Scripture for Easter Day includes Acts 10:34-43; Colossians 3:1-4; Matthew 28:1-10
Sitting in this room at this moment are people who assemble here pretty much every Sunday. If our pews were lined with memory foam, the pews themselves would have the imprint of these folks. (Oh, my… I hope I haven’t unwittingly inspired the vestry to explore church growth through better upholstery...)
We who come here often do so to have the moving parts of our lives reassembled, parts that seize-up and rub against the grain of best intentions and deepest hopes, and need freeing. I think all of us in this category see ourselves as seekers who come here as one way, one important way but not the only way, to allow God to do that healing, that correcting course, that restoring of perspective, that forgiving, that we acknowledge we need and want.
There’s another chief reason people become frequent flyers in a place like this, and that is that we make it a chief priority to retune our gratitude for life, ordinary life and all that is gracious and wondrous about it, and extraordinary life in which we see God’s hand and God’s likeness in remarkable experiences of the human spirit, new awareness of the whole shimmering mantle of interdependence on this planet, and fresh instances of ethical courage. We sing the scales of appreciation and gratefulness, Sunday by Sunday, such basic training for daily practice, moment by moment practice, that the heart of our communion liturgy is called The Great Thanksgiving.
And sitting here this morning are visitors and guests and perhaps a few who required a bit of persuasion to attend. This second category of who we are together today includes frequent flyers from other churches in other places, and you’re here perhaps because you’re visiting local family and friends. And some are occasional flyers, occasions like Christmas and Easter and the match-hatch-and-despatch occasions of weddings, baptisms, and funerals… and whenever the spirit moves.
If it weren’t for all of you, we regulars would be mightily disoriented today. We would be looking around us wondering, “Where ARE they? All those people who remind us that this place is not ours but God’s? All the Easter peeps who represent a wonderful challenge to our complacency and remind us of our mission to all people, not just some.
So it’s to you, our visitors and guests, especially you who aren’t necessarily conscious of being spiritual seekers; and even more especially you who are quite certain you’re not in any rush to take on yourself the responsibilities and contradictions, the trappings and potpourri of pew mates of organized religion)-- to you I dedicate this sermon.
I invite you to notice that in our first reading, from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, St. Peter sets the bar for inclusion in the Kingdom of God at a pretty accessible level: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”
No partiality. Radical equality. Frequent flyers in this room, the church’s regulars, are on equal footing with the Christmas and Easter folks, in God’s eyes. But more radical yet, neither gender nor class nor race nor religion works against you in the new creation God set in motion, that first Easter Day . The wealthiest in the 1% and the poorest in the 99% have adjacent seats at the heavenly banquet (assuming that the 1%ers are able to fit through the door, through the famous eye of the needle, heaven’s own homeland security).
One of the two basic requirements set by St. Peter is, “Anyone who does what is right is acceptable to God.” I for one believe it does fuller justice to the Gospel of Jesus Christ to say that anyone who does what is right is approved by God, even treasured by God.
But here’s the thing: What is right? Who gets to determine that? On the one hand (we might call it the upper hand) God does. And by the time the great vision and wisdom of the Hebrew prophets, their passion for justice and mercy, had passed into the obedience of Jesus Christ, God’s definition of what is right is compressed like a diamond in the brief and brilliant summary: You shall love the LORD your God with your whole heart, your whole mind, your whole strength; and you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.
And on the other hand, translating that into right action towards our neighbors is what we might call the lower hand that reaches out to open or close doors, embrace or distance, keep or share, brandish a sword or wield a pen, an olive branch, a green card. .
And on the third hand—oh my, someone lend me a hand!—ah, that’s what the community of faith does: Because what is right must fit not just God’s upper hand to guide and my lower hand to accomplish, but also a healthy love of self; because of the necessity of this foundation of faithful self-care, the community of faith engages people in augmenting their own self-care with spiritual practice, ministries of outreach, fearless exploration, and personal opportunity to recover from exhaustion and abuse within a sheltering-but-challenging environment of support and safety, prayer and sacrament, faith and hope and love. And because we know doing what is right is costly, we make it our aim to engage people in renewal and repair, rather than rules and obligations.
Even before “doing what is right,” St. Peter names “fearing God” as the attitude essential to this new creation into which Easter invites us. If any word in the Bible could use an extreme makeover, isn’t it fear (at least fear of God)? Ancient religions were built on fear. The Old Testament brims over with fearsome encounters with God, though our best take-aways from the Hebrew scriptures are their insistent assurancs of God’s lovingkindness and covenant loyalty. Building on that foundation, the New Testament keeps sending angels into the script—both at Christmas and at Easter, and all along the way—urging all the players to fear not!
So today in Matthew’s account of the resurrection, the two Marys leave the empty tomb “quickly with fear and great joy” and run to tell the other disciples the astonishing things they have seen and heard.
Easter is about joy commingling with fear to create reverence, the attitude of awe and gratitude for the gift of all that is sweet and spectacular in ordinary life and all the grace of extraordinary life that is beyond our earning, better than our designing.
Fear is always in the mix of how we experience mystery, always part of how we handle uncertainty and the not-yet-known. The faith we build and practice must be brave and broad enough to welcome fear to come in out of the cold, in under our own roof—God’s own roof-- where we can examine and reassemble the moving parts of our lives, find the freeing we need, and the guiding and the forgiving and the encouraging.
For the new creation opened on Easter Day takes the reverence that joy makes of fear and calls us to use it, to offer it in renewed commitment to do what is right: for God, for neighbor, and for self.
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Saturday, April 12, 2014
Raising Lazarus
Scripture for the 5th Sunday in Lent includes Ezekiel 37:1-14; Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45
Monday, I noticed a little clump of snowdrops blooming, at the base of the maple in our front yard.
Tuesday, I saw several white fists hugging the earth at the center of the Christmas rose in our front garden. By Wednesday, these buds were opening, persuaded apparently that the sun was to be trusted. I guess hellebores don’t mind the calendar too precisely (but, to give it all the credit it’s due, Diana reminds me that it did bloom at Christmas).
Meanwhile, out back, the Lenten rose hellebore has set its pink buds, but they’re so tight that they a week or so to catch up with the season. I know that feeling.
Wednesday, the first crocuses bloomed in that south-facing garden, just a handful.
Thursday, the purple, gold, and white had spread, and those crocuses were feeding the first phalanx of bees. Now, that was the crowning proof that winter has released its grip. What a surprise, and what a pleasure, to see those bees.
A lot can happen in four days. When Jesus arrived in Bethany, his old friend Lazarus had lain in his tomb that long. St. John’s purpose in that detail-- four days-- seems to convey the conventional expectation that a body would be in rapid decay by then. Such is the arithmetic when the mind is set on the flesh.
I would much prefer to set my mind on the front garden, to see what four days can accomplish. There’s grassroots training in the mathematics of resurrection, encouraging us to rehearse for Holy Week, when three or four great days will persuade us that death has released its grip on life.
It’s right in keeping with Jesus Christ that right from the start of this great Lazarus story
St. John tells, Jesus seems persuaded that death will not get the final say. Mary and Martha, sisters of Lazarus, had sent messengers to Jesus, urging his quick return to do something about this pending loss that would leave them bereft—and would grieve Jesus too, for everyone knew that these two men were close friends.
But Jesus does not react. He stays two days longer where he and the disciples have been on a mission that exposed them to an angry crowd ready to stone Jesus for blasphemy. Most of us would have jumped to the opportunity to escape such danger—who would blame him for backing down, when a good friend is at the point of death?
But it’s in keeping with Jesus that he’s persuaded that death will not have the final say over him. He stays until his work is done. Then, as he sets out for Bethany where the home of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary had been his frequent sanctuary of shelter and renewal and rest, he announces, “Lazarus is dead; let us go to him,” as if those two clauses weren’t at all as contradictory as they sound to us.
From John the Gospel writer, John our patron saint, here is another long story in our Lenten cavalcade of long Gospels in which Jesus goes one-on-one, with increasingly wondrous results.
First was the Samaritan woman he met at the well, overturning ancient cultural prohibitions that were meant to keep men and women separate, unequal, alienated. But his mission is to work the works of God, and with her he manifested a reconciling love that made her an apostle to the people of Samaria.
Last Sunday, Jesus encountered the man born blind. With him, our Lord’s mission is to work the works of God by both restoring his sight and by dismantling a nasty theology that blamed the sinner for his own suffering, and blamed God for running a universe based on getting even.
Today, the next step in the ladder rising toward his own passion, his own death and resurrection, we hear this rehearsal for Easter, Jesus betting the store on his trust that death will not have the final say.
There is much to appreciate in this gritty story. Martha, known for her embrace of the active life, for her conviction that acts of generous care can keep death at bay at least a while, it’s Martha who runs to meet Jesus on the road and scolds him for being too late to prevent her brother’s death—but if he will hurry and bombard heaven with his prayer, who knows what will happen?
“Your brother will rise again,” Jesus declare to her. “I think I know what you mean,” replies Martha, “At the last, when all is said and done, and God makes right all ancient wrong, and the just rise to their reward, Lazarus will be among them. But what about now?”
