“Mary,” Jesus says to her. And in one word he tells her all she needs to know: Despite the worst that the emperor’s violence could do to him, the power of God at work in Jesus Christ is proving itself strong and true, God is still casting down the mighty from their thrones and raising up the lowly. And Mary is still entirely known and perfectly loved by the very same Jesus to whom she has entrusted her life, her future, and her past.
Whatever we think we know about Mary Magdalene, we think she had a past, the kind that people these days explain into microphones. If Mary previously had looked for love in the wrong places, what passed between Jesus and herself gave her the experience of being entirely known and perfectly loved. With him, she had no explaining to do. The dignity he saw in her caused her to understand herself.
In this Easter morning that we spend together, I hope that you will have some moment in which you hear Jesus call you by name. And that you will recognize in his voice the One who knows you entirely and perfectly loves you.
“What are you looking for?” he may ask, inviting you to do your part, opening yourself, naming as much as you know of your own truth so that he may name to you the fullness of his truth, show you your place at his table, cause you to feel the dignity of bearing God’s image, and call you to the mission for which you’re matched precisely by your past and your gifts, and more precisely yet by the grace he gives you.
Will he say to you what he said to Mary? “Do not hold on to me…” He may, if you’ve outgrown a Jesus who hasn’t kept growing, as you have, one that you’re clinging to because he’s familiar, though you’re not altogether sure he knows your name or has much to say. Jesus, the one who promises you the truth that shall set you free, may say, “Trade in that bobble-head model of me and clear the way for a relationship…”
And will he urge you to “Go to my brothers and sisters,” as he did Mary?
Could that mean, “Stop trying to navigate life all on your own. Find the circle of people, build the friendships, invest in the community that feeds your spirit with truth, that has vision and mission worthy of your time and passion”?
The world in which we live needs the a building-up of human brotherhood and sisterhood. Our one world, torn apart by opposing empires committed to forces of terrorist violence and to forces of counter-terrorist violence, will be in agony until the peaceable power of God is built among us. We who believe that this reconciling and respectful power is to be found in Jesus Christ have vision and mission that deserve our time and passion.
Mary Magdalene shows us how to respond. Though Jesus has gone so far away, Mary will not leave him. To embrace the whole world, Jesus has died the death of a criminal. This has shocked and distanced most his disciples, that such a death should come to such a man, but Mary will not let what she doesn’t understand separate her from him. Jesus has gone far from the circle of his friends—but she was once far from that circle, too, and his was the love that drew her in and knew her as a whole person.
As he would not lose her from that circle, so she now will not lose him. She must learn what has become of him, she must find him. Notice that she does not recognize him when he appears near her. Her Jesus is growing. The circle he is drawing now will take him into all the world, and he needs her to find her place among the apostles who will take his Word into the world, who will be his hands and feet, his voice and his compassion to make the peoples of the world one in God, free in God.
The first thing she did was to seek Jesus. Had she not done that, she’d have had no evidence that he could still call her by name. The second thing she did was to let him grow, from the teacher whose voice and touch she knew, into the light of the world whose voice and touch she would carry to the world.
This Easter Day, I hope that in our time together you will find evidence that Jesus knows your name. I hope that you will feel encouraged to keep seeking him and to recognize how he is with you. That you will catch glimpses of how your relationship with him might be growing, and leave here with a fresh, even surprising, sense of how your gifts and passions fit his mission in this one world that so needs his peaceable power.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Monday, March 10, 2008
The Abundance of Holy Week
This sermon refers to John 11:1-45
Yes, another long Lenten Gospel. This time, I’m not so sure it’s about a person low on the totem pole of social and economic influence. Not, this week, a blind beggar regaining his sight at Jesus’s hand, nor a Samaritan woman having her thirst for love slaked by the Lord of love. This time, we’re told a story that shows Jesus at work in the middle class.
When we meet them at another famous moment, Mary and Martha are running their own household and appear to have some means. In that story (you’ll recall that Martha was banging pots in the kitchen, Mary taking note of every word Jesus was saying in the front parlor), Lazarus isn’t mentioned. Perhaps by then he was dead for real, as tradition reports that after he emerged from his tomb, Lazarus proved such an influential witness to the love of God in Jesus Christ that he had to be rubbed out by one or another of several powers-that-be, threatened by too much moving and shaking.
Here’s just the right story for crossing over to Holy Week. When Jesus enters the capital city of Jerusalem next Sunday—when he pulls up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House—he won’t be arriving by limousine as Queen Elizabeth would. He’ll be seated on a donkey, while around him will be his ragtag team of disciples. As usual, they’ll looking lost and unsure about what he’s up to now.
What isn’t hard to imagine is made clear by all these long Lenten Gospels: he was known throughout Galilee and Judea for what he did, healing the sick and the blind, restoring the alienated and loveless to their place at the table of God, even turning the tables on death itself. Now Jerusalem gets to meet him, and everyone turns out because everyone has heard of this fearless healer and teacher—could he be the Messiah promised of old?
The guardians of religion and the pillars of civil government have also heard of this Jesus. To their eyes, his parade on Palm Sunday is a subversive entry into Jerusalem, a city packed with pilgrims at Passover. The high and the mighty have heard that he subverts all normal standards of decency, eating with sinners, breaking the blue laws, daring to arouse hope among the poor. Here he comes to grandstand and set the city in commotion.
Well, no. He has come to keep Passover with his disciples, his chosen family. He has come to keep Passover with us. Maundy Thursday will take us there to that upper room where he must subvert his own friends’ standards of power and authority, for right at the time he most needs their understanding and openness to the complex suffering that awaits them all, they neurotically compete for his Most Valuable Player award, arguing among themselves who is greatest. Until he shows them greatness, stripping down to his wet gear and washing their feet to reach their hearts and their imagination. Enough, at least, that it wasn’t lost on them (and on us) forever, when he took common bread and table wine and made them perfect expressions of his love for the human race.
This year, Laurie and her helpers (Adrienne, Sam, Diana) have created in our window ledges 14 imaginative Stations of the Cross, speaking to us in 2008 the story of Jesus’s way of the cross, from his condemnation to his crucifixion. My favorite one is number six, the legend that St. Veronica wiped our Lord’s face with her veil, leaving on it the imprint of his likeness. And there, in a bowl of water that seems suspended in air, the exact likeness of the window above (the one that tells its own story of The Pilgrim’s Progress) is reflected. That’s a sight that exactly expresses the story it means to communicate. That’s success. That’s sacrament. And that’s symbol.
It’s what Holy Week is so good at: sights and sounds that show well what the love of God is in Jesus Christ, what the hope is that we have through this victory of Spirit over force, what courage and passion amount to when gotten hold of by a Messiah who will weep but not kill, will empty the tomb of his friend by filling it himself.
This year, in addition to our noon to 3:00 p.m. Preaching of the Passion, a joint service with our Methodist neighbors, and a later-evening liturgy, we’ll also offer an early-evening Stations of the Cross for children. What holds true for Worship Outside the Box on Sundays will apply also to this Good Friday service: it will be brief, and it will welcome not just children but all who want fresh ways of seeing and hearing this greatest story ever told.
In our Foundations course last Monday, Jim led a discussion of stewardship. We were reminded how, with God, life is experienced as abundance. The arithmetic of grace is not about our earning the love of God, but about our receiving, undeserved, not just the fullness of biological life but also the intense movement of spiritual life and, through them both, deeper than them both, the transformation that we call eternal life.
With a religion like this, we should wonder that Holy Week is such an embarrassment of riches? That Easter begins, not with sunrise Sunday but with sundown Saturday, because Easter requires darkness for the Christ light to penetrate and illumine, showing wordlessly in perfect expression what happens when the astonishingly generous love of God meets openness in us. And then Word is heard, ancient stories (like Ezekiel’s today, but you haven’t heard the Valley of Dry Bones until, on Easter Eve, you hear those bones rattle and watch inert bodies lying in this aisle rise as the breath of God blows over them) helping us see how the love that reaches us in Jesus has been reaching for us right from the beginning of time. And Word becomes flesh, as this Easter Eve young Will is to be baptized into the Body of Christ.
