
We live in a culture that mistakes entertainment for news, and therefore treats everything that happens to entertainers as if it were newsworthy. Our culture also exploits personal tragedy. Believing these things, I wanted to impose a buffer around this man’s death, to let its sadness and violence recede and perhaps revisit it all later, when it would feel less raw. When I heard myself, thick in denial, I recognized how this compartmentalizing couldn’t be an option for countless people who have lost a loved one to suicide: there’s no arm’s length option for them, and there isn’t for any of us. How many of us have almost lost someone to this form of death? How many of us have almost lost our own life this way? And what gradations of self-directed violence are there, short of calling in the coroner? What degrees of self-neglect and self-abuse count in a countdown to serious illness? For how many of us does the gap between the true self and the self we show to others grow wider and wider?
I read recently an interview with Ittetsu Nemoto, a Buddhist priest in Japan who counsels suicidal people and grieving survivors. His words are so simple and direct. “Suicide is really tough. The killer and the killed are the same person, so you don’t know what to make of it. You don’t know where to direct your anger. The wound stays with you for a long time.”
If ever there is a moment to recall John Donne’s way with words, it’s in the wake of a very public self-killing like this one. Hear both the familiar words from his Meditation XVII, and the less familiar (and grammatically challenging) words that follow it:
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.”
St. Paul, writing to the Christians in Rome, insists that our security lies in the gifts God has planted in us, and the call God issues to us to use these gifts to reach out to people who most need to be immersed in the mercy of God.
Security likely has little to do with protecting us from danger, risk, or affliction. Joseph’s long saga of falling and rising, falling and rising, calls us to imagine security being mostly about resilience and flexibility and trust.
And what do we make of John Donne’s attitude towards affliction? It is a treasure… that we don’t want, but once we have it, our attitude towards it helps shape the future, both our own and that of others around us. Robin Williams’s wife reports that he had been diagnosed as having Parkinson’s disease. I wonder if he knew people, as I do and as many of you do, who live with this disease yet find there is still gold to be mined from life.
In understanding the complexity of suicide, must there not be multiple insecurities that account for the anguish and despair that can shut tight the windows and doors of the soul?
The collect today calls us to secure ourselves—windows and doors open-- by allowing Jesus Christ to free our ability to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work, and by allowing the Holy Spirit to free in us the desire to follow Jesus daily, step by step, not knowing exactly where that takes us, but knowing him, and not controlling the journey as much as trusting the falling and the rising, the falling and the rising.
As Buddhist wisdom puts it, “Fall down seven times, stand up eight.”
(For the interview with Ittetsu Nemoto, see the Spring 2014 issue of “Tricycle”.)
The Episcopal Church expresses its dependence upon the Bible, its commitment to taking the Bible both seriously and joyfully, by a disciplined hearing of holy scripture each Sunday in the parish eucharist, and each weekday in the offering of morning and evening prayer.
Sunday by Sunday, readings are chosen—a text from the Hebrew Bible, a psalm from the Hebrew Bible, a portion from the letters (and other writings) of the Christian scriptures, and a portion of one of the four Gospels—chosen not by the pastor locally, but by the wider Church. And by “wider” I mean beyond the Episcopal Church, for the table of readings that we use here on Sundays has been set by a consortium of denominations so that Christian unity may be promoted.
And by language like “setting the table” I mean to acknowledge that in this holy meal that draws us together, it is not just bread and wine that are offered, but also the food and drink of ancient wisdom, pithy proverbs, puzzling parables, prophetic oracles, apocalyptic visions, compelling narratives of holy lives, poetic reach towards the transcendent, and the witness of amazing grace revealing the holiness of each moment of life.
The Word becomes flesh and dwells among us. Jesus Christ the Word made flesh shapes his likeness in us. The Holy Spirit hovers among us, dwells within each heart, her grace and wisdom nurturing from birth and baptism each soul’s growth into the full stature of Christ.
