Sermon delivered Sunday, March 5, 2017 (First Sunday in Lent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
Sermon Text(s): Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7, Romans 5:12-19
Since the season of Lent invites us to reflect on sin and its consequences, it is appropriate that we begin with the story of Adam and Eve, the story of the first sin, the “original sin,” in the Garden of Eden.
According to the story, humanity’s first sin was disobedience. God said not to do something, Adam and Eve did it, and wham: God expels them from the Garden.
Setting aside any philosophical questions about whether God’s rules were just and worthy of obedience or not, this story attempts to make sense of one of humanity’s fundamental flaws: our inability to accept limits, to acknowledge that “God is God and we are not.” We never seem to be satisfied with what God gives us; we always want more. As a species, we have a tendency to go after precisely the things we know we cannot have. Many a parent will tell you that the quickest way to get a child to do something is to tell them not to do it.
So what are the consequences of this sin? Immediately after their disobedience, after refusing to accept the limits placed on them, Adam and Eve feel shame -- they become aware of their nakedness and cover themselves, something they had previously not felt it necessary to do -- and fear -- they hide when God comes looking for them in the garden. Their relationship with each other and with God is changed because of their disobedience; rather than relationships characterized by trust and comfort and safety, they have become relationships tainted by fear and shame.
If fear and shame only entered Adam and Eve’s consciousness after the Fall, then it’s safe to say that fear and shame were not part of God’s intentions for humanity. Fear and shame are a consequence of sin, and in fact are sinful themselves, in a way, having nothing to do with what our relationship with God is intended to be like. Yet unfortunately, many people associate fear and shame with God. They think of God as a judgmental figure to be feared, someone in front of whom they should feel shame. Perhaps this is because so many churches and other religious communities -- the organizations that represent God to so many people -- use and rely on fear and shame to motivate and control people. Instead of seeing this as a characteristic of humanity’s sinfulness, people come to see it as a representation of how God relates to us.
And so when we enter a season like Lent, a season about repentance, a season that encourages us to look closely at our sin, it can stir up fear and shame for many people. They may feel they are being judged and shamed for their shortcomings in all areas of their lives. But while Lent encourages us to look seriously at our actions and make amends for any harm we have caused to others, it doesn’t invite us to wallow in shame or cower in fear.
Psychologists have written about the distinction between guilt and shame -- guilt is a feeling of remorse over some action we have done that we regret, while shame is a general feeling of unworthiness, a painful feeling about how we appear to others, whether or not we have actually done anything wrong. Guilt is about specific actions, whereas shame is about our sense of identity, our understanding of self [1]. That’s why shame is so destructive and unhealthy. It’s appropriate to feel guilt over something we’ve done that upset or harmed someone, and the season of Lent encourages us to acknowledge the sins of which we are guilty. But it’s not appropriate to feel like we are a horrible, unworthy person because we’ve done something that upset or harmed someone else -- that’s shame, one of the consequences of the Fall, something that God never intended for humanity.
According to psychologists, people who are overrun with shame often have an inability to feel true guilt, because they are so consumed with feeling bad about themselves they don’t have the ability to notice when they have hurt others or to feel remorse about it [2]. Feeling guilt, however, is considered a sign of emotional health. Emotionally healthy people are able to recognize that their actions may have caused pain to someone else, empathize with that person, and feel remorse and make amends [3]. Guilt may be painful, but it is healthy. Shame, on the other hand, is both painful and unhealthy.
And what about fear? Aren’t we supposed to “fear God?” The Bible constantly tells us things like “the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10, Psalm 111:10). Doesn’t fear motivate us to behave ethically, fear of punishment if we don’t?
Well, yes, that kind of fear can be a motivator, but the ancient wisdom of the elders in both Jewish and Christian traditions tell us that that kind of fear is an insufficient foundation for true faith, because it relies on an incomplete understanding of God [4]. Yes, God can punish us, God has the ability to punish us, but God is also merciful. The story of the Fall in the Qur’an says that while God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden for disobeying his law, he also provided them guidance for living in the world to which he banished them. In other words -- with the punishment also came mercy. That is a complete picture of God: as the psalmist says, “You were a God who forgave them, yet punished them for their evil deeds” (Psalm 99:8). With sin comes consequences, but we can also rest assured that God is merciful, that God is always working for our good, even when it may seem we are being slammed with a punishment. Because, as Paul points out in our reading from Romans today, God managed to turn even the Fall into a good thing. Yes, he punished Adam and Eve by expelling them from the Garden, but he righted their wrongs -- and all of our wrongs -- by sending Jesus to us as the “new Adam,” a new creation, a picture of humanity restored to God’s original intentions for us and a gateway to accessing that restored humanity ourselves.
When the Bible talks about “fearing God,” it is not talking primarily about being scared, dreading punishment, pleading with God, “please don’t hurt me.” The Hebrew word used in the phrase “the fear of the Lord” is yirat, a word that means awe, reverence, wonder, amazement [5]. If you’ve ever had a theophany, a moment where God’s presence was revealed to you, made known to you in a powerful way, then you will know that that kind of experience can be slightly “scary” in our normal sense of the meaning of that word, but the emotion generated is one that comes from feeling overwhelmed at being connected in a positive way to something larger than ourselves, not one that comes from worrying that that thing larger than us will squash us.
So this Lent, I invite you to focus more on guilt -- acknowledging and admitting when you hurt others -- than on shame -- thinking you are an unworthy person, and to focus more on awe -- marveling at the presence of God and your connection with God -- than fear -- worrying that God will punish you. Don’t allow Lent to be a season of shame and fear. In fact, maybe this year, you could try giving them up for Lent.
[1] Joseph Burgo, “The Difference Between Guilt and Shame,” Psychology Today Blog, 30 May 2013, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/shame/201305/the-difference-between-guilt-and-shame Accessed 4 March 2017.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] http://www.hebrew4christians.com/Scripture/Parashah/Summaries/Eikev/Yirah/yirah.html
[5] Tara Sophia Mohr, “Is it Fear or Awe?” http://www.jonathanfields.com/is-it-fear-or-awe/ Accessed 4 March 2017.
Showing posts with label repentance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label repentance. Show all posts
Sunday, March 5, 2017
Wednesday, March 1, 2017
An invitation to take stock of individual and corporate sins during Lent
Sermon delivered Wednesday, March 1, 2017 (Ash Wednesday) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
Sermon Text(s): Isaiah 58:1-12, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
“Create and make in us new and contrite hearts.” This is what we asked of God in our opening collect a few moments ago. As we enter the season of Lent, the season of penitence and fasting, self-examination and renewal, we hear again that biblical refrain that we’ve heard recently from John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul: all the right ritual actions are meaningless if not accompanied by the right intentions. Our hearts must be in the right place as we come to worship God, and our actions must reflect the faith we say we have.
This message was not new with John the Baptist and Paul: they were echoing the ancient call of the Hebrew prophets, like the passage from Isaiah that we hear today. “Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high,” God says through Isaiah to the people who observe the right rituals, but “who serve [their] own interest[s] on [their] fast day and oppress all [their] workers.” And Jesus repeats this theme in the Sermon on the Mount, warning his disciples against doing religious acts for the wrong reasons. Fasting or prayer or almsgiving should be done out of a sincere faith and desire to please God and to grow closer to God, not out of a desire for approval or recognition from one’s peers. “Beware of practicing your piety before others in other to be seen by them,” Jesus says, “for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.”
The issue here is one of intention and motivation. Those who practice their piety before others in order to be seen by them will have no reward from God not because they have performed religious actions publicly, but because the act of “going public” with their faith has caused their intentions to go astray: they are motivated by a desire to please other people rather than a desire to please God. Their hearts are not in the right place. Their actions become all about them instead of all about God.
The people Isaiah addresses are caught in this sin of self-absorption: they observe the fasts because they want to win favor with God, but they ignore God’s commands to care for the poor and to deal justly with others because of their desires for power or money. Both their business practices and their religious practices are entirely self-centered. Their only concern is securing a place for themselves, both on earth and in heaven.
Fasting is intended to be an act of personal sacrifice, a way of denying and emptying oneself in order to open oneself more fully to God. This meaning is negated if the person fasting continues to behave in a manner incongruent with the commandment of God to love one’s neighbor as oneself. A real sacrifice of self, God says through the prophet of Isaiah, is to give of yourself in service to others, to share your bread with the hungry, to clothe the naked, to work for justice and free the oppressed. Not only must there be right intentions, but right actions must flow from them. We must show, as John the Baptist would put it, “fruits worthy of repentance.”
The season of Lent invites us to take a step back from our regular routines and examine our own hearts and actions. Am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Am I giving of myself in the fast that God chooses, a fast that leads not to self-absorption, but self-giving? Has my worship become empty and rote, devoid of heart-filled sincerity? Am I at peace with the ways I am practicing my faith and living it out in my life?
But the self-examination of Lent invites us to go even further, looking beyond our individual lives. The discipline of Lent is a corporate as well as an individual one. We could ask the same questions of our life together as a church: not just am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance, but are we, as St. Cuthbert’s, as the Diocese of California, as the Episcopal Church, bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Are we practicing the fast of self-giving rather than self-absorption? Is our worship heartfelt and sincere? Are we satisfied with how we are practicing our faith together and living it out in service to our community, the nation, and the world?
But it doesn’t stop there. We are also invited to consider, as we expand the circle of our concern even wider, the corporate sins and shortcomings of the country and culture in which we live. In the litany of penitence that we will pray together in a few moments, we confess not just ways that we as individual Christians have sinned and ways the Church has sinned, but systemic sins rooted in our wider culture: “Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people… Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts… our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty.” This “our” is much bigger than you or me or all of us in this church combined. It is an “our” that resonates with the wider American culture: our materialism that values things over people, our individualism that leads us to believe we need to care only for ourselves and our families and not for the wider community, and our obsession with violence that desensitizes us to the image of God in all people. In our current political climate, these communal sins of our culture are on display in a particularly vivid way. This year I am especially aware of “the evil done on our behalf” that our confession of sin refers to – sins we may have not have committed personally, but things our government has done “on our behalf,” in which we are implicated whether we like it or not.
On Ash Wednesday, we are invited us to remember and contemplate our mortality and the fragility of human life. It is a time for examining our actions and behaviors and priorities and the intentions behind our actions, and taking stock of what is really important in the life of faith.
So as you begin Lent this year, take some time to consider: what is really important to you in your life of faith? What spiritual practices do you wish you were doing on a more regular basis? Could you commit to doing at least one of them during Lent? What relationship in your life do you most need to change in order for God’s love to be reflected in and through it? Could you take some steps toward changing that relationship during Lent?
Each of us may have a different Lenten discipline this year, but the underlying theme of our work is the same: to consider how we are called to live out our faith authentically in the world, in such a way that we contribute to God’s work of bringing justice and freedom to all. Through our Lenten fast, whatever form that may take for each of us, may we all seek a deeper knowledge of the heart of God and bear fruits of authentic repentance.
Sermon Text(s): Isaiah 58:1-12, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
“Create and make in us new and contrite hearts.” This is what we asked of God in our opening collect a few moments ago. As we enter the season of Lent, the season of penitence and fasting, self-examination and renewal, we hear again that biblical refrain that we’ve heard recently from John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul: all the right ritual actions are meaningless if not accompanied by the right intentions. Our hearts must be in the right place as we come to worship God, and our actions must reflect the faith we say we have.
This message was not new with John the Baptist and Paul: they were echoing the ancient call of the Hebrew prophets, like the passage from Isaiah that we hear today. “Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high,” God says through Isaiah to the people who observe the right rituals, but “who serve [their] own interest[s] on [their] fast day and oppress all [their] workers.” And Jesus repeats this theme in the Sermon on the Mount, warning his disciples against doing religious acts for the wrong reasons. Fasting or prayer or almsgiving should be done out of a sincere faith and desire to please God and to grow closer to God, not out of a desire for approval or recognition from one’s peers. “Beware of practicing your piety before others in other to be seen by them,” Jesus says, “for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.”
The issue here is one of intention and motivation. Those who practice their piety before others in order to be seen by them will have no reward from God not because they have performed religious actions publicly, but because the act of “going public” with their faith has caused their intentions to go astray: they are motivated by a desire to please other people rather than a desire to please God. Their hearts are not in the right place. Their actions become all about them instead of all about God.
The people Isaiah addresses are caught in this sin of self-absorption: they observe the fasts because they want to win favor with God, but they ignore God’s commands to care for the poor and to deal justly with others because of their desires for power or money. Both their business practices and their religious practices are entirely self-centered. Their only concern is securing a place for themselves, both on earth and in heaven.
Fasting is intended to be an act of personal sacrifice, a way of denying and emptying oneself in order to open oneself more fully to God. This meaning is negated if the person fasting continues to behave in a manner incongruent with the commandment of God to love one’s neighbor as oneself. A real sacrifice of self, God says through the prophet of Isaiah, is to give of yourself in service to others, to share your bread with the hungry, to clothe the naked, to work for justice and free the oppressed. Not only must there be right intentions, but right actions must flow from them. We must show, as John the Baptist would put it, “fruits worthy of repentance.”
The season of Lent invites us to take a step back from our regular routines and examine our own hearts and actions. Am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Am I giving of myself in the fast that God chooses, a fast that leads not to self-absorption, but self-giving? Has my worship become empty and rote, devoid of heart-filled sincerity? Am I at peace with the ways I am practicing my faith and living it out in my life?
But the self-examination of Lent invites us to go even further, looking beyond our individual lives. The discipline of Lent is a corporate as well as an individual one. We could ask the same questions of our life together as a church: not just am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance, but are we, as St. Cuthbert’s, as the Diocese of California, as the Episcopal Church, bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Are we practicing the fast of self-giving rather than self-absorption? Is our worship heartfelt and sincere? Are we satisfied with how we are practicing our faith together and living it out in service to our community, the nation, and the world?
But it doesn’t stop there. We are also invited to consider, as we expand the circle of our concern even wider, the corporate sins and shortcomings of the country and culture in which we live. In the litany of penitence that we will pray together in a few moments, we confess not just ways that we as individual Christians have sinned and ways the Church has sinned, but systemic sins rooted in our wider culture: “Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people… Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts… our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty.” This “our” is much bigger than you or me or all of us in this church combined. It is an “our” that resonates with the wider American culture: our materialism that values things over people, our individualism that leads us to believe we need to care only for ourselves and our families and not for the wider community, and our obsession with violence that desensitizes us to the image of God in all people. In our current political climate, these communal sins of our culture are on display in a particularly vivid way. This year I am especially aware of “the evil done on our behalf” that our confession of sin refers to – sins we may have not have committed personally, but things our government has done “on our behalf,” in which we are implicated whether we like it or not.