Somehow, this rich legacy of Holy Week isn’t yet, after 2000 years, as familiar or as popular as the bling of Easter Day, when every seat will be taken. In the early centuries of our religion, there was no Easter Day without Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Eve. It was all one seamless veil bearing the imprint of his likeness. Why not see if you can experience Holy Week that way, this year? Why not know for sure why you’ll be in church on Easter Day—and not at home watching one empire or another rise or fall?
Yes, another long Lenten Gospel. This time, I’m not so sure it’s about a person low on the totem pole of social and economic influence. Not, this week, a blind beggar regaining his sight at Jesus’s hand, nor a Samaritan woman having her thirst for love slaked by the Lord of love. This time, we’re told a story that shows Jesus at work in the middle class.
When we meet them at another famous moment, Mary and Martha are running their own household and appear to have some means. In that story (you’ll recall that Martha was banging pots in the kitchen, Mary taking note of every word Jesus was saying in the front parlor), Lazarus isn’t mentioned. Perhaps by then he was dead for real, as tradition reports that after he emerged from his tomb, Lazarus proved such an influential witness to the love of God in Jesus Christ that he had to be rubbed out by one or another of several powers-that-be, threatened by too much moving and shaking.
Here’s just the right story for crossing over to Holy Week. When Jesus enters the capital city of Jerusalem next Sunday—when he pulls up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House—he won’t be arriving by limousine as Queen Elizabeth would. He’ll be seated on a donkey, while around him will be his ragtag team of disciples. As usual, they’ll looking lost and unsure about what he’s up to now.
What isn’t hard to imagine is made clear by all these long Lenten Gospels: he was known throughout Galilee and Judea for what he did, healing the sick and the blind, restoring the alienated and loveless to their place at the table of God, even turning the tables on death itself. Now Jerusalem gets to meet him, and everyone turns out because everyone has heard of this fearless healer and teacher—could he be the Messiah promised of old?
The guardians of religion and the pillars of civil government have also heard of this Jesus. To their eyes, his parade on Palm Sunday is a subversive entry into Jerusalem, a city packed with pilgrims at Passover. The high and the mighty have heard that he subverts all normal standards of decency, eating with sinners, breaking the blue laws, daring to arouse hope among the poor. Here he comes to grandstand and set the city in commotion.
Well, no. He has come to keep Passover with his disciples, his chosen family. He has come to keep Passover with us. Maundy Thursday will take us there to that upper room where he must subvert his own friends’ standards of power and authority, for right at the time he most needs their understanding and openness to the complex suffering that awaits them all, they neurotically compete for his Most Valuable Player award, arguing among themselves who is greatest. Until he shows them greatness, stripping down to his wet gear and washing their feet to reach their hearts and their imagination. Enough, at least, that it wasn’t lost on them (and on us) forever, when he took common bread and table wine and made them perfect expressions of his love for the human race.
This year, Laurie and her helpers (Adrienne, Sam, Diana) have created in our window ledges 14 imaginative Stations of the Cross, speaking to us in 2008 the story of Jesus’s way of the cross, from his condemnation to his crucifixion. My favorite one is number six, the legend that St. Veronica wiped our Lord’s face with her veil, leaving on it the imprint of his likeness. And there, in a bowl of water that seems suspended in air, the exact likeness of the window above (the one that tells its own story of The Pilgrim’s Progress) is reflected. That’s a sight that exactly expresses the story it means to communicate. That’s success. That’s sacrament. And that’s symbol.
It’s what Holy Week is so good at: sights and sounds that show well what the love of God is in Jesus Christ, what the hope is that we have through this victory of Spirit over force, what courage and passion amount to when gotten hold of by a Messiah who will weep but not kill, will empty the tomb of his friend by filling it himself.
This year, in addition to our noon to 3:00 p.m. Preaching of the Passion, a joint service with our Methodist neighbors, and a later-evening liturgy, we’ll also offer an early-evening Stations of the Cross for children. What holds true for Worship Outside the Box on Sundays will apply also to this Good Friday service: it will be brief, and it will welcome not just children but all who want fresh ways of seeing and hearing this greatest story ever told.
In our Foundations course last Monday, Jim led a discussion of stewardship. We were reminded how, with God, life is experienced as abundance. The arithmetic of grace is not about our earning the love of God, but about our receiving, undeserved, not just the fullness of biological life but also the intense movement of spiritual life and, through them both, deeper than them both, the transformation that we call eternal life.
With a religion like this, we should wonder that Holy Week is such an embarrassment of riches? That Easter begins, not with sunrise Sunday but with sundown Saturday, because Easter requires darkness for the Christ light to penetrate and illumine, showing wordlessly in perfect expression what happens when the astonishingly generous love of God meets openness in us. And then Word is heard, ancient stories (like Ezekiel’s today, but you haven’t heard the Valley of Dry Bones until, on Easter Eve, you hear those bones rattle and watch inert bodies lying in this aisle rise as the breath of God blows over them) helping us see how the love that reaches us in Jesus has been reaching for us right from the beginning of time. And Word becomes flesh, as this Easter Eve young Will is to be baptized into the Body of Christ.
Somehow, this rich legacy of Holy Week isn’t yet, after 2000 years, as familiar or as popular as the bling of Easter Day, when every seat will be taken. In the early centuries of our religion, there was no Easter Day without Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Eve. It was all one seamless veil bearing the imprint of his likeness. Why not see if you can experience Holy Week that way, this year? Why not know for sure why you’ll be in church on Easter Day—and not at home watching one empire or another rise or fall?
Friday, March 7, 2008
Seeing the Light
Readings for 4 Lent mentioned in this sermon:
Ephesians 5: 8-14
John 9:1-41
I am using in this sermon a concept of the “social program” of Jesus that I met in John Dominic Crossan’s and Jonathan L. Reed’s book In Search of Paul, and am also indebted to Martin Smith, whose book A Season for the Spirit feeds me, each Lent.
A man blind from birth. Think of that: he has had to depend on his other senses, to navigate life. Until we have to do without the full sight of an eye for a while, how can we imagine the extent to which we depend on sight as we move through each day, and especially as we move through the night.
This man has learned to feel his way, to reach out with hands and feet to tell him where he is. He has learned to listen far more acutely than most of his neighbors. His sense of smell has shown him many times what’s happening around him.
Likely, he has depended on a stout walking stick to reclaim balance when he loses it, to use as a sensor ahead of him, tapping his way. I imagine him counting on those who treated him humanely to take him by the hand and lead him through those moments and places that had changed—a military barricade blocking a familiar crossing, the marketplace reconfigured for a festival.
Dependence is a key word in describing his life. He is a beggar. We aren’t told that until a quarter of the way into his story. But that’s because everyone hearing his story in early times would know that a blind man begs.
Notice about this story what you may have noticed about last Sunday’s equally lengthy Gospel: that so much airtime is given to a story, to the full and even prolonged story of one person’s recovery, the recovery (in both cases) of a person right at the bottom of the socio-economic heap, a Samaritan woman married five times going on six, and a beggar who is blind. A whole bloody chapter! I can recall just one Gospel story that is longer than either of these, and that’s the one we will read on Palm Sunday and Good Friday, the story of Christ’s Passion.
So can it be that these long stories also testify to the Passion of Christ? Did our ancestors in the first and second centuries keep these stories because in them they saw clear-shining that light of the world, Jesus, and heard without doubt the heartbeat of his mission, the mission that brought him right into the noose knotted for him by men who could not stand his rocking the boat of church and state?