On a good day. I mean, that quick sketch of spiritual growth sounds way too smooth and easy, doesn’t it? But if I’m right in the claim that every moment is holy, no moment devoid of the grace of Christ and the presence of the Spirit, then at least we might agree that much of our spiritual growth is hidden, much of it eludes our understanding and analysis, and much of it seems to resemble (to recall our Lord’s summertime parables) a garden that requires a load of manure in order to do its yielding, and a healthy regard for the tenacity of weeds. And, to borrow from our late summer pilgrimage with Joseph, the favored child sold into slavery by his brothers, the gifted young man who went down into the pit, down into Egypt, down into Pharoah’s dungeon, only to rise to the pinnacle of power in ancient Egypt, we see presented the familiar human pattern that first you fall, then you rise. No death, no resurrection.
If the menu at our Sunday banquet is not only bread and wine but also the Word of holy scripture, there comes also at the start an appetizer, the collect of the day. A collect gets its nickname from its purpose, to collect all our attention deficits and invite the harnessing of our hearts and minds to the Word we’re about to hear.
These little treasures of prayer trace a bloodline that goes back to the 4th and 5th centuries, others from the middle ages, some from catholic missals, others from the Protestant reformers of the 16th century. These prayers sometimes have about them an air of Where’s Waldo, as they catch wind of a great theme that blows through the readings that day, and invite us to listen for it.
And often, as in today’s collect, there’s a gracious touch of catechism: we learn today that at the heart of the spiritual journey is thankful receiving of the redeeming work of Jesus, in particular the grace to follow daily in the steps of his holy life. That desire to follow him is what we bring to the equation of spiritual growth—and this collect makes it clear that we bring this desire not from obligation or guilt, but from appreciation and gratitude. And right from the get-go, the collect teaches us, the freedom we need to have this desire is itself a result, a fruit, of Jesus’s redeeming work. We love because he first loves us.
And it is for the replenishing of love that we come to this table that is set for us. The sabbath rest we choose by coming here repairs us from the week that was, prepares us for the week that comes.
This past week has been especially brutal. Vicious genocide in Northern Iraq. The ongoing pathos of unending violence between Israelis and Palestinians (neither side willing to feel pathos, empathy, for the other). And the shooting death of an African American teenager by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri.
Yet, with all this violence, nothing prepared us for the news, last week, of Robin Williams’s death. Patch Adams, Mrs. Doubtfire, Armand in The Bird Cage, Mr. Keating in Dead Poet’s Society, Air Force DJ Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning, Vietnam… Robin Williams long ago insinuated himself into my personal pantheon of gifted actors I admire. Beyond zany, able to slip from serious to crazy in the twinkling of an eye, when he was in role he could do anything, and he did, including tenderness, steadfastness, wonderment, fearlessness, quiet intensity, and, of course, crack-up antics.
Hearing that he had taken his own life, I wondered, “Why would someone who seemed able to do anything do that?” As if a talented actor, in particular a zany comedian, should be immune from despair. As if clowns don’t cry. It didn’t take me long to realize I should know better.
We live in a culture that mistakes entertainment for news, and therefore treats everything that happens to entertainers as if it were newsworthy. Our culture also exploits personal tragedy. Believing these things, I wanted to impose a buffer around this man’s death, to let its sadness and violence recede and perhaps revisit it all later, when it would feel less raw. When I heard myself, thick in denial, I recognized how this compartmentalizing couldn’t be an option for countless people who have lost a loved one to suicide: there’s no arm’s length option for them, and there isn’t for any of us. How many of us have almost lost someone to this form of death? How many of us have almost lost our own life this way? And what gradations of self-directed violence are there, short of calling in the coroner? What degrees of self-neglect and self-abuse count in a countdown to serious illness? For how many of us does the gap between the true self and the self we show to others grow wider and wider?
I read recently an interview with Ittetsu Nemoto, a Buddhist priest in Japan who counsels suicidal people and grieving survivors. His words are so simple and direct. “Suicide is really tough. The killer and the killed are the same person, so you don’t know what to make of it. You don’t know where to direct your anger. The wound stays with you for a long time.”