“I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
Though she says she does, am I imagining it, or is she muttering to herself, “For heaven sake, there he goes again, rhapsodizing the way I hear Mary do when she speaks of him…” So Martha runs back to the house to pull Mary away from her praying, and says to her, “the Teacher is here and is calling for you.” Which is to say, “Get it through to him, will you, that we need some action here! Use your contemplative language to say what my activist soul does not know how to say.”
When Mary does, she uses her sister’s exact language (“Lord, if you had been here, this wouldn’t have happened…”) though I hear her words as gentler, and her words dissolve into her tears, the deeper vocabulary of the contemplative way.
Her tears disturb Jesus. He could have said to Mary, “Mary, hear your own words: if I had come sooner, this grace wouldn’t have happened either, this astonishing confrontation between life and death that we’re about to have…” Instead, he goes with her beyond language into spirit, and joins her in weeping.
And he becomes even more disturbed, says John. Jesus goes to the tomb. “It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone.’”
Martha, the activist, protests this ultimate action. Fear grips even her.
Is it even clutching his vocal cords as he dares to speak the Word of life? “Lazarus, come out!” He bets the whole store, the very kingdom itself, as he who is the Word of God evokes, from the other side of death, the response of faith. By the terms of this story, the dead are not beyond the gracious reach of God.
It is said that the raising of Lazarus accelerated the growing campaign to do away with Jesus. The reported return to life of a dead man embarrassed the authorities, threatened the authorities. Lazarus had long been in their crosshairs, too: the kind of radical justice that Jesus stood for, Lazarus had stood for. And now here he was, standing again—explain that however you will—they just couldn’t shake free from this fellow.
In the next chapter of John’s Gospel, it is a few days later. Jesus the itinerant preacher goes away for a few days, then returns to Bethany, where the sisters Martha and Mary prepare a dinner for Jesus. Lazarus is at the table, among the disciples. It is then that Mary anoints Jesus with costly perfume, which hindsight would show to be in preparation for his death. It is then that Judas Iscariot turns on them all, complaining that the perfume should have been sold to feed the poor (as if he cared about the poor… he kept the money box and used to steal what was in it, so we’re told).
And it is then that we are told that great crowds of people come, not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. And it is on account of Lazarus that many people are believing in Jesus.
And it is then, the next day, that Jesus and his disciples come to Jerusalem, and those crowds take branches of palm trees and go to meet him, shouting Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—the King of Israel!
The voice of Wendell Berry’s musing farmer could be the voice of Lazarus:
“However long I’ve stayed away,
coming home is resurrection. The man
who has been gone comes back to his place
as he would come naked and cold
into his own clothes… The dead,
too, denying their graves, haunt
the places they were known in and knew…
To the place we parted from in sorrow
we return in joy; the beautiful shore,
eternal morning, unclouded day.”
Wendell Berry
Leavings 2008, No. 10, in his collection Leavings (Counterpoint, 2010)
Monday, I noticed a little clump of snowdrops blooming, at the base of the maple in our front yard.
Tuesday, I saw several white fists hugging the earth at the center of the Christmas rose in our front garden. By Wednesday, these buds were opening, persuaded apparently that the sun was to be trusted. I guess hellebores don’t mind the calendar too precisely (but, to give it all the credit it’s due, Diana reminds me that it did bloom at Christmas).
Meanwhile, out back, the Lenten rose hellebore has set its pink buds, but they’re so tight that they a week or so to catch up with the season. I know that feeling.
Wednesday, the first crocuses bloomed in that south-facing garden, just a handful.
Thursday, the purple, gold, and white had spread, and those crocuses were feeding the first phalanx of bees. Now, that was the crowning proof that winter has released its grip. What a surprise, and what a pleasure, to see those bees.
A lot can happen in four days. When Jesus arrived in Bethany, his old friend Lazarus had lain in his tomb that long. St. John’s purpose in that detail-- four days-- seems to convey the conventional expectation that a body would be in rapid decay by then. Such is the arithmetic when the mind is set on the flesh.
I would much prefer to set my mind on the front garden, to see what four days can accomplish. There’s grassroots training in the mathematics of resurrection, encouraging us to rehearse for Holy Week, when three or four great days will persuade us that death has released its grip on life.
It’s right in keeping with Jesus Christ that right from the start of this great Lazarus story
St. John tells, Jesus seems persuaded that death will not get the final say. Mary and Martha, sisters of Lazarus, had sent messengers to Jesus, urging his quick return to do something about this pending loss that would leave them bereft—and would grieve Jesus too, for everyone knew that these two men were close friends.
But Jesus does not react. He stays two days longer where he and the disciples have been on a mission that exposed them to an angry crowd ready to stone Jesus for blasphemy. Most of us would have jumped to the opportunity to escape such danger—who would blame him for backing down, when a good friend is at the point of death?
But it’s in keeping with Jesus that he’s persuaded that death will not have the final say over him. He stays until his work is done. Then, as he sets out for Bethany where the home of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary had been his frequent sanctuary of shelter and renewal and rest, he announces, “Lazarus is dead; let us go to him,” as if those two clauses weren’t at all as contradictory as they sound to us.
From John the Gospel writer, John our patron saint, here is another long story in our Lenten cavalcade of long Gospels in which Jesus goes one-on-one, with increasingly wondrous results.
First was the Samaritan woman he met at the well, overturning ancient cultural prohibitions that were meant to keep men and women separate, unequal, alienated. But his mission is to work the works of God, and with her he manifested a reconciling love that made her an apostle to the people of Samaria.
Last Sunday, Jesus encountered the man born blind. With him, our Lord’s mission is to work the works of God by both restoring his sight and by dismantling a nasty theology that blamed the sinner for his own suffering, and blamed God for running a universe based on getting even.
Today, the next step in the ladder rising toward his own passion, his own death and resurrection, we hear this rehearsal for Easter, Jesus betting the store on his trust that death will not have the final say.
There is much to appreciate in this gritty story. Martha, known for her embrace of the active life, for her conviction that acts of generous care can keep death at bay at least a while, it’s Martha who runs to meet Jesus on the road and scolds him for being too late to prevent her brother’s death—but if he will hurry and bombard heaven with his prayer, who knows what will happen?
“Your brother will rise again,” Jesus declare to her. “I think I know what you mean,” replies Martha, “At the last, when all is said and done, and God makes right all ancient wrong, and the just rise to their reward, Lazarus will be among them. But what about now?”
“I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
Though she says she does, am I imagining it, or is she muttering to herself, “For heaven sake, there he goes again, rhapsodizing the way I hear Mary do when she speaks of him…” So Martha runs back to the house to pull Mary away from her praying, and says to her, “the Teacher is here and is calling for you.” Which is to say, “Get it through to him, will you, that we need some action here! Use your contemplative language to say what my activist soul does not know how to say.”
When Mary does, she uses her sister’s exact language (“Lord, if you had been here, this wouldn’t have happened…”) though I hear her words as gentler, and her words dissolve into her tears, the deeper vocabulary of the contemplative way.
Her tears disturb Jesus. He could have said to Mary, “Mary, hear your own words: if I had come sooner, this grace wouldn’t have happened either, this astonishing confrontation between life and death that we’re about to have…” Instead, he goes with her beyond language into spirit, and joins her in weeping.
And he becomes even more disturbed, says John. Jesus goes to the tomb. “It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone.’”
Martha, the activist, protests this ultimate action. Fear grips even her.
Is it even clutching his vocal cords as he dares to speak the Word of life? “Lazarus, come out!” He bets the whole store, the very kingdom itself, as he who is the Word of God evokes, from the other side of death, the response of faith. By the terms of this story, the dead are not beyond the gracious reach of God.
It is said that the raising of Lazarus accelerated the growing campaign to do away with Jesus. The reported return to life of a dead man embarrassed the authorities, threatened the authorities. Lazarus had long been in their crosshairs, too: the kind of radical justice that Jesus stood for, Lazarus had stood for. And now here he was, standing again—explain that however you will—they just couldn’t shake free from this fellow.
In the next chapter of John’s Gospel, it is a few days later. Jesus the itinerant preacher goes away for a few days, then returns to Bethany, where the sisters Martha and Mary prepare a dinner for Jesus. Lazarus is at the table, among the disciples. It is then that Mary anoints Jesus with costly perfume, which hindsight would show to be in preparation for his death. It is then that Judas Iscariot turns on them all, complaining that the perfume should have been sold to feed the poor (as if he cared about the poor… he kept the money box and used to steal what was in it, so we’re told).
And it is then that we are told that great crowds of people come, not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. And it is on account of Lazarus that many people are believing in Jesus.
And it is then, the next day, that Jesus and his disciples come to Jerusalem, and those crowds take branches of palm trees and go to meet him, shouting Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—the King of Israel!
The voice of Wendell Berry’s musing farmer could be the voice of Lazarus:
“However long I’ve stayed away,
coming home is resurrection. The man
who has been gone comes back to his place
as he would come naked and cold
into his own clothes… The dead,
too, denying their graves, haunt
the places they were known in and knew…
To the place we parted from in sorrow
we return in joy; the beautiful shore,
eternal morning, unclouded day.”
