Sermon delivered Sunday, May 1, 2016 (6th Sunday of Easter, Year C) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
Acts 16:9-15, John 14:23-29
“Come over to Macedonia and help us.”
This line from today’s passage from Acts is a classic in the theology of evangelism and missions. Paul’s vision of the man from Macedonia pleading for help has been echoed in the call stories of evangelists throughout the centuries – many missionaries have framed their sense of call to travel abroad with a similar sense that a foreign people is asking them to “come over and help us.”
At its best, casting missionary work within this framework encourages people to be willing to go wherever God calls them and to respond to expressed human need wherever they find it. But at its worst, conceptualizing missionary work in this way has led to a patronizing kind of approach in which the missionaries go of their own initiative to “help” people who have not expressed a need for help, bringing with them an attitude that assumes they have all the answers and solutions to bring to the people they have set out to “help.” Let’s explore that shadow side a bit more before we turn our attention to what I believe is a corrective to that shadow side within this very passage.
Any time we talk about “helping” others, we have to step back and examine the power dynamics at play. It is often much easier to be the “helpers” than to be the “helped.” The “helpers” are the ones with power, money, with enough abundance in their lives that they have something to give. The “helped” are the ones “in need,” the ones who lack something, the ones who are vulnerable and dependent. It is much easier to see ourselves as the competent givers than the vulnerable receivers, and yet in our relationship with God we are ALL vulnerable and dependent. The roles of “helper” and “helped” are never completely separable when God’s Spirit is at work. That’s the tricky part and the key thing to remember anytime we begin to see ourselves primarily as the “helpers.” All encounter that is led by the Spirit is intended for the mutual transformation of both parties, and requires listening and obedience on both sides.
The blueprint for evangelism we have in the Acts of the Apostles, the stories of how the first disciples spread the faith in its earliest days, show story after story of mutual encounter. I’m struck by how often the people to whom the disciples are sent to bring the message receive their own vision from God ahead of time to let them know these people are coming. It’s not like the disciples are the only ones receiving visions telling them what other people need; the people they are sent to have also been spoken to by God and they are ready and waiting for them when they arrive.
We’ve heard several of these stories lately: in Paul’s conversion story we heard a few weeks ago from Acts chapter 9, Paul receives a vision from God telling him to go into the city and wait for someone to come and tell him what to do, and Ananias receives a vision telling him to go look for Paul, the infamous persecutor of the church. When they meet up, they confirm that they each have received visions that brought them together. In Acts 10, we hear the story of how Cornelius, the Roman soldier, receives a vision that he should send for Peter, and right about that same time Peter receives a vision telling him that all foods are clean and the Spirit tells him that some men have come looking for him and that the Spirit has sent them. This leads Peter to share the Gospel with Cornelius, breaking tradition in taking the message to and including Gentiles, not just his fellow Jews.
In today’s story, we don’t have as clear of an example of the Spirit moving on both sides – we’re not told whether the people of Macedonia also received a vision telling them to expect the disciples, but Lydia is receptive and open to their message when they arrive. And far from a patronizing encounter where the disciples do all the “giving” and “helping” to this “poor lost soul,” Lydia does her own share of giving right back – she shows them hospitality by providing lodging for the disciples while they are in her community. The encounter is one of mutual transformation, mutual benefit, mutual assistance, not just from one side to the other.
And perhaps the most important aspect of this evangelism story is that it is Spirit-led; it is God’s initiative that leads to Lydia’s conversion, not Paul’s or any other person’s. Paul and his crew weren’t even planning to go to Macedonia originally; they had planned to continue to travel in the region where they had been. If our first lesson had started just three verses earlier in this chapter, at verse 6 instead of verse 9, we would have heard this introduction to the journey to Macedonia:
“They went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia. When they had come opposite Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them; so, passing by Mysia, they went down to Troas.” (Acts 16:6-8)
It’s here that our reading for today picks up, with verse 9:
“During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them. We set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the following day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city for some days.”
It is in Philippi that they encounter Lydia. Now, if you look at the map I’ve included in your bulletins, you’ll see all these cities or regions that were mentioned in the reading have been circled. Look at where Phrygia and Galatia are, in the central part of what is now Turkey. That whole region is called “Asia” on the map, and even though the scripture says they had already been “forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the Word in Asia,” still they try to go to Bithynia – see where that is on the map? Even further north than Galatia, and still East! It’s like, um, hello, what part of “not in Asia right now, folks!” did you guys not get? But “the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them” to go there, and so they go down to Troas – see where that is? Basically as far West as you can go and still be in Asia. They’re trying desperately to hang on to what they already know, to stay in the area that’s familiar to them, to continue to try to do something in Asia despite being told that their ministry is not there right now. So here they are, hanging out in Troas, at the very edge of their familiar territory, and it’s here that Paul receives the message to go to Macedonia – even further West – a whole different land mass! They follow that call and they wind up finding Lydia in Philippi. She was the one God had prepared for them to encounter next, and if they hadn’t been willing to listen to the Spirit’s promptings and follow where God led, they would have never even met her.
In our Gospel passage for today, Jesus promises the disciples that after he is taken from them, they will continue to have a teacher and guide in the Holy Spirit:
“I have said these things to you while I am still with you,” he says. “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” (John 14:25-26)
The Holy Spirit is the continuing presence of God among us, to continue to guide and direct the church in the ways that God wants us to go. The disciples had the benefit of an actual human person in the form of Jesus of Nazareth to teach and guide them, but now we are left with this illusive and not-so-easy-to-identify Holy Spirit as our guide. Our challenge is to remember that we still have a teacher and guide with us, because it is a lot easier to ignore that guide if it is not a physical person actually speaking to us and showing us the way. It’s a lot easier, in the absence of a physical person as leader, to be guided by our own ideas and desires rather than God’s ideas and desires.
I’ve said quite a bit about that distinction lately, and I want to make clear that I’m not saying that our ideas and desires are inherently opposed to God’s ideas and desires. They can, in fact, be the same thing. But the key is remembering to ask the question, to listen for where the Spirit is leading us and being open to the idea that that might not be the same place we’ve decided we want to go. Like the disciples in our passage from Acts today, we might think we’re going to Bithynia, but God wants us to go to Macedonia! Sometimes when we listen to the Spirit, we find a whole new direction that we hadn’t even thought of before. Other times, we confirm that the direction we’re already going is indeed of God – but again, remembering to listen is the key point.
So the corrective to the shadow side of Christianity’s missionary impulse is to ensure that evangelism is always Spirit-led. When left to our own devices, we know the horrible things we are capable of – coming in to a community and tearing away their time-honored traditions and the ways God has spoken to them throughout the centuries, insisting that they do things our way, right down to the clothes they wear and the language they speak, falsely equating one particular human culture with the Gospel. But when we look at the stories of evangelism in the book of Acts, the account of how the faith first spread, we are reminded that authentic evangelism is always Spirit-led. It is God-initiated rather than human-initiated. And it is never a one-way encounter. It is never one people telling another what to do. It is always a mutual encounter in which both sides have received messages or visions from God and together they attempt to discover the wonderful thing that God is trying to do in their midst and to be faithful to that call.
So as we consider the ways we might reach out to our neighborhood and the community around this church building, let us be in prayer and deep listening about where God is calling us – and how God might already be speaking to the people around us. Being still long enough to listen will help us ensure that our evangelism is Spirit-led rather than human-led.
Sunday, May 1, 2016
Sunday, April 24, 2016
Who are we to hinder God -- even when God breaks tradition?
Sermon delivered Sunday, April 24, 2016 (5th Sunday of Easter, Year C) at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
(Acts 11:1-18, Revelation 21:1-6, John 13:31-35)
“Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.”
We use that phrase to conclude the reading of the Scriptures in public worship at St. Cuthbert’s. This phrase comes from a liturgical resource called “Enriching Our Worship,” which was made available to the Episcopal Church in 1998 as a supplement to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. It offers alternative phrases and imagery to the more traditional wording in the prayer book.
The traditional phrase used after the reading of Scripture in the prayer book is, “The Word of the Lord.” But I much prefer “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people,” for several reasons.
Although I do believe our scriptures to be “The Word of the Lord,” I think using that phrase so casually and without clarification can lead to a misunderstanding of how we are to engage with them. To me, when I hear “THE WORD OF THE LORD,” I imagine some big booming voice of authority sending down a message from on high. To me, that phrase has a sense of absolutism that does not encourage inquiry and exploration. This is the truth, the whole truth, the undeniable, indisputable truth, so help us God!
But “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people” has an entirely different ring, at least to my ears. Rather than telling us to be passive recipients of something coming down from heaven, it invites us to discern what God is saying to us now in and through this text. It doesn’t imply that there is one meaning and all we have to do is accept it. When we are invited to “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people,” we must do something in response to the scripture. We have to use our own faculties, our own God-given gifts for discernment, to figure out what God is saying to our church, to our community, to our country, to our world, through this passage of scripture.
This semantic distinction is important, I think, because it reminds us that God’s revelation to us is ongoing, not static. While maintaining and preserving tradition and passing it on to the next generation is important, if we focus only on that part of religion, we can end up knowing more about what God said to the ancient people than what God is saying to us today.
The letter to the Hebrews says that “the Word of God is living and active” (Hebrews 4:12), and our brothers and sisters in the United Church of Christ remind us that “God is still speaking,” which has been their official slogan since 2004. Despite the fact that the scriptures include stories of God encouraging change in individuals and within communities, and of God saying outright, “I am doing a new thing!” – whether through the ancient prophet Isaiah or the futuristic book of Revelation – many people still tend to think of God – and therefore religion – as unchanging, unchangeable, set in stone, and church can be a place where “innovation” can be a dirty word.
But our scriptures on this Fifth Sunday of Easter, in this season of change and renewal, put innovation right up front and center. Beyond John’s vision of the heavenly king proclaiming “I am making all things new” in the passage from Revelation and Jesus giving a “new commandment” to the disciples in the passage from John, perhaps the most striking example of innovation is in our passage from Acts, when Peter receives a revelation from God that leads him to abandon the dietary laws that were central to Jewish tradition.