Jesus’s primary objective was not to resist imperial Rome and upend a rigid and self-preoccupied church. Those rockings of the boat were the collateral damage (though we have learned to call them collateral blessings) of his primary purpose: to take the dream of global justice and put flesh upon its bones at the local, ordinary, everyday level, and not just there and then, but here and now, by penetrating our eyeballs with the sights, and piercing our eardrums with the sounds, of recovery, healing, and to make clear that his love alive in us will make us unafraid to love just as boldly as he loves, across all borders of class and race, sex and creed, wellness and illness, freedom and bondage.
We get part of the picture when we see Good Friday caused by the words Jesus spoke in public squares. The other part, and I believe the bigger part, is his public embrace of the poor. That this appealing and persuasive preacher chose to spend his mealtimes with the rough refuse of the social order—isn’t that what the wealthy and privileged often think of the service sector, especially the night shift, and certainly the prostitutes—this they found subversive, not just that he enjoyed eating with them, but that he would use those mealtimes to teach the same radical equality among people that he would then show while on the road.
Neither the politicians nor the priests knew how to value this social program of Jesus. From the plight of the poor in America 2008, neither does our society know how to value his purpose. From the preoccupations of the Church, we could judge, neither do we Christians.
Sight is restored to a man born blind. I remember Oliver Sacks telling the story of a rare success in surgery, repairing the eyes of a man who had been born blind. At first, this man just drank up life, bowled-over by finally seeing all that he had seen only by his ability to imagine. Then, weeks or months later, he was so overwhelmed that even with his ability to see restored, he stopped seeing. Was it that what he actually saw failed to correspond to the reality he had built within his mind? Or that his dependence on his other senses was so thrown out of balance that he couldn’t cope with the overload? Or that his imagination couldn’t recognize a future? While I don’t recall the full story, I believe his whole health unraveled, at the end—not a Hollywood ending. One that suggests that we might want to take this story one level deeper than its surface.
Isn’t there a being-born-blind that happens to many of us in the western nations, who have no sense of our relative wealth in a world burdened with poverty, until we cross the borders of our insulated lives and come up against the mud and saliva of another world, and receive new sight, insight, as a gift of the Christ who is at-home on that side of the border as he is on this?
Isn’t there a being-born-blind that makes us see the faults and weaknesses of others more critically than we assess our own? And isn’t there a critical not-seeing the relentless lovingkindness of God who wants to forgive offences and build mercy in each of us? We slip into projecting onto others those faults and failings we can’t face in ourselves. We humans perfect the art of spitting at those we scorn. We need our spit to fall into God’s dust. We need humility to kneel, to go down into the earth, stir the mud of our conflicts into a poultice that we apply to our own eyes, to see through our own issues, through to what matters.
“For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light—for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.”
These long Lenten Gospels urge us to seek light. More than our wintering instincts, making us long for spring and nudging us to move our clocks ahead an hour next weekend…
The light we seek will be kindled at sundown, Easter Eve.
Its flame will light the great Paschal candle that will lead us into this darkened church in procession to its resting place at the altar, as three times along the way we stop to hear sung, “The Light of Christ!” And respond, “Thanks be to God!”
Then, one by one, our little lights are lit from that great light, wordlessly re-enacting what happens when God’s astonishing love for us in Jesus Christ meets our readiness to be open.
Ephesians 5: 8-14
John 9:1-41
I am using in this sermon a concept of the “social program” of Jesus that I met in John Dominic Crossan’s and Jonathan L. Reed’s book In Search of Paul, and am also indebted to Martin Smith, whose book A Season for the Spirit feeds me, each Lent.
A man blind from birth. Think of that: he has had to depend on his other senses, to navigate life. Until we have to do without the full sight of an eye for a while, how can we imagine the extent to which we depend on sight as we move through each day, and especially as we move through the night.
This man has learned to feel his way, to reach out with hands and feet to tell him where he is. He has learned to listen far more acutely than most of his neighbors. His sense of smell has shown him many times what’s happening around him.
Likely, he has depended on a stout walking stick to reclaim balance when he loses it, to use as a sensor ahead of him, tapping his way. I imagine him counting on those who treated him humanely to take him by the hand and lead him through those moments and places that had changed—a military barricade blocking a familiar crossing, the marketplace reconfigured for a festival.
Dependence is a key word in describing his life. He is a beggar. We aren’t told that until a quarter of the way into his story. But that’s because everyone hearing his story in early times would know that a blind man begs.
Notice about this story what you may have noticed about last Sunday’s equally lengthy Gospel: that so much airtime is given to a story, to the full and even prolonged story of one person’s recovery, the recovery (in both cases) of a person right at the bottom of the socio-economic heap, a Samaritan woman married five times going on six, and a beggar who is blind. A whole bloody chapter! I can recall just one Gospel story that is longer than either of these, and that’s the one we will read on Palm Sunday and Good Friday, the story of Christ’s Passion.
So can it be that these long stories also testify to the Passion of Christ? Did our ancestors in the first and second centuries keep these stories because in them they saw clear-shining that light of the world, Jesus, and heard without doubt the heartbeat of his mission, the mission that brought him right into the noose knotted for him by men who could not stand his rocking the boat of church and state?
Jesus’s primary objective was not to resist imperial Rome and upend a rigid and self-preoccupied church. Those rockings of the boat were the collateral damage (though we have learned to call them collateral blessings) of his primary purpose: to take the dream of global justice and put flesh upon its bones at the local, ordinary, everyday level, and not just there and then, but here and now, by penetrating our eyeballs with the sights, and piercing our eardrums with the sounds, of recovery, healing, and to make clear that his love alive in us will make us unafraid to love just as boldly as he loves, across all borders of class and race, sex and creed, wellness and illness, freedom and bondage.
We get part of the picture when we see Good Friday caused by the words Jesus spoke in public squares. The other part, and I believe the bigger part, is his public embrace of the poor. That this appealing and persuasive preacher chose to spend his mealtimes with the rough refuse of the social order—isn’t that what the wealthy and privileged often think of the service sector, especially the night shift, and certainly the prostitutes—this they found subversive, not just that he enjoyed eating with them, but that he would use those mealtimes to teach the same radical equality among people that he would then show while on the road.
Neither the politicians nor the priests knew how to value this social program of Jesus. From the plight of the poor in America 2008, neither does our society know how to value his purpose. From the preoccupations of the Church, we could judge, neither do we Christians.
Sight is restored to a man born blind. I remember Oliver Sacks telling the story of a rare success in surgery, repairing the eyes of a man who had been born blind. At first, this man just drank up life, bowled-over by finally seeing all that he had seen only by his ability to imagine. Then, weeks or months later, he was so overwhelmed that even with his ability to see restored, he stopped seeing. Was it that what he actually saw failed to correspond to the reality he had built within his mind? Or that his dependence on his other senses was so thrown out of balance that he couldn’t cope with the overload? Or that his imagination couldn’t recognize a future? While I don’t recall the full story, I believe his whole health unraveled, at the end—not a Hollywood ending. One that suggests that we might want to take this story one level deeper than its surface.
Isn’t there a being-born-blind that happens to many of us in the western nations, who have no sense of our relative wealth in a world burdened with poverty, until we cross the borders of our insulated lives and come up against the mud and saliva of another world, and receive new sight, insight, as a gift of the Christ who is at-home on that side of the border as he is on this?
Isn’t there a being-born-blind that makes us see the faults and weaknesses of others more critically than we assess our own? And isn’t there a critical not-seeing the relentless lovingkindness of God who wants to forgive offences and build mercy in each of us? We slip into projecting onto others those faults and failings we can’t face in ourselves. We humans perfect the art of spitting at those we scorn. We need our spit to fall into God’s dust. We need humility to kneel, to go down into the earth, stir the mud of our conflicts into a poultice that we apply to our own eyes, to see through our own issues, through to what matters.
“For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light—for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.”
These long Lenten Gospels urge us to seek light. More than our wintering instincts, making us long for spring and nudging us to move our clocks ahead an hour next weekend…
The light we seek will be kindled at sundown, Easter Eve.