Wendell Berry
Leavings 2008, No. 10, in his collection Leavings (Counterpoint, 2010)
Monday, March 31, 2014
Facing Reality, Facing the Future
Scripture for the 4th Sunday in Lent includes I Samuel 16:1-13; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41. This poem opened our service, that morning:
“Mind”
Mind in its purest play is like some bat
That beats about in caverns all alone,
Contriving by a kind of senseless wit
Not to conclude against a wall of stone.
It has no need to falter or explore;
Darkly it knows what obstacles are there,
And so may weave and flitter, dip and soar
In perfect courses through the blackest air.
And has this simile a like perfection?
The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save
That in the very happiest intellection
A graceful error may correct the cave.
Richard Wilbur, New and Collected Poems
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1998
The fourth Sunday in Lent is nicknamed Refreshment Sunday. As if, midway through this penitential season, we need to kick back, lighten up, and start rehearsing for Easter.
Whatever I might have imagined preaching on, this Sunday, is at least partially eclipsed by the news that has shaken us all in the North County, the closing of North Adams Regional Hospital. I say “partially eclipsed” because I see a couple of ways in which our readings may help us look directly at that difficult decision and its impact. So by the end of this sermon I trust we’ll have had not just current events, but some recollection of scripture.
But for sure, and first, I want to revisit Richard Wilbur’s poem, which he entitles “Mind”. He says that the mind “in its purest play is like some bat that beats about in caverns…” using a “senseless wit not to conclude against a wall of stone.”
The poet isn’t describing the mind only in its thinking function: he says “Mind in its purest play,” to include the whole of its functioning, not just the cerebral cortex that sits enthroned on the mammalian brain, which is atop the reptilian brain, but all those layers, their instincts, the wits we have with and without such senses as sight and hearing. The poet holds the bat in high regard: “It has no need to falter or explore; darkly it knows what obstacles are there, and so may weave and flitter, dip and soar in perfect courses through the blackest air.”
You might even say that a bat navigates far more impressively and successfully than human beings do, even with our global positioning devices (if we’ve learned how to use them). The bat in our poem beats about alone: put two or three human beings in a car, and though they face in one direction, they’ll find it tempting to argue what direction to go in next.
How perfect is this simile: “The mind is like a bat”? In this one way it’s an imprecise comparison: “that in the very happiest intellection a graceful error may correct the cave.”
I don’t know what Richard Wilbur means there. If you do, I’ll look forward to hearing your theory later. But I can’t help wondering if he doesn’t mean to remind us of the allegory of the cave in Plato’s “Republic”. Here’s a pithy little description of that allegory, straight from Wikipedia:
“Plato has Socrates describe a collection of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to assign names to these shadows. The shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. Socrates then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.”
Correcting the cave, reorienting perception within the cave, revealing what is real and true from what is distorted and false, all this is the work of the philosopher, the one who dares break his or her captivity, and turning, turning, comes round right and becomes the truth teller.
So let’s consider the image of the cave. An engulfing crisis (the closing of our hospital, for instance) can feel like a cave, dark, foreboding, confusing, threatening, and while the fire in the cave may give light and warmth, we’re probably not facing it: more likely, our eyes are glued to our ipads, as we search the news sites for… news, with all its shadows and distortions.
Things are not necessarily what they seem. That’s true in Plato’s cave, and it’s true at that ritual gathering at Bethlehem, where the prophet Samuel was looking to anoint the next king of Israel and had before him all the sons of Jesse—all save one, the youngest, the cocky one, the boy Jesse was hoping to train by setting him out to keep the sheep. The Lord God of hosts whispered nothing in Samuel’s ear as each of the more impressive accomplished sons of Jesse filed by, the men in suits, holding their smart phones; but when ruddy David appeared, the Lord said to Samuel, “Rise and anoint him: this is the one.” This scripture calls us to recollect that things are not necessarily what they seem.
That insight is worth keeping as a balancing influence as we ride the waves of the hospital closing. We value transparency in our institutions, but an equally important piece of the puzzle is that we pay attention, keep learning, and, recognizing that the process of sensitive negotiations cannot be turned into public discourse, trust our trustees to have done their very best in a dire situation. Unlike most of us, they have seen the whole picture: not the shadows on the walls, but the real situation.
While seeing is the evident theme of our Gospel today, notice how it vies with another theme: blaming. “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” ask Jesus’s disciples. The disciples! Not the Pharisees or the Sadducees, but Team Jesus. Talk about being chained to a wall: that attitude perpetuates and aggravates the suffering of those who are already suffering. If this blind man in John’s Gospel is blind by some sort of retributive justice wielded by God, what a perfect excuse to abandon him to his isolation and do nothing to help him. Before he can touch and heal this man, Jesus must demolish a theology that is chained to the cave wall.
There is another insight worth holding as a balancing influence as we experience the tension rippling out from the closing of our hospital. Blame, fed by what people don’t see, don’t understand, blame chains people to the wall of their cave. I believe Mayor Alcombright set the right course when he said, last Wednesday, that he will not waste his energy dwelling on why things happened as they did, when every ounce of his attention is needed to find new solutions.
I want to end by sharing with you some of what I have seen, this week.
More North County clergy gathered for one purpose than I have ever seen in the past—evidence, I hope, that this crisis will teach and require our eleven communities to work as one community, more than ever before.
At First Baptist Church in North Adams Thursday evening, in a congregation with sixteen of its members grieving at the loss of their jobs at the hospital, a prayer vigil was held. Chief among its themes was thankfulness for the truly remarkable personal care for which North Adams Regional was rightly known and justly proud. Praying was intense, as Pastor Dave Anderson invited us to consider the needs of so many.
Walking back to my car around 8:00 p.m., my eye was drawn to the TD bank building, where all the lights were on and crowds of people were lined up, cashing their final paychecks issued just a few hours earlier.
Just a few days earlier, some of those nurses and aides, housekeepers and doctors, had generously, graciously cared for one of our parishioners and his family, during his final days. I saw that hospital staff circle the wagons around this family, anticipating their needs and going well beyond ordinary expectations to ease the way.
This kind of extraordinary care we’ve all seen at this hospital, and it’s frightening to imagine our future without it.
Yet we know that all human institutions and communities go through cycles that embrace decline as well as growth, death as well as birth. As people who believe in the redeeming transforming love of God in Jesus Christ, we believe that the human cycle, by the grace of God, is embraced by resurrection. On Easter Day, God corrects the cave.
In that greater cycling, death precedes resurrection. Unless we die, resurrection cannot get hold of us. Martin Smith says in his Lenten book “A Season for the Spirit”, “In the end the Spirit will recruit the disintegrating power of death to break us up enough to be remade whole…”
We pray that resurrection get hold of us here in the North County. We pray for grace and courage to accept the death of the old order at North Adams Regional Hospital, and so free ourselves to find good solutions.
“Mind”
Mind in its purest play is like some bat
That beats about in caverns all alone,
Contriving by a kind of senseless wit
Not to conclude against a wall of stone.
It has no need to falter or explore;
Darkly it knows what obstacles are there,
And so may weave and flitter, dip and soar
In perfect courses through the blackest air.
And has this simile a like perfection?
The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save
That in the very happiest intellection
A graceful error may correct the cave.
Richard Wilbur, New and Collected Poems
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1998
The fourth Sunday in Lent is nicknamed Refreshment Sunday. As if, midway through this penitential season, we need to kick back, lighten up, and start rehearsing for Easter.
Whatever I might have imagined preaching on, this Sunday, is at least partially eclipsed by the news that has shaken us all in the North County, the closing of North Adams Regional Hospital. I say “partially eclipsed” because I see a couple of ways in which our readings may help us look directly at that difficult decision and its impact. So by the end of this sermon I trust we’ll have had not just current events, but some recollection of scripture.
But for sure, and first, I want to revisit Richard Wilbur’s poem, which he entitles “Mind”. He says that the mind “in its purest play is like some bat that beats about in caverns…” using a “senseless wit not to conclude against a wall of stone.”
The poet isn’t describing the mind only in its thinking function: he says “Mind in its purest play,” to include the whole of its functioning, not just the cerebral cortex that sits enthroned on the mammalian brain, which is atop the reptilian brain, but all those layers, their instincts, the wits we have with and without such senses as sight and hearing. The poet holds the bat in high regard: “It has no need to falter or explore; darkly it knows what obstacles are there, and so may weave and flitter, dip and soar in perfect courses through the blackest air.”
You might even say that a bat navigates far more impressively and successfully than human beings do, even with our global positioning devices (if we’ve learned how to use them). The bat in our poem beats about alone: put two or three human beings in a car, and though they face in one direction, they’ll find it tempting to argue what direction to go in next.
How perfect is this simile: “The mind is like a bat”? In this one way it’s an imprecise comparison: “that in the very happiest intellection a graceful error may correct the cave.”