On Ash Wednesday, we are invited us to remember and contemplate our mortality and the fragility of human life. It is a time for examining our actions and behaviors and priorities and the intentions behind our actions, and taking stock of what is really important in the life of faith.
So as you begin Lent this year, take some time to consider: what is really important to you in your life of faith? What spiritual practices do you wish you were doing on a more regular basis? Could you commit to doing at least one of them during Lent? What relationship in your life do you most need to change in order for God’s love to be reflected in and through it? Could you take some steps toward changing that relationship during Lent?
Each of us may have a different Lenten discipline this year, but the underlying theme of our work is the same: to consider how we are called to live out our faith authentically in the world, in such a way that we contribute to God’s work of bringing justice and freedom to all. Through our Lenten fast, whatever form that may take for each of us, may we all seek a deeper knowledge of the heart of God and bear fruits of authentic repentance.
Sunday, February 12, 2017
Repentance, reconciliation and return - in the liturgy and in our lives
Sermon delivered Sunday, Feb. 12, 2017 (Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany, Year A), at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA, as part six of a seven-week series on baptism and the Baptismal Covenant.
Sermon Text(s): Deuteronomy 30:15-30, Matthew 5:21-37, Baptismal Covenant Question #2
“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.”
Moses’s speech to the Israelites in today’s reading from Deuteronomy reminds them that while God has given them a set of commandments and instructions for living, he does not make them behave in a certain way. They always have a choice whether they will follow the commandments or not.
We, too, have a real choice as to whether we will follow the commandments we have been given in our Baptistmal Covenant. Because we have free will, our obedience to our baptismal vows is by no means guaranteed. It is always a choice, and because we are human, we will mess up sometimes. We will make the wrong choice. Sometimes we choose death and curses instead of life and blessings.
This is why our baptismal covenant has built into it a vow about what we will do when that happens. In this sixth week of our preaching series on baptism, we look at the second question of the baptismal covenant:
"Will you persevere in resisting evil, and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?"
Notice that the question does not say IF you fall into sin, but WHEN. The Baptismal Covenant does not assume perfection from us. It assumes we will mess up. Being faithful does not mean never sinning. It means properly making amends when we do.
Jesus’s teachings in today’s passage from the Sermon on the Mount set an extremely high standard for our behavior, pretty much guaranteeing that we will always fall short! Don’t just refrain from murdering someone, but refrain from being angry at them, he says. Don’t just refrain from having an affair with a married person, but refrain from even thinking lustfully about anyone who is married.
Seriously, Jesus? How is it even humanly possible to obey these teachings completely? Maybe it’s not, but his point is that you’re not made right with God simply by refraining from certain actions. Fully embracing the ethical standards God sets means making an effort to live with integrity, purifying your inner life and thoughts as well as your outward actions. Even if you never kill someone, if you nurture anger and resentment toward that person, that in itself is its own kind of death, for you and for the person you are angry with.
Jesus encourages us to go the extra mile in the work of reconciliation and actively seek to restore relationships with our neighbors as part and parcel of what it means to be reconciled with God.
Right after the teaching about it not being enough to simply not murder someone, but not to be angry with them either, Jesus says,
“So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.”
This is the theological basis behind the passing of the peace during our liturgy. After we collectively confess our sins, first we are reconciled with God, symbolized by the priest pronouncing absolution over us, reminding us that God forgives us, and then we are reconciled with our neighbors, symbolized by our sharing the peace with one another.
When we say “peace” to one another, we are offering a sign of reconciliation, making peace with everyone before we receive the Eucharist, as Jesus instructs us to do in this passage from Matthew: “First be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come [to the altar].” Some interpretations of this passage say that we should not receive communion if we are in a serious conflict with anyone in our lives that we have not attempted to resolve. I once voluntarily denied myself communion for several months because I was in conflict with a member of my family. He did not immediately respond to my attempts to reconcile, but after I had written a letter and reached out and done all that I felt I could at that point, after I had made a good faith effort to be reconciled, I started to receive communion again. As much as we enjoy greeting one another and being cheerful during the peace, the peace is not meant to be a time to casually greet one another on a social level. It is meant to be a time to seek forgiveness from anyone whom we may have harmed and to forgive anyone who may have harmed us in the community.
While I was serving a congregation in Omaha, Nebraska, as an intern through one of the Episcopal Service Corps discernment programs for young adults, I carelessly made a remark that offended one of my parishioners. At a book study one night, I was commenting about the lack of mental health services for veterans coming back from war. My intent was to express concern and to advocate for veteran’s needs, but the way I said it – making a comment about how the military “turns people into killing machines” through basic training and then doesn’t give them the tools to undo that training when they return to civilian life – inadvertently upset one of the people in the book study, who was a veteran and didn’t take kindly to my categorization of soldiers as “killing machines.” We talked about it afterwards and were able to come to a congenial resolution. That Sunday, we intentionally approached each other at the peace, and that handshake and brief eye contact we made while saying “peace” to one another had a much deeper meaning to me in that moment than it ever had before in the liturgy.
If you have ever been through a Twelve Step program, or know someone who has, you know about the importance of Step Nine – making amends. Making amends means approaching anyone we have wronged and attempting to make things right – to apologize for what we have done and to offer any kind of remuneration appropriate to the situation, anything we can do to “make it up to them,” as the saying goes. After this initial reconciliation, Step Ten is to “continue to take personal inventory and when we [are] wrong, promptly admit it.” Since the founders of AA and the Twelve Step program were influenced by biblical teachings, it is no surprise that Steps Nine and Ten echo these teachings of Jesus and the second vow of our Baptismal Covenant:
"Will you persevere in resisting evil, and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?"
In other words, this question asks us, “Will you continue to be vigilant in your resistance against evil, against sin, against addiction, against whatever it is that draws you away from God, and whenever you find yourself going astray from that, whenever you realize you have done wrong, to promptly admit it and make amends – to others and to God?”
Of course, while we may be able to right some wrongs we have done to others in this life, some wrongs are impossible to correct. An apology doesn’t bring someone back from the dead, for instance. When we come up against the limits of our ability to make amends, we are forced to acknowledge our dependence on God’s grace.
Remember in stewardship season when we talked about how we can never really “give back to God?” Well, it is also true that we can never really “make amends” to God. What could we possibly give to God or do for God that would make up for all the ways we have harmed God when we have fallen short of God’s intentions for us, for God’s plan for us to live with one other in peace? Despite the universal foxhole prayer – “Dear God, if you just save my life, if you just get me out of this situation, I’ll make it up to you – I’ll go to church every week, I’ll give up all my possessions, I’ll become a preacher, I’ll….” whatever the bargain is we’re making with God” – in reality, we can never actually “make it up to God.” If we do make it through whatever difficult situation we’re in, we know that our success or relief is a gift of pure grace.
If our relationship with God is built on trying to “make up for” all the things we have done wrong, we will only sink further into guilt and despair. The heart of the Christian message is one of pure grace – completely undeserved, unearned mercy shown by God to us, a complete gift. It is a foundation in this overflowing mercy of God that frees us, that compels us, to forgive as we have been forgiven. Knowing that God forgives us for anything and everything we have done allows us to begin to work toward forgiving others.
This is why I like the absolution from the New Zealand Prayer Book and why I’ve been using it in our liturgy for the past several months:
“God forgives you. Forgive others, forgive yourself.”
It is through fully coming to understand that God forgives you that you can begin to forgive others and yourself.
And the second part of that absolution: “Through Christ, God has put away your sins. Approach your God in peace.” – reminds us that God has ALREADY forgiven us. I, as the priest, am not pronouncing you to be forgiven in that moment. I am reminding you that, as Jesus said on the cross, “It is finished.” You are already forgiven. You are free. Free to approach God in peace, without fear of retribution. Free to approach your brothers and sisters secure in the knowledge of your own acceptance and forgiveness and therefore free to offer them your forgiveness.
After this, we flow seamlessly into the exchanging of the peace. We “approach our God in peace” by approaching one another in peace, being reconciled with one another, and then coming together to share the Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ “given for you and for all for the forgiveness of sins.”
Repentance, reconciliation and return. We rehearse these steps every week in the structure of our worship. It is meant to be a pattern for our lives outside these 90 minutes on Sunday mornings as well.
"Will you persevere in resisting evil, and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?"
We will, with God’s help.
Sermon Text(s): Deuteronomy 30:15-30, Matthew 5:21-37, Baptismal Covenant Question #2
“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.”
Moses’s speech to the Israelites in today’s reading from Deuteronomy reminds them that while God has given them a set of commandments and instructions for living, he does not make them behave in a certain way. They always have a choice whether they will follow the commandments or not.
We, too, have a real choice as to whether we will follow the commandments we have been given in our Baptistmal Covenant. Because we have free will, our obedience to our baptismal vows is by no means guaranteed. It is always a choice, and because we are human, we will mess up sometimes. We will make the wrong choice. Sometimes we choose death and curses instead of life and blessings.
This is why our baptismal covenant has built into it a vow about what we will do when that happens. In this sixth week of our preaching series on baptism, we look at the second question of the baptismal covenant:
"Will you persevere in resisting evil, and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?"
Notice that the question does not say IF you fall into sin, but WHEN. The Baptismal Covenant does not assume perfection from us. It assumes we will mess up. Being faithful does not mean never sinning. It means properly making amends when we do.
Jesus’s teachings in today’s passage from the Sermon on the Mount set an extremely high standard for our behavior, pretty much guaranteeing that we will always fall short! Don’t just refrain from murdering someone, but refrain from being angry at them, he says. Don’t just refrain from having an affair with a married person, but refrain from even thinking lustfully about anyone who is married.
Seriously, Jesus? How is it even humanly possible to obey these teachings completely? Maybe it’s not, but his point is that you’re not made right with God simply by refraining from certain actions. Fully embracing the ethical standards God sets means making an effort to live with integrity, purifying your inner life and thoughts as well as your outward actions. Even if you never kill someone, if you nurture anger and resentment toward that person, that in itself is its own kind of death, for you and for the person you are angry with.
Jesus encourages us to go the extra mile in the work of reconciliation and actively seek to restore relationships with our neighbors as part and parcel of what it means to be reconciled with God.
Right after the teaching about it not being enough to simply not murder someone, but not to be angry with them either, Jesus says,
“So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.”
This is the theological basis behind the passing of the peace during our liturgy. After we collectively confess our sins, first we are reconciled with God, symbolized by the priest pronouncing absolution over us, reminding us that God forgives us, and then we are reconciled with our neighbors, symbolized by our sharing the peace with one another.
When we say “peace” to one another, we are offering a sign of reconciliation, making peace with everyone before we receive the Eucharist, as Jesus instructs us to do in this passage from Matthew: “First be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come [to the altar].” Some interpretations of this passage say that we should not receive communion if we are in a serious conflict with anyone in our lives that we have not attempted to resolve. I once voluntarily denied myself communion for several months because I was in conflict with a member of my family. He did not immediately respond to my attempts to reconcile, but after I had written a letter and reached out and done all that I felt I could at that point, after I had made a good faith effort to be reconciled, I started to receive communion again. As much as we enjoy greeting one another and being cheerful during the peace, the peace is not meant to be a time to casually greet one another on a social level. It is meant to be a time to seek forgiveness from anyone whom we may have harmed and to forgive anyone who may have harmed us in the community.
While I was serving a congregation in Omaha, Nebraska, as an intern through one of the Episcopal Service Corps discernment programs for young adults, I carelessly made a remark that offended one of my parishioners. At a book study one night, I was commenting about the lack of mental health services for veterans coming back from war. My intent was to express concern and to advocate for veteran’s needs, but the way I said it – making a comment about how the military “turns people into killing machines” through basic training and then doesn’t give them the tools to undo that training when they return to civilian life – inadvertently upset one of the people in the book study, who was a veteran and didn’t take kindly to my categorization of soldiers as “killing machines.” We talked about it afterwards and were able to come to a congenial resolution. That Sunday, we intentionally approached each other at the peace, and that handshake and brief eye contact we made while saying “peace” to one another had a much deeper meaning to me in that moment than it ever had before in the liturgy.
If you have ever been through a Twelve Step program, or know someone who has, you know about the importance of Step Nine – making amends. Making amends means approaching anyone we have wronged and attempting to make things right – to apologize for what we have done and to offer any kind of remuneration appropriate to the situation, anything we can do to “make it up to them,” as the saying goes. After this initial reconciliation, Step Ten is to “continue to take personal inventory and when we [are] wrong, promptly admit it.” Since the founders of AA and the Twelve Step program were influenced by biblical teachings, it is no surprise that Steps Nine and Ten echo these teachings of Jesus and the second vow of our Baptismal Covenant:
"Will you persevere in resisting evil, and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?"
In other words, this question asks us, “Will you continue to be vigilant in your resistance against evil, against sin, against addiction, against whatever it is that draws you away from God, and whenever you find yourself going astray from that, whenever you realize you have done wrong, to promptly admit it and make amends – to others and to God?”
Of course, while we may be able to right some wrongs we have done to others in this life, some wrongs are impossible to correct. An apology doesn’t bring someone back from the dead, for instance. When we come up against the limits of our ability to make amends, we are forced to acknowledge our dependence on God’s grace.
Remember in stewardship season when we talked about how we can never really “give back to God?” Well, it is also true that we can never really “make amends” to God. What could we possibly give to God or do for God that would make up for all the ways we have harmed God when we have fallen short of God’s intentions for us, for God’s plan for us to live with one other in peace? Despite the universal foxhole prayer – “Dear God, if you just save my life, if you just get me out of this situation, I’ll make it up to you – I’ll go to church every week, I’ll give up all my possessions, I’ll become a preacher, I’ll….” whatever the bargain is we’re making with God” – in reality, we can never actually “make it up to God.” If we do make it through whatever difficult situation we’re in, we know that our success or relief is a gift of pure grace.
If our relationship with God is built on trying to “make up for” all the things we have done wrong, we will only sink further into guilt and despair. The heart of the Christian message is one of pure grace – completely undeserved, unearned mercy shown by God to us, a complete gift. It is a foundation in this overflowing mercy of God that frees us, that compels us, to forgive as we have been forgiven. Knowing that God forgives us for anything and everything we have done allows us to begin to work toward forgiving others.
This is why I like the absolution from the New Zealand Prayer Book and why I’ve been using it in our liturgy for the past several months:
“God forgives you. Forgive others, forgive yourself.”
It is through fully coming to understand that God forgives you that you can begin to forgive others and yourself.
And the second part of that absolution: “Through Christ, God has put away your sins. Approach your God in peace.” – reminds us that God has ALREADY forgiven us. I, as the priest, am not pronouncing you to be forgiven in that moment. I am reminding you that, as Jesus said on the cross, “It is finished.” You are already forgiven. You are free. Free to approach God in peace, without fear of retribution. Free to approach your brothers and sisters secure in the knowledge of your own acceptance and forgiveness and therefore free to offer them your forgiveness.