Its flame will light the great Paschal candle that will lead us into this darkened church in procession to its resting place at the altar, as three times along the way we stop to hear sung, “The Light of Christ!” And respond, “Thanks be to God!”
Then, one by one, our little lights are lit from that great light, wordlessly re-enacting what happens when God’s astonishing love for us in Jesus Christ meets our readiness to be open.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Who Gets to Sit at the Table of God?
So who gets to sit at the table of God? Not waiting on that table as a servant, but seated there as belonging? Consider the table a metaphor representing the love, the deep-hearted relentless love of God from whom we come, in whom we live and move and have our being, and to whom we go when life no longer animates our bodies. For God has come to humankind in Jesus Christ to dwell within each of us and among all of us, to make us a people generously included in the covenant love that has long embraced the Jewish people.
That embrace goes back, says the Book of Genesis, to Abram. “For he is the father of all of us,” says St. Paul in his letter today. And the noteworthy thing about Abraham, says Paul, is that we celebrate not his righteousness through keeping the law of Israel’s covenant with God—there was no such law, or covenant, or Israel in his time—but instead we remember him for his sheer faith, his trusting of God. (You remember that story: God called a fairly elderly Abram and Sarai his wife to pick up their stakes and move from a settled life in Ur of the Chaldees—that would be modern Iraq—to journey to Canaan, the famous promised land that Israel would one day claim, and endlessly fight over.)
Abraham stops being Abram when he agrees to obey God and become displaced from his homeland, a moment when covenant is made between them and Abram emerges a changed man. Abram, the Hebrew for “exalted father”, gives way to Abraham, an Aramaic form meaning “father of many nations”.
And the point, lest we miss it: Abraham is noteworthy because Jew and Christian and Muslim alike can celebrate him in terms that trump all religious claims that he is one of them. He wasn’t. There was no Judaism to belong to, in any formal sense, in that time. And it’s a sure thing there was no Christianity or Islam. Yet all three recognize his righteousness, and lay claim to him, “father of us all.”
This fractured world needs Abraham!
You can see the cast of characters in our readings today already shaping an answer to the question, “Who gets to sit at the table of God?”
In his letter, St. Paul speaks Abraham language to the Romans, to show that the Christian faith, while rising from Judaism, is not restricted to Jewish people. Christianity “depends on faith, in order that God’s promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all God’s descendants, not only to the adherents of the Jewish law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham…”
And what is the faith of Abraham? Certainty that God allows no resting on laurels. Sureness that God will upset your applecart, even in old age. Assurance that you should never put your hiking boots too far in the back of your closet. Conviction that God never calls you to do anything that God doesn’t also equip you to do. Awareness that God is always making all things new, always conceiving, always gestating a new heaven and a new earth. Realization that here on earth we have no permanent dwelling place. Assent to God’s radical agenda, that God is blessing all nations, not just our own. And, finally, the faith of Abraham is a shedding of the illusion that God’s blessing means ease and comfort, absolute clarity that God’s blessing awakens a person, a nation, to new responsibilities, new insights, new questions, and new ability to pursue the mission that is entrusted whenever God blesses.
Who gets to sit at the table of God? In the light of today’s portions from scripture, perhaps the question ought to be: On what basis could people not find their seats there? And I hear the Gospel answering, not with the suggestion that God could have an exclusivist attitude, but with the words of Jesus: “You must be born from above.” Without openness to the Spirit of God, without being born of the Spirit, one doesn’t look for the table. Without news of the fiesta, one doesn’t come to the fiesta.
Nicodemus gets close. He has come to Jesus by night, and could there not have been a meal in the background of this meeting? We get the sense, though, that Nicodemus, a religious leader with a lot at stake should he be discovered in the ragtag company of Jesus and friends, Nicodemus stands at the edge of holy space, not at the table—in the obscurity of shadow, not out in the torchlight. “How can these things be?” he asks painfully, yearning for what he will not allow himself to reach for.
Nicodemus has a seat. He is a member of the powerful Sanhedrin which will one day pass lethal judgment on Jesus, and, of course, already has judged him a threat to the established order. Nicodemus is not ready to give up that seat. Understandably, since until he met Jesus he had every reason to believe that there was no finer seat at the table of God than to be an elder of Israel. Rather like being an Anglican bishop.
Jesus upsets that sureness. Nicodemus feels drawn, cannot shake the appeal Jesus makes with authentic integrity of divine Spirit that makes the soul of this old man sing. But he has paid attention, has heard Jesus insist that at God’s table no one sits higher than the next, no one gets favored portions or special influence. It is to a table of equals that Jesus invites him, and could it be that Nicodemus can’t yet see his equal in the likes of boastful James and John, the fisherman Peter, that nervous Judas Iscariot—not to mention earnest Mary of Bethany, her fussy sister Martha, and that one with the long hair and bold look, the Magdalene?
Nicodemus’s resistance may be explained by verses from the Gospel of Mark: “As Jesus sat at dinner in Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who followed him. When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ When Jesus heard this, he said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick do; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’” (Mark 2:15-17)
If you know him well, you will not hear those last words as excluding anyone. But he had a sharp tongue, and used it to slice people free from false assumptions and presumptions. The consummate truth-teller, Jesus tells it like it is: the already-righteous do not need him. Those with big important seats to occupy will not see the compelling beauty or hear the sweet wisdom of God’s hospitality without being born from above, of the Spirit.
Who gets to sit at the table of God?
There’s no more important question to be answered than that one. The Episcopal Church is just one of several parts of Christ’s one Body in spasm at this time in history, over this question.
It is a question that you’ll want to ask and answer before you vote in the presidential election, this fall.
The question is being answered falsely wherever racist grafitti appears on walls, or sexist reaction is allowed to go unchallenged, or fear of the stranger is allowed to block our best impulse to welcome, include, and celebrate the seating of yet another who is revealed to be sister, brother.
Now, what if you ask the question of yourself? Is it just some righteous part of you that gets to sit at the table of God, just the commendable part?
My all-time favorite Lenten book is Martin Smith’s A Season for the Spirit. I’ve set out a few copies at the foot of the aisle, if you’d like to borrow one. His premise is that within each self there is a little world of selves, and he says this:
“The Holy Spirit of God dwells in your heart and is no stranger to the diversity and conflict there. The Spirit dwells with and among and between all the selves of your self. There is no secret place where the Spirit has no access, nor any inner person excluded from the Spirit’s presence…
“…What the Spirit struggles to achieve in human societies will throw light on what the Spirit is bringing about in my own conversion and healing. If the Spirit unites people into communities of love where there is room for everyone, then the conversion of each heart will be a similar process of reconciliation. The Spirit will bring the selves of the self into a unity around the center of the indwelling Christ. The New Self will be a kind of inner community based on the principle of love in which there is room for everyone.
“Jesus proclaims the hospitality of God that beckons all the excluded and disabled and powerless out of the shadows into the full light of day.
“Jesus is serving notice that the present arrangements of human society are obsolete. The announcement of God’s community of equals requires the abolition of human structures that alienate and oppress and starve out the needy, and that maintain enmities between societies and races…” (And, we might add, deepens the opposition between political parties, among churches, and among people with differing viewpoints who need to hear one another.)
“The Spirit’s work in the heart is not a matter of a few adjustments here and there, a little polishing and refining. There has to be a breaking up of the present order… And so the scriptures speak of a breaking down of the old way of being a person and the discovery of a completely new one. They speak of our need to be born again.”
Compassion is not just for others. Acceptance and forgiveness are not for export only. Carrying around a burden of self-rejection is not going to leave us free to love others, try as hard as we will. Smith says, “Without an inner climate of compassion in the heart it is not possible to be a peacemaker.”
God’s call to take our place at the table is not a call to seat just the righteous part, leaving the rest in the shadows. The righteous part may not even have heard that there is a fiesta, and may simply not need—or may be too busy—to come.