I don’t know what Richard Wilbur means there. If you do, I’ll look forward to hearing your theory later. But I can’t help wondering if he doesn’t mean to remind us of the allegory of the cave in Plato’s “Republic”. Here’s a pithy little description of that allegory, straight from Wikipedia:
“Plato has Socrates describe a collection of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to assign names to these shadows. The shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. Socrates then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.”
Correcting the cave, reorienting perception within the cave, revealing what is real and true from what is distorted and false, all this is the work of the philosopher, the one who dares break his or her captivity, and turning, turning, comes round right and becomes the truth teller.
So let’s consider the image of the cave. An engulfing crisis (the closing of our hospital, for instance) can feel like a cave, dark, foreboding, confusing, threatening, and while the fire in the cave may give light and warmth, we’re probably not facing it: more likely, our eyes are glued to our ipads, as we search the news sites for… news, with all its shadows and distortions.
Things are not necessarily what they seem. That’s true in Plato’s cave, and it’s true at that ritual gathering at Bethlehem, where the prophet Samuel was looking to anoint the next king of Israel and had before him all the sons of Jesse—all save one, the youngest, the cocky one, the boy Jesse was hoping to train by setting him out to keep the sheep. The Lord God of hosts whispered nothing in Samuel’s ear as each of the more impressive accomplished sons of Jesse filed by, the men in suits, holding their smart phones; but when ruddy David appeared, the Lord said to Samuel, “Rise and anoint him: this is the one.” This scripture calls us to recollect that things are not necessarily what they seem.
That insight is worth keeping as a balancing influence as we ride the waves of the hospital closing. We value transparency in our institutions, but an equally important piece of the puzzle is that we pay attention, keep learning, and, recognizing that the process of sensitive negotiations cannot be turned into public discourse, trust our trustees to have done their very best in a dire situation. Unlike most of us, they have seen the whole picture: not the shadows on the walls, but the real situation.
While seeing is the evident theme of our Gospel today, notice how it vies with another theme: blaming. “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” ask Jesus’s disciples. The disciples! Not the Pharisees or the Sadducees, but Team Jesus. Talk about being chained to a wall: that attitude perpetuates and aggravates the suffering of those who are already suffering. If this blind man in John’s Gospel is blind by some sort of retributive justice wielded by God, what a perfect excuse to abandon him to his isolation and do nothing to help him. Before he can touch and heal this man, Jesus must demolish a theology that is chained to the cave wall.
There is another insight worth holding as a balancing influence as we experience the tension rippling out from the closing of our hospital. Blame, fed by what people don’t see, don’t understand, blame chains people to the wall of their cave. I believe Mayor Alcombright set the right course when he said, last Wednesday, that he will not waste his energy dwelling on why things happened as they did, when every ounce of his attention is needed to find new solutions.
I want to end by sharing with you some of what I have seen, this week.
More North County clergy gathered for one purpose than I have ever seen in the past—evidence, I hope, that this crisis will teach and require our eleven communities to work as one community, more than ever before.
At First Baptist Church in North Adams Thursday evening, in a congregation with sixteen of its members grieving at the loss of their jobs at the hospital, a prayer vigil was held. Chief among its themes was thankfulness for the truly remarkable personal care for which North Adams Regional was rightly known and justly proud. Praying was intense, as Pastor Dave Anderson invited us to consider the needs of so many.
Walking back to my car around 8:00 p.m., my eye was drawn to the TD bank building, where all the lights were on and crowds of people were lined up, cashing their final paychecks issued just a few hours earlier.
Just a few days earlier, some of those nurses and aides, housekeepers and doctors, had generously, graciously cared for one of our parishioners and his family, during his final days. I saw that hospital staff circle the wagons around this family, anticipating their needs and going well beyond ordinary expectations to ease the way.
This kind of extraordinary care we’ve all seen at this hospital, and it’s frightening to imagine our future without it.
Yet we know that all human institutions and communities go through cycles that embrace decline as well as growth, death as well as birth. As people who believe in the redeeming transforming love of God in Jesus Christ, we believe that the human cycle, by the grace of God, is embraced by resurrection. On Easter Day, God corrects the cave.
In that greater cycling, death precedes resurrection. Unless we die, resurrection cannot get hold of us. Martin Smith says in his Lenten book “A Season for the Spirit”, “In the end the Spirit will recruit the disintegrating power of death to break us up enough to be remade whole…”
We pray that resurrection get hold of us here in the North County. We pray for grace and courage to accept the death of the old order at North Adams Regional Hospital, and so free ourselves to find good solutions.
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Jesus Needs
Scripture for the 3rd Sunday in Lent includes Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42
Spring is springing. I know, some of you want more evidence of the claim. O ye of little faith… So consider the following proof that Spring has come:
The goldfinches at our feeders, like the leaf buds on the willow trees, are turning gold.
Bird-song in our yards and fields and woods is turning operatic, the crooners are crooning and those being courted are fanning the flames.
Friday, I saw a crow pumping his way through the air above the student union, a long tuft of grass clamped in his beak, heading from his avian Home Depot to build that nest.
And most of our students are gone, so it must be Spring.
The evidence that spoke to my soul was that crow. Seeing him rise with purloined college property reminded me that we aren’t the only species enjoying the results of our gardens. Watching his determination navigating that beakful I was reminded of the raven Noah sent out from the ark, forty days after that great rescue vessel had come to rest on Mount Ararat: that bird “went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth.”
And we think we’ve had a tough winter.
Water, water everywhere in the Book of Genesis, but not a drop to drink, there in the wilderness along the Sinai desert, says the Book of Exodus. On Easter Eve, we will hear the dramatic rescue God achieved for the Hebrew slaves escaping from Egypt; but today we fast-forward to the tough going that followed, when those refugees quarreled with Moses, demanding to know what he would do about their lack of water. What kind of spring break was this, that their lives might be in peril for lack of foresight by the tour management?
In the companion story from John’s Gospel we see Jesus, tired out by his own long desert journey, sitting down by an historic well near the Samaritan city of Sychar. Like the Hebrew refugees encamped at Rephidim, Jesus sits right above a source of water. Like his ancestors, Jesus lacks the tool he needs to get that water. He has no bucket.
I guess you could say that in the Exodus story, Moses has the tool needed to raise that water: his miraculous staff, straight from Hogwarts. But the way the Exodus story reads, the tool the refugees lack is faith, trust in God, confidence in Moses: Their situation matches those words we spoke in today’s collect: they had no power in themselves to help themselves. Well, they did, but they squandered it by their quarreling, their complaining; it seeped through the tightly-gripped fingers of their anxiety. They were powerless, helpless through their incessant blaming of Moses, their inner pool of responsibility evaporated.
By contrast, Jesus is not short on faith, trust, and confidence. But he puts himself quite purposefully into a helpless mode, sitting by a deep well with no bucket. Jesus needs. Jesus needs help. He has power in himself to help himself—recall those intense temptations he met and mastered in the desert—but he chooses to set up shop dead center in the human experience. As St. Paul puts it today, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly… while we still were sinners, Christ died for us.” This Savior is not revealed as a take-charge sort of guy. He gets the point about voluntary vulnerability. Heaven knows how long he was sitting there, before a Samaritan woman arrives. He wasn’t doing it for effect. He needed. He needed help. And he willingly saw the waiting as part of the providence of God.
We know that this story sounded in the first century a lot kinkier than it does to us. “Oh, good, here comes a Samaritan woman,” we may say, with all our enlightened naivete. In fact, this encounter occurs along a razor blade of judgment and scorn. The first sign of this is in the words of the woman herself: “How is it that you, a Jewish preacher type, ask a drink of me, obviously a woman, and, in case you hadn’t noticed, a resident of Samaria?” Our patron St. John, wielding his stylus, edits the moment: “Traditionally, Jews and Samaritans don’t share their toys and tools (sort of like Episcopalians and Methodists, with that sloppy schism back in the 18th century, or Episcopalians and Roman Catholics, split asunder by a bloody Reformation).” And then, hello, aren’t the culture police watching as you, a man, speak publicly to me, a woman?
Jesus needs. Jesus needs help. God needs Jesus to occupy this forbidden ground for the sake of reconciliation.
The woman’s story is, as you’ll have noticed, a long one, a complicated one. Five husbands, and (no wonder) she’s no longer quite so interested in marrying her current significant other. This history suggests additional layers of judgmentalism she may fall prey to. And additional reason why God needs Jesus to be right where he is, and as he is, for the work of reconciling love to move forward.
She becomes an apostle to the Samaritans. But notice how even they, her own kinsmen, dismiss her at the end: “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe this Jesus is the Messiah, for we have heard him ourselves (and everyone knows a woman cannot be trusted as a dependable witness)…” Nyah, nyah, nyah… Plenty of people were prepared to call her a sinner. The Gospel of John our patron presents her as an apostle.
That’s one way this story turns everything on its head. Remember the other: for that apostle to have been called, Jesus had to need, had to be powerless a while to create the terms under which they would meet. For the Church to grow, for the kingdom of God to increase, for alienation to give way to reconciliation, Jesus needs… Jesus needs us… Needs us to reconsider the nature of powerlessness, how it may be the holy ground, the vulnerable condition, the way, the truth, the life in which we may meet reconciling love, and help it happen.