Now, it’s perhaps not possible to overstate how significant this change was for Peter and for the followers of Jesus. Although there is a common misperception that Jesus rejected Jewish tradition and ritual because of the many times he broke the Sabbath or challenged the authorities, Jesus actually was not really a religious innovator. He followed the traditional Jewish practices and he observed all the Jewish festivals. He told his followers, “I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill.” In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5, he has this to say about Jewish law:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:17-19)
Now, given that context, Peter’s vision telling him to “get up, kill and eat” animals that were forbidden by Jewish law to be eaten is extraordinarily radical! Peter immediately protests, saying, “By no means, Lord, for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.” He probably thought this vision was a test, to see if he’d do the right thing, to see if he’d be tempted to eat any of the “forbidden fruits” he was being shown on this sheet coming down from heaven. I imagine Peter might have been remembering Jesus’s words: “Whoever breaks one of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” “No way am I going to break the dietary laws,” Peter’s thinking, “I’ve already screwed up enough times; I’m not going to screw it up again! I know the right answer to this one – ‘By no means, Lord, I wouldn’t DREAM of disobeying the law!’”
But in the vision, God insists that he do so! “What God has made clean, you must not call profane,” says the voice from heaven.
I spent some time in evangelical non-denominational churches in college, and I remember a key part of their teaching was that no revelation could ever contradict scripture. So if you thought you had a vision from God, you had to go back and read the scriptures and see what they said, and if what you felt God was telling you to do was contrary to what the scripture said, it couldn’t be an authentic message from God. This line of reasoning was often used to explain to women who felt a call to ordained ministry why that couldn’t be an authentic message from God. Since women leading congregations would contradict scriptures that said, “Women should be silent in church,” or “I do not permit a woman to have authority over a man,” then obviously the woman must be confused or misunderstand what she’s really being called to do. God would never call a woman to ordained ministry, because that would contradict scripture!
But by that line of reasoning, Peter’s revelation in today’s passage from Acts would also be invalid! I’m sure some of the believers in Jerusalem rejected Peter’s message for the same reason: “What do you mean, God told you to eat unclean animals? That contradicts the scriptures! God would never tell you to do something that contradicts scripture!”
And yet, Christian tradition has held up this story as an example of how the Spirit moved among the believers in the early church, and the church would look very different today had Peter’s vision not been taken seriously – we would all still be keeping kosher and all the other commandments of the Jewish law as well. We would have essentially been required to convert to Judaism in order to become a follower of Jesus. But Peter’s contrary-to-scripture revelation acknowledged that God was bringing in the Gentiles even without their conversion to Judaism. Peter’s contrary-to-scripture revelation was central to the birth of the church and what it would become, and therefore central to our identity as Christians today. We now regard this example of breaking tradition as scripture!
The revelation Peter received wasn’t just a new interpretation of an old way of being; it was literally rejecting something that had been sacrosanct and endorsing something that had been forbidden! If this was possible, how could the church ever know for sure that they were following the right path? How could they be sure they were following God’s will, if God’s will could change with the next revelation to come along?
We still continue to struggle with these questions today. The debate over women’s ordination that raged in the 20th century in Protestant churches and of course continues today in the Roman Catholic Church, and the debate over same-sex marriage that has become the “hot button issue” of the 21st century, are just two obvious, high profile examples of the church wrestling with whether God can move us in a direction that “contradicts tradition” or “contradicts scripture,” but we can see this dynamic at play in any number of situations in the church, in issues large and small, any time we feel ourselves being called to move in a direction that somehow seems to be contrary to what is taught in the Bible or church tradition, and yet, we feel this call so strongly that we cannot deny that it is of God.
And although he valued the religious tradition of his birth and upheld it, Jesus himself also taught his followers that the action of God in this world is not always so easy to pin down. He compared the work of the Spirit to the wind. In John chapter 3, he answers Nicodemus’s inquiry about how to enter the kingdom of heaven by saying, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). The Spirit moves where it will, and our job is to be still long enough to listen for it and hear where it is moving, and to acknowledge it wherever we find it, even if it contradicts everything we’ve always known.
After the believers in Jerusalem hear about Peter’s vision showing that all foods had been made clean and then his story of the Gentiles receiving the Holy Spirit just as the Jewish followers of Jesus had, they acknowledge that it is possible that God is moving even in this unconventional way. “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” Peter asks, as he explains why he’s allowed Gentiles to join the community without keeping the Jewish law, and why he’s eaten with them despite their lack of adherence to the Jewish dietary laws. His listeners are silenced, for what satisfactory answer is there to that question? Who are we to hinder God? If God’s Spirit is behind something, good luck trying to stop it.
At another point in the book of Acts, the teacher Gamaliel, a wise elder on the Jewish council, defends the leaders of the church against calls for their execution by reasoning with his fellow councilmembers in this way:
“So in the present case,” Gamaliel says, “I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone; because if this plan or this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them—in that case you may even be found fighting against God!’” (Acts 5:38-39)
As we begin the work of discernment about the future this congregation over the next weeks and months to come, let me remind you again about the key role of LISTENING in discernment. We are being invited to “hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people” at St. Cuthbert’s and in this part of Oakland. Our job is to listen for where God is already at work in the world around us, and to join in, to become his partners in creation, in bringing forth that “new thing” in our midst. Our job is to be open to the Spirit’s promptings and to follow them wherever they lead – even if they lead us to break tradition! Even if they lead us to do things that might contradict what we always thought we knew, or what we always thought we wanted for this church and for this community. Because no matter how noble and compassionate our ideas are, no matter how exciting or fun or promising they might seem, and no matter how much effort we put in to fulfilling them, they will never come to fruition if they are not in line with where God’s Spirit is already moving in the world. We can’t FORCE something to happen of our own will if it is not already of God.
So as we discern together, we must continue to ask ourselves “is this plan or this undertaking of human origin, or is it of God?” And we must be willing to accept the answer we receive, for if it is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, we will not be able to stop it, because who are we to hinder God?
(Acts 11:1-18, Revelation 21:1-6, John 13:31-35)
“Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.”
We use that phrase to conclude the reading of the Scriptures in public worship at St. Cuthbert’s. This phrase comes from a liturgical resource called “Enriching Our Worship,” which was made available to the Episcopal Church in 1998 as a supplement to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. It offers alternative phrases and imagery to the more traditional wording in the prayer book.
The traditional phrase used after the reading of Scripture in the prayer book is, “The Word of the Lord.” But I much prefer “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people,” for several reasons.
Although I do believe our scriptures to be “The Word of the Lord,” I think using that phrase so casually and without clarification can lead to a misunderstanding of how we are to engage with them. To me, when I hear “THE WORD OF THE LORD,” I imagine some big booming voice of authority sending down a message from on high. To me, that phrase has a sense of absolutism that does not encourage inquiry and exploration. This is the truth, the whole truth, the undeniable, indisputable truth, so help us God!
But “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people” has an entirely different ring, at least to my ears. Rather than telling us to be passive recipients of something coming down from heaven, it invites us to discern what God is saying to us now in and through this text. It doesn’t imply that there is one meaning and all we have to do is accept it. When we are invited to “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people,” we must do something in response to the scripture. We have to use our own faculties, our own God-given gifts for discernment, to figure out what God is saying to our church, to our community, to our country, to our world, through this passage of scripture.
This semantic distinction is important, I think, because it reminds us that God’s revelation to us is ongoing, not static. While maintaining and preserving tradition and passing it on to the next generation is important, if we focus only on that part of religion, we can end up knowing more about what God said to the ancient people than what God is saying to us today.
The letter to the Hebrews says that “the Word of God is living and active” (Hebrews 4:12), and our brothers and sisters in the United Church of Christ remind us that “God is still speaking,” which has been their official slogan since 2004. Despite the fact that the scriptures include stories of God encouraging change in individuals and within communities, and of God saying outright, “I am doing a new thing!” – whether through the ancient prophet Isaiah or the futuristic book of Revelation – many people still tend to think of God – and therefore religion – as unchanging, unchangeable, set in stone, and church can be a place where “innovation” can be a dirty word.
But our scriptures on this Fifth Sunday of Easter, in this season of change and renewal, put innovation right up front and center. Beyond John’s vision of the heavenly king proclaiming “I am making all things new” in the passage from Revelation and Jesus giving a “new commandment” to the disciples in the passage from John, perhaps the most striking example of innovation is in our passage from Acts, when Peter receives a revelation from God that leads him to abandon the dietary laws that were central to Jewish tradition.
Now, it’s perhaps not possible to overstate how significant this change was for Peter and for the followers of Jesus. Although there is a common misperception that Jesus rejected Jewish tradition and ritual because of the many times he broke the Sabbath or challenged the authorities, Jesus actually was not really a religious innovator. He followed the traditional Jewish practices and he observed all the Jewish festivals. He told his followers, “I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill.” In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5, he has this to say about Jewish law:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:17-19)
Now, given that context, Peter’s vision telling him to “get up, kill and eat” animals that were forbidden by Jewish law to be eaten is extraordinarily radical! Peter immediately protests, saying, “By no means, Lord, for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.” He probably thought this vision was a test, to see if he’d do the right thing, to see if he’d be tempted to eat any of the “forbidden fruits” he was being shown on this sheet coming down from heaven. I imagine Peter might have been remembering Jesus’s words: “Whoever breaks one of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” “No way am I going to break the dietary laws,” Peter’s thinking, “I’ve already screwed up enough times; I’m not going to screw it up again! I know the right answer to this one – ‘By no means, Lord, I wouldn’t DREAM of disobeying the law!’”
But in the vision, God insists that he do so! “What God has made clean, you must not call profane,” says the voice from heaven.
I spent some time in evangelical non-denominational churches in college, and I remember a key part of their teaching was that no revelation could ever contradict scripture. So if you thought you had a vision from God, you had to go back and read the scriptures and see what they said, and if what you felt God was telling you to do was contrary to what the scripture said, it couldn’t be an authentic message from God. This line of reasoning was often used to explain to women who felt a call to ordained ministry why that couldn’t be an authentic message from God. Since women leading congregations would contradict scriptures that said, “Women should be silent in church,” or “I do not permit a woman to have authority over a man,” then obviously the woman must be confused or misunderstand what she’s really being called to do. God would never call a woman to ordained ministry, because that would contradict scripture!