After this, we flow seamlessly into the exchanging of the peace. We “approach our God in peace” by approaching one another in peace, being reconciled with one another, and then coming together to share the Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ “given for you and for all for the forgiveness of sins.”
Repentance, reconciliation and return. We rehearse these steps every week in the structure of our worship. It is meant to be a pattern for our lives outside these 90 minutes on Sunday mornings as well.
"Will you persevere in resisting evil, and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?"
We will, with God’s help.
Sunday, December 4, 2016
"Let every heart prepare him room" through repentance during Advent
Sermon delivered Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016 (Second Sunday of Advent, Year A), at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
Sermon Text(s): Matthew 3:1-12, Isaiah 11:1-10
Repentance and joy. They may sound like opposites, but the season of Advent pushes them together in close proximity, making a connection between the serious soul-searching of repentance and the ability to celebrate with abandon, to be free enough to experience true joy.
As we wait expectantly for the coming of Christ – both for our annual celebration of his birth at Christmas and for his Second Coming which is yet to come, we take time to prepare our hearts to receive him. Part of that preparation involves repentance. It involves conducting a “searching and fearless moral inventory” of our lives, in order that we might make amends where amends are necessary and be at peace with ourselves, with others, and with God, so that, as the preface for Advent in our Eucharistic prayer says, when he “come[s] again in power and great triumph to judge the world, we may without shame or fear rejoice to behold his appearing.”
In today’s Gospel reading, John the Baptist, that great prophet who prepared the way for Jesus to begin his preaching and teaching ministry, reminds us that we all need to repent, even those who are sure they are already part of God’s people and have found favor with God.
“Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor;’” John tells the Jewish leaders of his day, “for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”
John reminds any who might have felt that their lineage as sons and daughters of Abraham entitled them to a sort of “free pass” at the last judgment, who might have thought that they were worthy just by virtue of the fact that they were part of God’s “chosen people,” that they must also live an authentic life of faith that bears visible fruit in their actions. “Bear fruits worthy of repentance,” he tells them. Being a son or daughter of Abraham means nothing, he says, if your life does not bear witness to God’s justice and love.
According to John, bearing fruit is the standard by which we will be judged, not our membership within a particular religious community. We will be judged not by what we’ve said we believed, but by the testimony of our hearts and our lives.
I’m sure that at some point in your life you’ve heard someone comment on the good deeds and sound life of someone who professes no faith at all. The statement usually goes something like this: “I know some atheists who are better Christians than some Christians I know!” What they are pointing to is the issue of bearing fruit. They see many people who say they believe in Christ judging others, saying one thing and doing another, going to church on Sunday but engaging in corrupt business practices or questionable moral behavior during the week – while they see many people who say they have no religious faith feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, visiting the sick, working for justice – the very things Christians are called to do. And so, they sigh and say, “Some atheists are better Christians than some Christians I know!”
That’s actually a very biblical statement. It’s essentially what John the Baptist was saying to the first-century Jewish community, and what Jesus would wind up saying to them as well. “Tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you,” Jesus said to the religious leaders of his day (Matthew 21:31). In other words, the supposedly “unfaithful” can actually be more faithful than the faithful at times. This is why the prophets continually call us to repentance, and remind us that bearing fruit is of utmost importance.
But lest we think that “bearing fruit” is simply a matter of doing the right things, the prophets also remind us that doing the right things without the right intentions is equally as empty as trusting in the fact that you were born into the “right” religious community. “Bear fruits worthy of repentance,” John the Baptist says. Repentance is a matter of the heart, of the inner orientation and intentions underlying our actions. Not only is it not enough to be children of Abraham, but it is also not enough to observe the right rituals if our hearts are not in the right place.
“For you have no delight in sacrifice,” writes the psalmist, “if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:16-17). The prophet Amos brings this word of God to the people: “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them… but let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:21-22, 24). The prophet Hosea said God desires mercy, not sacrifice (Hosea 6:6), and Jesus quoted this in his teachings.
In all these passages, the issue is not that the rituals themselves were bad – the people believed God had commanded them to do them – but that the people were doing them without the proper intentions in their hearts, and their lives were not bearing the proper fruit. The apostle Paul echoed this theme in his first letter to the Corinthians, when he insisted that without love – without one’s heart being in the right place – all the most praiseworthy actions on behalf of spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ were utterly worthless. “If I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing,” he wrote (1 Corinthians 13:2). This is a common theme, from the earliest of the Hebrew prophets all the way through the New Testament. Although our faith engages our heads – in our assent to certain beliefs or doctrines – and our hands and feet – in our actions in the world – at the end of the day, the life of faith is ultimately a matter of the heart.
This is why we pray the Collect for Purity at the beginning of every Eucharist: “Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your Holy Name, through Christ our Lord.” Today’s passage from Isaiah tells us that that “branch from the root of Jesse” that Christians understand to be referring to Jesus will “not judge by what his eyes see or decide by what his ears hear,” but will judge “with righteousness,” the kind of righteousness that comes from knowing what is in one’s heart. So when we come to church, we might appear to be doing all the “right” things by being here, participating in a ritual that we believe Jesus commanded his followers to continue in his name, but if our hearts are not in the right place, our actions will not please God. And so we pray in the Collect for Purity for God’s assistance in orienting ourselves toward God and cleansing our hearts of any sin within them so that our worship of God may be an authentic expression of love and praise.
The word “Advent” means “coming,” and the early church fathers spoke of three “advents” in the Christian religion: the first coming of Christ, in his birth at Bethlehem in the first century, the second coming of Christ to judge the world at the end of time, and the daily coming of Christ into the hearts of individual believers. Without that third advent, the first and second advents won’t have much meaning to us. In the season of Advent, we do not only remember what has already been and wait for what is to come, but celebrate what currently is: the presence of Christ with us every day in our hearts -- and in the hearts of believers around the world.
“Let every heart prepare him room,” says the Christmas hymn “Joy to the World,” and that is indeed the work of Advent, the work of examining our hearts and opening them to receive the coming of Christ that is available to us every day. It is through the heart-cleansing work of repentance that we might be able to experience the joy of Christ’s presence among us.
Sermon Text(s): Matthew 3:1-12, Isaiah 11:1-10
Repentance and joy. They may sound like opposites, but the season of Advent pushes them together in close proximity, making a connection between the serious soul-searching of repentance and the ability to celebrate with abandon, to be free enough to experience true joy.
As we wait expectantly for the coming of Christ – both for our annual celebration of his birth at Christmas and for his Second Coming which is yet to come, we take time to prepare our hearts to receive him. Part of that preparation involves repentance. It involves conducting a “searching and fearless moral inventory” of our lives, in order that we might make amends where amends are necessary and be at peace with ourselves, with others, and with God, so that, as the preface for Advent in our Eucharistic prayer says, when he “come[s] again in power and great triumph to judge the world, we may without shame or fear rejoice to behold his appearing.”
In today’s Gospel reading, John the Baptist, that great prophet who prepared the way for Jesus to begin his preaching and teaching ministry, reminds us that we all need to repent, even those who are sure they are already part of God’s people and have found favor with God.
“Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor;’” John tells the Jewish leaders of his day, “for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”
John reminds any who might have felt that their lineage as sons and daughters of Abraham entitled them to a sort of “free pass” at the last judgment, who might have thought that they were worthy just by virtue of the fact that they were part of God’s “chosen people,” that they must also live an authentic life of faith that bears visible fruit in their actions. “Bear fruits worthy of repentance,” he tells them. Being a son or daughter of Abraham means nothing, he says, if your life does not bear witness to God’s justice and love.
According to John, bearing fruit is the standard by which we will be judged, not our membership within a particular religious community. We will be judged not by what we’ve said we believed, but by the testimony of our hearts and our lives.
I’m sure that at some point in your life you’ve heard someone comment on the good deeds and sound life of someone who professes no faith at all. The statement usually goes something like this: “I know some atheists who are better Christians than some Christians I know!” What they are pointing to is the issue of bearing fruit. They see many people who say they believe in Christ judging others, saying one thing and doing another, going to church on Sunday but engaging in corrupt business practices or questionable moral behavior during the week – while they see many people who say they have no religious faith feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, visiting the sick, working for justice – the very things Christians are called to do. And so, they sigh and say, “Some atheists are better Christians than some Christians I know!”
That’s actually a very biblical statement. It’s essentially what John the Baptist was saying to the first-century Jewish community, and what Jesus would wind up saying to them as well. “Tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you,” Jesus said to the religious leaders of his day (Matthew 21:31). In other words, the supposedly “unfaithful” can actually be more faithful than the faithful at times. This is why the prophets continually call us to repentance, and remind us that bearing fruit is of utmost importance.
But lest we think that “bearing fruit” is simply a matter of doing the right things, the prophets also remind us that doing the right things without the right intentions is equally as empty as trusting in the fact that you were born into the “right” religious community. “Bear fruits worthy of repentance,” John the Baptist says. Repentance is a matter of the heart, of the inner orientation and intentions underlying our actions. Not only is it not enough to be children of Abraham, but it is also not enough to observe the right rituals if our hearts are not in the right place.
“For you have no delight in sacrifice,” writes the psalmist, “if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:16-17). The prophet Amos brings this word of God to the people: “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them… but let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:21-22, 24). The prophet Hosea said God desires mercy, not sacrifice (Hosea 6:6), and Jesus quoted this in his teachings.
In all these passages, the issue is not that the rituals themselves were bad – the people believed God had commanded them to do them – but that the people were doing them without the proper intentions in their hearts, and their lives were not bearing the proper fruit. The apostle Paul echoed this theme in his first letter to the Corinthians, when he insisted that without love – without one’s heart being in the right place – all the most praiseworthy actions on behalf of spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ were utterly worthless. “If I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing,” he wrote (1 Corinthians 13:2). This is a common theme, from the earliest of the Hebrew prophets all the way through the New Testament. Although our faith engages our heads – in our assent to certain beliefs or doctrines – and our hands and feet – in our actions in the world – at the end of the day, the life of faith is ultimately a matter of the heart.
This is why we pray the Collect for Purity at the beginning of every Eucharist: “Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your Holy Name, through Christ our Lord.” Today’s passage from Isaiah tells us that that “branch from the root of Jesse” that Christians understand to be referring to Jesus will “not judge by what his eyes see or decide by what his ears hear,” but will judge “with righteousness,” the kind of righteousness that comes from knowing what is in one’s heart. So when we come to church, we might appear to be doing all the “right” things by being here, participating in a ritual that we believe Jesus commanded his followers to continue in his name, but if our hearts are not in the right place, our actions will not please God. And so we pray in the Collect for Purity for God’s assistance in orienting ourselves toward God and cleansing our hearts of any sin within them so that our worship of God may be an authentic expression of love and praise.
The word “Advent” means “coming,” and the early church fathers spoke of three “advents” in the Christian religion: the first coming of Christ, in his birth at Bethlehem in the first century, the second coming of Christ to judge the world at the end of time, and the daily coming of Christ into the hearts of individual believers. Without that third advent, the first and second advents won’t have much meaning to us. In the season of Advent, we do not only remember what has already been and wait for what is to come, but celebrate what currently is: the presence of Christ with us every day in our hearts -- and in the hearts of believers around the world.
“Let every heart prepare him room,” says the Christmas hymn “Joy to the World,” and that is indeed the work of Advent, the work of examining our hearts and opening them to receive the coming of Christ that is available to us every day. It is through the heart-cleansing work of repentance that we might be able to experience the joy of Christ’s presence among us.
Sunday, September 11, 2016
What do you do when the 15th anniversary of 9/11 falls on a Sunday?
Instead of a sermon on Sept. 11, 2016, we saw a brief clip of the film Divided We Fall and did an interactive dialogue exercise called "Crossing the Line." Below is the letter Mother Tracy sent out to the congregation before that Sunday:
What do you do when the 15th anniversary of 9/11 falls on a Sunday?
This is the question pastors all over the country have been asking this week. Do you acknowledge it in the sermon, in the prayers? Do you pray for first responders and have a special blessing for them? Do you just go on with life as usual, not wanting to draw too much attention to what may be too traumatic to remember for many? Has enough time passed that we don't "need" to acknowledge it anymore?
Since the events of 9/11 and its aftermath profoundly changed my life and influenced the way I do ministry, and since this anniversary falls on a Sunday and is a significant number (15 years), and since the lessons for this Sunday seem in some way related to the themes of 9/11, I've decided to observe the anniversary in this way:
This Sunday, at the sermon time, we'll have an opportunity to share with each other about our own 9/11 experiences. Instead of a sermon, I'll show the opening 3 minutes of the film "Divided We Fall: Americans in the Aftermath" (www.dividedwefallfilm.com), the documentary film on hate crimes after 9/11 that I've mentioned to you before, that I worked for as communications director. After that clip, I'll lead the congregation in a participatory dialogue exercise designed to illustrate our shared experience of 9/11 and also the ways in which our experiences of that event highlight our differences.
Because time won't permit during the service, the debrief and discussion of this exercise will take place after the service in the parish hall. As we make sandwiches for the outdoor church for the homeless in Hayward (as we do every second Sunday of the month), we'll share reflections about how the dialogue exercise during the service and our own experiences with 9/11 relate to our scripture passages for this Sunday, which have a theme of sin and repentance.
I hope you'll join us, and bring friends: the more diverse the crowd we do this exercise with, the better.
To prepare for Sunday, if you'd like, you can actually watch the entire film online (1.5 hours) -- the filmmakers have partnered with the Sikh Coalition, a civil rights group, to make the film available to the public online for FREE from now until Election Day, to showcase one way in which love can overcome fear and hatred.
Watch the film here:
http://dividedwefallfilm.com/
You can also read the scripture passages ahead of time, here:
http://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp19_RCL.html
These passages call us to think about our own sinfulness and God's great mercy. They call us to remember that "Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners," that Jesus "welcomed sinners and ate with them," that "all are corrupt and commit abominable acts." How do you hear these passages with the memory of 9/11 in the forefront of your mind? How do you hear them in light of our current context, fifteen years later?
Some may ask, why even commemorate the "anniversary" of a horrific event, anyway? Shouldn't we focus on remembering positive things?
Certainly, an "anniversary" is often something we celebrate, but not always. Consider the ways in which you mark the months or years after the death of a loved one or another traumatic event in your life. Yes, sometimes it can be best not to dwell on it, but sometimes the healthiest thing to do is to dig into it and process the remaining grief and find a way to hold on to the relentless hope and optimism that is at the core of our faith. To find a way to look at the darkness and say, in the words of the Gospel of John, "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."
On this 15th anniversary of 9/11, we'll both see the darkness and affirm the strength of the light. Join us in worship this Sunday, at 10 a.m.
Many blessings,
Mother Tracy+
What do you do when the 15th anniversary of 9/11 falls on a Sunday?