Spring is springing. I know, some of you want more evidence of the claim. O ye of little faith… So consider the following proof that Spring has come:
The goldfinches at our feeders, like the leaf buds on the willow trees, are turning gold.
Bird-song in our yards and fields and woods is turning operatic, the crooners are crooning and those being courted are fanning the flames.
Friday, I saw a crow pumping his way through the air above the student union, a long tuft of grass clamped in his beak, heading from his avian Home Depot to build that nest.
And most of our students are gone, so it must be Spring.
The evidence that spoke to my soul was that crow. Seeing him rise with purloined college property reminded me that we aren’t the only species enjoying the results of our gardens. Watching his determination navigating that beakful I was reminded of the raven Noah sent out from the ark, forty days after that great rescue vessel had come to rest on Mount Ararat: that bird “went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth.”
And we think we’ve had a tough winter.
Water, water everywhere in the Book of Genesis, but not a drop to drink, there in the wilderness along the Sinai desert, says the Book of Exodus. On Easter Eve, we will hear the dramatic rescue God achieved for the Hebrew slaves escaping from Egypt; but today we fast-forward to the tough going that followed, when those refugees quarreled with Moses, demanding to know what he would do about their lack of water. What kind of spring break was this, that their lives might be in peril for lack of foresight by the tour management?
In the companion story from John’s Gospel we see Jesus, tired out by his own long desert journey, sitting down by an historic well near the Samaritan city of Sychar. Like the Hebrew refugees encamped at Rephidim, Jesus sits right above a source of water. Like his ancestors, Jesus lacks the tool he needs to get that water. He has no bucket.
I guess you could say that in the Exodus story, Moses has the tool needed to raise that water: his miraculous staff, straight from Hogwarts. But the way the Exodus story reads, the tool the refugees lack is faith, trust in God, confidence in Moses: Their situation matches those words we spoke in today’s collect: they had no power in themselves to help themselves. Well, they did, but they squandered it by their quarreling, their complaining; it seeped through the tightly-gripped fingers of their anxiety. They were powerless, helpless through their incessant blaming of Moses, their inner pool of responsibility evaporated.
By contrast, Jesus is not short on faith, trust, and confidence. But he puts himself quite purposefully into a helpless mode, sitting by a deep well with no bucket. Jesus needs. Jesus needs help. He has power in himself to help himself—recall those intense temptations he met and mastered in the desert—but he chooses to set up shop dead center in the human experience. As St. Paul puts it today, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly… while we still were sinners, Christ died for us.” This Savior is not revealed as a take-charge sort of guy. He gets the point about voluntary vulnerability. Heaven knows how long he was sitting there, before a Samaritan woman arrives. He wasn’t doing it for effect. He needed. He needed help. And he willingly saw the waiting as part of the providence of God.
We know that this story sounded in the first century a lot kinkier than it does to us. “Oh, good, here comes a Samaritan woman,” we may say, with all our enlightened naivete. In fact, this encounter occurs along a razor blade of judgment and scorn. The first sign of this is in the words of the woman herself: “How is it that you, a Jewish preacher type, ask a drink of me, obviously a woman, and, in case you hadn’t noticed, a resident of Samaria?” Our patron St. John, wielding his stylus, edits the moment: “Traditionally, Jews and Samaritans don’t share their toys and tools (sort of like Episcopalians and Methodists, with that sloppy schism back in the 18th century, or Episcopalians and Roman Catholics, split asunder by a bloody Reformation).” And then, hello, aren’t the culture police watching as you, a man, speak publicly to me, a woman?
Jesus needs. Jesus needs help. God needs Jesus to occupy this forbidden ground for the sake of reconciliation.
The woman’s story is, as you’ll have noticed, a long one, a complicated one. Five husbands, and (no wonder) she’s no longer quite so interested in marrying her current significant other. This history suggests additional layers of judgmentalism she may fall prey to. And additional reason why God needs Jesus to be right where he is, and as he is, for the work of reconciling love to move forward.
She becomes an apostle to the Samaritans. But notice how even they, her own kinsmen, dismiss her at the end: “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe this Jesus is the Messiah, for we have heard him ourselves (and everyone knows a woman cannot be trusted as a dependable witness)…” Nyah, nyah, nyah… Plenty of people were prepared to call her a sinner. The Gospel of John our patron presents her as an apostle.
That’s one way this story turns everything on its head. Remember the other: for that apostle to have been called, Jesus had to need, had to be powerless a while to create the terms under which they would meet. For the Church to grow, for the kingdom of God to increase, for alienation to give way to reconciliation, Jesus needs… Jesus needs us… Needs us to reconsider the nature of powerlessness, how it may be the holy ground, the vulnerable condition, the way, the truth, the life in which we may meet reconciling love, and help it happen.
Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath 2014
Scripture for the 2nd Sunday in Lent includes Genesis 12:1-4a; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17
When it comes to gun violence, we discover a sinister side to American exceptionalism.
The average annual number of gun homicides in Japan is 50. Germany fewer than 150, a range that holds true for Italy and France as well. Canada, fewer than 200.
Combine those rates and there are about 700 gun homicides yearly, grouping all five of these countries whose combined populations equal just over two-thirds of America’s.
In the United States, the average annual number of gun homicides exceeds 10,000 people. Counting suicides, self-defense, law-enforcement and accidental shootings, more than 30,000 people are killed by firearms yearly. Half of them are between the ages of 18 and 35. One third are under the age of 20.
There’s no mistaking the fact that a disproportionate number of victims of our glut of guns are young.
And glut is the right word. 283 million guns are in civilian hands, a number that grows by 4.5 million annually. On the bright side, the percentage of American households with a gun has been steadily declining (from 54% in 1977 to 33% in 2009). On the troubling side, the average number of guns per owner has increased from 4.1 in 1994 to 6.9 in 2004.
When it comes to gun control, it seems as if there are two very different Americas. Nothing has brought that home to me better than a recent op ed piece by Patt Morrison, writing in the Los Angeles Times this past Tuesday. Hear what she wrote.
“What would Jesus shoot?
Some churches in Kentucky and in upstate New York are doing what it takes to get people into the pews to hear the word of God — and in their neck of the woods, that means giving away guns.
The flier for the raffle at Grace Baptist Church, in Troy, N.Y., shows an AR-15 — an assault rifle altered to make it legal in that state — with a quote from the gospel of St. John, “My peace I give unto you.” It isn’t spelled “piece,” but it could have been.
The church's pastor, John Koletas, told the Albany Times Union, “I’m just trying to be a blessing and a help to the gun owners and the hunters and give away a free AR-15. It’s the right thing to do.”
In Kentucky, where gun giveaways happen in some churches just about every week, a free raffle of 25 guns by Paducah's Lone Oak First Baptist Church got about 1,300 people into the church hall for a steak dinner and a pep talk by a gun fancier named Chuck McAlister who’s been hired by Kentucky’s Southern Baptists to help boost congregations by evangelizing — in this case, about guns and sin and Jesus.
A good number of those 1,300 may not wind up in the pews on Sunday morning; a lot of them go to other churches. And there was no Sermon on the Mount, with its remark about the blessed peacemakers, to generate big applause; it was McAlister displaying his grandfather’s gun and saying, "There's no government on the face of this Earth that has the right to take this gun from me.”
Sunday school teacher David Keele told NPR that the church was accomplishing two things: “One, we're going to talk about the 2nd Amendment to bear arms. But that isn't the primary thing. The primary thing is who Jesus is.": And Jesus, in the form of a stack of Bibles, is right there alongside the display of donated guns — but the Bibles, as NPR pointed out, will cost you money.
Tom Jackson isn’t a regular churchgoer, but he showed up for the Kentucky raffle, saying what many say when they’re asked about why they need guns: “If somebody kicks your door down, means to hurt your wife, your kids, you — how do you turn the other cheek to that?”
But there are a lot of things to defend your family against, and a lot of other ways to defend them apart from what comes out of the barrel of a gun.
There’s defending them from illiteracy and sickness. So are there churches in New York or Kentucky, or churches anywhere, raffling off a year’s worth of healthcare coverage, or $500 savings bonds for a child’s education?
Eighty-nine years ago, an adman named Bruce Barton, who co-founded the renowned advertising company BBD&O, wrote a book that proclaimed Jesus to be “the world’s greatest business executive,” and “the founder of modern business.” That Jesus would have understood the principle behind getting people in the door — by loaves and fishes, but probably not by Smith & Wesson.”
I have an idea. Let’s not raffle anything. With the bishop we have, as committed to preventing gambling as he is to preventing gun violence, raffles don’t face a bright future in Western Massachusetts.
Just as well. Let’s keep providing good things—goods and services to those who need them, good services rooted in the challenging culture of the kingdom of God—and rather than try to attract people by appealing to their acquisitive nature, let’s appeal to their inquisitive nature.
And to guard against any holier-than-the-Baptists attitude that I might have unintentionally encouraged this morning, let me say that one of the very best online resources I could find in preparing for today is the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America. I doubt the folks at Grace Church in Troy align themselves with that branch of the Baptist tree.