If ever there is a moment to recall John Donne’s way with words, it’s in the wake of a very public self-killing like this one. Hear both the familiar words from his Meditation XVII, and the less familiar (and grammatically challenging) words that follow it:
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.”
St. Paul, writing to the Christians in Rome, insists that our security lies in the gifts God has planted in us, and the call God issues to us to use these gifts to reach out to people who most need to be immersed in the mercy of God.
Security likely has little to do with protecting us from danger, risk, or affliction. Joseph’s long saga of falling and rising, falling and rising, calls us to imagine security being mostly about resilience and flexibility and trust.
And what do we make of John Donne’s attitude towards affliction? It is a treasure… that we don’t want, but once we have it, our attitude towards it helps shape the future, both our own and that of others around us. Robin Williams’s wife reports that he had been diagnosed as having Parkinson’s disease. I wonder if he knew people, as I do and as many of you do, who live with this disease yet find there is still gold to be mined from life.
In understanding the complexity of suicide, must there not be multiple insecurities that account for the anguish and despair that can shut tight the windows and doors of the soul?
The collect today calls us to secure ourselves—windows and doors open-- by allowing Jesus Christ to free our ability to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work, and by allowing the Holy Spirit to free in us the desire to follow Jesus daily, step by step, not knowing exactly where that takes us, but knowing him, and not controlling the journey as much as trusting the falling and the rising, the falling and the rising.
As Buddhist wisdom puts it, “Fall down seven times, stand up eight.”
(For the interview with Ittetsu Nemoto, see the Spring 2014 issue of “Tricycle”.)
Friday, August 15, 2014
The Holiness of Each Moment
Scripture for the 9th Sunday after Pentecost includes Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28; Romans 10:5-15; Matthew 14:22-33
“Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”—do you remember the musical that brought the Joseph saga to the stage and screen?
That coat of many colors—notice how the New RSV translates the phrase “a long robe with sleeves,” suggesting the play that is possible within a biblical text, not to mention what keeps Bible scholars at play—whatever this sartorial splendor was, it only intensified the hatred Joseph’s brothers bore against him. That stemmed from the special love their father Jacob (who is also named Israel) felt for this youngest son of his old age, who reminded him of his beloved late wife, Rachel.
So the stage is set for a long blockbuster series of stories centering on Joseph. As we hear today, he is sold into slavery by his brothers, sent in chains to Egypt—the kind of radical demotion Jesus would feature, centuries later, in his story of the prodigal son. Once in Egypt, Joseph, by his beauty, his trustworthiness, and his managerial skill, rises to prominence in the household of Potiphar, a high muckety-muck of the Pharoah.
Mrs. Potiphar falls head over heels for this young slave, but he resists her wiles, proving his integrity but caught in a web of circumstantial evidence that lands him in jail. As bleak as that sounds, the skillful storyteller in Genesis is creating the drama that will elevate Joseph to the very pinnacle of power in Egypt: as far as he has descended—down into that pit, down into Egypt, down in Pharoah’s dungeon—just as high will he rise, in time becoming Pharoah’s right hand man. I would bet that the early Church treasured this story as a forecast of our Lord’s betrayal and vindication, his descent into the jaws of death and his rising to the right hand of God.
What saved Joseph from rotting in prison was his extraordinary gift for interpreting dreams. Back in Hebron, he had shamelessly explained to his family his own dreams as a young man about whom it could be said that he was full of himself, for his dreams foretold the day that his brothers, even his father and mother, would bow down to him. That gift failed to endear him to his brothers, but in Egypt it was his ticket to freedom as he reveals the meaning within the dreams of two of Pharoah’s servants who displeased their master and wound up jailmates of Joseph. After word of his success traveled, Joseph was summoned by Pharoah to interpret his royal dreams, and with that Joseph becomes a royal advisor on his way up the ladder of power.
And there he will face, and help Egypt survive, longterm devastating widespread drought and famine. Having become the chief administrator in all the land, he devises bold, cold ways by which the poor would survive, but at the expense of losing title to their land which passed into the hands of Pharoah. What we are to make of this steely competence is hard to say—though historians tell us that exactly this kind of shift in land ownership happened in ancient Egypt.