This is the question pastors all over the country have been asking this week. Do you acknowledge it in the sermon, in the prayers? Do you pray for first responders and have a special blessing for them? Do you just go on with life as usual, not wanting to draw too much attention to what may be too traumatic to remember for many? Has enough time passed that we don't "need" to acknowledge it anymore?
Since the events of 9/11 and its aftermath profoundly changed my life and influenced the way I do ministry, and since this anniversary falls on a Sunday and is a significant number (15 years), and since the lessons for this Sunday seem in some way related to the themes of 9/11, I've decided to observe the anniversary in this way:
This Sunday, at the sermon time, we'll have an opportunity to share with each other about our own 9/11 experiences. Instead of a sermon, I'll show the opening 3 minutes of the film "Divided We Fall: Americans in the Aftermath" (www.dividedwefallfilm.com), the documentary film on hate crimes after 9/11 that I've mentioned to you before, that I worked for as communications director. After that clip, I'll lead the congregation in a participatory dialogue exercise designed to illustrate our shared experience of 9/11 and also the ways in which our experiences of that event highlight our differences.
Because time won't permit during the service, the debrief and discussion of this exercise will take place after the service in the parish hall. As we make sandwiches for the outdoor church for the homeless in Hayward (as we do every second Sunday of the month), we'll share reflections about how the dialogue exercise during the service and our own experiences with 9/11 relate to our scripture passages for this Sunday, which have a theme of sin and repentance.
I hope you'll join us, and bring friends: the more diverse the crowd we do this exercise with, the better.
To prepare for Sunday, if you'd like, you can actually watch the entire film online (1.5 hours) -- the filmmakers have partnered with the Sikh Coalition, a civil rights group, to make the film available to the public online for FREE from now until Election Day, to showcase one way in which love can overcome fear and hatred.
Watch the film here:
http://dividedwefallfilm.com/
You can also read the scripture passages ahead of time, here:
http://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp19_RCL.html
These passages call us to think about our own sinfulness and God's great mercy. They call us to remember that "Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners," that Jesus "welcomed sinners and ate with them," that "all are corrupt and commit abominable acts." How do you hear these passages with the memory of 9/11 in the forefront of your mind? How do you hear them in light of our current context, fifteen years later?
Some may ask, why even commemorate the "anniversary" of a horrific event, anyway? Shouldn't we focus on remembering positive things?
Certainly, an "anniversary" is often something we celebrate, but not always. Consider the ways in which you mark the months or years after the death of a loved one or another traumatic event in your life. Yes, sometimes it can be best not to dwell on it, but sometimes the healthiest thing to do is to dig into it and process the remaining grief and find a way to hold on to the relentless hope and optimism that is at the core of our faith. To find a way to look at the darkness and say, in the words of the Gospel of John, "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."
On this 15th anniversary of 9/11, we'll both see the darkness and affirm the strength of the light. Join us in worship this Sunday, at 10 a.m.
Many blessings,
Mother Tracy+
Sunday, August 14, 2016
What kind of "peace" does Jesus come to bring?
Sermon delivered Sunday, August 14, 2016 (The Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 15, Year C (Track 2)) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” (Luke 12:51)
Jesus’s words in today’s Gospel passage stand in stark contrast to the understanding many of us in the mainline churches have of the teachings of Jesus. Jesus is the “Prince of Peace,” Jesus “loves the little children,” Jesus’s message was to “love God and love neighbor,” and that’s about it, right? We often talk about our faith as if we think “be nice to each other” pretty much sums up the Gospel.
But that’s not quite all of it. Jesus didn’t just say “be nice to each other.” He also said to free the oppressed and heal the sick and release the prisoners. He called us to fight against injustice, to stand in solidarity with the marginalized, to question any institutional structures whose rules about right and wrong ignore and even perpetuate human suffering. And as most of you know from experience, when you start standing up against injustice and raising up the voices of the marginalized, the reactions from others are often less than peaceful.
“I have not come to bring peace, but division,” Jesus says. Yes, he does call us to love God and love neighbor, but he wants us to understand that “loving God and loving neighbor” doesn’t mean always being nice, or never getting into conflict with anyone, or “keeping the peace” at all costs. Loving God and loving neighbor can be a revolutionary act – an act that compels us to see one other’s wounds rather than hide them.
Jesus’s words here echo other scripture passages from the Hebrew Bible that admonish false prophets for assuring the people that everything was ok when it wasn’t. He would have known these words of the prophet Jeremiah well:
“They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14)
Or, as Taylor Swift puts it in her song “Bad Blood,” “Band-aids don’t fix bullet holes.”
Unfortunately that’s too often how we, in society at large and in the church, attempt to solve problems. We offer solutions that do not take into account the seriousness of the problem. We attempt to “dress the wound as though it were not serious.” We become like the false prophets Ezekiel spoke about, who cover a flimsy wall with whitewash to make look good what is really weak and rotting (Ezekiel 13:11). That’s the kind of “peace” Jesus is talking about when he says “I come not to bring peace” – he doesn’t come to bring the kind of peace that shoves conflict under the rug rather than resolving it, or worse, that denies there’s even a problem at all.
“I’m sure there’s a legitimate reason the cop pulled you over.”
“Just cheer up and snap out of it; you’re not REALLY sick.”
“I’m sure your boss didn’t REALLY mean that as a threat.”
You’re blowing things out of proportion, you’re being too sensitive.
Just put a band-aid on it.
Everything will be all right.
But everything is NOT all right, and as followers of Jesus Christ, we are called to say so, even if doing so causes conflict or division with those closest to us.
How many social issues in our society would cause arguments if you were to bring them up with your family members? When Jesus says, “I have come not to bring peace but division. From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three,” he didn’t mean that his GOAL was to divide people, to create familial discord, but that whenever the word of God breaks through into human society, it almost always causes conflict because of humanity’s tendency to avoid pain. We’d rather bury our heads in the sand and say “everything will be all right” than to acknowledge that there is something seriously wrong with us or with our society. So the voices that don’t deny the wounds, that shine spotlights on things others would rather stay hidden – they often wind up causing division within their communities, and especially within their own families.
This is playing out right now in American society with Black Lives Matter. One could certainly say that the Black Lives Matter movement has caused division in this country. But the folks affiliated with Black Lives Matter would probably say they haven’t caused division, they are simply pointing out divisions that have existed for a long time. Despite the achievements of the Civil Rights movement, we still have much further to go. When Barack Obama was elected President, it was easy for some people to assume we had “arrived,” that we had reached a point where racism was no longer an issue in this country. And it is easy for those of us who have never lived in this society with brown or black skin to say “peace, peace” on this issue, when in reality there is no peace. For those of us in that position of privilege, our role is to listen. To listen to the voices we have not heard, to bear witness to experiences that we have not had, and acknowledge that they are real even if we haven’t personally experienced them ourselves. We must not turn away from pain, but face it head on, as Jesus and the prophets did.
The apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans that “all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death” (Romans 6:3). Our baptism connects us not just to the washing with water that Jesus got from John in the Jordan River, but to the “terrible baptism of suffering” that he experienced on the cross, the “baptism” he refers to in today’s Gospel that causes him great distress. We should have issued little Benjamin a hard hat along with his baptismal candle a few weeks ago, because while baptism is empowering, it is also dangerous. It means that we are forever connected to God and our sins are forgiven, but it also means we are also forever connected to Christ’s suffering and death.
Many people have criticized Christian theology that emphasizes our call to suffering, that insists that suffering can be redemptive, that we can be saved through suffering, that Jesus saves us through suffering. They don’t want to acknowledge that anything could be positive about suffering because of the ways that idea can be abused by people in power to justify injustice, to keep the oppressed oppressed. “Oh, you guys are called to suffer, it’s ok, just wait and stick it out; your reward will be great in heaven,” the church has said to black people in slavery, to women in abusive relationships, to workers exploited by corporations.
But that’s not the message of the Gospel! That’s the message of the false prophets who say “peace” when there is no peace! The call to suffering is not a call to inflict suffering on others, it’s a call to experience the suffering of others – to “weep with those who weep and to mourn with those who mourn.”
Charles Péguy, a French poet and philosopher, imagines that when we die, the recording angel at the entrance to heaven will say to us, “Show me your wounds.”
A life in Christ calls us to a life of suffering. If we have no wounds to show at the end of our days, we haven’t truly lived the Christian life. We’ve followed the false prophets who say “peace, peace” when there is no peace. We’ve turned a blind eye to the world’s injustices and benefitted from our complicity in them.
In the midst of the national anxiety around the police shootings last month, there was a meme circulating on Facebook that said,
“Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other close and continue to pull back the veil.”
Testifying to the truth might create division, but it is what we are called to do. Pulling back that veil so we can truly see the wounds that divide our society might make things seem like they are getting worse, but in another one of Jesus’s less popular sayings, he refers to this kind of conflict as the “beginning of the birth pangs,” of the necessary pain we must go through to come out on the other side with new life and a true peace, a peace that has its roots in reconciliation rather than denial, a peace that comes from healing the bullet hole rather than putting a band-aid over it.
That’s what “loving God and loving neighbor” looks like. Jesus calls us to a revolutionary love, a love that involves suffering. The suffering inherent in the Christian way leads us to a peace greater than any that would deny the existence of the wounds. And that’s the kind of peace Jesus is the prince of.
“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” (Luke 12:51)
Jesus’s words in today’s Gospel passage stand in stark contrast to the understanding many of us in the mainline churches have of the teachings of Jesus. Jesus is the “Prince of Peace,” Jesus “loves the little children,” Jesus’s message was to “love God and love neighbor,” and that’s about it, right? We often talk about our faith as if we think “be nice to each other” pretty much sums up the Gospel.
But that’s not quite all of it. Jesus didn’t just say “be nice to each other.” He also said to free the oppressed and heal the sick and release the prisoners. He called us to fight against injustice, to stand in solidarity with the marginalized, to question any institutional structures whose rules about right and wrong ignore and even perpetuate human suffering. And as most of you know from experience, when you start standing up against injustice and raising up the voices of the marginalized, the reactions from others are often less than peaceful.
“I have not come to bring peace, but division,” Jesus says. Yes, he does call us to love God and love neighbor, but he wants us to understand that “loving God and loving neighbor” doesn’t mean always being nice, or never getting into conflict with anyone, or “keeping the peace” at all costs. Loving God and loving neighbor can be a revolutionary act – an act that compels us to see one other’s wounds rather than hide them.
Jesus’s words here echo other scripture passages from the Hebrew Bible that admonish false prophets for assuring the people that everything was ok when it wasn’t. He would have known these words of the prophet Jeremiah well:
“They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14)
Or, as Taylor Swift puts it in her song “Bad Blood,” “Band-aids don’t fix bullet holes.”
Unfortunately that’s too often how we, in society at large and in the church, attempt to solve problems. We offer solutions that do not take into account the seriousness of the problem. We attempt to “dress the wound as though it were not serious.” We become like the false prophets Ezekiel spoke about, who cover a flimsy wall with whitewash to make look good what is really weak and rotting (Ezekiel 13:11). That’s the kind of “peace” Jesus is talking about when he says “I come not to bring peace” – he doesn’t come to bring the kind of peace that shoves conflict under the rug rather than resolving it, or worse, that denies there’s even a problem at all.
“I’m sure there’s a legitimate reason the cop pulled you over.”
“Just cheer up and snap out of it; you’re not REALLY sick.”
“I’m sure your boss didn’t REALLY mean that as a threat.”
You’re blowing things out of proportion, you’re being too sensitive.
Just put a band-aid on it.
Everything will be all right.
But everything is NOT all right, and as followers of Jesus Christ, we are called to say so, even if doing so causes conflict or division with those closest to us.
How many social issues in our society would cause arguments if you were to bring them up with your family members? When Jesus says, “I have come not to bring peace but division. From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three,” he didn’t mean that his GOAL was to divide people, to create familial discord, but that whenever the word of God breaks through into human society, it almost always causes conflict because of humanity’s tendency to avoid pain. We’d rather bury our heads in the sand and say “everything will be all right” than to acknowledge that there is something seriously wrong with us or with our society. So the voices that don’t deny the wounds, that shine spotlights on things others would rather stay hidden – they often wind up causing division within their communities, and especially within their own families.
This is playing out right now in American society with Black Lives Matter. One could certainly say that the Black Lives Matter movement has caused division in this country. But the folks affiliated with Black Lives Matter would probably say they haven’t caused division, they are simply pointing out divisions that have existed for a long time. Despite the achievements of the Civil Rights movement, we still have much further to go. When Barack Obama was elected President, it was easy for some people to assume we had “arrived,” that we had reached a point where racism was no longer an issue in this country. And it is easy for those of us who have never lived in this society with brown or black skin to say “peace, peace” on this issue, when in reality there is no peace. For those of us in that position of privilege, our role is to listen. To listen to the voices we have not heard, to bear witness to experiences that we have not had, and acknowledge that they are real even if we haven’t personally experienced them ourselves. We must not turn away from pain, but face it head on, as Jesus and the prophets did.
The apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans that “all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death” (Romans 6:3). Our baptism connects us not just to the washing with water that Jesus got from John in the Jordan River, but to the “terrible baptism of suffering” that he experienced on the cross, the “baptism” he refers to in today’s Gospel that causes him great distress. We should have issued little Benjamin a hard hat along with his baptismal candle a few weeks ago, because while baptism is empowering, it is also dangerous. It means that we are forever connected to God and our sins are forgiven, but it also means we are also forever connected to Christ’s suffering and death.
Many people have criticized Christian theology that emphasizes our call to suffering, that insists that suffering can be redemptive, that we can be saved through suffering, that Jesus saves us through suffering. They don’t want to acknowledge that anything could be positive about suffering because of the ways that idea can be abused by people in power to justify injustice, to keep the oppressed oppressed. “Oh, you guys are called to suffer, it’s ok, just wait and stick it out; your reward will be great in heaven,” the church has said to black people in slavery, to women in abusive relationships, to workers exploited by corporations.
But that’s not the message of the Gospel! That’s the message of the false prophets who say “peace” when there is no peace! The call to suffering is not a call to inflict suffering on others, it’s a call to experience the suffering of others – to “weep with those who weep and to mourn with those who mourn.”
Charles Péguy, a French poet and philosopher, imagines that when we die, the recording angel at the entrance to heaven will say to us, “Show me your wounds.”
A life in Christ calls us to a life of suffering. If we have no wounds to show at the end of our days, we haven’t truly lived the Christian life. We’ve followed the false prophets who say “peace, peace” when there is no peace. We’ve turned a blind eye to the world’s injustices and benefitted from our complicity in them.
In the midst of the national anxiety around the police shootings last month, there was a meme circulating on Facebook that said,
“Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other close and continue to pull back the veil.”