But by that line of reasoning, Peter’s revelation in today’s passage from Acts would also be invalid! I’m sure some of the believers in Jerusalem rejected Peter’s message for the same reason: “What do you mean, God told you to eat unclean animals? That contradicts the scriptures! God would never tell you to do something that contradicts scripture!”
And yet, Christian tradition has held up this story as an example of how the Spirit moved among the believers in the early church, and the church would look very different today had Peter’s vision not been taken seriously – we would all still be keeping kosher and all the other commandments of the Jewish law as well. We would have essentially been required to convert to Judaism in order to become a follower of Jesus. But Peter’s contrary-to-scripture revelation acknowledged that God was bringing in the Gentiles even without their conversion to Judaism. Peter’s contrary-to-scripture revelation was central to the birth of the church and what it would become, and therefore central to our identity as Christians today. We now regard this example of breaking tradition as scripture!
The revelation Peter received wasn’t just a new interpretation of an old way of being; it was literally rejecting something that had been sacrosanct and endorsing something that had been forbidden! If this was possible, how could the church ever know for sure that they were following the right path? How could they be sure they were following God’s will, if God’s will could change with the next revelation to come along?
We still continue to struggle with these questions today. The debate over women’s ordination that raged in the 20th century in Protestant churches and of course continues today in the Roman Catholic Church, and the debate over same-sex marriage that has become the “hot button issue” of the 21st century, are just two obvious, high profile examples of the church wrestling with whether God can move us in a direction that “contradicts tradition” or “contradicts scripture,” but we can see this dynamic at play in any number of situations in the church, in issues large and small, any time we feel ourselves being called to move in a direction that somehow seems to be contrary to what is taught in the Bible or church tradition, and yet, we feel this call so strongly that we cannot deny that it is of God.
And although he valued the religious tradition of his birth and upheld it, Jesus himself also taught his followers that the action of God in this world is not always so easy to pin down. He compared the work of the Spirit to the wind. In John chapter 3, he answers Nicodemus’s inquiry about how to enter the kingdom of heaven by saying, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). The Spirit moves where it will, and our job is to be still long enough to listen for it and hear where it is moving, and to acknowledge it wherever we find it, even if it contradicts everything we’ve always known.
After the believers in Jerusalem hear about Peter’s vision showing that all foods had been made clean and then his story of the Gentiles receiving the Holy Spirit just as the Jewish followers of Jesus had, they acknowledge that it is possible that God is moving even in this unconventional way. “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” Peter asks, as he explains why he’s allowed Gentiles to join the community without keeping the Jewish law, and why he’s eaten with them despite their lack of adherence to the Jewish dietary laws. His listeners are silenced, for what satisfactory answer is there to that question? Who are we to hinder God? If God’s Spirit is behind something, good luck trying to stop it.
At another point in the book of Acts, the teacher Gamaliel, a wise elder on the Jewish council, defends the leaders of the church against calls for their execution by reasoning with his fellow councilmembers in this way:
“So in the present case,” Gamaliel says, “I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone; because if this plan or this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them—in that case you may even be found fighting against God!’” (Acts 5:38-39)
As we begin the work of discernment about the future this congregation over the next weeks and months to come, let me remind you again about the key role of LISTENING in discernment. We are being invited to “hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people” at St. Cuthbert’s and in this part of Oakland. Our job is to listen for where God is already at work in the world around us, and to join in, to become his partners in creation, in bringing forth that “new thing” in our midst. Our job is to be open to the Spirit’s promptings and to follow them wherever they lead – even if they lead us to break tradition! Even if they lead us to do things that might contradict what we always thought we knew, or what we always thought we wanted for this church and for this community. Because no matter how noble and compassionate our ideas are, no matter how exciting or fun or promising they might seem, and no matter how much effort we put in to fulfilling them, they will never come to fruition if they are not in line with where God’s Spirit is already moving in the world. We can’t FORCE something to happen of our own will if it is not already of God.
So as we discern together, we must continue to ask ourselves “is this plan or this undertaking of human origin, or is it of God?” And we must be willing to accept the answer we receive, for if it is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, we will not be able to stop it, because who are we to hinder God?
Sunday, April 10, 2016
When the people of God listen to God and trust God's word, amazing things are possible
Sermon delivered Sunday, April 10, 2016 (3rd Sunday of Easter, Year C), at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
(Acts 9:1-20, John 21:1-19)
On this third Sunday of Easter, we continue to hear stories of uncertainty, newness, change, and fear. The disciples are still reeling from the events of Jesus’s final week in Jerusalem – arrest, crucifixion, death, and now, these miraculous appearances! In our passage from John today we see Jesus appearing to the disciples while they are out doing what is familiar to them – fishing – and reminding them of their call to go beyond the familiar in order to bring in a successful “catch” for the kingdom. And in Acts, although the story is chronologically a bit later than the first post-Resurrection appearances, we have another powerful story of uncertainty, newness, change, and fear – when Jesus appears to Saul, an adamant persecutor of Christians, and Saul does a complete 180 – transforming from violent enemy to passionate leader in the church.
In both stories, the people of God are asked to trust God’s word, God’s direction, God’s movement in their lives, even when that leads them to do things that are unknown, unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and scary. When Jesus appears to the disciples on the beach and offers them some advice on getting better results with their fishing excursion, they have to trust that he knows what he’s talking about, even though they have been casting their nets all night and catching nothing.
“Cast the net to the right side of the boat,” Jesus says. “Oh, gee, thanks,” the disciples might have thought, “You think we haven’t thought of that one? What difference is casting the net on a different side of the boat going to make? If there aren’t any fish on this side, there aren’t going to be any just a few feet away on the other side! There are no fish! We know; we’ve been out here all night!” So they have, but perhaps they’ve only been casting the net on the left side of the boat because it was easier for them to do it that way. If they were right-handed, casting on the left side would make hauling the fish in easier, since they could use their dominant right arm to lift the heavy loads. They were professional fishermen; they’d probably perfected their technique to where it taxed the body the least so they could sustain longer working hours. They’d always done it this way and it had always worked for them in the past. But Jesus comes along after the Resurrection and asks them to do something slightly different, something that wasn’t the way they’d always done it, something that might have felt uncomfortable and unfamiliar. They’d have to use muscles they weren’t used to using. They’d have to call upon strengths they didn’t know they had. They’d have to modify their actions to adapt to the situation at hand.
And when they did – when they trusted Jesus’s advice and tried something different, they were overwhelmed with an enormous haul of fish – 153, to be exact, the same number as the number of nations known to exist at that particular time. A catch of 153 fish was symbolic of a “catch” of all the nations, foreshadowing the evangelism they would do as they spread the Gospel throughout the world.
And what about Ananias, in our passage from Acts today? Can you imagine God asking you to go voluntarily to meet with one of the chief persecutors of the church, someone who had sworn to kill anyone who was a follower of Jesus?
“Um, are you SURE that’s who you want me to go see?” Ananias asks. “I’ve heard lots of stories about this guy, and none of them are good. Do you KNOW how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem? And you want me to go heal HIM?”
But the Lord answers, “Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel.”
Imagine the kind of trust it had to take for Ananias to follow through on that command! In our Gospel passage, the disciples had to trust just enough to try a slight change in their professional working habits, but still operating in the realm of something they were used to doing and that wasn’t threatening to them in any way. But Ananias is essentially being asked to walk right into the lion’s den! He has to trust God’s word that Saul is “an instrument God has chosen” – although every self-preservation instinct – and all of his friends who cared about him – would have urged him to stay as far away from Saul as possible.
But somehow, Ananias does it. He takes God at God’s word and does what he is being asked to do. And Saul is converted to the faith and becomes one of its strongest leaders.
When the people of God listen to God and trust God's word, amazing things are possible. Miraculous things are possible. When the people of God listen to God and trust God's word, lives are changed.
What is God asking you, the people of St. Cuthbert’s, to do that might be unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and scary? Fr. John Rawlinson’s sermon last week invited you to consider what the “resurrection” of this congregation might look like. “Resurrection is not the same old, same old,” he said. “Resurrection is not a repeat of what has been. Resurrection is the unknown and new life, but in likely a very different way.” This is the message of our scriptures for today as well. Resurrection means change – subtle change in some cases, radical change in others, but all cases, change.
St. Cuthbert’s is at a crucial moment in its history. In this “liminal space,” as Deacon Pam put it in her sermon the week after the retirement of your previous priest, in this in between time, you are being invited to consider what the future of this community will be. Your task is to listen for where the Holy Spirit is moving in this place – this congregation, this neighborhood, this city – and how God is calling you to respond.
In the short amount of time I have been here, I have seen and felt God’s spirit moving in a number of ways at St. Cuthbert’s. I’ll share a few of my thoughts, which I hope will be the start of a conversation that will engage the whole congregation over the next few weeks and months.
I see the Spirit moving in the passionate and beautiful music we make with one another each week. Quality music can be difficult to come by in small congregations, and St. Cuthbert’s is very fortunate to have the wonderful musicians it has to lead us in our praise of God.
I see the Spirit in the re-engagement of Lydia Pierce Chong with the congregation. Lydia is a young woman who had been loosely connected to St. Cuthbert’s in the past but now has a fire lit in her to reach out to the neighborhood surrounding the church and find ways we can minister to young parents and families in the area. Deacon Pam told me that after seeing the nursery room in the narthex used on Easter Sunday for the first time in a long time, she felt a nudge from the Spirit for us to do some kind of a blessing for that space, to put the energy out there in the universe that we are setting aside and dedicating that space for the nurture of children whom we have not yet met, but who God intends to bring to us.
I see the Spirit moving in the determination of BJ Gerton and her crew to keep the produce market going, despite the loss of funding from Episcopal Senior Communities, to provide a source of fresh produce in this neighborhood that in many ways is a “food desert,” an urban area where it is difficult to buy affordable or good quality fresh food.