It may need to be a disadvantaged self within the self, a part that is wounded or unwell, that will hear the invitation to come to the table of God.
That embrace goes back, says the Book of Genesis, to Abram. “For he is the father of all of us,” says St. Paul in his letter today. And the noteworthy thing about Abraham, says Paul, is that we celebrate not his righteousness through keeping the law of Israel’s covenant with God—there was no such law, or covenant, or Israel in his time—but instead we remember him for his sheer faith, his trusting of God. (You remember that story: God called a fairly elderly Abram and Sarai his wife to pick up their stakes and move from a settled life in Ur of the Chaldees—that would be modern Iraq—to journey to Canaan, the famous promised land that Israel would one day claim, and endlessly fight over.)
Abraham stops being Abram when he agrees to obey God and become displaced from his homeland, a moment when covenant is made between them and Abram emerges a changed man. Abram, the Hebrew for “exalted father”, gives way to Abraham, an Aramaic form meaning “father of many nations”.
And the point, lest we miss it: Abraham is noteworthy because Jew and Christian and Muslim alike can celebrate him in terms that trump all religious claims that he is one of them. He wasn’t. There was no Judaism to belong to, in any formal sense, in that time. And it’s a sure thing there was no Christianity or Islam. Yet all three recognize his righteousness, and lay claim to him, “father of us all.”
This fractured world needs Abraham!
You can see the cast of characters in our readings today already shaping an answer to the question, “Who gets to sit at the table of God?”
In his letter, St. Paul speaks Abraham language to the Romans, to show that the Christian faith, while rising from Judaism, is not restricted to Jewish people. Christianity “depends on faith, in order that God’s promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all God’s descendants, not only to the adherents of the Jewish law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham…”
And what is the faith of Abraham? Certainty that God allows no resting on laurels. Sureness that God will upset your applecart, even in old age. Assurance that you should never put your hiking boots too far in the back of your closet. Conviction that God never calls you to do anything that God doesn’t also equip you to do. Awareness that God is always making all things new, always conceiving, always gestating a new heaven and a new earth. Realization that here on earth we have no permanent dwelling place. Assent to God’s radical agenda, that God is blessing all nations, not just our own. And, finally, the faith of Abraham is a shedding of the illusion that God’s blessing means ease and comfort, absolute clarity that God’s blessing awakens a person, a nation, to new responsibilities, new insights, new questions, and new ability to pursue the mission that is entrusted whenever God blesses.
Who gets to sit at the table of God? In the light of today’s portions from scripture, perhaps the question ought to be: On what basis could people not find their seats there? And I hear the Gospel answering, not with the suggestion that God could have an exclusivist attitude, but with the words of Jesus: “You must be born from above.” Without openness to the Spirit of God, without being born of the Spirit, one doesn’t look for the table. Without news of the fiesta, one doesn’t come to the fiesta.
Nicodemus gets close. He has come to Jesus by night, and could there not have been a meal in the background of this meeting? We get the sense, though, that Nicodemus, a religious leader with a lot at stake should he be discovered in the ragtag company of Jesus and friends, Nicodemus stands at the edge of holy space, not at the table—in the obscurity of shadow, not out in the torchlight. “How can these things be?” he asks painfully, yearning for what he will not allow himself to reach for.
Nicodemus has a seat. He is a member of the powerful Sanhedrin which will one day pass lethal judgment on Jesus, and, of course, already has judged him a threat to the established order. Nicodemus is not ready to give up that seat. Understandably, since until he met Jesus he had every reason to believe that there was no finer seat at the table of God than to be an elder of Israel. Rather like being an Anglican bishop.
Jesus upsets that sureness. Nicodemus feels drawn, cannot shake the appeal Jesus makes with authentic integrity of divine Spirit that makes the soul of this old man sing. But he has paid attention, has heard Jesus insist that at God’s table no one sits higher than the next, no one gets favored portions or special influence. It is to a table of equals that Jesus invites him, and could it be that Nicodemus can’t yet see his equal in the likes of boastful James and John, the fisherman Peter, that nervous Judas Iscariot—not to mention earnest Mary of Bethany, her fussy sister Martha, and that one with the long hair and bold look, the Magdalene?
Nicodemus’s resistance may be explained by verses from the Gospel of Mark: “As Jesus sat at dinner in Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who followed him. When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ When Jesus heard this, he said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick do; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’” (Mark 2:15-17)
If you know him well, you will not hear those last words as excluding anyone. But he had a sharp tongue, and used it to slice people free from false assumptions and presumptions. The consummate truth-teller, Jesus tells it like it is: the already-righteous do not need him. Those with big important seats to occupy will not see the compelling beauty or hear the sweet wisdom of God’s hospitality without being born from above, of the Spirit.
Who gets to sit at the table of God?
There’s no more important question to be answered than that one. The Episcopal Church is just one of several parts of Christ’s one Body in spasm at this time in history, over this question.
It is a question that you’ll want to ask and answer before you vote in the presidential election, this fall.
The question is being answered falsely wherever racist grafitti appears on walls, or sexist reaction is allowed to go unchallenged, or fear of the stranger is allowed to block our best impulse to welcome, include, and celebrate the seating of yet another who is revealed to be sister, brother.
Now, what if you ask the question of yourself? Is it just some righteous part of you that gets to sit at the table of God, just the commendable part?
My all-time favorite Lenten book is Martin Smith’s A Season for the Spirit. I’ve set out a few copies at the foot of the aisle, if you’d like to borrow one. His premise is that within each self there is a little world of selves, and he says this:
“The Holy Spirit of God dwells in your heart and is no stranger to the diversity and conflict there. The Spirit dwells with and among and between all the selves of your self. There is no secret place where the Spirit has no access, nor any inner person excluded from the Spirit’s presence…
“…What the Spirit struggles to achieve in human societies will throw light on what the Spirit is bringing about in my own conversion and healing. If the Spirit unites people into communities of love where there is room for everyone, then the conversion of each heart will be a similar process of reconciliation. The Spirit will bring the selves of the self into a unity around the center of the indwelling Christ. The New Self will be a kind of inner community based on the principle of love in which there is room for everyone.
“Jesus proclaims the hospitality of God that beckons all the excluded and disabled and powerless out of the shadows into the full light of day.
“Jesus is serving notice that the present arrangements of human society are obsolete. The announcement of God’s community of equals requires the abolition of human structures that alienate and oppress and starve out the needy, and that maintain enmities between societies and races…” (And, we might add, deepens the opposition between political parties, among churches, and among people with differing viewpoints who need to hear one another.)
“The Spirit’s work in the heart is not a matter of a few adjustments here and there, a little polishing and refining. There has to be a breaking up of the present order… And so the scriptures speak of a breaking down of the old way of being a person and the discovery of a completely new one. They speak of our need to be born again.”
Compassion is not just for others. Acceptance and forgiveness are not for export only. Carrying around a burden of self-rejection is not going to leave us free to love others, try as hard as we will. Smith says, “Without an inner climate of compassion in the heart it is not possible to be a peacemaker.”
God’s call to take our place at the table is not a call to seat just the righteous part, leaving the rest in the shadows. The righteous part may not even have heard that there is a fiesta, and may simply not need—or may be too busy—to come.
It may need to be a disadvantaged self within the self, a part that is wounded or unwell, that will hear the invitation to come to the table of God.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
What is Lent for?
So here’s our Lenten mantra this year: “Lent is not about giving up potato chips, but about hearing the story, fresh and deep.”
Today, we might ask “which story?”
Let’s start with the tornadoes in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee. On Tuesday, February 5, storms moving across the South spawned a cluster of killer tornadoes, along with hail and heavy snow. Fifty-five people were killed, over a hundred injured, and countless homes, schools, and businesses were reduced to rubble.
Episcopal Relief and Development has already reached out on our behalf to affected dioceses, beginning assessment to determine critical needs. Don’t assume that working through dioceses means that we’re only taking care of our own. It means that dioceses have local arms and legs, networks and connections. What we heard the prophet Isaiah urge us to do on Ash Wednesday, our Church is doing: to share our bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into our house, to cover the naked, and not to hide ourselves from our own kin.