Testifying to the truth might create division, but it is what we are called to do. Pulling back that veil so we can truly see the wounds that divide our society might make things seem like they are getting worse, but in another one of Jesus’s less popular sayings, he refers to this kind of conflict as the “beginning of the birth pangs,” of the necessary pain we must go through to come out on the other side with new life and a true peace, a peace that has its roots in reconciliation rather than denial, a peace that comes from healing the bullet hole rather than putting a band-aid over it.
That’s what “loving God and loving neighbor” looks like. Jesus calls us to a revolutionary love, a love that involves suffering. The suffering inherent in the Christian way leads us to a peace greater than any that would deny the existence of the wounds. And that’s the kind of peace Jesus is the prince of.
Sunday, March 6, 2016
The Prodigal Son: The transforming power of love and forgiveness
Sermon delivered Sunday, March 6, 2016 (4th Sunday in Lent, Year C) at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA, where I am serving as long-term supply priest. Audio only (not video) available below.
(2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32)
Jesus is at it again in today’s Gospel reading: answering those self-righteous Pharisees with a parable that gets ‘em right in the gut. “So you’re worried about the fact that I’m eating with ‘sinners,’ are you? Well chew on THIS one for a while!” – and out comes the Prodigal Son, a story that has spoken deeply to the human soul throughout the centuries.
At face value, the message of the parable of the Prodigal Son seems simple, and completely appropriate for the season of Lent: The son repents, the father forgives him. Voila! The God-human relationship illustrated. As the son has sinned and left the father, so we have sinned and left God. As the son realizes the error of his ways and returns to his father, so should we repent and return to God in order to be forgiven of our sins.
But wait just a minute. If we look carefully at the story, it’s not actually that simple. Does the son actually repent? The story tells us that the son “came to himself.” But it’s not entirely clear what that means; whether he actually had a change of heart, or whether the “coming to himself” was him having an “ah ha” moment realizing another way he could continue to continue to make sure he was taken care of at his father’s expense. “How many of my father's hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger!” he thinks. “I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.’” Is this expression of humility genuine, or is he just trying to figure out a way to get himself back in the door in a place where he assumes he will be unwelcome? It’s not like he becomes successful and wealthy and goes home to share the bounty with his father – as is so often the case with children and their parents (and with human beings and God!), he only turns back to the father when he needs something, when he seeks to gain from reestablishing the relationship.
So, we’ve got the problem of whether the son’s repentance is genuine or not, and then the story gets further complicated when the son returns home. The parable tells us that “while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” The father runs to him while he was still far off. The son doesn’t even have a chance to make his confession, to grovel before his father and ask for forgiveness, before the father sweeps him into his arms with hugs and kisses. The son hasn’t said a word yet that would indicate that he is repentant, that he is sorry for what he’s done. For all the father knows, the son could be returning home to ask for more money – which, in fact, is sort of what he is doing, since he’s asking for his father to again provide for his needs in the form of food and shelter. But the father still runs toward him and embraces him. He doesn’t stand back, eyeing his son skeptically and asking him a bunch of questions about what he’s done and where he’s been and what has happened to all the money he gave him. He doesn’t lecture him on respect for one’s elders or demand an apology before he extends his hand in peace. His love for his son overtakes any feelings of resentment or being wronged. His love is unconditional, offered without any action required on the part of the son outside of just showing up.
“Now hold on there,” our inner sense of justice cries out. “That’s now how the story’s supposed to go! The sinner is supposed to show sufficient remorse and contrition before forgiveness is granted! God forgives the repentant, but the unrepentant he will burn with unquenchable fire… or something like that, right? I mean, there has to be some consequences for this guy’s actions! How can the father throw a party for this guy after what he’s done? Isn’t that like condoning his actions?”
Conventional religious thinking, in the Judaism of Jesus’s time and in many other religions in various times and contexts, tends to think of God as a just judge, concerned with impartially enforcing the law. In this way of thinking, God is ultimately concerned with “fairness,” with making sure that each person gets what they “deserve.” If they are good, they deserve a reward. If they are bad, they deserve punishment. Our relationship with God becomes some kind of balancing scale where we hope that, at the end, our good deeds outweigh our bad and we get in to heaven by virtue of how the accounting works out in some kind of divine judgment book. The elder son in the parable represents this kind of conventional religious thinking, as do the Pharisees who are so concerned about who Jesus is eating with and spending time with.
But Jesus constantly challenged the notion of God as an impartial calculator, crunching the numbers to determine our fate. Jesus emphasized the image of God as a loving parent, like the father in today’s parable, who is overcome with love for his or her children. That love guides his response to them, that love colors and influences her judgment, that love makes allowances for her children’s shortcomings.
When this kind of love expresses itself, it may not look “fair” to those who are keeping the great accounting sheet of rights and wrongs. It may mean that some people get celebrations and parties and forgiveness and acceptance that they don’t seem to deserve. But Jesus’s message is that God’s love and mercy is not something we can earn by doing or saying or believing the right things. None of us “deserve” God’s love or forgiveness based on our actions, however “good” we might think we have been! God’s acceptance and forgiveness of us is a gift freely given – out of a relationship based in unconditional love, a love that will not leave us if we screw up or disappoint or “squander our inheritance in dissolute living.”
This kind of love is more concerned with transformation than with fairness. This kind of love is willing to break all the rules if it means helping one soul to know they are loved and valued.
Can this kind of love be taken advantage of? Could the forgiven and loved prodigal son, after enjoying the fatted calf at his reunion party, have ripped his father off, stolen his valuables, and pawned them for money? Of course he could have. This kind of love is risky. It makes us vulnerable. It opens us to the possibility of being deeply wronged, or even physically harmed, in certain circumstances. But it also has the power to transform.
The main character of Les Misérables, that great novel by Victor Hugo that has been cinematized numerous times and made into a stage musical, is an example of a kind of “prodigal son” who is transformed by this kind of love.
Jean Valjean is released from prison after serving 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family. He has become cynical, hardened, and trusts no one. He has nothing to his name and is let out on the streets with no resources and nowhere to turn for help. As he goes door to door begging, he happens to knock on the local bishop’s door. The bishop takes him in and feeds him and gives him a place to stay. That night, Valjean sneaks out in the middle of the night, stealing the silver place settings from the table. When he is caught and the police drag him to the bishop’s door, they tell the bishop that Valjean has told them that the bishop gave him the silver. The bishop surprises everyone, Valjean most of all, when he confirms Valjean’s story. “That is right,” he tells the police. In the poetic wording of the stage play, he responds, “But my friend, you left so early / surely something slipped your mind / You forgot I gave these also / Would you leave the best behind?” – and proceeds to give Valjean the two silver candlesticks from his fireplace mantle.
According to the law, the right and “fair” thing for the bishop to do would have been to press charges, and for Valjean to go back to prison. But the bishop was more concerned with the transformative power of love than the fair application of the law.
The bishop took a risk by following Jesus’s teachings in Matthew 5:39-40: “Do not resist an evildoer… if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well.” Valjean could have betrayed his trust once again after this incident, or gone on to do harm to others as well. The bishop had no way of knowing what the outcome would be, but he chose trust over fear. He chose forgiveness over retribution. And it changed a man’s life. This risky act of generosity and forgiveness by the bishop transforms Valjean. His hardened shell falls away and reveals a kind, tender man with a heart of compassion, who goes about doing good for the rest of the story. The bishop responded to Valjean’s behavior not by “giving him what he deserved,” but by giving him a second chance.
As much as Lent gets a bad rep as a depressing season where we are told how bad we are, Lent is actually the season of second chances. It’s the season where we are reminded not just of our sins, but of God’s mercy. The joy of the father in the parable of the prodigal son at seeing his son return home is a metaphor for the joy God feels every time we return to him, no matter what we’ve done and no matter what is in our hearts when we do. God welcomes us home not for a stern scolding, but for a great celebration.
And we are called to do the same. If we are truly transformed by the love and forgiveness God has shown to us, we will offer forgiveness as freely as the father in the parable and the bishop in Les Misérables. As Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians, God has “entrusted the message of reconciliation to us. We are ambassadors for Christ.” We are the ones carrying God’s message to the world, the message that God is ready to throw you a party if you would but show up: no questions asked, no explanations needed. Just come, join us, and feast at that banquet prepared before the foundation of the world. If we are doing our job as Christians, it will also be said of us, “Those folks welcome sinners and eat with them!” Amen.
(2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32)
Jesus is at it again in today’s Gospel reading: answering those self-righteous Pharisees with a parable that gets ‘em right in the gut. “So you’re worried about the fact that I’m eating with ‘sinners,’ are you? Well chew on THIS one for a while!” – and out comes the Prodigal Son, a story that has spoken deeply to the human soul throughout the centuries.
At face value, the message of the parable of the Prodigal Son seems simple, and completely appropriate for the season of Lent: The son repents, the father forgives him. Voila! The God-human relationship illustrated. As the son has sinned and left the father, so we have sinned and left God. As the son realizes the error of his ways and returns to his father, so should we repent and return to God in order to be forgiven of our sins.
But wait just a minute. If we look carefully at the story, it’s not actually that simple. Does the son actually repent? The story tells us that the son “came to himself.” But it’s not entirely clear what that means; whether he actually had a change of heart, or whether the “coming to himself” was him having an “ah ha” moment realizing another way he could continue to continue to make sure he was taken care of at his father’s expense. “How many of my father's hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger!” he thinks. “I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.’” Is this expression of humility genuine, or is he just trying to figure out a way to get himself back in the door in a place where he assumes he will be unwelcome? It’s not like he becomes successful and wealthy and goes home to share the bounty with his father – as is so often the case with children and their parents (and with human beings and God!), he only turns back to the father when he needs something, when he seeks to gain from reestablishing the relationship.
So, we’ve got the problem of whether the son’s repentance is genuine or not, and then the story gets further complicated when the son returns home. The parable tells us that “while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” The father runs to him while he was still far off. The son doesn’t even have a chance to make his confession, to grovel before his father and ask for forgiveness, before the father sweeps him into his arms with hugs and kisses. The son hasn’t said a word yet that would indicate that he is repentant, that he is sorry for what he’s done. For all the father knows, the son could be returning home to ask for more money – which, in fact, is sort of what he is doing, since he’s asking for his father to again provide for his needs in the form of food and shelter. But the father still runs toward him and embraces him. He doesn’t stand back, eyeing his son skeptically and asking him a bunch of questions about what he’s done and where he’s been and what has happened to all the money he gave him. He doesn’t lecture him on respect for one’s elders or demand an apology before he extends his hand in peace. His love for his son overtakes any feelings of resentment or being wronged. His love is unconditional, offered without any action required on the part of the son outside of just showing up.
“Now hold on there,” our inner sense of justice cries out. “That’s now how the story’s supposed to go! The sinner is supposed to show sufficient remorse and contrition before forgiveness is granted! God forgives the repentant, but the unrepentant he will burn with unquenchable fire… or something like that, right? I mean, there has to be some consequences for this guy’s actions! How can the father throw a party for this guy after what he’s done? Isn’t that like condoning his actions?”
Conventional religious thinking, in the Judaism of Jesus’s time and in many other religions in various times and contexts, tends to think of God as a just judge, concerned with impartially enforcing the law. In this way of thinking, God is ultimately concerned with “fairness,” with making sure that each person gets what they “deserve.” If they are good, they deserve a reward. If they are bad, they deserve punishment. Our relationship with God becomes some kind of balancing scale where we hope that, at the end, our good deeds outweigh our bad and we get in to heaven by virtue of how the accounting works out in some kind of divine judgment book. The elder son in the parable represents this kind of conventional religious thinking, as do the Pharisees who are so concerned about who Jesus is eating with and spending time with.
But Jesus constantly challenged the notion of God as an impartial calculator, crunching the numbers to determine our fate. Jesus emphasized the image of God as a loving parent, like the father in today’s parable, who is overcome with love for his or her children. That love guides his response to them, that love colors and influences her judgment, that love makes allowances for her children’s shortcomings.
When this kind of love expresses itself, it may not look “fair” to those who are keeping the great accounting sheet of rights and wrongs. It may mean that some people get celebrations and parties and forgiveness and acceptance that they don’t seem to deserve. But Jesus’s message is that God’s love and mercy is not something we can earn by doing or saying or believing the right things. None of us “deserve” God’s love or forgiveness based on our actions, however “good” we might think we have been! God’s acceptance and forgiveness of us is a gift freely given – out of a relationship based in unconditional love, a love that will not leave us if we screw up or disappoint or “squander our inheritance in dissolute living.”
This kind of love is more concerned with transformation than with fairness. This kind of love is willing to break all the rules if it means helping one soul to know they are loved and valued.
Can this kind of love be taken advantage of? Could the forgiven and loved prodigal son, after enjoying the fatted calf at his reunion party, have ripped his father off, stolen his valuables, and pawned them for money? Of course he could have. This kind of love is risky. It makes us vulnerable. It opens us to the possibility of being deeply wronged, or even physically harmed, in certain circumstances. But it also has the power to transform.
The main character of Les Misérables, that great novel by Victor Hugo that has been cinematized numerous times and made into a stage musical, is an example of a kind of “prodigal son” who is transformed by this kind of love.
Jean Valjean is released from prison after serving 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family. He has become cynical, hardened, and trusts no one. He has nothing to his name and is let out on the streets with no resources and nowhere to turn for help. As he goes door to door begging, he happens to knock on the local bishop’s door. The bishop takes him in and feeds him and gives him a place to stay. That night, Valjean sneaks out in the middle of the night, stealing the silver place settings from the table. When he is caught and the police drag him to the bishop’s door, they tell the bishop that Valjean has told them that the bishop gave him the silver. The bishop surprises everyone, Valjean most of all, when he confirms Valjean’s story. “That is right,” he tells the police. In the poetic wording of the stage play, he responds, “But my friend, you left so early / surely something slipped your mind / You forgot I gave these also / Would you leave the best behind?” – and proceeds to give Valjean the two silver candlesticks from his fireplace mantle.
According to the law, the right and “fair” thing for the bishop to do would have been to press charges, and for Valjean to go back to prison. But the bishop was more concerned with the transformative power of love than the fair application of the law.
The bishop took a risk by following Jesus’s teachings in Matthew 5:39-40: “Do not resist an evildoer… if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well.” Valjean could have betrayed his trust once again after this incident, or gone on to do harm to others as well. The bishop had no way of knowing what the outcome would be, but he chose trust over fear. He chose forgiveness over retribution. And it changed a man’s life. This risky act of generosity and forgiveness by the bishop transforms Valjean. His hardened shell falls away and reveals a kind, tender man with a heart of compassion, who goes about doing good for the rest of the story. The bishop responded to Valjean’s behavior not by “giving him what he deserved,” but by giving him a second chance.