And speaking of produce, I feel a nudge from the Spirit every time I see the farmers standing on the street corner in front of St. Cuthbert’s selling their produce during the week. This parish is blessed in terms of location to be perched on such a busy intersection. These guys wouldn’t choose this spot to sell their produce if it wasn’t a high traffic area with potential to net them good business. We could harness that energy to draw attention to St. Cuthbert’s. I’ve had visions of standing on the corner with them during the week, wearing my collar, holding up signs that say – “Pull over for free prayers” or “God loves you - join us on Sundays” – or whatever other creative ideas you all can come up with! Or, doing something as simple as holding a service outside one Sunday under the big trees in front of the church would make us more visible and show that there is life and energy in this place.
Where do YOU see or feel the Spirit moving at St. Cuthbert’s? What do you feel the Spirit nudging you to do around here? Now is a time for dreaming, for visioning, for considering what might be. No idea is too grandiose or too impractical – let your minds go wild, and share your ideas with Milene Rawlinson, our senior warden, BJ Gerton, our junior warden, or anyone else on the Bishop’s Committee. Diocesan leaders will be coming to St. Cuthbert’s within the next few weeks to begin a conversation about the future of St. Cuthbert’s. If you feel the Spirit moving us toward resurrection, listen. Listen and make it known to the rest of us, because we discern God’s will in community, through hearing and listening to one another. Listen and act on it, because when the people of God listen to God and trust God's word, amazing things are possible.
(Acts 9:1-20, John 21:1-19)
On this third Sunday of Easter, we continue to hear stories of uncertainty, newness, change, and fear. The disciples are still reeling from the events of Jesus’s final week in Jerusalem – arrest, crucifixion, death, and now, these miraculous appearances! In our passage from John today we see Jesus appearing to the disciples while they are out doing what is familiar to them – fishing – and reminding them of their call to go beyond the familiar in order to bring in a successful “catch” for the kingdom. And in Acts, although the story is chronologically a bit later than the first post-Resurrection appearances, we have another powerful story of uncertainty, newness, change, and fear – when Jesus appears to Saul, an adamant persecutor of Christians, and Saul does a complete 180 – transforming from violent enemy to passionate leader in the church.
In both stories, the people of God are asked to trust God’s word, God’s direction, God’s movement in their lives, even when that leads them to do things that are unknown, unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and scary. When Jesus appears to the disciples on the beach and offers them some advice on getting better results with their fishing excursion, they have to trust that he knows what he’s talking about, even though they have been casting their nets all night and catching nothing.
“Cast the net to the right side of the boat,” Jesus says. “Oh, gee, thanks,” the disciples might have thought, “You think we haven’t thought of that one? What difference is casting the net on a different side of the boat going to make? If there aren’t any fish on this side, there aren’t going to be any just a few feet away on the other side! There are no fish! We know; we’ve been out here all night!” So they have, but perhaps they’ve only been casting the net on the left side of the boat because it was easier for them to do it that way. If they were right-handed, casting on the left side would make hauling the fish in easier, since they could use their dominant right arm to lift the heavy loads. They were professional fishermen; they’d probably perfected their technique to where it taxed the body the least so they could sustain longer working hours. They’d always done it this way and it had always worked for them in the past. But Jesus comes along after the Resurrection and asks them to do something slightly different, something that wasn’t the way they’d always done it, something that might have felt uncomfortable and unfamiliar. They’d have to use muscles they weren’t used to using. They’d have to call upon strengths they didn’t know they had. They’d have to modify their actions to adapt to the situation at hand.
And when they did – when they trusted Jesus’s advice and tried something different, they were overwhelmed with an enormous haul of fish – 153, to be exact, the same number as the number of nations known to exist at that particular time. A catch of 153 fish was symbolic of a “catch” of all the nations, foreshadowing the evangelism they would do as they spread the Gospel throughout the world.
And what about Ananias, in our passage from Acts today? Can you imagine God asking you to go voluntarily to meet with one of the chief persecutors of the church, someone who had sworn to kill anyone who was a follower of Jesus?
“Um, are you SURE that’s who you want me to go see?” Ananias asks. “I’ve heard lots of stories about this guy, and none of them are good. Do you KNOW how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem? And you want me to go heal HIM?”
But the Lord answers, “Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel.”
Imagine the kind of trust it had to take for Ananias to follow through on that command! In our Gospel passage, the disciples had to trust just enough to try a slight change in their professional working habits, but still operating in the realm of something they were used to doing and that wasn’t threatening to them in any way. But Ananias is essentially being asked to walk right into the lion’s den! He has to trust God’s word that Saul is “an instrument God has chosen” – although every self-preservation instinct – and all of his friends who cared about him – would have urged him to stay as far away from Saul as possible.
But somehow, Ananias does it. He takes God at God’s word and does what he is being asked to do. And Saul is converted to the faith and becomes one of its strongest leaders.
When the people of God listen to God and trust God's word, amazing things are possible. Miraculous things are possible. When the people of God listen to God and trust God's word, lives are changed.
What is God asking you, the people of St. Cuthbert’s, to do that might be unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and scary? Fr. John Rawlinson’s sermon last week invited you to consider what the “resurrection” of this congregation might look like. “Resurrection is not the same old, same old,” he said. “Resurrection is not a repeat of what has been. Resurrection is the unknown and new life, but in likely a very different way.” This is the message of our scriptures for today as well. Resurrection means change – subtle change in some cases, radical change in others, but all cases, change.
St. Cuthbert’s is at a crucial moment in its history. In this “liminal space,” as Deacon Pam put it in her sermon the week after the retirement of your previous priest, in this in between time, you are being invited to consider what the future of this community will be. Your task is to listen for where the Holy Spirit is moving in this place – this congregation, this neighborhood, this city – and how God is calling you to respond.
In the short amount of time I have been here, I have seen and felt God’s spirit moving in a number of ways at St. Cuthbert’s. I’ll share a few of my thoughts, which I hope will be the start of a conversation that will engage the whole congregation over the next few weeks and months.
I see the Spirit moving in the passionate and beautiful music we make with one another each week. Quality music can be difficult to come by in small congregations, and St. Cuthbert’s is very fortunate to have the wonderful musicians it has to lead us in our praise of God.
I see the Spirit in the re-engagement of Lydia Pierce Chong with the congregation. Lydia is a young woman who had been loosely connected to St. Cuthbert’s in the past but now has a fire lit in her to reach out to the neighborhood surrounding the church and find ways we can minister to young parents and families in the area. Deacon Pam told me that after seeing the nursery room in the narthex used on Easter Sunday for the first time in a long time, she felt a nudge from the Spirit for us to do some kind of a blessing for that space, to put the energy out there in the universe that we are setting aside and dedicating that space for the nurture of children whom we have not yet met, but who God intends to bring to us.
I see the Spirit moving in the determination of BJ Gerton and her crew to keep the produce market going, despite the loss of funding from Episcopal Senior Communities, to provide a source of fresh produce in this neighborhood that in many ways is a “food desert,” an urban area where it is difficult to buy affordable or good quality fresh food.
And speaking of produce, I feel a nudge from the Spirit every time I see the farmers standing on the street corner in front of St. Cuthbert’s selling their produce during the week. This parish is blessed in terms of location to be perched on such a busy intersection. These guys wouldn’t choose this spot to sell their produce if it wasn’t a high traffic area with potential to net them good business. We could harness that energy to draw attention to St. Cuthbert’s. I’ve had visions of standing on the corner with them during the week, wearing my collar, holding up signs that say – “Pull over for free prayers” or “God loves you - join us on Sundays” – or whatever other creative ideas you all can come up with! Or, doing something as simple as holding a service outside one Sunday under the big trees in front of the church would make us more visible and show that there is life and energy in this place.
Where do YOU see or feel the Spirit moving at St. Cuthbert’s? What do you feel the Spirit nudging you to do around here? Now is a time for dreaming, for visioning, for considering what might be. No idea is too grandiose or too impractical – let your minds go wild, and share your ideas with Milene Rawlinson, our senior warden, BJ Gerton, our junior warden, or anyone else on the Bishop’s Committee. Diocesan leaders will be coming to St. Cuthbert’s within the next few weeks to begin a conversation about the future of St. Cuthbert’s. If you feel the Spirit moving us toward resurrection, listen. Listen and make it known to the rest of us, because we discern God’s will in community, through hearing and listening to one another. Listen and act on it, because when the people of God listen to God and trust God's word, amazing things are possible.
Sunday, March 20, 2016
Jesus offers us a "way out" from crowd mentality
Sermon delivered Sunday, March 20, 2016 (The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday, Year C) at
St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
Luke 19:29-40, Luke 22:14-23:56
Palm Sunday brings us face to face with one of the most difficult truths about human nature: our inclination to follow the crowd.
We begin the service with Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, when the crowds gather around and hail him as King, but soon, the mood abruptly changes as we hear the story of how the crowds turned against him and demanded his death just a few days later.
Although cramming the remembrance of these two events together on the same Sunday is in some ways a concession to the fact that not everyone will come to church during Holy Week (We’ve gotta make sure you hear the story of the crucifixion today, in case you don’t come on Good Friday!), there is also some meaning, I think, in feeling the dissonance of these two completely opposite moods juxtaposed beside one another.
They are both, at their core, stories about crowd mentality – joyful crowds celebrating Jesus and angry crowds torturing and killing Jesus – made all the more poignant by the fact that there were likely some – perhaps many – who were part of both crowds. This is not a pretty picture of humanity’s tendency to follow the crowd, no matter what the morality or ethics of what the crowd is doing. We have the ability to love someone one minute and hate him the next, to make someone our leader one minute and then put him to death the next.
The pressure to conform to the ways of the crowd squelches individual conscience and sense of responsibility. Psychological studies on conformity show that people tend to think that if everyone in a group is doing something, it can’t possibly be wrong [1], and they feel less legal culpability or personal responsibility for what happens when an action is taken by multiple people at the same time – no one person can be easily held responsible, so individuals who have an issue with what the group is doing are more likely to go along rather than to resist [2].