Let’s call this a Lenten ka’ching moment: what the Emergency Relief Fund of ERD is disbursing, needs replacing. Your gifts placed in Raile’s Bowl this morning will go to that purpose.
Months ago, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori declared this Sunday Episcopal Relief and Development Sunday—a date well chosen.
Other stories circle around us today. St. Matthew tells us of our Lord’s dark night of the soul (in fact, forty nights and days) in the desert, facing down one temptation after another, and all on an empty stomach and in profound solitude.
The first of these temptations catches my imagination: “Command these stones to become loaves of bread.”
What I see when I hear those words is all the stones in this building that we have labored over, these past two years. That each is in its place is already a great act of recycling and change, these many hundreds of glacial pebbles rubbed off in the passage of the Ice Age. For farmers to plow, these stones had to go; and while some became fill and some were piled in walls, these became a church.
Are they of any use, unless they are turned to bread? If we fail to express our faith through works of mercy, compassion, and justice, how does our pile of stones, however charming, glorify God? Without our faith becoming action in the world, don’t we become cold and inert, stone upon stone, with a sad tendency to wobble in our cracking mortar?
There’s one temptation. But Jesus’s own ju-jitsu with the tempter asserts the primacy of God’s living Word over the importance of bread, even to the famished. I hear him saying that if we’re always in motion and never still, always adding to our lists and never emptying our independent souls as Jesus was doing in the desert, if we’re afraid to pray, afraid to really listen and to recognize God in our own experience—then we’ll become hollow and insubstantial. At least stones have mass and dumbly know how to support. Disciples, on the other hand (as we saw last Sunday), tend to get agitated and close up when confronted by change and transcendence. Think of Peter, James, and John on the mount of Transfiguration, nervously offering to build shrines to capture a passing glory while the demand from God is, “Listen to my beloved Son.”
What was Jesus doing in the desert? He was being empty so that the mind and heart and will of God might fill every cell and fiber of his being. He was knowing with God his own weaknesses so that God’s brand of might could build itself in him. He was listening, and he was hearing.
As if this day’s cup of stories isn’t overflowing already, we have yet another about listening. Adam, Eve, and the serpent all share a growing commitment not to listen to the LORD God. The way the story is told and taken, disobedience is the result, and the root of that word tells the story: the edience part of obedience is from the Latin audire, to hear. I’ll guess that the ob part, a Latin preposition, may mean towards.
Towards hearing. That’s what Lent is for: to move us towards hearing, fresh and clear and deep, the story of Jesus’s passion, God’s compassion, and our mission as Christian hearers. The kind of Lenten obedience that will reward us and delight God is not the obedience of grim will power, but the obedience of open-minded, open-hearted listening.
That’s our purpose in the Lenten lunch series that follows this service today and on the four following Sundays. Not business as usual, but time invested in community, gathered around tables for homemade soup and hearty breads. Then hearing a story teller who will help us walk the way of the cross, telling us one story from one day in that holy week that opens with Palm Sunday and, in Easter, refuses to end. We’ll be rediscovering that we’re always in holy week, that all time is within the reign of the Prince of Peace, and that we’re given the mission to claim all moments in his name—as Paul puts it in his letter today, exercising dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
After we hear John Ladd tell the story of Palm Sunday, our Lord’s dramatic entry into Jerusalem, we’ll choose into small groups, either one that will consider how this story speaks to our faith journey, or one that will explore how this story addresses issues of social justice in the world.
Then we’ll hear how this first of the stories of holy week has been enacted and celebrated in the Church’s life over the centuries, how we usually do it here, and we’ll be listening for inspirations as to how we might observe Palm Sunday this year.
All that in eighty minutes, including lunch. And you won’t have to wash the dishes.
You’ll just need to place yourself at the gates of Jerusalem and be open to what you hear and see as Jesus enters the city famed for killing its prophets, chewing up and spitting out its peacemakers. In that respect it could be any modern city, but to belong to all time a story first must have its traction in one time and place, even as it requires us to see and understand our own nature. Does any day in the Christian year do that better than Palm Sunday, when our very own voices call out Hosanna! and Crucify him! all within eight minutes in St. Matthew’s story?
For it is in our nature both to listen deeply and to listen not at all, to hear and understand, and to have an urgent truth pass through the chambers of our ears, in one side, out the other.
“Do not be like horse or mule, which have no understanding; who must be fitted with bit and bridle, or else they will not stay near you.” We said those words that God, through the psalmist, says to us, and we’ll do well to hear them summon us to a Lent of listening. Listening to Jesus’s story so we rightly hear our own, and better understand our own nature, letting it be re-shaped to a finer obedience.
So, if Biscuit the donkey visits us again this Palm Sunday, you and I won’t be shown up as creatures less in tune with God than an ass.
Today, we might ask “which story?”
Let’s start with the tornadoes in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee. On Tuesday, February 5, storms moving across the South spawned a cluster of killer tornadoes, along with hail and heavy snow. Fifty-five people were killed, over a hundred injured, and countless homes, schools, and businesses were reduced to rubble.
Episcopal Relief and Development has already reached out on our behalf to affected dioceses, beginning assessment to determine critical needs. Don’t assume that working through dioceses means that we’re only taking care of our own. It means that dioceses have local arms and legs, networks and connections. What we heard the prophet Isaiah urge us to do on Ash Wednesday, our Church is doing: to share our bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into our house, to cover the naked, and not to hide ourselves from our own kin.
Let’s call this a Lenten ka’ching moment: what the Emergency Relief Fund of ERD is disbursing, needs replacing. Your gifts placed in Raile’s Bowl this morning will go to that purpose.
Months ago, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori declared this Sunday Episcopal Relief and Development Sunday—a date well chosen.
Other stories circle around us today. St. Matthew tells us of our Lord’s dark night of the soul (in fact, forty nights and days) in the desert, facing down one temptation after another, and all on an empty stomach and in profound solitude.
The first of these temptations catches my imagination: “Command these stones to become loaves of bread.”
What I see when I hear those words is all the stones in this building that we have labored over, these past two years. That each is in its place is already a great act of recycling and change, these many hundreds of glacial pebbles rubbed off in the passage of the Ice Age. For farmers to plow, these stones had to go; and while some became fill and some were piled in walls, these became a church.
Are they of any use, unless they are turned to bread? If we fail to express our faith through works of mercy, compassion, and justice, how does our pile of stones, however charming, glorify God? Without our faith becoming action in the world, don’t we become cold and inert, stone upon stone, with a sad tendency to wobble in our cracking mortar?
There’s one temptation. But Jesus’s own ju-jitsu with the tempter asserts the primacy of God’s living Word over the importance of bread, even to the famished. I hear him saying that if we’re always in motion and never still, always adding to our lists and never emptying our independent souls as Jesus was doing in the desert, if we’re afraid to pray, afraid to really listen and to recognize God in our own experience—then we’ll become hollow and insubstantial. At least stones have mass and dumbly know how to support. Disciples, on the other hand (as we saw last Sunday), tend to get agitated and close up when confronted by change and transcendence. Think of Peter, James, and John on the mount of Transfiguration, nervously offering to build shrines to capture a passing glory while the demand from God is, “Listen to my beloved Son.”
What was Jesus doing in the desert? He was being empty so that the mind and heart and will of God might fill every cell and fiber of his being. He was knowing with God his own weaknesses so that God’s brand of might could build itself in him. He was listening, and he was hearing.
As if this day’s cup of stories isn’t overflowing already, we have yet another about listening. Adam, Eve, and the serpent all share a growing commitment not to listen to the LORD God. The way the story is told and taken, disobedience is the result, and the root of that word tells the story: the edience part of obedience is from the Latin audire, to hear. I’ll guess that the ob part, a Latin preposition, may mean towards.