As much as Lent gets a bad rep as a depressing season where we are told how bad we are, Lent is actually the season of second chances. It’s the season where we are reminded not just of our sins, but of God’s mercy. The joy of the father in the parable of the prodigal son at seeing his son return home is a metaphor for the joy God feels every time we return to him, no matter what we’ve done and no matter what is in our hearts when we do. God welcomes us home not for a stern scolding, but for a great celebration.
And we are called to do the same. If we are truly transformed by the love and forgiveness God has shown to us, we will offer forgiveness as freely as the father in the parable and the bishop in Les Misérables. As Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians, God has “entrusted the message of reconciliation to us. We are ambassadors for Christ.” We are the ones carrying God’s message to the world, the message that God is ready to throw you a party if you would but show up: no questions asked, no explanations needed. Just come, join us, and feast at that banquet prepared before the foundation of the world. If we are doing our job as Christians, it will also be said of us, “Those folks welcome sinners and eat with them!” Amen.
Sunday, August 2, 2015
How much easier it is to see faults in others than in ourselves!
Sermon delivered Sunday, August 2, 2015 (10th Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 13, Year B), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN.
(2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a, Psalm 51:1-13)
In our reading from the Hebrew Bible last week, we heard about David’s affair with Bathsheba. The concluding sentence of that reading was, “In the letter [David sent to the general, he] wrote, ‘Set Uriah [Bathsheba’s husband] in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die.’” If it seemed a little odd to you that our response to this reading was, “Thanks be to God!”, your discomfort should be assuaged by the way the story continues in this week’s reading. David might be remembered as one of Israel’s great kings and “a man after God’s own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14), but he doesn’t get away with adultery, deceit and murder without a stern rebuke.
In this week’s lesson, the prophet Nathan confronts David about his actions. But the way he does so is very clever. Instead of accusing David directly of his indiscretions, which probably would have made David defensive and unable to hear his critique, Nathan instead tells David a story. “There once was a rich man,” he says, “who had many possessions. This man had access to anything he could possibly want, but when a traveler came by seeking shelter and food, the rich man didn’t offer him anything from his own possessions, even though he had plenty to spare. Instead, he stole a lamb from his neighbor, a poor man who had barely enough to provide for his family. The rich man killed and prepared the poor man’s lamb as food for the traveler. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the lamb was not just livestock to his neighbor; it was like a member of his family, a beloved companion animal who was ‘like a daughter to him.’”
When David hears this story, he is outraged. He says to Nathan, “As the LORD lives, the man who has done this deserves to die; he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.” The Hebrew phrase that is translated “the man who has done this deserves to die” literally says, “this man is a son of death.” Calling someone a “son of death” was not a legal judgment indicating that the person deserved the death penalty, but an attack on a person’s character, a colloquialism used to disparage people.
So David has walked right into Nathan’s trap. “This man did WHAT?” he says. “What a dirty, rotten, no good…” you fill in the blank with your choice of insults. The names David calls the rich man in the story probably weren’t the G-rated version I’m choosing to give from the pulpit, if you get my drift. And then Nathan sticks it to him with his “gotcha” line – “You are the man! This story is an illustration of what you’ve done, you dirty, rotten, no good – hey, you said it, not me – rich man with all the abundance in the world of goods and possessions and many wives already at your service in your lavish palace – and yet you pick out the only wife of one of your men at battle, sleep with her, and then have her husband killed so you can take her for yourself. Yeah, the rich man in the story is a ‘son of death,’ alright – and that rich man is YOU!”
Nathan’s approach works. Rather than becoming angry and defensive, David’s eyes are opened and he acknowledges his guilt. “I have sinned against the Lord,” he admits, and, according to tradition, promptly pens the 51st psalm. The psalm we read this morning, that famous psalm of repentance, that psalm that we read every year on Ash Wednesday as we begin the season of Lent and acknowledge our own sins and repent before God, is attributed to King David, and tradition holds that he wrote it right after Nathan confronted him about his affair with Bathsheba.
Nathan’s use of an indirect story to confront David about his sin works because it is so often easier to see faults in others than it is to recognize them in ourselves. David can clearly see what the “rich man” in the story has done wrong, even when he is blind to his own sin. It is always easier to point out what others have done wrong in any conflict or argument than to seriously consider what role we have played in contributing to the issue. Sometimes seeing ourselves portrayed in caricature in a story allows our eyes to be opened to truths about ourselves that otherwise may be difficult to face.
A Jewish rabbi and therapist named Edwin Friedman, who specialized in family systems theory and applying that theory to congregational life, published a series of modern-day parables called “Friedman’s Fables” in the early 1990s. These parables were designed to open our eyes to the dynamics of unhealthy relationships within families or congregations. I’d like to share one of them with you today, because they are a sort of modern equivalent to Nathan’s use of a parable to help David to see his sin. This one is called “A Nervous Condition,” and it may give some of you an experience of what David must have felt when he realized he was the rich man in Nathan’s parable. See if you can see yourself or anyone you know in this fable:
[Read “A Nervous Condition,” from Edwin H. Friedman, Friedman’s Fables (New York: Guilford Press, 1990). I'm not sure whether it would violate copyright rules to post the story in its entirety here in written form, so I'm not posting it. But you can hear the whole story if you listen to the audio file of the sermon, linked above.]
The discussion questions included in the back of the book summarize this fable with the following moral: “Beware the insensitivities of the sensitive.” Having always been a very sensitive person from the time I was a child, this parable probably hit me as hard as Nathan’s story hit David when I first read it many years ago. My eyes were suddenly opened as to how my sensitivity could have a negative impact on others. I have since done a lot of internal work to try to recognize when my sensitivity may be inadvertently hurting others, and to claim responsibility for my own feelings rather than blaming my state of mind or reactions on others.
Friedman’s basic thesis in all of his family therapy and congregational work is that a system – whether it be a family, a workplace, a congregation, or a country – is only as healthy as its leaders, and that the key to successful leadership is not learning how to manage one’s children or employees or parishioners or constituents, but learning how to manage oneself. If we are able to become differentiated – that is, to become defined by our own sense of identity that comes from a place of deep internal conviction rather than being defined by the feelings, opinions, and reactions of others – then we automatically have a positive effect on the system, even without directly trying to change anything about it. Friedman suggests that sometimes rather than taking the “problem child” or “problem person” into therapy, if the person who sees the problem in others can begin to work on themselves, their own internal work can change the system enough so that the “problem person” begins to change even without making any intentional effort themselves. It is an illustration of Jesus’s advice in the Sermon on the Mount: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” In other words, if you want others to address their faults, work first on addressing your own.
The work of faith is the work of serious reflection and self-examination. While we are called to work for reconciliation and peace and justice and righteousness in the world around us, that work must first start with ourselves. The old cliché about “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me” has more truth to it than we realize. Or the one about “charity begins at home.” One way we can all work to change the world is to work on changing ourselves. It’s the only thing we really can change, after all. So as our eyes are opened to the faults in others, let us see that as an invitation to look more closely at the faults in ourselves. With much prayer and discernment, and with the help of a trusted guide like a therapist or spiritual director, we can change the world, one repentant sinner at a time.
(2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a, Psalm 51:1-13)
In our reading from the Hebrew Bible last week, we heard about David’s affair with Bathsheba. The concluding sentence of that reading was, “In the letter [David sent to the general, he] wrote, ‘Set Uriah [Bathsheba’s husband] in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die.’” If it seemed a little odd to you that our response to this reading was, “Thanks be to God!”, your discomfort should be assuaged by the way the story continues in this week’s reading. David might be remembered as one of Israel’s great kings and “a man after God’s own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14), but he doesn’t get away with adultery, deceit and murder without a stern rebuke.
In this week’s lesson, the prophet Nathan confronts David about his actions. But the way he does so is very clever. Instead of accusing David directly of his indiscretions, which probably would have made David defensive and unable to hear his critique, Nathan instead tells David a story. “There once was a rich man,” he says, “who had many possessions. This man had access to anything he could possibly want, but when a traveler came by seeking shelter and food, the rich man didn’t offer him anything from his own possessions, even though he had plenty to spare. Instead, he stole a lamb from his neighbor, a poor man who had barely enough to provide for his family. The rich man killed and prepared the poor man’s lamb as food for the traveler. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the lamb was not just livestock to his neighbor; it was like a member of his family, a beloved companion animal who was ‘like a daughter to him.’”
When David hears this story, he is outraged. He says to Nathan, “As the LORD lives, the man who has done this deserves to die; he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.” The Hebrew phrase that is translated “the man who has done this deserves to die” literally says, “this man is a son of death.” Calling someone a “son of death” was not a legal judgment indicating that the person deserved the death penalty, but an attack on a person’s character, a colloquialism used to disparage people.
So David has walked right into Nathan’s trap. “This man did WHAT?” he says. “What a dirty, rotten, no good…” you fill in the blank with your choice of insults. The names David calls the rich man in the story probably weren’t the G-rated version I’m choosing to give from the pulpit, if you get my drift. And then Nathan sticks it to him with his “gotcha” line – “You are the man! This story is an illustration of what you’ve done, you dirty, rotten, no good – hey, you said it, not me – rich man with all the abundance in the world of goods and possessions and many wives already at your service in your lavish palace – and yet you pick out the only wife of one of your men at battle, sleep with her, and then have her husband killed so you can take her for yourself. Yeah, the rich man in the story is a ‘son of death,’ alright – and that rich man is YOU!”
Nathan’s approach works. Rather than becoming angry and defensive, David’s eyes are opened and he acknowledges his guilt. “I have sinned against the Lord,” he admits, and, according to tradition, promptly pens the 51st psalm. The psalm we read this morning, that famous psalm of repentance, that psalm that we read every year on Ash Wednesday as we begin the season of Lent and acknowledge our own sins and repent before God, is attributed to King David, and tradition holds that he wrote it right after Nathan confronted him about his affair with Bathsheba.
Nathan’s use of an indirect story to confront David about his sin works because it is so often easier to see faults in others than it is to recognize them in ourselves. David can clearly see what the “rich man” in the story has done wrong, even when he is blind to his own sin. It is always easier to point out what others have done wrong in any conflict or argument than to seriously consider what role we have played in contributing to the issue. Sometimes seeing ourselves portrayed in caricature in a story allows our eyes to be opened to truths about ourselves that otherwise may be difficult to face.
A Jewish rabbi and therapist named Edwin Friedman, who specialized in family systems theory and applying that theory to congregational life, published a series of modern-day parables called “Friedman’s Fables” in the early 1990s. These parables were designed to open our eyes to the dynamics of unhealthy relationships within families or congregations. I’d like to share one of them with you today, because they are a sort of modern equivalent to Nathan’s use of a parable to help David to see his sin. This one is called “A Nervous Condition,” and it may give some of you an experience of what David must have felt when he realized he was the rich man in Nathan’s parable. See if you can see yourself or anyone you know in this fable:
[Read “A Nervous Condition,” from Edwin H. Friedman, Friedman’s Fables (New York: Guilford Press, 1990). I'm not sure whether it would violate copyright rules to post the story in its entirety here in written form, so I'm not posting it. But you can hear the whole story if you listen to the audio file of the sermon, linked above.]
The discussion questions included in the back of the book summarize this fable with the following moral: “Beware the insensitivities of the sensitive.” Having always been a very sensitive person from the time I was a child, this parable probably hit me as hard as Nathan’s story hit David when I first read it many years ago. My eyes were suddenly opened as to how my sensitivity could have a negative impact on others. I have since done a lot of internal work to try to recognize when my sensitivity may be inadvertently hurting others, and to claim responsibility for my own feelings rather than blaming my state of mind or reactions on others.
Friedman’s basic thesis in all of his family therapy and congregational work is that a system – whether it be a family, a workplace, a congregation, or a country – is only as healthy as its leaders, and that the key to successful leadership is not learning how to manage one’s children or employees or parishioners or constituents, but learning how to manage oneself. If we are able to become differentiated – that is, to become defined by our own sense of identity that comes from a place of deep internal conviction rather than being defined by the feelings, opinions, and reactions of others – then we automatically have a positive effect on the system, even without directly trying to change anything about it. Friedman suggests that sometimes rather than taking the “problem child” or “problem person” into therapy, if the person who sees the problem in others can begin to work on themselves, their own internal work can change the system enough so that the “problem person” begins to change even without making any intentional effort themselves. It is an illustration of Jesus’s advice in the Sermon on the Mount: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” In other words, if you want others to address their faults, work first on addressing your own.
The work of faith is the work of serious reflection and self-examination. While we are called to work for reconciliation and peace and justice and righteousness in the world around us, that work must first start with ourselves. The old cliché about “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me” has more truth to it than we realize. Or the one about “charity begins at home.” One way we can all work to change the world is to work on changing ourselves. It’s the only thing we really can change, after all. So as our eyes are opened to the faults in others, let us see that as an invitation to look more closely at the faults in ourselves. With much prayer and discernment, and with the help of a trusted guide like a therapist or spiritual director, we can change the world, one repentant sinner at a time.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Reflections on "Ashes to Go" - an answer to the critics
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| Our rector, Bob Cowperthwaite, and parishioner Gerald Hancock offering Ashes to Go at our first shift from 8:30-9:30 a.m. |
Ashes to Go has become a nation-wide movement. It started with several Episcopal churches in the St. Louis and Chicago areas in 2007 and 2010, and it “went viral” in 2012, with more than 80 churches in 21 states participating. In 2013, it went international, with participants in Canada, the UK, and South Africa, in addition to the U.S. (Statistics from the Ashes to Go website at www.ashestogo.org.)
As Ashes to Go has become more known amongst “church people,” especially amongst professional church people like clergy and church staff, there has been a lot of discussion about it. It has its share of critics, who assert that this “quickie” liturgy cheapens what should be a somber call to repentance. The critics say that people should make time to attend the full-length liturgy on Ash Wednesday, and if they can’t attend church, that shows that their priorities are in the wrong place. They worry about people taking Ash Wednesday too lightly, or going to an Ashes to Go site just to “get their ashes” as some kind of a token or rote ritual rather than out of a true sense of repentance and desire for connection with God.
I must admit that despite the fact that my call to the priesthood emerged out of my involvement with a street church for homeless people in Cambridge, Mass., and the fact that I was naturally drawn to Ashes to Go when I first heard about it because of the "street church" element of it, my training in seminary conditioned me to always take a step back and listen to the other side of the story, to another perspective. The critics' arguments against Ashes to Go were well-crafted enough that they gave me pause. Maybe this was an inappropriate cheapening of the dignity of the liturgy. Maybe we shouldn't do it.