A recognition of this tendency to distance ourselves from wrongdoing committed by a group for which we are not “personally responsible” is behind the wording in the confession of sin we’ve been using from Enriching Our Worship: “We repent of the evil that enslaves us: the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” In saying this, the liturgy reminds us that we are complicit even in sins we did not personally commit when we are part of the unjust structures that allow or even encourage them to exist.
Palm Sunday forces each of us to look inward and ask ourselves, In the face of the pressure to conform to the ways of the crowd, do we have the ability to stand up for what we know to be true and right, even if our very lives are threatened? Peter, that “rock” on whom Jesus chose to build the church, didn’t. The same guy who promised Jesus, “I am ready to go with you to prison and to death!” winds up vigorously denying that he even knows Jesus when questioned in the courtyard of the high priest.
If the first among the apostles, Peter himself, wasn’t able to resist this instinct to conform for the sake of self-preservation, perhaps we shouldn’t beat ourselves up too much about it if we can’t, either, we might think. But before we excuse ourselves too easily, we must remember that at the same time, there were others who were able to resist that instinct, like the women who remained at the foot of the cross to the bitter end, or Joseph of Arimathea, “who, though a member of the council, had not agreed to their plan and action” and who asks Pilate for the body of Jesus so that he can give him a respectable burial after his death.
The tragic story of the crucifixion plays itself out again and again throughout human history, anytime we allow ourselves to get swept up by a crowd into doing or saying things that internally raise all sorts of red flags for us. But the pull of the crowd is so strong, and the fear of rejection or even physical harm if we dare to resist is so powerful, that we become just a grain of sand tossed about by the power of the wave.
This week, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church issued a “Word to the Church” that warns us of the ways this crowd mentality continues to play out in our world today, specifically in this election season in the United States. The bishops write:
“On Good Friday the ruling political forces of the day tortured and executed an innocent man. They sacrificed the weak and the blameless to protect their own status and power… In a country still living under the shadow of the lynching tree, we are troubled by the violent forces being released by this season’s political rhetoric. Americans are turning against their neighbors, particularly those on the margins of society. They seek to secure their own safety and security at the expense of others. There is legitimate reason to fear where this rhetoric and the actions arising from it might take us.”
We in the church, of all people, should know the dangers of crowd mentality. At the center of our faith we have a paradigm case of mob rule gone wrong, a story that we remember and recite year after year after year. Our bishops have reminded us that that story is not an isolated incident from 2,000 years ago. Mob rule continues to crucify innocent people today, and we are complicit in that if we do not actively speak against it.
The bishops’ call to us is clear: “No matter where we fall on the political spectrum, we must respect the dignity of every human being and we must seek the common good above all else.” As people committed to follow the way of Christ, we must always remember that he chose the role of servant, not ruler; that he advocated love of enemy, not revenge; and as much as his death illustrated the worst of what humanity is capable of, his resurrection showed us that violence does not have to have the last word; in fact, that it will not have the last word in reality.
The bishops write, “On the third day Jesus was raised from the dead…unmasking the lie that might makes right.”
“Unmaking the lie that might makes right.” How easily we are seduced by that lie. Some scholars even think that seduction was at the heart of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus – that Judas thought by calling in the authorities, he would force Jesus’s hand and get him to lead the armed uprising against the occupying Roman forces that everyone expected the Messiah to lead. But Jesus tells the disciples to put away their swords when they try to defend him. He heals the ear of the slave of the high priest after one of his guys cut it off. And then he prays for God to forgive his executioners even as he hangs on the cross dying at their hands. He resists all the basest instincts of human nature that lead us to turn against one another, to follow the crowd no matter where it leads, and he shows us a way out. A way out of the cycle of violence, a way out of being held captive to the lie that might makes right.
My prayer is that the power of the story we retell this Holy Week would remind all Christians everywhere that we have a way out. That Jesus has shown us another way. That we have the power to resist the forces of fear and anger that would lead us to betray one another. And that with God’s help, we will do so.
[1] Greenberg, M.S. (2010). Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology, cited in Wikipedia entry on “Crowd psychology,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology, accessed 18 March 2016.
[2] Summarizing views of Gustave Le Bon, as described in Wikipedia entry on “Crowd psychology,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology, accessed 18 March 2016.
Luke 19:29-40, Luke 22:14-23:56
Palm Sunday brings us face to face with one of the most difficult truths about human nature: our inclination to follow the crowd.
We begin the service with Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, when the crowds gather around and hail him as King, but soon, the mood abruptly changes as we hear the story of how the crowds turned against him and demanded his death just a few days later.
Although cramming the remembrance of these two events together on the same Sunday is in some ways a concession to the fact that not everyone will come to church during Holy Week (We’ve gotta make sure you hear the story of the crucifixion today, in case you don’t come on Good Friday!), there is also some meaning, I think, in feeling the dissonance of these two completely opposite moods juxtaposed beside one another.
They are both, at their core, stories about crowd mentality – joyful crowds celebrating Jesus and angry crowds torturing and killing Jesus – made all the more poignant by the fact that there were likely some – perhaps many – who were part of both crowds. This is not a pretty picture of humanity’s tendency to follow the crowd, no matter what the morality or ethics of what the crowd is doing. We have the ability to love someone one minute and hate him the next, to make someone our leader one minute and then put him to death the next.
The pressure to conform to the ways of the crowd squelches individual conscience and sense of responsibility. Psychological studies on conformity show that people tend to think that if everyone in a group is doing something, it can’t possibly be wrong [1], and they feel less legal culpability or personal responsibility for what happens when an action is taken by multiple people at the same time – no one person can be easily held responsible, so individuals who have an issue with what the group is doing are more likely to go along rather than to resist [2].
A recognition of this tendency to distance ourselves from wrongdoing committed by a group for which we are not “personally responsible” is behind the wording in the confession of sin we’ve been using from Enriching Our Worship: “We repent of the evil that enslaves us: the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” In saying this, the liturgy reminds us that we are complicit even in sins we did not personally commit when we are part of the unjust structures that allow or even encourage them to exist.
Palm Sunday forces each of us to look inward and ask ourselves, In the face of the pressure to conform to the ways of the crowd, do we have the ability to stand up for what we know to be true and right, even if our very lives are threatened? Peter, that “rock” on whom Jesus chose to build the church, didn’t. The same guy who promised Jesus, “I am ready to go with you to prison and to death!” winds up vigorously denying that he even knows Jesus when questioned in the courtyard of the high priest.
If the first among the apostles, Peter himself, wasn’t able to resist this instinct to conform for the sake of self-preservation, perhaps we shouldn’t beat ourselves up too much about it if we can’t, either, we might think. But before we excuse ourselves too easily, we must remember that at the same time, there were others who were able to resist that instinct, like the women who remained at the foot of the cross to the bitter end, or Joseph of Arimathea, “who, though a member of the council, had not agreed to their plan and action” and who asks Pilate for the body of Jesus so that he can give him a respectable burial after his death.
The tragic story of the crucifixion plays itself out again and again throughout human history, anytime we allow ourselves to get swept up by a crowd into doing or saying things that internally raise all sorts of red flags for us. But the pull of the crowd is so strong, and the fear of rejection or even physical harm if we dare to resist is so powerful, that we become just a grain of sand tossed about by the power of the wave.
This week, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church issued a “Word to the Church” that warns us of the ways this crowd mentality continues to play out in our world today, specifically in this election season in the United States. The bishops write:
“On Good Friday the ruling political forces of the day tortured and executed an innocent man. They sacrificed the weak and the blameless to protect their own status and power… In a country still living under the shadow of the lynching tree, we are troubled by the violent forces being released by this season’s political rhetoric. Americans are turning against their neighbors, particularly those on the margins of society. They seek to secure their own safety and security at the expense of others. There is legitimate reason to fear where this rhetoric and the actions arising from it might take us.”
We in the church, of all people, should know the dangers of crowd mentality. At the center of our faith we have a paradigm case of mob rule gone wrong, a story that we remember and recite year after year after year. Our bishops have reminded us that that story is not an isolated incident from 2,000 years ago. Mob rule continues to crucify innocent people today, and we are complicit in that if we do not actively speak against it.
The bishops’ call to us is clear: “No matter where we fall on the political spectrum, we must respect the dignity of every human being and we must seek the common good above all else.” As people committed to follow the way of Christ, we must always remember that he chose the role of servant, not ruler; that he advocated love of enemy, not revenge; and as much as his death illustrated the worst of what humanity is capable of, his resurrection showed us that violence does not have to have the last word; in fact, that it will not have the last word in reality.
The bishops write, “On the third day Jesus was raised from the dead…unmasking the lie that might makes right.”
“Unmaking the lie that might makes right.” How easily we are seduced by that lie. Some scholars even think that seduction was at the heart of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus – that Judas thought by calling in the authorities, he would force Jesus’s hand and get him to lead the armed uprising against the occupying Roman forces that everyone expected the Messiah to lead. But Jesus tells the disciples to put away their swords when they try to defend him. He heals the ear of the slave of the high priest after one of his guys cut it off. And then he prays for God to forgive his executioners even as he hangs on the cross dying at their hands. He resists all the basest instincts of human nature that lead us to turn against one another, to follow the crowd no matter where it leads, and he shows us a way out. A way out of the cycle of violence, a way out of being held captive to the lie that might makes right.
My prayer is that the power of the story we retell this Holy Week would remind all Christians everywhere that we have a way out. That Jesus has shown us another way. That we have the power to resist the forces of fear and anger that would lead us to betray one another. And that with God’s help, we will do so.
[1] Greenberg, M.S. (2010). Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology, cited in Wikipedia entry on “Crowd psychology,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology, accessed 18 March 2016.
[2] Summarizing views of Gustave Le Bon, as described in Wikipedia entry on “Crowd psychology,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology, accessed 18 March 2016.
Sunday, March 13, 2016
"You will not always have me" -- a call to cherish the times God shows up in our lives
Sermon delivered Sunday, March 13, 2016 (Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year C), at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA (where I am serving as long-term supply priest).