There are two Americas, when it comes to guns and gun control. That division runs right through communities, denominations, and families. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that there’s a third America as well, uncommitted, unpersuaded, disengaged. This first Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath is an effort to get dialogue opened among all Americans, for the reconciliation of differences, the discovery of common ground, and an end to the exceptionally high incidence of gun violence that threatens our future.
(Patt Morrison’s article, “Guns for Jesus: Churches fill their pews with weapons giveaways” appeared in the March 11, 2014 issue of the Los Angeles Times.)
When it comes to gun violence, we discover a sinister side to American exceptionalism.
The average annual number of gun homicides in Japan is 50. Germany fewer than 150, a range that holds true for Italy and France as well. Canada, fewer than 200.
Combine those rates and there are about 700 gun homicides yearly, grouping all five of these countries whose combined populations equal just over two-thirds of America’s.
In the United States, the average annual number of gun homicides exceeds 10,000 people. Counting suicides, self-defense, law-enforcement and accidental shootings, more than 30,000 people are killed by firearms yearly. Half of them are between the ages of 18 and 35. One third are under the age of 20.
There’s no mistaking the fact that a disproportionate number of victims of our glut of guns are young.
And glut is the right word. 283 million guns are in civilian hands, a number that grows by 4.5 million annually. On the bright side, the percentage of American households with a gun has been steadily declining (from 54% in 1977 to 33% in 2009). On the troubling side, the average number of guns per owner has increased from 4.1 in 1994 to 6.9 in 2004.
When it comes to gun control, it seems as if there are two very different Americas. Nothing has brought that home to me better than a recent op ed piece by Patt Morrison, writing in the Los Angeles Times this past Tuesday. Hear what she wrote.
“What would Jesus shoot?
Some churches in Kentucky and in upstate New York are doing what it takes to get people into the pews to hear the word of God — and in their neck of the woods, that means giving away guns.
The flier for the raffle at Grace Baptist Church, in Troy, N.Y., shows an AR-15 — an assault rifle altered to make it legal in that state — with a quote from the gospel of St. John, “My peace I give unto you.” It isn’t spelled “piece,” but it could have been.
The church's pastor, John Koletas, told the Albany Times Union, “I’m just trying to be a blessing and a help to the gun owners and the hunters and give away a free AR-15. It’s the right thing to do.”
In Kentucky, where gun giveaways happen in some churches just about every week, a free raffle of 25 guns by Paducah's Lone Oak First Baptist Church got about 1,300 people into the church hall for a steak dinner and a pep talk by a gun fancier named Chuck McAlister who’s been hired by Kentucky’s Southern Baptists to help boost congregations by evangelizing — in this case, about guns and sin and Jesus.
A good number of those 1,300 may not wind up in the pews on Sunday morning; a lot of them go to other churches. And there was no Sermon on the Mount, with its remark about the blessed peacemakers, to generate big applause; it was McAlister displaying his grandfather’s gun and saying, "There's no government on the face of this Earth that has the right to take this gun from me.”
Sunday school teacher David Keele told NPR that the church was accomplishing two things: “One, we're going to talk about the 2nd Amendment to bear arms. But that isn't the primary thing. The primary thing is who Jesus is.": And Jesus, in the form of a stack of Bibles, is right there alongside the display of donated guns — but the Bibles, as NPR pointed out, will cost you money.
Tom Jackson isn’t a regular churchgoer, but he showed up for the Kentucky raffle, saying what many say when they’re asked about why they need guns: “If somebody kicks your door down, means to hurt your wife, your kids, you — how do you turn the other cheek to that?”
But there are a lot of things to defend your family against, and a lot of other ways to defend them apart from what comes out of the barrel of a gun.
There’s defending them from illiteracy and sickness. So are there churches in New York or Kentucky, or churches anywhere, raffling off a year’s worth of healthcare coverage, or $500 savings bonds for a child’s education?
Eighty-nine years ago, an adman named Bruce Barton, who co-founded the renowned advertising company BBD&O, wrote a book that proclaimed Jesus to be “the world’s greatest business executive,” and “the founder of modern business.” That Jesus would have understood the principle behind getting people in the door — by loaves and fishes, but probably not by Smith & Wesson.”
I have an idea. Let’s not raffle anything. With the bishop we have, as committed to preventing gambling as he is to preventing gun violence, raffles don’t face a bright future in Western Massachusetts.
Just as well. Let’s keep providing good things—goods and services to those who need them, good services rooted in the challenging culture of the kingdom of God—and rather than try to attract people by appealing to their acquisitive nature, let’s appeal to their inquisitive nature.
And to guard against any holier-than-the-Baptists attitude that I might have unintentionally encouraged this morning, let me say that one of the very best online resources I could find in preparing for today is the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America. I doubt the folks at Grace Church in Troy align themselves with that branch of the Baptist tree.
There are two Americas, when it comes to guns and gun control. That division runs right through communities, denominations, and families. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that there’s a third America as well, uncommitted, unpersuaded, disengaged. This first Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath is an effort to get dialogue opened among all Americans, for the reconciliation of differences, the discovery of common ground, and an end to the exceptionally high incidence of gun violence that threatens our future.
(Patt Morrison’s article, “Guns for Jesus: Churches fill their pews with weapons giveaways” appeared in the March 11, 2014 issue of the Los Angeles Times.)
Monday, March 17, 2014
Angels Come
Scripture for the 1st Sunday in Lent includes Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11
The opening words of our worship today came from priest and poet Michael Hudson, writing about our Lord’s temptations in the desert. Hudson structures his poem by opening each stanza with the most familiar words we know about the subject of temptation: “Lead us not into…”, a phrase he lifts from the tool-kit of prayer that Jesus gave his disciples, the Lord’s Prayer. On the hook of this repeated phrase, Hudson hangs three comments.
First, the way the tempter works is “to bend us from the way that is open to the promise and the purpose of each day.”
Second, the tempter comes enticing, spinning visions of an easy journey. By contrast, “Wisdom knows an easy journey is the devil’s sweetest lie.”
Third, in spite of “lead us not,” Jesus points us toward the desert “with its devils, well aware God is sending better angels on the wind to join us there.”
The poet’s comments on temptation are worth considering more closely. At the root of the word “religion” is “religare”, to tie back—as in staking a sapling so it will grow true. So too, religion trains us to grow towards God. The tempter bends us from, distorts, binds us to negatives, not positives. The tempter has, actually, little to offer us: the promise and purpose of the day are not his to give, but he’s intent on depriving us of having what God has invested in the new day. The tempter distracts us—or contracts us—from being open to the day.
The day, of course, like every day, will not be simple. It will have its own complexities, and people of faith know that God is just as present and active in the difficult passages as in the simpler gifts. By contrast, the tempter persuades us to take what he promises to be an easy journey; but that promise is made of “spinning visions in the sky”, what the poet calls “the devil’s sweetest lie.”
God who works through what challenges us keeps calling us to our deserts because they are such valuable frontiers, workshops, laboratories for discovering priorities and values and goals. In our deserts, we are required to choose what we believe and trust to be our best choices, recognizing that our lives depend on best choices from among the many that we may face.
Perhaps it’s that desert sand that reminds me of the sandpaper at the carpenter’s bench, where we are the wood in this prayer from the Iona Community: “O Christ, the Master Carpenter, who at the last, through wood and nails, purchased our whole salvation, wield well your tools in the workshop of your world, so that we who come rough-hewn to your bench may here be fashioned to a truer beauty of your hand.”
For me, the take-away message from our Gospel today is that when we are at our most vulnerable in the thick of particular temptation, we may feel alone, locked in argument with whatever is tempting us, isolation that may terrify us. But the truth is heard in Matthew’s final words: “Then the devil left Jesus, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.”
If we will recognize and welcome them, we will discover angels of mercy, companions on the way, fellow-tempteds who have something to teach us, fellow travelers who might like to learn from our experiences.
That was no hollow claim, as I read this Gospel to a dear couple in the parish, last week, when I brought communion to their home, where one of these partners is declining (or inclining) towards death. Their children had come and gone, the previous weekend; every day, two or three friends come to visit (different two or three, from day to day), and many phone calls come, including oldest friends and distant relatives.
There must be moments when it’s tempting to believe we’re alone in our extremes of weakness or suffering or doubt or despair. But, if recognized and welcomed, angels come.
(Michael Hudson’s poem, “Meditation for Matthew 4:1-11,” is found in “Songs for the Cycle: Fresh Hymn Texts,” Church Publishing, 2004.)
The opening words of our worship today came from priest and poet Michael Hudson, writing about our Lord’s temptations in the desert. Hudson structures his poem by opening each stanza with the most familiar words we know about the subject of temptation: “Lead us not into…”, a phrase he lifts from the tool-kit of prayer that Jesus gave his disciples, the Lord’s Prayer. On the hook of this repeated phrase, Hudson hangs three comments.
First, the way the tempter works is “to bend us from the way that is open to the promise and the purpose of each day.”
Second, the tempter comes enticing, spinning visions of an easy journey. By contrast, “Wisdom knows an easy journey is the devil’s sweetest lie.”