But after serving two one-hour “shifts” out on the street corner on Ash Wednesday, I can say that not a single person we encountered in those two shifts seemed to be taking this encounter lightly. Some people had driven from the other side of town just to participate in this brief encounter on the sidewalk. They’d seen an article that the local paper had run about the fact that we were going to do this, and they made time in their day, they went out of their way to come to downtown Franklin just to get their ashes. Their schedule may not have allowed them to attend services at the traditional times of noon or later in the evening, but for whatever reason they were able to get away mid-morning or mid-afternoon, and they were so appreciative because otherwise they really would not have gotten to have an Ash Wednesday experience today, however brief our encounter was. Several people even got tears in their eyes as they thanked us, clearly moved that we were taking the time to bring church to them.
There was a depth of gratitude in their voices as they thanked us that echoed the deeply grateful sincerity I’ve heard in people’s voices when I’ve taken communion to people who are in the hospital or homebound. “Thank you so much for doing this!” they say, with a depth of gratitude that goes beyond the cursory “thanks” we give the cashier at the grocery store or a friend or family member who passes us the salt at dinner. This is a different kind of thanks, a thanks born out of touching a place of need and vulnerability, of mediating a brief moment of grace from one human being to another – whether an Ashes to Go recipient or a parishioner recovering at home from surgery.
As I reflected on this, it occurred to me that I can’t imagine any of the critics of the Ashes to Go movement who are within the Episcopal Church saying that we shouldn’t take communion to people at home or in the hospital because it would “cheapen” the experience, that if they can’t get to church on Sunday for the entire celebration of the Eucharist, then their priorities must not be in the right place. We consider Eucharistic visitation to be one of the most sacred and holy things we do as priests. And yet, what we say and do when we take communion to people is a very shortened version of the full Eucharistic liturgy, just as Ashes to Go offers a shortened version of the full Ash Wednesday liturgy.
That’s when I realized that Ashes to Go is basically a series of “pastoral visits” on the street. It’s about offering a shortened version of the regular liturgy to those who can’t be with the rest of the gathered community. And just as we do when we visit people in the hospital, if there are several people present visiting with the patient, they are all invited to join in the communion, so on Ash Wednesday, when two people happened to walk up at the same time, we invited them to all join together with us in the brief liturgy. Even though none of us had ever met before, in that one brief moment, we were a community of faith praying together. “Wherever two of three are gathered,” Jesus said, “I am in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). Not “wherever there is an officially sanctioned, full-length liturgy approved by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer.”
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| Praying with several people who walked up at the same time. "Wherever two or three are gathered..." |
So even the Ashes to Go recipients did get an opportunity to join with other Christians in prayer today. Yes, they could have gone home and read through the entire Ash Wednesday liturgy in their prayer books instead, to get the “full experience,” but there’s something about the encounter with another person, that incarnational experience that is really at the heart of our faith, that is sacred and powerful, however brief.
The difference between Ashes to Go and a traditional pastoral visit, of course, is that we are doing it in a public place. It is no small irony that the Gospel reading for Ash Wednesday is the passage from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus warns us to “beware of practicing your piety before others, in order to be seen by them” (Matthew 6:1), and tells us not to “stand and pray… at the street corners, so that we may be seen [by others]” (Matthew 6:5). Um, gulp. The critics of Ashes to Go point out that we appear to be doing exactly what Jesus told us not to do! When I was “plugging” Ashes to Go to one of my classes at church, encouraging lay people to sign up to help out with it, I made a joke about the irony of this passage and what we were going to do. Everyone laughed, but one of the parishioners spoke up in a serious tone and said, “But I don’t think that’s the same thing as what you’re doing. Jesus was talking about being hypocritical. I don’t think that’s what this is. I think this is different.”
I was surprised by her immediate positive view of what we were doing with Ashes to Go and the disconnect for her in associating it with Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount. But after my experience on the street and my insight into the ways in which Ashes to Go is a pastoral encounter, it makes me appreciate her insight even more. If we’re doing Ashes to Go primarily “to be seen by others” in a showy kind of way, then yes, we should hear Jesus’s words of rebuke in the Sermon on the Mount for showy displays of piety. But if we’re doing Ashes to Go out of a sincere desire to serve others and to care for them, then perhaps the more appropriate words of Jesus to remember would be the ways he rebuked the religious leaders for being unwilling to break tradition in order to address human need. “What is lawful on the Sabbath, to do good or to do evil?” (Mark 3:4) he said to those who criticized him for healing on the Sabbath. And while I’m not saying that it’s a matter of life and death for people to get their ashes on Ash Wednesday, I do think that we are addressing a very real need and a very real and sincere desire and longing to connect with God and the liturgies of the church, not throwing tradition to the wind or dismissing the gravity and seriousness of that day.
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| An Ashes to Go recipient jumps for joy after receiving her ashes. |
I hope that the critics of Ashes to Go might be willing to just give it a try one year and see what happens. The great thing about Ashes to Go is that if you do it, you do it on your own terms. Do you think people should recite at least part of Psalm 51 for it to really be Ash Wednesday? Then include that in the brief liturgy you offer to people. Or, decide to do the whole Ash Wednesday service at a non-typical time in a location more convenient to working people in your area. Take ashes to people in the hospital and in nursing homes and do an abbreviated version of the liturgy with them. Whatever you do and however you do it, the intention is to bring the church to people where they are, to represent symbolically the truth that although it is true that we must make the choice to step toward God in faith, God also is already stepping out to meet us wherever we are. I can think of no more sacred and holy task than to serve as a symbol of that for the world.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Repentance based on love, not fear
Sermon delivered Sunday, Feb. 24, 2013 (Second Sunday in Lent, Year C), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN. (Readings: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18, Psalm 27, Philippians 3:17-4:1, Luke 13:31-35)
Culturally, most people’s understanding of repentance probably has something to do with street preachers shaking their fists in judgment, holding up signs condemning the world, yelling at passers-by to “repent or perish!” Calls to repentance like these often come with a threat, a threat that if people do not change their ways, they will face destruction – either in this life or the next. It is a way of calling for change that relies on fear as a motivator – people respond to these calls out of a very real fear that if they do not do what the preacher says, their lives will be miserable and they will go to hell when they die.
However uncomfortable such methods might make us, this way of calling people to repentance is not entirely unbiblical. There are countless stories in the Bible of God threatening people with destruction if they do not change their ways, and actually following through on that threat if they do refuse to change. The texts of the Hebrew Bible tell us that God rained down fire and sulphur on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of their sinfulness (Genesis 19:24), that God drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea because the Pharaoh refused to free the Israelites from slavery (Exodus 14:26-29), and that God dispossessed the Canaanites and other peoples of their lands because of their wickedness (Deuteronomy 9:4-5), just to name a few of the better-known stories.
But this is not the only picture of God we receive in the Bible, a God who calls for change by using threats and fear. Mixed in with that portrayal of God is another image of God as a God who calls for change by humbling himself out of compassion and love. This is the biblical refrain that speaks of a God who turns society’s conventions upside down, who casts down the mighty and lifts up the lowly, who says that the last will be first and the first will be last. And, contrary to popular belief, this image of God does not appear only in the New Testament. It shows up as a constant refrain throughout the Hebrew Bible as well.
Today’s reading from the Hebrew Bible is one example of this image of God as one who motivates and communicates out of humility and love. When Abram doubts God’s promise that he will give the land to Abram’s descendants, God does not respond in anger, condemning Abram for not trusting God’s word. Instead, to prove his point, God radically humbles himself to show Abram just how serious he is about his promise.
When God asks Abram to bring the various animals to him for a sacrifice, he is setting the stage for a traditional way of making a treaty or covenant in ancient Near Eastern culture. This particular method comes out of Hittite culture and would have been the most serious way of making a covenant that Abram would have known. God is using the cultural conventions of Abram’s time to speak to him where he is.
Treaties between two parties who had been at war with one another in the ancient Near East would go something like this: After a war between two groups, the victors would be on the loser’s property, having just defeated them. The victors would offer a treaty to the losers that would consist of various demands: since you all are now under our rule, you must be loyal only to us and serve only us. There would be specific details about the things the losers were and weren’t allowed to do. Then, in order to ratify the treaty, they would take some animals and cut them in two and make the losers walk between the animal pieces while reciting the stipulations of the treaty. The implication was that if the losers did not abide by the stipulations of the treaty, the conquerors would do to them what had been done to the animals! [1]
If this were a story in the “repent or perish” tradition that uses threats and fear as a way to motivate, we would expect God to demand that Abram walk between the pieces to declare his utmost loyalty to God – with the accompanying threat that if Abram did not keep the stipulations of the covenant God was making with him, that God would make him look like the animal pieces. After all, in other parts of the Hebrew Bible, we do hear stories of God threatening destruction to the people if they do not keep the law and his commandments. But that’s not what happens in this story.
In this story, “When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.” (Genesis 15:17). It is not Abram who passes between the pieces, but the very presence of God. Smoke and fire were classic symbols for the appearance of the presence of God: think about Moses and the burning bush, or the pillar of cloud that accompanied the Israelites in the wilderness. In passing between the pieces, God is taking on the role of the weaker party in the covenant; God is playing the role of the “loser.” God could have easily demanded that Abram perform the traditional role of the weaker party in the covenant, and no doubt Abram would have thought this entirely appropriate. But instead, in response to Abram’s doubts, God humbles himself, makes himself vulnerable, in essence saying to Abram, “May I be made like these animal pieces if I do not keep my word to you.”
Fast forward several thousand years, and God’s willingness to humble himself goes a step further. God’s willingness to take human form in the person of Jesus Christ, to live as one of us, and to be willing even to die on the cross, is the ultimate act of divine humility. Like God’s willingness to walk between the animal pieces to show Abram how serious God was about the covenant he was making with Abram, God’s willingness to go to the cross shows us how serious God is about the covenant he makes with us in Jesus Christ. God voluntarily puts himself in a position of human weakness in order to profess his love for us.
These acts of humility and love also serve as calls to repentance – a call to change our ways in the face of a God who is willing to give up everything for us. In this biblical theme, God moves us to repentance not by beating us down and scaring us, but by making himself vulnerable and giving of himself for us. If we truly understand the implications and magnitude of such divine humility, I believe it generates a much more authentic repentance than threats of destruction do. So often, calls for repentance that are based in fear, threat, and judgment produce change motivated by a fearful desire to protect one’s own personal safety rather than an authentic love for God. But when God chooses not to exercise God’s power to destroy, but shows mercy and forgiveness instead, we are naturally moved to a change of heart and a reciprocal loving response. The words of an anonymous 17th century Spanish poem, Soneto a Cristo crucificado, “Sonnet to Christ crucified,” express this point well. As one English translation interprets it, the poet writes,
The poet turns to God not because he fears punishment if he does not, but because Jesus’s life, death, and Resurrection moves him and fills him with gratitude and love. The author of the first letter of John writes that “perfect love drives out all fear” (1 John 4:18). As Christians, I believe our primary call to repentance comes from Christ crucified, an act not of judgment or threats, but of perfect love. In turning our eyes to the cross, we can find the authentic repentance and change of heart and life that we seek during Lent. Perhaps no one has said it better than the great English hymn-writer Isaac Watts:
[1] Information about Hittite vassal treaties from lecture notes from Rebecca Abts Wright’s Old Testament class, fall 2009, The School of Theology at Sewanee: The University of the South.
Culturally, most people’s understanding of repentance probably has something to do with street preachers shaking their fists in judgment, holding up signs condemning the world, yelling at passers-by to “repent or perish!” Calls to repentance like these often come with a threat, a threat that if people do not change their ways, they will face destruction – either in this life or the next. It is a way of calling for change that relies on fear as a motivator – people respond to these calls out of a very real fear that if they do not do what the preacher says, their lives will be miserable and they will go to hell when they die.
However uncomfortable such methods might make us, this way of calling people to repentance is not entirely unbiblical. There are countless stories in the Bible of God threatening people with destruction if they do not change their ways, and actually following through on that threat if they do refuse to change. The texts of the Hebrew Bible tell us that God rained down fire and sulphur on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of their sinfulness (Genesis 19:24), that God drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea because the Pharaoh refused to free the Israelites from slavery (Exodus 14:26-29), and that God dispossessed the Canaanites and other peoples of their lands because of their wickedness (Deuteronomy 9:4-5), just to name a few of the better-known stories.
But this is not the only picture of God we receive in the Bible, a God who calls for change by using threats and fear. Mixed in with that portrayal of God is another image of God as a God who calls for change by humbling himself out of compassion and love. This is the biblical refrain that speaks of a God who turns society’s conventions upside down, who casts down the mighty and lifts up the lowly, who says that the last will be first and the first will be last. And, contrary to popular belief, this image of God does not appear only in the New Testament. It shows up as a constant refrain throughout the Hebrew Bible as well.
Today’s reading from the Hebrew Bible is one example of this image of God as one who motivates and communicates out of humility and love. When Abram doubts God’s promise that he will give the land to Abram’s descendants, God does not respond in anger, condemning Abram for not trusting God’s word. Instead, to prove his point, God radically humbles himself to show Abram just how serious he is about his promise.
When God asks Abram to bring the various animals to him for a sacrifice, he is setting the stage for a traditional way of making a treaty or covenant in ancient Near Eastern culture. This particular method comes out of Hittite culture and would have been the most serious way of making a covenant that Abram would have known. God is using the cultural conventions of Abram’s time to speak to him where he is.
Treaties between two parties who had been at war with one another in the ancient Near East would go something like this: After a war between two groups, the victors would be on the loser’s property, having just defeated them. The victors would offer a treaty to the losers that would consist of various demands: since you all are now under our rule, you must be loyal only to us and serve only us. There would be specific details about the things the losers were and weren’t allowed to do. Then, in order to ratify the treaty, they would take some animals and cut them in two and make the losers walk between the animal pieces while reciting the stipulations of the treaty. The implication was that if the losers did not abide by the stipulations of the treaty, the conquerors would do to them what had been done to the animals! [1]
If this were a story in the “repent or perish” tradition that uses threats and fear as a way to motivate, we would expect God to demand that Abram walk between the pieces to declare his utmost loyalty to God – with the accompanying threat that if Abram did not keep the stipulations of the covenant God was making with him, that God would make him look like the animal pieces. After all, in other parts of the Hebrew Bible, we do hear stories of God threatening destruction to the people if they do not keep the law and his commandments. But that’s not what happens in this story.
In this story, “When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.” (Genesis 15:17). It is not Abram who passes between the pieces, but the very presence of God. Smoke and fire were classic symbols for the appearance of the presence of God: think about Moses and the burning bush, or the pillar of cloud that accompanied the Israelites in the wilderness. In passing between the pieces, God is taking on the role of the weaker party in the covenant; God is playing the role of the “loser.” God could have easily demanded that Abram perform the traditional role of the weaker party in the covenant, and no doubt Abram would have thought this entirely appropriate. But instead, in response to Abram’s doubts, God humbles himself, makes himself vulnerable, in essence saying to Abram, “May I be made like these animal pieces if I do not keep my word to you.”