(John 12:1-8)
As we close down the season of Lent and prepare to move into Holy Week next week, our Gospel passage today gets us ready for that transition. The story we hear today is set six days before the Passover, and so we’re hearing it approximately the same amount of time ahead of Holy Week as it took place before the events of the actual Holy Week. Jesus is having dinner at the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus of Bethany, and Mary pours a jar of expensive oil on Jesus’s feet and wipes them with her hair. Judas protests that this use of the oil was wasteful and that Mary was not being a good steward of her wealth; “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” he asks?
Interestingly enough, the story of the anointing of Jesus is one of the few stories that appears in all four of the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all have slightly different accounts of the story; the woman is not always the same, nor is the person who objects, but the core elements of the story – that it took place at a dinner in someone’s home, that a woman poured expensive oil over Jesus and someone protested that that was an extravagant and wasteful act – are consistent across all four accounts. In all of the Gospels except for Luke, Jesus’s response to those who criticize the woman is some variation of:
“Leave her alone. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
This famous one-liner is perhaps one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted sayings of Jesus. Throughout the centuries, Christians who wanted to justify neglect of the poor and extravagant, lavish displays of wealth in the church would turn to this passage as a biblical basis for the use of solid silver chalices and vestments adorned with rare and precious jewels, and enormous marble churches with gold-gilded ornamentation. To anyone who would protest that perhaps this spending was a bit excessive and maybe more good could have been done with that money in the community to help those in need, well, you know, Jesus said “the poor you will always have with you,” and that woman in the Bible poured out that jar of oil on Jesus that would have been worth an average laborer’s entire yearly salary, so as long as you’re spending lavish amounts of money to express your love for Jesus, it’s all ok.
Sometimes I think Jesus looks down on us and just shakes his head, going, “Seriously?” Like, “that’s where you went with that?” And I’m probably not too far off in my imagination, since Jesus did a lot of shaking his head at the disciples while he was with them on earth, expressing in many ways some version of this sentiment: “You’ve been spending time with me for HOW LONG and you STILL don’t get it??”
Somehow I don’t think Jesus was making known his desire for lavish, expensive gifts in his defense of the woman’s actions in this story. I personally think Jesus could care about less where we worship him and what we wear when we worship him and what kind of objects we use to worship of him. His defense of the woman was not about condoning extravagant displays of wealth. It was about encouraging us to cherish the sacred moments in our lives.
Jesus tells the woman’s critics that she has anointed his body for burial. That’s the key aspect of this story – Jesus’s death is near. “She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial,” he says in John’s version of the story that we heard today. This woman, despite her seemingly wasteful use of money, “gets it.” While the disciples are quibbling about finances and expenses, not really aware of the gravity of the situation and the preciousness of every last moment they have with Jesus, this woman realizes her time with him is limited. She realizes that Jesus’s days are numbered and she wants to give him the best send-off she can. So instead of waiting until he is dead to anoint his body with oil, as was the custom, she chooses to do this for him while he is still alive. How many times have you sat at a funeral reception and wished the deceased could have heard all the wonderful things that are being said about him or her? So often we wait to honor people until they are dead, but this woman wants to honor Jesus while he is still with her. She wants to express her love for him before it’s too late.
I am reminded of a TED Talk I watched recently by Janine di Giovanni, a journalist who reports from war zones around the world. In her talk, she mentions that in 2004, after the birth of her son, her foreign editor sent her back to Iraq to continue her coverage of the war there when her son was just four months old. She says she was crying on the plane because of how difficult it was to leave her son, and an Iraqi politician who knew she had recently had a child said to her, "What are you doing here? Why aren't you home with [your son]?" And she said, "Well, I have to see." It was 2004, which was the beginning of an incredibly bloody time in Iraq, and she felt a sense of responsibility to bear witness to the atrocities and bring the stories of those people who were suffering to the world, as she had done in places like Sarajevo and Rwanda years before. "I have to see, I have to see what is happening here. I have to report it," she said. And the politician said to her, "Go home. Because if you miss his first tooth, if you miss his first step, you'll never forgive yourself. But there will always be another war."
There will always be another war. This is what I think Jesus meant when he said “the poor you will always have with you.” He meant what the politician meant when he encouraged the reporter to go spend time with her son. By saying that, he didn’t mean that the suffering and death in his country wasn’t important, or that the stories of his people didn’t need to be told. He didn’t mean that on a cosmic level it would be ok to neglect their stories and the stories of countless others who suffer. What he meant was, there is an endless amount of suffering in the world. You can’t capture it all and see it all and fix it all. You can only do your part, and right now your part is to focus on this beautiful miracle that has been given to you, this new life which, in a few blinks of an eye, will be a full-grown, independent man.
When Jesus said, “the poor you will always have with you,” he didn’t mean that helping the poor was unimportant, or that it was ok to spend lavish amounts of money on worship instead of giving to those in need. Jesus was one of a long line of prophets in the Jewish tradition who called the people to care people in poverty, who taught that you can judge a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable members. But this particular saying of Jesus actually has very little to do with people in poverty and has everything to do with recognizing the preciousness of each moment you have with the important people in your lives, whether that be God himself in the form of Jesus for the disciples in the first century, or whoever mediates God’s presence to you in your life today.
For me, this Lent has brought news of the deaths of several beloved parishioners from former parishes I have served. From Atlanta to Nashville, the stories of their deaths have come to me across the miles, and I am reminded of the most basic truth behind Jesus’s comment in today’s Gospel reading: “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”
You will not always have me. Our days with our loved ones are limited, so spend time with the ones you love before they are gone. Don’t miss a precious, irreplaceable moment focusing on something that will still be there for you to take care of later.
This truth is perhaps hardest to hear when the limitations of our time and money force us to make impossible choices – to choose between visiting a sick child of a parishioner in the hospital or going to our own child’s soccer game – to choose between paying the hospital bill for our parents’ stay or to make that annual donation to our favorite nonprofit, a donation we know provides the bulk of their operating expenses – to choose between spending time with our dearest friend in a time of crisis or giving an educational presentation about the very topic our friend is struggling with, to a large audience where we have the potential of touching thousands of lives. Whatever your deepest calling is, the thing that gives your life meaning and which you feel God has uniquely gifted you to address, whatever work you do that has the potential to bring hope and healing to many people – put that in the place of “the poor” in Jesus’s statement:
“__________ you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”
There will always be another ________. What is that for you? What is that thing that you do, even if noble and important and sacred and holy, that threatens to blind you to the times God chooses to show up right in front of you?
Jesus’s point, I think, is that even if you are doing good work, like caring for the poor, if you are doing it in such a way that you miss the precious, beautiful moments life has to offer you – the incarnational moments, the times when God is in your midst – and do not stop and celebrate or acknowledge them appropriately, then you miss the point just as much as if all you do is praise God and neglect to care for the poor. We must do both – acknowledge and marvel in God’s presence and go out to do the hard work he calls us to do. Each of us has a tendency to err toward one extreme or the other. The key is finding a balance, that Anglican via media, the middle way, between the two extremes.
“You will not always have me.”
Our time with those we love is precious. Our experience of God’s presence in our midst is often fleeting and temporary. Don’t let anything keep you from reveling in those moments and soaking them up. Like Mary anointing Jesus before his burial, pour out lavish amounts of thanksgiving and praise whenever you encounter God in your life. Remind yourself: “There will always be another war. There will always be another societal ill to address. There will always be poor among us. But there will not always be this.” – and cherish it while you can.
(John 12:1-8)
As we close down the season of Lent and prepare to move into Holy Week next week, our Gospel passage today gets us ready for that transition. The story we hear today is set six days before the Passover, and so we’re hearing it approximately the same amount of time ahead of Holy Week as it took place before the events of the actual Holy Week. Jesus is having dinner at the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus of Bethany, and Mary pours a jar of expensive oil on Jesus’s feet and wipes them with her hair. Judas protests that this use of the oil was wasteful and that Mary was not being a good steward of her wealth; “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” he asks?
Interestingly enough, the story of the anointing of Jesus is one of the few stories that appears in all four of the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all have slightly different accounts of the story; the woman is not always the same, nor is the person who objects, but the core elements of the story – that it took place at a dinner in someone’s home, that a woman poured expensive oil over Jesus and someone protested that that was an extravagant and wasteful act – are consistent across all four accounts. In all of the Gospels except for Luke, Jesus’s response to those who criticize the woman is some variation of:
“Leave her alone. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
This famous one-liner is perhaps one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted sayings of Jesus. Throughout the centuries, Christians who wanted to justify neglect of the poor and extravagant, lavish displays of wealth in the church would turn to this passage as a biblical basis for the use of solid silver chalices and vestments adorned with rare and precious jewels, and enormous marble churches with gold-gilded ornamentation. To anyone who would protest that perhaps this spending was a bit excessive and maybe more good could have been done with that money in the community to help those in need, well, you know, Jesus said “the poor you will always have with you,” and that woman in the Bible poured out that jar of oil on Jesus that would have been worth an average laborer’s entire yearly salary, so as long as you’re spending lavish amounts of money to express your love for Jesus, it’s all ok.
Sometimes I think Jesus looks down on us and just shakes his head, going, “Seriously?” Like, “that’s where you went with that?” And I’m probably not too far off in my imagination, since Jesus did a lot of shaking his head at the disciples while he was with them on earth, expressing in many ways some version of this sentiment: “You’ve been spending time with me for HOW LONG and you STILL don’t get it??”
Somehow I don’t think Jesus was making known his desire for lavish, expensive gifts in his defense of the woman’s actions in this story. I personally think Jesus could care about less where we worship him and what we wear when we worship him and what kind of objects we use to worship of him. His defense of the woman was not about condoning extravagant displays of wealth. It was about encouraging us to cherish the sacred moments in our lives.
Jesus tells the woman’s critics that she has anointed his body for burial. That’s the key aspect of this story – Jesus’s death is near. “She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial,” he says in John’s version of the story that we heard today. This woman, despite her seemingly wasteful use of money, “gets it.” While the disciples are quibbling about finances and expenses, not really aware of the gravity of the situation and the preciousness of every last moment they have with Jesus, this woman realizes her time with him is limited. She realizes that Jesus’s days are numbered and she wants to give him the best send-off she can. So instead of waiting until he is dead to anoint his body with oil, as was the custom, she chooses to do this for him while he is still alive. How many times have you sat at a funeral reception and wished the deceased could have heard all the wonderful things that are being said about him or her? So often we wait to honor people until they are dead, but this woman wants to honor Jesus while he is still with her. She wants to express her love for him before it’s too late.