Third, in spite of “lead us not,” Jesus points us toward the desert “with its devils, well aware God is sending better angels on the wind to join us there.”
The poet’s comments on temptation are worth considering more closely. At the root of the word “religion” is “religare”, to tie back—as in staking a sapling so it will grow true. So too, religion trains us to grow towards God. The tempter bends us from, distorts, binds us to negatives, not positives. The tempter has, actually, little to offer us: the promise and purpose of the day are not his to give, but he’s intent on depriving us of having what God has invested in the new day. The tempter distracts us—or contracts us—from being open to the day.
The day, of course, like every day, will not be simple. It will have its own complexities, and people of faith know that God is just as present and active in the difficult passages as in the simpler gifts. By contrast, the tempter persuades us to take what he promises to be an easy journey; but that promise is made of “spinning visions in the sky”, what the poet calls “the devil’s sweetest lie.”
God who works through what challenges us keeps calling us to our deserts because they are such valuable frontiers, workshops, laboratories for discovering priorities and values and goals. In our deserts, we are required to choose what we believe and trust to be our best choices, recognizing that our lives depend on best choices from among the many that we may face.
Perhaps it’s that desert sand that reminds me of the sandpaper at the carpenter’s bench, where we are the wood in this prayer from the Iona Community: “O Christ, the Master Carpenter, who at the last, through wood and nails, purchased our whole salvation, wield well your tools in the workshop of your world, so that we who come rough-hewn to your bench may here be fashioned to a truer beauty of your hand.”
For me, the take-away message from our Gospel today is that when we are at our most vulnerable in the thick of particular temptation, we may feel alone, locked in argument with whatever is tempting us, isolation that may terrify us. But the truth is heard in Matthew’s final words: “Then the devil left Jesus, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.”
If we will recognize and welcome them, we will discover angels of mercy, companions on the way, fellow-tempteds who have something to teach us, fellow travelers who might like to learn from our experiences.
That was no hollow claim, as I read this Gospel to a dear couple in the parish, last week, when I brought communion to their home, where one of these partners is declining (or inclining) towards death. Their children had come and gone, the previous weekend; every day, two or three friends come to visit (different two or three, from day to day), and many phone calls come, including oldest friends and distant relatives.
There must be moments when it’s tempting to believe we’re alone in our extremes of weakness or suffering or doubt or despair. But, if recognized and welcomed, angels come.
(Michael Hudson’s poem, “Meditation for Matthew 4:1-11,” is found in “Songs for the Cycle: Fresh Hymn Texts,” Church Publishing, 2004.)
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Perfection
Scripture for the 7th Sunday after the Epiphany includes Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18; I Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23; Matthew 5:38-48
Here begins the second of two sermons exploring one sermon, Jesus’s quintessential Sermon on the Mount, found in the early chapters of Matthew’s Gospel. And what a package it is! In it, Jesus teaches us to pray the Our Father. The Beatitudes? They’re included. Famous metaphors for the Kingdom of God—the city built on a hill, disciples as salt and light—you’ll find them there. And our focus last Sunday and this: the greater righteousness to which Jesus calls his disciples in every generation. “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Today we hit the mother-lode in Jesus’s sermon—or is it a better metaphor that we hit the live nerve in the tooth?—“For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? And if you greet only your own family and friends, what more are you doing than others? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
To appreciate Jesus’s teaching and Matthew’s reporting of it requires remembering that they both announce life-changing news: the Kingdom of God has come in Jesus Christ, who calls us to an obedience that he calls perfection, wholeness: not getting it all right, but taking it all in, embracing all, loving all. Once, a lawyer asked Jesus, “Which commandment in the law is the greatest? He said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Hence our collect today: Without love, whatever we do is worth nothing…without love, we aren’t really living.
But how? How to love? This same Jesus who calls us to the wholeness of the Kingdom of God also stands with us in our struggles with How. The kingdom of God has come, but the old age continues, we live in the tension between the pure standards of the kingdom that has come and the conflicting demands of obedient love here and now.
Last week, we heard Jesus do an astonishing thing. Way beyond announcing a new improved interpretation of the Law of Moses, Jesus relocates authority from the written text to himself—not arrogantly self-aggrandizing, but simply because of God’s presence in his life, his teaching, his death and resurrection. He is where God’s action is, and he is ready to be the ground we need to stand on, the ground of our being, the mount we climb.
Many centuries before, Moses had been the action-bearer of God, the location of meeting between humanity and God. Matthew tells his Gospel in ways that show Jesus to be the new Moses, yet far more than Moses.
So Jesus in Matthew (and only Matthew, among the four Gospels) uses this radical approach in teaching the ethics of the Kingdom of God. Jesus cites an old law, time-honored in Torah, introducing it by saying, “You have heard it said, of old…” Then he radicalizes that law, reveals its arterial connection to the human heart and the heart of God: “You have heard it said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy…” “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain (we can think snow) on the righteous and the unrighteous.”
Jesus goes—and calls us to go—beyond the law’s limit. Again, his teaching pattern is to reaffirm the old law… then radicalize it, revealing its roots… then offer an application of the unlimited law, here and now. In the current example (love your enemies) he asks us to raise our sights on what it means to love in a costly way. Love only those who love you? That serves to advance the evolution of the human race? That easy love extends the kingdom of God in this brutal world? Hardly. Reward, gain, progress come as we love beyond our comfort zone.
Rehearsing that stretching of our safety range lies at the heart of discipleship. In an entry-level sort of way, this ought to shape how—and to whom—we pay attention at coffee hour, in our passing the peace, in our discovery that each of us here is a host to one another (whether a visitor or a veteran, adult or child), and as we seek out opportunities to grow our faith and practice in what we volunteer to learn and try and grow into.
It’s not as if our very own families don’t give us cause to stretch beyond easy love into truly challenging love. Right? We describe families as nuclear to suggest how they hold together—but the word might also suggest their capacity to blow apart.
Yet the point Jesus makes is that our domestic family and our voluntary fellowship as disciples are on one side of an equation. They bring resources to bear, sturdy (even if sometimes shaky) experiences of loving and being loved that God can and will use to transform a brutal world—if we will take our part in the stretching of old limits, if, that is, we are willing to become more perfect.
Believe me, I know I have to build this case carefully. I thought by adding that little word “more” in front of “perfect”, I could buy some credits. But I notice Jesus does not call us to more perfection, but to be perfect.
So let’s be clear what this does not mean. “Perfect” does not mean to Jesus what it did to the ancient Greeks, being untarnished by concrete involvement in the material world. No, Jesus does not mean an abstract ideal of keeping one’s hands and nose clean.
And “perfect” was not understood by Jesus to mean what it did to ancient Israel, the keeping of all the laws of their religious community at the expense of caring about the wellbeing of their neighbors, local and national, who were not members of their religious community. No, Jesus does not have in mind a legalism that still leaves plenty of room for one’s own selfish will.
“Perfect” is translated from the Hebrew word “tamim”, meaning “wholeness”. “You shall be perfect before the LORD your God,” a phrase Jesus knew from the Book of Deutronomy, meant “to serve God wholeheartedly, to be single-minded in devotion.”
Ask Jesus or Matthew to consider the perfection that keeps psychotherapists busy, or the kind of thousandths-of-a-second perfection it takes to win Olympic gold in the bobsled run, and I’ll guess they’d both say, No, not that perfection—it isn’t about “getting it all right”, it’s about “taking it all in”, embracing all, loving all. The practice of wholeness, fulfilling the divine call to love.
We heard St. Paul put it in his own way, today: the corollary to the stunningly goodnews that we belong to Christ is the awesome opportunity to behave as though all belong to us, and we to them, in that shared universe described by Jesus as being lit by the sun that shines on all, and wet with that rain that falls on all.
In those sun-drenched rain-washed fields, the gleaning of your harvest is never to strip the vineyard bare: leave some, at least the fallen grapes, for the poor and the refugees. Whether or not the law permits you to wait til morning to pay your day laborers, pay them the very day they’ve earned it. Include the hearing-impaired and vision-impaired, for you and they belong to one community.
This reading from the lawbook Leviticus gives us much to admire about how the Torah expanded from ten commandments to a much larger body of law and custom. We may be more familiar with the Torah’s less admirable laws, the kind that get lampooned and rightly omitted from the church’s lectionary. It’s important that we appreciate how the Torah also stretches to raise the bar of social responsibility, and lower the bar to the flow of lovingkindness.
Our Torah reading today segues perfectly to the Sermon on the Mount. “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people… You shall not hate anyone of your kin…you shall love (and, notice, reprove) your neighbor as yourself.”
There is the old law, straining forward to something finer than vengeance and grudge and hatred, but not yet a love that embraces the enemy. The old law is preaching to the choir, urging forbearance towards one’s own people (granted, hard enough on many days), reaching as far as the neighbor, but with no clear signal that this includes unrelated strangers who aren’t in the circle of kith and kin.
Then Jesus gets his hands on the scrolls. Retributive justice—an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—is not enough to change the world, he says.