Fast forward several thousand years, and God’s willingness to humble himself goes a step further. God’s willingness to take human form in the person of Jesus Christ, to live as one of us, and to be willing even to die on the cross, is the ultimate act of divine humility. Like God’s willingness to walk between the animal pieces to show Abram how serious God was about the covenant he was making with Abram, God’s willingness to go to the cross shows us how serious God is about the covenant he makes with us in Jesus Christ. God voluntarily puts himself in a position of human weakness in order to profess his love for us.
These acts of humility and love also serve as calls to repentance – a call to change our ways in the face of a God who is willing to give up everything for us. In this biblical theme, God moves us to repentance not by beating us down and scaring us, but by making himself vulnerable and giving of himself for us. If we truly understand the implications and magnitude of such divine humility, I believe it generates a much more authentic repentance than threats of destruction do. So often, calls for repentance that are based in fear, threat, and judgment produce change motivated by a fearful desire to protect one’s own personal safety rather than an authentic love for God. But when God chooses not to exercise God’s power to destroy, but shows mercy and forgiveness instead, we are naturally moved to a change of heart and a reciprocal loving response. The words of an anonymous 17th century Spanish poem, Soneto a Cristo crucificado, “Sonnet to Christ crucified,” express this point well. As one English translation interprets it, the poet writes,
“I love thee, Lord, but not because
I hope for heaven thereby,
nor yet for fear that loving not
I might for ever die;
but for that thou didst all the world
upon the cross embrace;
for us didst bear the nails and spear,
and manifold disgrace,
and griefs and torments numberless,
and sweat of agony;
e'en death itself; and all for one
who was thine enemy.”
The poet turns to God not because he fears punishment if he does not, but because Jesus’s life, death, and Resurrection moves him and fills him with gratitude and love. The author of the first letter of John writes that “perfect love drives out all fear” (1 John 4:18). As Christians, I believe our primary call to repentance comes from Christ crucified, an act not of judgment or threats, but of perfect love. In turning our eyes to the cross, we can find the authentic repentance and change of heart and life that we seek during Lent. Perhaps no one has said it better than the great English hymn-writer Isaac Watts:
When I survey the wondrous cross
Where the young Prince of Glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss
And pour contempt on all my pride.
Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small
Love so amazing, so divine
Demands my soul, my life, my all.
[1] Information about Hittite vassal treaties from lecture notes from Rebecca Abts Wright’s Old Testament class, fall 2009, The School of Theology at Sewanee: The University of the South.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Lent, corporate repentence, and gun violence
Sermon delivered Ash Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 103, 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21).
“Create and make in us new and contrite hearts.” This is what we asked of God in our opening collect a few moments ago. As we enter the season of Lent, the season of penitence and fasting, self-examination and renewal, we hear again that biblical refrain that we’ve heard recently from John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul: God calls us not only to right ritual, but to right intention and right action. Our hearts must be in the right place as we come to worship God, and our actions must reflect the faith we say we have.
This message was not new with John the Baptist and Paul: they were echoing the ancient call of the Hebrew prophets, like the passage from Isaiah that we hear today. “Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high,” God says through Isaiah to the people who observe the right rituals, but “who serve [their] own interest[s] on [their] fast day and oppress all [their] workers” (Isaiah 58:4, 3). And Jesus repeats this theme in the Sermon on the Mount, warning his disciples against doing religious acts for the wrong reasons. Fasting or prayer or almsgiving should be done out of a sincere faith and desire to please God and to grow closer to God, not out of a desire for approval or recognition from one’s peers. “Beware of practicing your piety before others in other to be seen by them,” Jesus says, “for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:1).
The issue here is one of intention and motivation. Those who practice their piety before others in order to be seen by them will have no reward from God not because they have performed religious actions publicly, but because the act of “going public” with their faith has caused their intentions to go astray: they are motivated by a desire to please other people rather than a desire to please God. Their hearts are not in the right place. Their actions become all about them instead of all about God.
The people Isaiah addresses are caught in this sin of self-absorption: they observe the fasts because they want to win favor with God, but they ignore God’s commands to care for the poor and to deal justly with others because of their desires for power or money. Both their business practices and their religious practices are entirely self-centered. Their only concern is securing a place for themselves, both on earth and in heaven.
Fasting is intended to be an act of personal sacrifice, a way of emptying ourselves in order to open ourselves more fully to God. This meaning is negated if the person fasting continues to behave in a manner incongruent with the commandment of God to love our neighbors as ourselves. A real sacrifice of self, God says through the prophet Isaiah, is to give of yourself in service to others, to share your bread with the hungry, to clothe the naked, to work for justice and free the oppressed. Not only must there be right intentions, but right actions must flow from them. We must show, as John the Baptist would put it, “fruits worthy of repentance” (Luke 3:8).
The season of Lent invites us to take a step back from our regular routines and examine our own intentions and actions. Am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Am I giving of myself in the fast that God chooses, a fast that leads not to self-absorption, but self-giving? Has my worship become empty and rote, devoid of heart-filled sincerity? Am I at peace with the ways I am practicing my faith and living it out in my life?
But the self-examination of Lent invites us to go even further, looking beyond our individual lives. The discipline of Lent is a corporate as well as an individual one. We could ask the same questions of our life together as a church: not just am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance, but are we, as St. Paul’s, as the Diocese of Tennessee, as the Episcopal Church, bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Are we practicing the fast of self-giving rather than self-absorption? Is our worship heartfelt and sincere? Are we satisfied with how we are practicing our faith together and living it out in service to our community, the nation, and the world?
But it doesn’t stop there. We are also invited to consider, as we expand the circle of our concern even wider, the corporate sins and shortcomings of the country and culture in which we live. In the litany of penitence that we will pray together in a few moments, we confess not just ways that we as individual Christians have sinned and ways the Church has sinned, but systemic sins rooted in our wider culture: “Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people… Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts… our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty.” This “our” is much bigger than you or me or all of us in this church combined. It is an “our” that resonates with the wider American culture: our materialism that values things over people, our individualism that leads us to believe we need to care only for ourselves and our families and not for the wider community, and our obsession with violence that desensitizes us to the image of God in all people.
If you read the announcements in the February newsletter and last week’s Take-Out about our upcoming Lenten series on Thursday nights, you know that our adult Lenten program this year will be on the topic of gun violence. You may have wondered, as you read that announcement, what this subject has to do with Lent. I believe that the prevalence of gun violence in our country at this time is a corporate sin that we are called to grapple with, and it is in the Lenten spirit of self-examination and “taking stock” of ourselves that we will consider this issue in our Lenten study this year.
Gun violence is by no means the only corporate or systemic sin in our country, but we will focus on this one because of its immediacy in our national discourse at the moment. In the seven short months that I have been with you at St. Paul’s, there have been three mass shootings in the U.S. that have made major media coverage: the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado in July, the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in August, and the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut in December. Although mass shootings are nothing new in this country, the frequency and intensity with which they happened last year has led many people, including me, to take note and begin to ask questions about why these things are happening, and about what it says about our culture. After the shootings in Newtown, the Episcopal bishops of Connecticut called for their diocese to spend the season of Lent this year in “a time of discernment and action on how all of us can best work to overcome the death-dealing culture of violence that seems to be so prevalent in our society at this time.” This is an appropriate topic to explore during Lent, a time set aside for reflection and self-examination, and a time during which we reflect on the ways in which another “death-dealing culture of violence,” in first century Palestine, led to the death of our Lord. My prayer is that these discussions will help each of us discern what part we are called to play in “loosing the bonds of injustice” (Isaiah 58:6) that leave too many parents childless and too many children motherless and fatherless.
And as we do this, I pray that we are mindful of another one of our confessions from today’s litany: “for all false judgments, for uncharitable thoughts toward our neighbors, and for our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us.” There can and will be very different views amongst us about the best way to address the issue of gun violence, especially considering the ways this issue has been highly politicized. Our study will attempt to offer a balanced presentation of the issue and encourage honest dialogue between those of you with different perspectives, a dialogue that will attempt to dismantle those false judgments and prejudices that we may have toward those whose views differ from ours.
On Ash Wednesday, we are invited us to remember and contemplate our own mortality and the fragility of human life. During this season of Lent, my prayer is that we as individuals and as a community will examine our priorities and the intentions behind our actions, and take stock of what is really important in the life of faith. Whether each of you do that through participation in the Lenten study or through examining and contemplating other issues or concerns that are more pressing and relevant in your life right now, the underlying theme of our work this season is the same: to consider how we are called to live out our faith authentically in the world, in such a way that we contribute to God’s work of bringing justice and freedom to all. Through our Lenten fast, whatever form that may take for each of us, may we all seek a deeper knowledge of the heart of God and bear fruits of authentic repentance.
“Create and make in us new and contrite hearts.” This is what we asked of God in our opening collect a few moments ago. As we enter the season of Lent, the season of penitence and fasting, self-examination and renewal, we hear again that biblical refrain that we’ve heard recently from John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul: God calls us not only to right ritual, but to right intention and right action. Our hearts must be in the right place as we come to worship God, and our actions must reflect the faith we say we have.
This message was not new with John the Baptist and Paul: they were echoing the ancient call of the Hebrew prophets, like the passage from Isaiah that we hear today. “Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high,” God says through Isaiah to the people who observe the right rituals, but “who serve [their] own interest[s] on [their] fast day and oppress all [their] workers” (Isaiah 58:4, 3). And Jesus repeats this theme in the Sermon on the Mount, warning his disciples against doing religious acts for the wrong reasons. Fasting or prayer or almsgiving should be done out of a sincere faith and desire to please God and to grow closer to God, not out of a desire for approval or recognition from one’s peers. “Beware of practicing your piety before others in other to be seen by them,” Jesus says, “for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:1).
The issue here is one of intention and motivation. Those who practice their piety before others in order to be seen by them will have no reward from God not because they have performed religious actions publicly, but because the act of “going public” with their faith has caused their intentions to go astray: they are motivated by a desire to please other people rather than a desire to please God. Their hearts are not in the right place. Their actions become all about them instead of all about God.
The people Isaiah addresses are caught in this sin of self-absorption: they observe the fasts because they want to win favor with God, but they ignore God’s commands to care for the poor and to deal justly with others because of their desires for power or money. Both their business practices and their religious practices are entirely self-centered. Their only concern is securing a place for themselves, both on earth and in heaven.
Fasting is intended to be an act of personal sacrifice, a way of emptying ourselves in order to open ourselves more fully to God. This meaning is negated if the person fasting continues to behave in a manner incongruent with the commandment of God to love our neighbors as ourselves. A real sacrifice of self, God says through the prophet Isaiah, is to give of yourself in service to others, to share your bread with the hungry, to clothe the naked, to work for justice and free the oppressed. Not only must there be right intentions, but right actions must flow from them. We must show, as John the Baptist would put it, “fruits worthy of repentance” (Luke 3:8).
The season of Lent invites us to take a step back from our regular routines and examine our own intentions and actions. Am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Am I giving of myself in the fast that God chooses, a fast that leads not to self-absorption, but self-giving? Has my worship become empty and rote, devoid of heart-filled sincerity? Am I at peace with the ways I am practicing my faith and living it out in my life?
But the self-examination of Lent invites us to go even further, looking beyond our individual lives. The discipline of Lent is a corporate as well as an individual one. We could ask the same questions of our life together as a church: not just am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance, but are we, as St. Paul’s, as the Diocese of Tennessee, as the Episcopal Church, bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Are we practicing the fast of self-giving rather than self-absorption? Is our worship heartfelt and sincere? Are we satisfied with how we are practicing our faith together and living it out in service to our community, the nation, and the world?
But it doesn’t stop there. We are also invited to consider, as we expand the circle of our concern even wider, the corporate sins and shortcomings of the country and culture in which we live. In the litany of penitence that we will pray together in a few moments, we confess not just ways that we as individual Christians have sinned and ways the Church has sinned, but systemic sins rooted in our wider culture: “Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people… Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts… our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty.” This “our” is much bigger than you or me or all of us in this church combined. It is an “our” that resonates with the wider American culture: our materialism that values things over people, our individualism that leads us to believe we need to care only for ourselves and our families and not for the wider community, and our obsession with violence that desensitizes us to the image of God in all people.
If you read the announcements in the February newsletter and last week’s Take-Out about our upcoming Lenten series on Thursday nights, you know that our adult Lenten program this year will be on the topic of gun violence. You may have wondered, as you read that announcement, what this subject has to do with Lent. I believe that the prevalence of gun violence in our country at this time is a corporate sin that we are called to grapple with, and it is in the Lenten spirit of self-examination and “taking stock” of ourselves that we will consider this issue in our Lenten study this year.
Gun violence is by no means the only corporate or systemic sin in our country, but we will focus on this one because of its immediacy in our national discourse at the moment. In the seven short months that I have been with you at St. Paul’s, there have been three mass shootings in the U.S. that have made major media coverage: the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado in July, the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in August, and the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut in December. Although mass shootings are nothing new in this country, the frequency and intensity with which they happened last year has led many people, including me, to take note and begin to ask questions about why these things are happening, and about what it says about our culture. After the shootings in Newtown, the Episcopal bishops of Connecticut called for their diocese to spend the season of Lent this year in “a time of discernment and action on how all of us can best work to overcome the death-dealing culture of violence that seems to be so prevalent in our society at this time.” This is an appropriate topic to explore during Lent, a time set aside for reflection and self-examination, and a time during which we reflect on the ways in which another “death-dealing culture of violence,” in first century Palestine, led to the death of our Lord. My prayer is that these discussions will help each of us discern what part we are called to play in “loosing the bonds of injustice” (Isaiah 58:6) that leave too many parents childless and too many children motherless and fatherless.
And as we do this, I pray that we are mindful of another one of our confessions from today’s litany: “for all false judgments, for uncharitable thoughts toward our neighbors, and for our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us.” There can and will be very different views amongst us about the best way to address the issue of gun violence, especially considering the ways this issue has been highly politicized. Our study will attempt to offer a balanced presentation of the issue and encourage honest dialogue between those of you with different perspectives, a dialogue that will attempt to dismantle those false judgments and prejudices that we may have toward those whose views differ from ours.
On Ash Wednesday, we are invited us to remember and contemplate our own mortality and the fragility of human life. During this season of Lent, my prayer is that we as individuals and as a community will examine our priorities and the intentions behind our actions, and take stock of what is really important in the life of faith. Whether each of you do that through participation in the Lenten study or through examining and contemplating other issues or concerns that are more pressing and relevant in your life right now, the underlying theme of our work this season is the same: to consider how we are called to live out our faith authentically in the world, in such a way that we contribute to God’s work of bringing justice and freedom to all. Through our Lenten fast, whatever form that may take for each of us, may we all seek a deeper knowledge of the heart of God and bear fruits of authentic repentance.
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