I am reminded of a TED Talk I watched recently by Janine di Giovanni, a journalist who reports from war zones around the world. In her talk, she mentions that in 2004, after the birth of her son, her foreign editor sent her back to Iraq to continue her coverage of the war there when her son was just four months old. She says she was crying on the plane because of how difficult it was to leave her son, and an Iraqi politician who knew she had recently had a child said to her, "What are you doing here? Why aren't you home with [your son]?" And she said, "Well, I have to see." It was 2004, which was the beginning of an incredibly bloody time in Iraq, and she felt a sense of responsibility to bear witness to the atrocities and bring the stories of those people who were suffering to the world, as she had done in places like Sarajevo and Rwanda years before. "I have to see, I have to see what is happening here. I have to report it," she said. And the politician said to her, "Go home. Because if you miss his first tooth, if you miss his first step, you'll never forgive yourself. But there will always be another war."
There will always be another war. This is what I think Jesus meant when he said “the poor you will always have with you.” He meant what the politician meant when he encouraged the reporter to go spend time with her son. By saying that, he didn’t mean that the suffering and death in his country wasn’t important, or that the stories of his people didn’t need to be told. He didn’t mean that on a cosmic level it would be ok to neglect their stories and the stories of countless others who suffer. What he meant was, there is an endless amount of suffering in the world. You can’t capture it all and see it all and fix it all. You can only do your part, and right now your part is to focus on this beautiful miracle that has been given to you, this new life which, in a few blinks of an eye, will be a full-grown, independent man.
When Jesus said, “the poor you will always have with you,” he didn’t mean that helping the poor was unimportant, or that it was ok to spend lavish amounts of money on worship instead of giving to those in need. Jesus was one of a long line of prophets in the Jewish tradition who called the people to care people in poverty, who taught that you can judge a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable members. But this particular saying of Jesus actually has very little to do with people in poverty and has everything to do with recognizing the preciousness of each moment you have with the important people in your lives, whether that be God himself in the form of Jesus for the disciples in the first century, or whoever mediates God’s presence to you in your life today.
For me, this Lent has brought news of the deaths of several beloved parishioners from former parishes I have served. From Atlanta to Nashville, the stories of their deaths have come to me across the miles, and I am reminded of the most basic truth behind Jesus’s comment in today’s Gospel reading: “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”
You will not always have me. Our days with our loved ones are limited, so spend time with the ones you love before they are gone. Don’t miss a precious, irreplaceable moment focusing on something that will still be there for you to take care of later.
This truth is perhaps hardest to hear when the limitations of our time and money force us to make impossible choices – to choose between visiting a sick child of a parishioner in the hospital or going to our own child’s soccer game – to choose between paying the hospital bill for our parents’ stay or to make that annual donation to our favorite nonprofit, a donation we know provides the bulk of their operating expenses – to choose between spending time with our dearest friend in a time of crisis or giving an educational presentation about the very topic our friend is struggling with, to a large audience where we have the potential of touching thousands of lives. Whatever your deepest calling is, the thing that gives your life meaning and which you feel God has uniquely gifted you to address, whatever work you do that has the potential to bring hope and healing to many people – put that in the place of “the poor” in Jesus’s statement:
“__________ you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”
There will always be another ________. What is that for you? What is that thing that you do, even if noble and important and sacred and holy, that threatens to blind you to the times God chooses to show up right in front of you?
Jesus’s point, I think, is that even if you are doing good work, like caring for the poor, if you are doing it in such a way that you miss the precious, beautiful moments life has to offer you – the incarnational moments, the times when God is in your midst – and do not stop and celebrate or acknowledge them appropriately, then you miss the point just as much as if all you do is praise God and neglect to care for the poor. We must do both – acknowledge and marvel in God’s presence and go out to do the hard work he calls us to do. Each of us has a tendency to err toward one extreme or the other. The key is finding a balance, that Anglican via media, the middle way, between the two extremes.
“You will not always have me.”
Our time with those we love is precious. Our experience of God’s presence in our midst is often fleeting and temporary. Don’t let anything keep you from reveling in those moments and soaking them up. Like Mary anointing Jesus before his burial, pour out lavish amounts of thanksgiving and praise whenever you encounter God in your life. Remind yourself: “There will always be another war. There will always be another societal ill to address. There will always be poor among us. But there will not always be this.” – and cherish it while you can.
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, January 31, 2016
"Spiritual but not religious?" Let's be the kind of "religious" Jesus was
Sermon delivered Sunday, Jan. 31, 2016 (4th Sunday After the Epiphany, Year C), at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, Fremont, CA (where I was filling in as a supply priest). Audio (but no video) posted below on Vimeo.
(1 Corinthians 13:1-13, Luke 4:21-30)
Our Gospel passage from Luke today describes Jesus’s return to his hometown of Nazareth after beginning his ministry in other parts of Galilee. The homecoming does not end well: while the people are initially impressed with his preaching, the story ends with them running him out of town and trying to throw him off a cliff! Jesus observes, in a now oft-quoted statement: “no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.”
But it’s not just in his hometown that Jesus is rejected; he offends lots of people and almost gets attacked in several different stories throughout the Gospels, and of course, ultimately ends up crucified. It was not just his childhood friends and neighbors who found Jesus’s teachings hard to accept or threatening, it was many, many people – and most of them highly religious people.
In reading commentaries on today’s Gospel text, I came across an article titled, “Why Religious People Reject Christ.” Why Religious People Reject Christ. The author points to the fact that today, as in the time of Jesus, “most opposition [to the work of God] comes from the religious crowd, not from those outside.”[1] It’s always the people who are the most passionate about and devoted to their faith who are the most threatened by any criticism of it, even when that criticism is well-deserved.
“Religious people” don’t fare too well in the Gospel texts. It’s the religious leaders and the highly devout who reject Jesus, and ultimately come to call for his execution. Most of the prophets throughout the Hebrew Bible are rejected and scorned by “religious people” as well. Prophets come to remind the faithful of what it truly means to follow God, but they are met with resistance from those who think they already have it all figured out. In today’s particular example, the people of Nazareth are so offended by Jesus reminding them – with stories from their own scriptures, by the way – that God can and does work outside of the people of Israel that they almost kill him. They are so sure that they alone are deserving of God’s favor that the very idea that God would neglect lepers and widows in need in Israel while blessing and healing people who would normally be considered enemies of Israel – a leper who is a commander of the Syrian army and a widow who is a Canaanite, one of the people the Israelites had been commanded to drive out of the land so they could possess it – sends them into a rage. How dare God show mercy on anyone other than us? And how dare you suggest that somehow that has something to do with the fulfillment of God’s purpose?
This kind of thinking is alive and well today, as we all know. There’s a modern “parable” that says that a public sinner was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church. So he takes his case to God in protest: ‘They won’t let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner,’ he says. ‘What are you complaining about?’ God responds. ‘They won’t let me in either.’[2]
It’s likely because of those kinds of “religious people” that an increasing number of Americans are rejecting organized religion – the latest surveys show that up to 20% of the population now does not claim any particular religious affiliation. [3] When asked, many of them will tell you they are “spiritual but not religious.” Perhaps you’ve heard that line before; perhaps you’ve even said it yourself at some point. Because being “religious” has gotten a bad rep because the “religious” people are the ones who are so often uptight about things, the ones who draw lines around who’s in and who’s out, the ones who manage to take the fun out of everything.
People who say they are “spiritual but not religious” often point out the hypocrisy within organized religion and the ways in which it is used to control or exploit people. They take issue with any group of people thinking that God chooses or prefers them over others, and point out that when people think they have all the answers, not only do they shut out God, but they shut out other people, in the most extreme cases leading to dehumanization and violence.
This critique of religion is really nothing new – in an interesting twist, these modern religiously unaffiliated people are echoing the words of the biblical prophets!
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” Jesus says to the “religious people” of his day. “For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.” (Matthew 23:13-15)
Before Jesus, John the Baptist called out any within the Jewish faith who might have felt that their lineage as “sons and daughters of Abraham” entitled them to a kind 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.” He says to them (you might remember this from a few Sundays ago during Advent):
“Do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” (Luke 3:8-9)
John calls them to “bear fruits worthy of repentance,” to live an authentic life of faith that bears visible fruit in their actions. Being a son or daughter of Abraham means nothing, John says, if your life does not bear witness to God’s justice and love.
Reaching back into the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Amos brought this word of God to the people: “Because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain… you… afflict the righteous, … take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate… 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” (Amos 5:11a, 12b, 21-22a).
Prophets always remind religious people that the correct observance of rituals means nothing if their hearts are not in the right place. You can say all your prayers and go to services every week, but if you do that while people are suffering from injustice and hunger all around you and do nothing to help, you’ve entirely missed the point. And that’s pretty much what the “spiritual but not religious” people are saying as well.
What’s frustrating to me is when people reject religion entirely when they encounter religious hypocrisy and abuses of power, when they see all the things that are wrong with “religious people.” Because what they’re rejecting isn’t actually an authentic representation of religion. It’s a twisted version, filtered through the lens of sinful humanity. The prophets rejected that kind of religion, too, and yet they were all deeply “religious!”
There’s a common misperception among many people, Christian and non-Christian alike, that Jesus’s message carried with it a rejection of “religion.” They see in Jesus’s critiques of Jewish ritual practice and his scathing rebukes of the religious leaders of his day a rejection of religion altogether. I've heard folks say, "Christianity isn't a religion -- it's a relationship." But Jesus didn’t reject religion; Jesus was a devout Jew. He followed all the rituals and traditions of his faith. As we read in last week’s Gospel, “he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom” (Luke 4:16). He knew the scriptures of his tradition well enough to quote them from memory on a regular basis. He observed the Passover. He did all the things that a “good Jewish boy” of his day would have done. He just didn’t let the observance of those rituals blind him to the meaning behind why they were set up in the first place.