PBS Evening News featured recently a piece on a Restorative Justice program at Hinkley High School in Aurora, Colorado. Rather than reacting to student fights by suspending students, the school decided to respond by creating circles of conversation that bring together the involved fighting students and their parents, facilitated by a social worker skilled at helping people speak truth to one another respectfully, leveraging mutual apologies . Since starting this program, physical altercations annually dropped from 263 in 2007-8 to 31 last year, with a 48% drop in suspensions.
Restorative justice is a good way to describe the African tribe whose way of dealing with an offender who violates the peace and order of the community is to call a village meeting with the offender present within the circle. Their task is to remember aloud whatever good the offender has done, whatever they have admired about him or been grateful for. They intervene to recall him to his better self.
Is restorative justice enough to change the world? Jesus urges a yet more radical justice based, as one commentator says, not on a doctrine of human rights, or a strategy to win over the enemy, but is based simply on the nature of God who loves all impartially, and on the belief that love has the power to change a brutal world.
Are you dissatisfied with that? I fully expect that it’s my sermon, not Jesus’s, that doesn’t do justice to this vision that love extends to the enemy. Put your dissatisfaction to work and keep wrestling with this vision Jesus has, because we have been baptized into it.
Keep wrestling with this vision. For the sake of the peoples of Ukraine, of Syria, of South Sudan, and so many more who are divided and locked in mortal resistance until a greater love is learned and embraced.
Here begins the second of two sermons exploring one sermon, Jesus’s quintessential Sermon on the Mount, found in the early chapters of Matthew’s Gospel. And what a package it is! In it, Jesus teaches us to pray the Our Father. The Beatitudes? They’re included. Famous metaphors for the Kingdom of God—the city built on a hill, disciples as salt and light—you’ll find them there. And our focus last Sunday and this: the greater righteousness to which Jesus calls his disciples in every generation. “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Today we hit the mother-lode in Jesus’s sermon—or is it a better metaphor that we hit the live nerve in the tooth?—“For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? And if you greet only your own family and friends, what more are you doing than others? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
To appreciate Jesus’s teaching and Matthew’s reporting of it requires remembering that they both announce life-changing news: the Kingdom of God has come in Jesus Christ, who calls us to an obedience that he calls perfection, wholeness: not getting it all right, but taking it all in, embracing all, loving all. Once, a lawyer asked Jesus, “Which commandment in the law is the greatest? He said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Hence our collect today: Without love, whatever we do is worth nothing…without love, we aren’t really living.
But how? How to love? This same Jesus who calls us to the wholeness of the Kingdom of God also stands with us in our struggles with How. The kingdom of God has come, but the old age continues, we live in the tension between the pure standards of the kingdom that has come and the conflicting demands of obedient love here and now.
Last week, we heard Jesus do an astonishing thing. Way beyond announcing a new improved interpretation of the Law of Moses, Jesus relocates authority from the written text to himself—not arrogantly self-aggrandizing, but simply because of God’s presence in his life, his teaching, his death and resurrection. He is where God’s action is, and he is ready to be the ground we need to stand on, the ground of our being, the mount we climb.
Many centuries before, Moses had been the action-bearer of God, the location of meeting between humanity and God. Matthew tells his Gospel in ways that show Jesus to be the new Moses, yet far more than Moses.
So Jesus in Matthew (and only Matthew, among the four Gospels) uses this radical approach in teaching the ethics of the Kingdom of God. Jesus cites an old law, time-honored in Torah, introducing it by saying, “You have heard it said, of old…” Then he radicalizes that law, reveals its arterial connection to the human heart and the heart of God: “You have heard it said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy…” “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain (we can think snow) on the righteous and the unrighteous.”
Jesus goes—and calls us to go—beyond the law’s limit. Again, his teaching pattern is to reaffirm the old law… then radicalize it, revealing its roots… then offer an application of the unlimited law, here and now. In the current example (love your enemies) he asks us to raise our sights on what it means to love in a costly way. Love only those who love you? That serves to advance the evolution of the human race? That easy love extends the kingdom of God in this brutal world? Hardly. Reward, gain, progress come as we love beyond our comfort zone.
Rehearsing that stretching of our safety range lies at the heart of discipleship. In an entry-level sort of way, this ought to shape how—and to whom—we pay attention at coffee hour, in our passing the peace, in our discovery that each of us here is a host to one another (whether a visitor or a veteran, adult or child), and as we seek out opportunities to grow our faith and practice in what we volunteer to learn and try and grow into.
It’s not as if our very own families don’t give us cause to stretch beyond easy love into truly challenging love. Right? We describe families as nuclear to suggest how they hold together—but the word might also suggest their capacity to blow apart.
Yet the point Jesus makes is that our domestic family and our voluntary fellowship as disciples are on one side of an equation. They bring resources to bear, sturdy (even if sometimes shaky) experiences of loving and being loved that God can and will use to transform a brutal world—if we will take our part in the stretching of old limits, if, that is, we are willing to become more perfect.
Believe me, I know I have to build this case carefully. I thought by adding that little word “more” in front of “perfect”, I could buy some credits. But I notice Jesus does not call us to more perfection, but to be perfect.
So let’s be clear what this does not mean. “Perfect” does not mean to Jesus what it did to the ancient Greeks, being untarnished by concrete involvement in the material world. No, Jesus does not mean an abstract ideal of keeping one’s hands and nose clean.
And “perfect” was not understood by Jesus to mean what it did to ancient Israel, the keeping of all the laws of their religious community at the expense of caring about the wellbeing of their neighbors, local and national, who were not members of their religious community. No, Jesus does not have in mind a legalism that still leaves plenty of room for one’s own selfish will.
“Perfect” is translated from the Hebrew word “tamim”, meaning “wholeness”. “You shall be perfect before the LORD your God,” a phrase Jesus knew from the Book of Deutronomy, meant “to serve God wholeheartedly, to be single-minded in devotion.”
Ask Jesus or Matthew to consider the perfection that keeps psychotherapists busy, or the kind of thousandths-of-a-second perfection it takes to win Olympic gold in the bobsled run, and I’ll guess they’d both say, No, not that perfection—it isn’t about “getting it all right”, it’s about “taking it all in”, embracing all, loving all. The practice of wholeness, fulfilling the divine call to love.
We heard St. Paul put it in his own way, today: the corollary to the stunningly goodnews that we belong to Christ is the awesome opportunity to behave as though all belong to us, and we to them, in that shared universe described by Jesus as being lit by the sun that shines on all, and wet with that rain that falls on all.
In those sun-drenched rain-washed fields, the gleaning of your harvest is never to strip the vineyard bare: leave some, at least the fallen grapes, for the poor and the refugees. Whether or not the law permits you to wait til morning to pay your day laborers, pay them the very day they’ve earned it. Include the hearing-impaired and vision-impaired, for you and they belong to one community.
This reading from the lawbook Leviticus gives us much to admire about how the Torah expanded from ten commandments to a much larger body of law and custom. We may be more familiar with the Torah’s less admirable laws, the kind that get lampooned and rightly omitted from the church’s lectionary. It’s important that we appreciate how the Torah also stretches to raise the bar of social responsibility, and lower the bar to the flow of lovingkindness.
Our Torah reading today segues perfectly to the Sermon on the Mount. “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people… You shall not hate anyone of your kin…you shall love (and, notice, reprove) your neighbor as yourself.”
There is the old law, straining forward to something finer than vengeance and grudge and hatred, but not yet a love that embraces the enemy. The old law is preaching to the choir, urging forbearance towards one’s own people (granted, hard enough on many days), reaching as far as the neighbor, but with no clear signal that this includes unrelated strangers who aren’t in the circle of kith and kin.
Then Jesus gets his hands on the scrolls. Retributive justice—an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—is not enough to change the world, he says.
PBS Evening News featured recently a piece on a Restorative Justice program at Hinkley High School in Aurora, Colorado. Rather than reacting to student fights by suspending students, the school decided to respond by creating circles of conversation that bring together the involved fighting students and their parents, facilitated by a social worker skilled at helping people speak truth to one another respectfully, leveraging mutual apologies . Since starting this program, physical altercations annually dropped from 263 in 2007-8 to 31 last year, with a 48% drop in suspensions.
Restorative justice is a good way to describe the African tribe whose way of dealing with an offender who violates the peace and order of the community is to call a village meeting with the offender present within the circle. Their task is to remember aloud whatever good the offender has done, whatever they have admired about him or been grateful for. They intervene to recall him to his better self.
Is restorative justice enough to change the world? Jesus urges a yet more radical justice based, as one commentator says, not on a doctrine of human rights, or a strategy to win over the enemy, but is based simply on the nature of God who loves all impartially, and on the belief that love has the power to change a brutal world.
Are you dissatisfied with that? I fully expect that it’s my sermon, not Jesus’s, that doesn’t do justice to this vision that love extends to the enemy. Put your dissatisfaction to work and keep wrestling with this vision Jesus has, because we have been baptized into it.
Keep wrestling with this vision. For the sake of the peoples of Ukraine, of Syria, of South Sudan, and so many more who are divided and locked in mortal resistance until a greater love is learned and embraced.
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