It isn’t long before Joseph’s family, back in Hebron, runs out of options and turns to Egypt, where they’ve heard it is still possible to buy food. So the stage is set for dramatic reunion between Joseph and his brothers in scenes that are among the most affecting in the Hebrew Bible.
Whenever we get a story from the Book of Genesis, we get a time-treasured answer to some big question, bigger than just the cast of characters and their interactions. Here the question answered is, “How did the Hebrew people wind up in Egypt?” The answer: economic necessity, as the tribes of Israel, represented by those sons of Jacob, made their way to the storehouses Joseph established. And how is it that they became slaves to Pharoah? At first they weren’t, with Joseph’s prestige protecting them; but in time the same harsh realities that reduced Egyptians to landless slavery reduced also Israel’s offspring.
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel says of Joseph that he was the first Jew to link Israel to the wider world. “Everything happened to him, and never on a petty scale. In defeat, he touched the bottom of the abyss. In his glory, he was the peer of kings who regarded themselves as peers of the gods… He aroused hate or love, fear or admiration. Never indifference. .. Nobody failed to take a stand for or against him. He was to be found everywhere, embroiled more often than not in incredibly complex situations which he usually enjoyed confusing even further. While still a child, he behaved like a king. When he became a king he often behaved like a child… He loved to shock people and knew he could do it with impunity… In the context of the Biblical narrative, he was a new kind of hero, heralding a new era.”
For countless generations of Jews, Joseph “is the object of passionate admiration bordering on worship… a Jew whose tribulations had a happy ending… 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.”
Later Judaism would yearn for the Messiah, the anointed agent of God who would accomplish the doing of God’s will on earth as in heaven, righting all ancient wrongs. The worse life got for the Jews, the more deeply they longed for the Messiah. When pressed to describe him, they would point to their great King David. They would point also to Joseph.
As does the New Testament, where followers of Jesus declare their belief that the carpenter from Nazareth is the Messiah of God, and the Christian scriptures point to Joseph’s significance to the Church. His saga is re-told in chapter seven of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, as if Joseph helps establish the pedigree of Jesus. And because little in the Gospel narrative is coincidental, notice that Joseph is the name of Jesus’s earthly father, and it is through dreams that God reveals to this Joseph the wisdom of a hasty retreat to Egypt, saving the holy family from King Herod’s wrath.
Do our two New Testament readings play well with Joseph’s story? Both St. Paul in his letter to the Romans and Jesus in Matthew make clear that Jesus the Messiah is master of the present moment. No story says that better than Matthew’s snapshots of Jesus on the sea, the disciples in the boat, Peter rising, falling. Freeze-frame moments full of Jesus’s presence.
First, their moment of fear, into which he speaks: “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” Then the moment when Peter dares to go where Jesus is, and Jesus commissions him: “Come.” And after moments of focused obedience, one foot in front of the other, Peter is distracted by strong wind. In the moment of terror, the kind known by every one of us who has lost bearings in an attack of panic, Peter throws himself forward to Jesus, who catches him. Then, the stilling of sea, sound, silence. Finally, the boat rocks with praise.
It all resembles steps, stages, phases in faith formation, doesn’t it? In each of these powerful moments along the wet windy way, Jesus is Lord. None of these steps is more or less holy than the next.
St. Paul also draws us to locate the Messiah, God’s presence, not up in heaven or down in the abyss, but in the present moment. Jesus Christ does not need to be sent for from heaven for a rare appearance in ordinary life; nor is he confined in some mausoleum of the past. His word is near us, on our lips and in our hearts. Faith is the heart’s ability to trust.
With every Bible story, every portion we hear from the Hebrew scriptures and from the Christian, something is being said that is bigger than the actions and words of the characters on the page. Each encounter we have with the Word of God invites us, challenges us, to discern what that bigger message is… and to welcome it.