Towards hearing. That’s what Lent is for: to move us towards hearing, fresh and clear and deep, the story of Jesus’s passion, God’s compassion, and our mission as Christian hearers. The kind of Lenten obedience that will reward us and delight God is not the obedience of grim will power, but the obedience of open-minded, open-hearted listening.
That’s our purpose in the Lenten lunch series that follows this service today and on the four following Sundays. Not business as usual, but time invested in community, gathered around tables for homemade soup and hearty breads. Then hearing a story teller who will help us walk the way of the cross, telling us one story from one day in that holy week that opens with Palm Sunday and, in Easter, refuses to end. We’ll be rediscovering that we’re always in holy week, that all time is within the reign of the Prince of Peace, and that we’re given the mission to claim all moments in his name—as Paul puts it in his letter today, exercising dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
After we hear John Ladd tell the story of Palm Sunday, our Lord’s dramatic entry into Jerusalem, we’ll choose into small groups, either one that will consider how this story speaks to our faith journey, or one that will explore how this story addresses issues of social justice in the world.
Then we’ll hear how this first of the stories of holy week has been enacted and celebrated in the Church’s life over the centuries, how we usually do it here, and we’ll be listening for inspirations as to how we might observe Palm Sunday this year.
All that in eighty minutes, including lunch. And you won’t have to wash the dishes.
You’ll just need to place yourself at the gates of Jerusalem and be open to what you hear and see as Jesus enters the city famed for killing its prophets, chewing up and spitting out its peacemakers. In that respect it could be any modern city, but to belong to all time a story first must have its traction in one time and place, even as it requires us to see and understand our own nature. Does any day in the Christian year do that better than Palm Sunday, when our very own voices call out Hosanna! and Crucify him! all within eight minutes in St. Matthew’s story?
For it is in our nature both to listen deeply and to listen not at all, to hear and understand, and to have an urgent truth pass through the chambers of our ears, in one side, out the other.
“Do not be like horse or mule, which have no understanding; who must be fitted with bit and bridle, or else they will not stay near you.” We said those words that God, through the psalmist, says to us, and we’ll do well to hear them summon us to a Lent of listening. Listening to Jesus’s story so we rightly hear our own, and better understand our own nature, letting it be re-shaped to a finer obedience.
So, if Biscuit the donkey visits us again this Palm Sunday, you and I won’t be shown up as creatures less in tune with God than an ass.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Called by a New Name
I notice that our Lord changed a name in his encounter with his first two disciples. We’re not told whether Andrew underwent such a change, but his brother Simon did: “’You are to be called Kephas,’ (which is translated Peter).”
The fact is, of course, that Kephas is the Greek form of the Aramaic word that Jesus had in mind, the word for rock. What a merry little linguistic chase that is to make the point that our Lord saw in a flash, knew in his gut, read it clearly that Simon aka Kephas aka Peter was going to play a key role in his mission plan.
“The Rock”: says it all. Last Sunday, I urged you to hear the divine voice Jesus heard at his baptism addressing you: You are my son, my daughter, beloved; with you I am well pleased. Today, imagine yourself in the shoes of this fisherman. You’re being welcomed to the very core of a team that Jesus is forming simply by his Word, and he’s calling you Rock.
You will spend the rest of your life scratching your head, wondering why. You will spend the rest of your life trying to live into the truth of that name.
That he did live into this truth is shown in that every year the Church keeps January 18th as the Feast of the Confession of Peter, recalling how he was also the first of the disciples to recognize who Jesus truly is, and to call him by the name Messiah.
Names are important, aren’t they? Today, we heard Jesus change one in the calling of a disciple. We might all agree that he has authority to do that.
You may have noticed that in the opening verses and responses of the baptismal rite today, a name was changed in that we called God not just Father, but Mother as well. I did that. In the moment when I used that red pen, I had no doubt whatsoever that it was time to do so. In the moments that followed, doubt grew. And then it was printed, making it time to, well, deal with it.
Perhaps I need to be wary of those moments when I feel no doubt whatsoever—for I did not have authority to make that change.
It’s hardly a novel idea, calling God Mother. Not in the Judaic portion of our religious tradition, where at places in the Wisdom literature of the Bible Wisdom is named Sophia, and she speaks with God’s voice.
In the Book of Ecclesiasticus, we hear, “Wisdom tells of her glory… In the assembly of the Most high she opens her mouth… ‘I came forth from the mouth of the Most high, and covered the earth like a mist… I sought a resting place… Then the Creator of all things gave me a command… “Make your dwelling in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inheritance.”’”
And in the Book of The Wisdom of Solomon, “Wisdom protected the first-formed father of the world, when he alone had been created;… She delivered him from his transgression, and gave him strength to rule all things…” Later, “She brought (Israel) over the Red Sea, and led them through deep waters…”
Nor is it novel, calling God Mother, in the Christian tradition that brings us the likes of Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, and Hildegard of Bingen. Saints of God have been calling her Mother for, literally, centuries.
And it is in prayer that they found her. Doubtless, they were trained to pray to God their Father, and doubtless they did. Or was it doubtful, after they’d lived long enough to consider their own experience and recognize there the gentle patience of God, the tender cradling of God, the sensual intimacy of the Spirit, prayer’s relentless loving silence of the womb—was it doubtful, in time, that only the fatherhood of God “worked” to communicate the fullness of love within the Godhead?
Here’s Julian’s answer. In one of her “showings” or revelations she writes,
“And thus in our creation God Almighty is our natural father, and God all-wisdom is our natural mother, with the love and goodness of the Holy Spirit. These are all one God, one Lord. In the knitting and joining he is our real, true spouse and we are his loved wife and his fair maiden. ….”
So I hear Isaiah say that God names us in the womb, I look at the name Sophia Catherine, and I hear these female witnesses rejoicing that their number is about to grow by one, and I hear them testifying to how much more God is than our liturgical language permits us to celebrate, and I wonder how will we help train Sophia Catherine and all our children if we don’t allow our language of worship to reach to express the fullness of our tradition? How will we show our children the fullness of who God is, and help them embrace the wholeness of who they are, if we are afraid to expand our language in worship, keeping it true to what we know in prayer?
It exceeds my authority, to alter the language of the baptismal rite. By that same principle, I shouldn’t have drawn today’s post-communion prayer from the Presbyterian Church—and without that our communion rite today would say nothing about Martin Luther King, Jr. on a day when we need to have communion with him.
Perhaps my own aging is causing me to question the Anglican premise that we will not change words in our liturgy until the entire Church decides how to make those changes and makes them all together. Somehow, I’m sensing that the Episcopal Church will be preoccupied for the foreseeable future, and won’t be revising the Book of Common Prayer in the active years I have remaining.
Does that mean that our Lord won’t change a few names as he moves his mission team forward in the world? He will, for he has that authority. And when he changes the names we use, it is so that we will wonder and pray our way to growing into what new names mean.
Sophia Catherine’s name will not change today, but what she is called will grow. In just a few moments, we will take action with water in the name of God and from then on she will be called child of God, member of Christ’s Body the Church, and inheritor of the Kingdom of God. These are her new names, according to the teaching of the Book of Common Prayer. Isn’t it interesting that “Episcopalian” is missing from that list?
That is because this branch of Christ’s Church understands Holy Baptism as a sacrament that belongs to the whole Church. Because it is the defining sacrament that brings a person into union with Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection, it is an ecumenical action, not a denominational one. To borrow an image from our patron, St. John, baptism welcomes a person into the one household of God, without assigning her to one of those many dwelling-places (“mansions” in the King James Version) where we in time settle.
Seen that way, today’s baptism fits beautifully the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in which we find ourselves. On Wednesday at noon, people from several Williamstown churches will meet in our upper room to celebrate the unity we recognize in Jesus Christ, and to repent of our disunity. Episcopalians need to sharpen that spiritual skill, repenting of disunity. I hope you will come to welcome our Baptist, Methodist, Congregational, and Roman Catholic neighbors. Noon, Wednesday.