Today, the holiness of every present moment is the theme that draws our attention. In the long saga of Joseph, every moment of his descending and his ascending is of equal importance to the whole story of his life’s transformations. Each moment is a fresh opportunity for choice to be made, justice to be shown, inspiration to be trusted, opportunity to be claimed, responsibility to be shouldered, gratitude to be expressed.
We may long for mountaintop experiences, and we may dread anxious times—but our readings call us to recognize that no moment is more or less holy than another, no more or less valuable, playing its part in transformation whether or not we understand what that part is, or just why it happens as it does. In what moment of that stormy boat ride is grace not active on behalf of those disciples? God’s grace is not a stranger to any of our moments. The hand of Jesus Christ is within reach of us. The Spirit is already present in the moment ahead.
The bigger message, the good news, of these readings is clear: “Take heart, it is I: do not be afraid.”
(Elie Wiesel’s commentary on Joseph is found in his book “Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends”, Elirion Associates, Inc., 1976.)
“Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”—do you remember the musical that brought the Joseph saga to the stage and screen?
That coat of many colors—notice how the New RSV translates the phrase “a long robe with sleeves,” suggesting the play that is possible within a biblical text, not to mention what keeps Bible scholars at play—whatever this sartorial splendor was, it only intensified the hatred Joseph’s brothers bore against him. That stemmed from the special love their father Jacob (who is also named Israel) felt for this youngest son of his old age, who reminded him of his beloved late wife, Rachel.
So the stage is set for a long blockbuster series of stories centering on Joseph. As we hear today, he is sold into slavery by his brothers, sent in chains to Egypt—the kind of radical demotion Jesus would feature, centuries later, in his story of the prodigal son. Once in Egypt, Joseph, by his beauty, his trustworthiness, and his managerial skill, rises to prominence in the household of Potiphar, a high muckety-muck of the Pharoah.
Mrs. Potiphar falls head over heels for this young slave, but he resists her wiles, proving his integrity but caught in a web of circumstantial evidence that lands him in jail. As bleak as that sounds, the skillful storyteller in Genesis is creating the drama that will elevate Joseph to the very pinnacle of power in Egypt: as far as he has descended—down into that pit, down into Egypt, down in Pharoah’s dungeon—just as high will he rise, in time becoming Pharoah’s right hand man. I would bet that the early Church treasured this story as a forecast of our Lord’s betrayal and vindication, his descent into the jaws of death and his rising to the right hand of God.
What saved Joseph from rotting in prison was his extraordinary gift for interpreting dreams. Back in Hebron, he had shamelessly explained to his family his own dreams as a young man about whom it could be said that he was full of himself, for his dreams foretold the day that his brothers, even his father and mother, would bow down to him. That gift failed to endear him to his brothers, but in Egypt it was his ticket to freedom as he reveals the meaning within the dreams of two of Pharoah’s servants who displeased their master and wound up jailmates of Joseph. After word of his success traveled, Joseph was summoned by Pharoah to interpret his royal dreams, and with that Joseph becomes a royal advisor on his way up the ladder of power.
And there he will face, and help Egypt survive, longterm devastating widespread drought and famine. Having become the chief administrator in all the land, he devises bold, cold ways by which the poor would survive, but at the expense of losing title to their land which passed into the hands of Pharoah. What we are to make of this steely competence is hard to say—though historians tell us that exactly this kind of shift in land ownership happened in ancient Egypt.
It isn’t long before Joseph’s family, back in Hebron, runs out of options and turns to Egypt, where they’ve heard it is still possible to buy food. So the stage is set for dramatic reunion between Joseph and his brothers in scenes that are among the most affecting in the Hebrew Bible.
Whenever we get a story from the Book of Genesis, we get a time-treasured answer to some big question, bigger than just the cast of characters and their interactions. Here the question answered is, “How did the Hebrew people wind up in Egypt?” The answer: economic necessity, as the tribes of Israel, represented by those sons of Jacob, made their way to the storehouses Joseph established. And how is it that they became slaves to Pharoah? At first they weren’t, with Joseph’s prestige protecting them; but in time the same harsh realities that reduced Egyptians to landless slavery reduced also Israel’s offspring.
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel says of Joseph that he was the first Jew to link Israel to the wider world. “Everything happened to him, and never on a petty scale. In defeat, he touched the bottom of the abyss. In his glory, he was the peer of kings who regarded themselves as peers of the gods… He aroused hate or love, fear or admiration. Never indifference. .. Nobody failed to take a stand for or against him. He was to be found everywhere, embroiled more often than not in incredibly complex situations which he usually enjoyed confusing even further. While still a child, he behaved like a king. When he became a king he often behaved like a child… He loved to shock people and knew he could do it with impunity… In the context of the Biblical narrative, he was a new kind of hero, heralding a new era.”
For countless generations of Jews, Joseph “is the object of passionate admiration bordering on worship… a Jew whose tribulations had a happy ending… 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.”
Later Judaism would yearn for the Messiah, the anointed agent of God who would accomplish the doing of God’s will on earth as in heaven, righting all ancient wrongs. The worse life got for the Jews, the more deeply they longed for the Messiah. When pressed to describe him, they would point to their great King David. They would point also to Joseph.
As does the New Testament, where followers of Jesus declare their belief that the carpenter from Nazareth is the Messiah of God, and the Christian scriptures point to Joseph’s significance to the Church. His saga is re-told in chapter seven of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, as if Joseph helps establish the pedigree of Jesus. And because little in the Gospel narrative is coincidental, notice that Joseph is the name of Jesus’s earthly father, and it is through dreams that God reveals to this Joseph the wisdom of a hasty retreat to Egypt, saving the holy family from King Herod’s wrath.
Do our two New Testament readings play well with Joseph’s story? Both St. Paul in his letter to the Romans and Jesus in Matthew make clear that Jesus the Messiah is master of the present moment. No story says that better than Matthew’s snapshots of Jesus on the sea, the disciples in the boat, Peter rising, falling. Freeze-frame moments full of Jesus’s presence.
First, their moment of fear, into which he speaks: “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” Then the moment when Peter dares to go where Jesus is, and Jesus commissions him: “Come.” And after moments of focused obedience, one foot in front of the other, Peter is distracted by strong wind. In the moment of terror, the kind known by every one of us who has lost bearings in an attack of panic, Peter throws himself forward to Jesus, who catches him. Then, the stilling of sea, sound, silence. Finally, the boat rocks with praise.
It all resembles steps, stages, phases in faith formation, doesn’t it? In each of these powerful moments along the wet windy way, Jesus is Lord. None of these steps is more or less holy than the next.
St. Paul also draws us to locate the Messiah, God’s presence, not up in heaven or down in the abyss, but in the present moment. Jesus Christ does not need to be sent for from heaven for a rare appearance in ordinary life; nor is he confined in some mausoleum of the past. His word is near us, on our lips and in our hearts. Faith is the heart’s ability to trust.
With every Bible story, every portion we hear from the Hebrew scriptures and from the Christian, something is being said that is bigger than the actions and words of the characters on the page. Each encounter we have with the Word of God invites us, challenges us, to discern what that bigger message is… and to welcome it.
Today, the holiness of every present moment is the theme that draws our attention. In the long saga of Joseph, every moment of his descending and his ascending is of equal importance to the whole story of his life’s transformations. Each moment is a fresh opportunity for choice to be made, justice to be shown, inspiration to be trusted, opportunity to be claimed, responsibility to be shouldered, gratitude to be expressed.
We may long for mountaintop experiences, and we may dread anxious times—but our readings call us to recognize that no moment is more or less holy than another, no more or less valuable, playing its part in transformation whether or not we understand what that part is, or just why it happens as it does. In what moment of that stormy boat ride is grace not active on behalf of those disciples? God’s grace is not a stranger to any of our moments. The hand of Jesus Christ is within reach of us. The Spirit is already present in the moment ahead.
The bigger message, the good news, of these readings is clear: “Take heart, it is I: do not be afraid.”
(Elie Wiesel’s commentary on Joseph is found in his book “Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends”, Elirion Associates, Inc., 1976.)
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