Those denominational places we settle in, those religions mansions we inhabit, give us specific places into which we sink roots and find nourishment. What we are specifically called as Christians, our own variety, is a name given to us to live into.
What fills me with wonder and delight is the variety of religious experience and expression we have even in this one congregation. We’re still getting acquainted with ten new households worshiping with us since the fall, and while some come to us as Episcopalians, two people come as Adventist Christians, two are Unitarian Universalists, one is a Congregationalist, another describes himself equally at home with Buddhism as with Christianity. We are blessed to have among us people who did, and people who still do, identify themselves as Lutherans, as Roman Catholics, as Presbyterians. I believe we’re also blessed to have among us a share of agnostics who ask wonderful edgy questions.
This is small-town American Christianity. Many of us have taken new names during our spiritual journeys.
This happens in the story John tells today about Andrew and Peter. They were, at verse 35, disciples of John the Baptizer. By verse 42, they have become disciples of Jesus of Nazareth. All because their former teacher, John, gives Jesus a new name, Son of God.
Many of us like a settled life. Today’s Gospel—in fact, the whole Gospel of Jesus Christ—gives us little reason to expect a settled life in company with Jesus. He changes names. He adds to what we are called.
The fact is, of course, that Kephas is the Greek form of the Aramaic word that Jesus had in mind, the word for rock. What a merry little linguistic chase that is to make the point that our Lord saw in a flash, knew in his gut, read it clearly that Simon aka Kephas aka Peter was going to play a key role in his mission plan.
“The Rock”: says it all. Last Sunday, I urged you to hear the divine voice Jesus heard at his baptism addressing you: You are my son, my daughter, beloved; with you I am well pleased. Today, imagine yourself in the shoes of this fisherman. You’re being welcomed to the very core of a team that Jesus is forming simply by his Word, and he’s calling you Rock.
You will spend the rest of your life scratching your head, wondering why. You will spend the rest of your life trying to live into the truth of that name.
That he did live into this truth is shown in that every year the Church keeps January 18th as the Feast of the Confession of Peter, recalling how he was also the first of the disciples to recognize who Jesus truly is, and to call him by the name Messiah.
Names are important, aren’t they? Today, we heard Jesus change one in the calling of a disciple. We might all agree that he has authority to do that.
You may have noticed that in the opening verses and responses of the baptismal rite today, a name was changed in that we called God not just Father, but Mother as well. I did that. In the moment when I used that red pen, I had no doubt whatsoever that it was time to do so. In the moments that followed, doubt grew. And then it was printed, making it time to, well, deal with it.
Perhaps I need to be wary of those moments when I feel no doubt whatsoever—for I did not have authority to make that change.
It’s hardly a novel idea, calling God Mother. Not in the Judaic portion of our religious tradition, where at places in the Wisdom literature of the Bible Wisdom is named Sophia, and she speaks with God’s voice.
In the Book of Ecclesiasticus, we hear, “Wisdom tells of her glory… In the assembly of the Most high she opens her mouth… ‘I came forth from the mouth of the Most high, and covered the earth like a mist… I sought a resting place… Then the Creator of all things gave me a command… “Make your dwelling in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inheritance.”’”
And in the Book of The Wisdom of Solomon, “Wisdom protected the first-formed father of the world, when he alone had been created;… She delivered him from his transgression, and gave him strength to rule all things…” Later, “She brought (Israel) over the Red Sea, and led them through deep waters…”
Nor is it novel, calling God Mother, in the Christian tradition that brings us the likes of Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, and Hildegard of Bingen. Saints of God have been calling her Mother for, literally, centuries.
And it is in prayer that they found her. Doubtless, they were trained to pray to God their Father, and doubtless they did. Or was it doubtful, after they’d lived long enough to consider their own experience and recognize there the gentle patience of God, the tender cradling of God, the sensual intimacy of the Spirit, prayer’s relentless loving silence of the womb—was it doubtful, in time, that only the fatherhood of God “worked” to communicate the fullness of love within the Godhead?
Here’s Julian’s answer. In one of her “showings” or revelations she writes,
“And thus in our creation God Almighty is our natural father, and God all-wisdom is our natural mother, with the love and goodness of the Holy Spirit. These are all one God, one Lord. In the knitting and joining he is our real, true spouse and we are his loved wife and his fair maiden. ….”
So I hear Isaiah say that God names us in the womb, I look at the name Sophia Catherine, and I hear these female witnesses rejoicing that their number is about to grow by one, and I hear them testifying to how much more God is than our liturgical language permits us to celebrate, and I wonder how will we help train Sophia Catherine and all our children if we don’t allow our language of worship to reach to express the fullness of our tradition? How will we show our children the fullness of who God is, and help them embrace the wholeness of who they are, if we are afraid to expand our language in worship, keeping it true to what we know in prayer?
It exceeds my authority, to alter the language of the baptismal rite. By that same principle, I shouldn’t have drawn today’s post-communion prayer from the Presbyterian Church—and without that our communion rite today would say nothing about Martin Luther King, Jr. on a day when we need to have communion with him.
Perhaps my own aging is causing me to question the Anglican premise that we will not change words in our liturgy until the entire Church decides how to make those changes and makes them all together. Somehow, I’m sensing that the Episcopal Church will be preoccupied for the foreseeable future, and won’t be revising the Book of Common Prayer in the active years I have remaining.
Does that mean that our Lord won’t change a few names as he moves his mission team forward in the world? He will, for he has that authority. And when he changes the names we use, it is so that we will wonder and pray our way to growing into what new names mean.
Sophia Catherine’s name will not change today, but what she is called will grow. In just a few moments, we will take action with water in the name of God and from then on she will be called child of God, member of Christ’s Body the Church, and inheritor of the Kingdom of God. These are her new names, according to the teaching of the Book of Common Prayer. Isn’t it interesting that “Episcopalian” is missing from that list?
That is because this branch of Christ’s Church understands Holy Baptism as a sacrament that belongs to the whole Church. Because it is the defining sacrament that brings a person into union with Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection, it is an ecumenical action, not a denominational one. To borrow an image from our patron, St. John, baptism welcomes a person into the one household of God, without assigning her to one of those many dwelling-places (“mansions” in the King James Version) where we in time settle.
Seen that way, today’s baptism fits beautifully the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in which we find ourselves. On Wednesday at noon, people from several Williamstown churches will meet in our upper room to celebrate the unity we recognize in Jesus Christ, and to repent of our disunity. Episcopalians need to sharpen that spiritual skill, repenting of disunity. I hope you will come to welcome our Baptist, Methodist, Congregational, and Roman Catholic neighbors. Noon, Wednesday.
Those denominational places we settle in, those religions mansions we inhabit, give us specific places into which we sink roots and find nourishment. What we are specifically called as Christians, our own variety, is a name given to us to live into.
What fills me with wonder and delight is the variety of religious experience and expression we have even in this one congregation. We’re still getting acquainted with ten new households worshiping with us since the fall, and while some come to us as Episcopalians, two people come as Adventist Christians, two are Unitarian Universalists, one is a Congregationalist, another describes himself equally at home with Buddhism as with Christianity. We are blessed to have among us people who did, and people who still do, identify themselves as Lutherans, as Roman Catholics, as Presbyterians. I believe we’re also blessed to have among us a share of agnostics who ask wonderful edgy questions.
This is small-town American Christianity. Many of us have taken new names during our spiritual journeys.
This happens in the story John tells today about Andrew and Peter. They were, at verse 35, disciples of John the Baptizer. By verse 42, they have become disciples of Jesus of Nazareth. All because their former teacher, John, gives Jesus a new name, Son of God.
Many of us like a settled life. Today’s Gospel—in fact, the whole Gospel of Jesus Christ—gives us little reason to expect a settled life in company with Jesus. He changes names. He adds to what we are called.
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