Jesus didn’t reject religion, he rejected a certain kind of religiosity, one that puts ritual observance above love of neighbor, one that puts the letter of the law above the spirit of the law. He rejected the kind of religiosity that would allow someone to die on the Sabbath because it is forbidden to do “work” on the Sabbath and healing them would be considered “work.” He rejected the kind of religiosity that makes people think God owes them something, instead of acknowledging that everything is a gift from God, the kind of religiosity that talks about “birthrights” instead of gifts, about righteousness instead of grace. He rejected the same kind of religiosity that “spiritual but not religious” people reject today.
What Jesus and the prophets came to remind us is that that kind of religiosity is not really being “religious,” it’s being self-righteous. It’s not worshipping God, it’s worshipping self. And it’s condemned in all the major world religions.
“This is the fast that I choose,” God says to the people through the prophet Isaiah; this is what he tells them it means to be “religious”:
“to loose the bonds of injustice…
to let the oppressed go free…
to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house” (Isaiah 58:6-7).
I get the critique of the “spiritual but not religious” folks. I do. It’s easy to want to walk away when you encounter hypocrisy and corruption in any institution. But let’s not let that define what it means to be “religious.” Instead of rejecting religion, let’s be the kind of religious Jesus was. The kind of religious that comes to “bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” – that passage from Isaiah that Jesus quoted in the synagogue in his hometown and said he came to fulfill (Isaiah 61:1-2, quoted in Luke 4). Let's be the kind of religious that reminds us that God can and does work through Canaanites and Syrians as well as Israelites. The kind of religious that acknowledges that “we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part” (1 Corinthians 13:9), that only God knows the full truth. The kind of religious that cultivates humility, not pride, and remembers Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians, that “if I do not love, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:2).
Perhaps if we were all that kind of “religious,” people would be drawn to religion instead of repelled by it. Religion could be a part of the solution instead of part of the problem. In our collect for today, we pray for God to “hear the supplications of your people, and in our time grant us your peace” – but we have to play a part in making peace as well. Perhaps God might respond to our prayer with a prayer of his own, that might go something like this:
“O finite and limited human beings, you are indebted to me for all things both in heaven and on earth: Mercifully hear the supplications of my prophets, so that in your time I may use you to bring peace.” Amen.
[1] Steven J. Cole, “Why Religious People Reject Christ.” From the series “Luke,” on Bible.org. Published 6 June 2013 https://bible.org/seriespage/lesson-16-why-religious-people-reject-christ-luke-414-30 Accessed Jan 28 2016.
[2] Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel.
[3] As cited by the 2014 Pew Research Forum survey of religion in American life. Article on the results of that story here: "America's Changing Religious Landscape," published May 12, 2015. http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/ Accessed Jan 28 2016.
Sunday, August 30, 2015
To Everything There is a Season
Sermon delivered on my last Sunday at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN -- Sunday, August 30, 2015 (14th Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 17).
(Song of Solomon 2:8-13, James 1:17-27)
Our first reading today comes from the Song of Solomon, that great love poem of the Hebrew scriptures, and is perhaps best known for its use at weddings. But at this particular time in my life and in the life of the community at St. Paul’s, I am struck by another aspect of this poem – its emphasis on change and seasons.
“Now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come” (Song of Solomon 2:11-12).
Although the poem describes physical aspects of the earth’s changing with the seasons – from winter to spring, from rain to flowers – perhaps there is a deeper metaphorical message. The lovers can celebrate their love with joy and go away together because “the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.” Perhaps the “winter” was a difficult time in their relationship; perhaps the “rain” was external stressors beating in from every side.
In any case, this passage points us to change – change in seasons, change in dynamics of relationships, and a recognition of the impermanence of everything in life, even of our lives themselves. It reminds me of another passage from the wisdom literature in the Hebrew Bible that gives voice to this theme more fully. Made famous by Pete Seeger setting it to music in the song “Turn! Turn! Turn!” in the 1960s, the words are from the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 3:
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8)
This passage resonated with me as I thought about taking my leave from you after three years serving together in ministry, and as this congregation goes through significant changes in leadership. “To everything there is a season.” A time to arrive, a time to depart. A time to welcome new people, and a time to say goodbye. A time to remember and honor the past, and a time to move forward and look to the future. Having just packed up my office, I know quite a bit about “a time to keep, and a time to throw away,” and perhaps rather than stones, “a time to throw away books, and a time to gather books together.”
This passage reminds us that no state of being lasts forever, whether it be positive or negative. Although we might bristle at the suggestion that there is “a time to hate” and a “time to kill,” I read this passage as describing the reality of human existence in this world, not necessarily the ideal or how it will be in the next life. In this life, nothing lasts forever. In this life, we experience seasons of good things and seasons of bad things. There are times of weeping and times of laughing. When we’re weeping, thinking that there will be a time to laugh in the future may bring us hope, and help get us through the tough times. When we’re laughing, we always realize that at any moment, something could happen that will send us back into crying again. Nothing lasts forever. Everything is temporary, no matter how permanent it may seem to us in the moment. Even our buildings and monuments that outlast generations of people are subject to the destructive forces of nature. As a line in our closing hymn today says, “Though with care and toil we build them, tower and temple fall to dust.”
But our epistle reading from James reminds us of what is truly eternal. “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). With God there is “no variation or shadow due to change.” It is only in God that we find permanence, constancy, a true illustration of the word “forever.” Although “tower and temple fall to dust,” in the hymn text we go on to proclaim, “But God’s power, hour by hour, is my temple and my tower.” In the midst of this ever-changing tide of seasons that flows through our lives, bringing good and bad, life and death, we must always remember to turn our attention to the one “fixed point” in the midst of all the changes: God’s love, God’s mercy, God’s power, God’s eternal presence, the fount of all being, sustaining and guiding us as our life unfolds.
One of my favorite prayers in the prayer book is in the service of Compline, that service in the Daily Office intended for use right before bedtime. It says:
“Be present, O merciful God, and protect us through the hours of this night, so that we who are wearied by the changes and chances of this life may rest in your eternal changelessness; through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (BCP 133).
“We who are wearied by the changes and chances of this life” – that is such a vivid turn of phrase, isn’t it? Who among us can’t relate to the feeling of being “wearied by the changes and chances of this life” – this life which can change in an instant, in which things we spend hours and years building can be destroyed overnight, this life in which friends and relatives can betray our trust, drift away from us, or get sick and die, this life which offers us no guarantees except for the fact of change itself.
But even in the midst of all that, God remains constant. As the collect says, we can rest in God’s “eternal changelessness,” that solid foundation at the center of our faith. And as Christians, we are an Easter people, a Resurrection people. Change and transformation are at the heart of what we understand God to be about in the world, bringing new life from death. The year I graduated high school, the song “Closing Time” by SemiSonic was at the top of the radio playlists, and I have always remembered a line from that song during times of transition in my life: “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” SemiSonic didn’t come up with that line; it is actually an ancient saying often attributed to the 1st century Roman philosopher Seneca. But it could very well be the slogan for the Christian faith: “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” Or as Jesus puts it in the Gospel of John, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24)
On Ash Wednesday and at every funeral liturgy we are reminded that “we are dust, and to dust we shall return.” As we commend a loved one to the Lord, we say to God: “You only are immortal, the creator and maker of mankind; and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we return” (BCP 499). Our opening hymn today reminded us, in words that echo lines from the psalms and the prophet Isaiah, that “we blossom and flourish like leaves on the tree; then wither and perish, but nought changeth thee.”
Nought changeth thee. The author of the letter to the Hebrews put it this way: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). The scriptures say in various places that Christ is our foundation, our cornerstone, our rock. God is the one thing we can count on not to change, no matter what. But for everything else, there is a season…
(Song of Solomon 2:8-13, James 1:17-27)
Our first reading today comes from the Song of Solomon, that great love poem of the Hebrew scriptures, and is perhaps best known for its use at weddings. But at this particular time in my life and in the life of the community at St. Paul’s, I am struck by another aspect of this poem – its emphasis on change and seasons.
“Now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come” (Song of Solomon 2:11-12).
Although the poem describes physical aspects of the earth’s changing with the seasons – from winter to spring, from rain to flowers – perhaps there is a deeper metaphorical message. The lovers can celebrate their love with joy and go away together because “the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.” Perhaps the “winter” was a difficult time in their relationship; perhaps the “rain” was external stressors beating in from every side.
In any case, this passage points us to change – change in seasons, change in dynamics of relationships, and a recognition of the impermanence of everything in life, even of our lives themselves. It reminds me of another passage from the wisdom literature in the Hebrew Bible that gives voice to this theme more fully. Made famous by Pete Seeger setting it to music in the song “Turn! Turn! Turn!” in the 1960s, the words are from the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 3:
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8)
This passage resonated with me as I thought about taking my leave from you after three years serving together in ministry, and as this congregation goes through significant changes in leadership. “To everything there is a season.” A time to arrive, a time to depart. A time to welcome new people, and a time to say goodbye. A time to remember and honor the past, and a time to move forward and look to the future. Having just packed up my office, I know quite a bit about “a time to keep, and a time to throw away,” and perhaps rather than stones, “a time to throw away books, and a time to gather books together.”
This passage reminds us that no state of being lasts forever, whether it be positive or negative. Although we might bristle at the suggestion that there is “a time to hate” and a “time to kill,” I read this passage as describing the reality of human existence in this world, not necessarily the ideal or how it will be in the next life. In this life, nothing lasts forever. In this life, we experience seasons of good things and seasons of bad things. There are times of weeping and times of laughing. When we’re weeping, thinking that there will be a time to laugh in the future may bring us hope, and help get us through the tough times. When we’re laughing, we always realize that at any moment, something could happen that will send us back into crying again. Nothing lasts forever. Everything is temporary, no matter how permanent it may seem to us in the moment. Even our buildings and monuments that outlast generations of people are subject to the destructive forces of nature. As a line in our closing hymn today says, “Though with care and toil we build them, tower and temple fall to dust.”
But our epistle reading from James reminds us of what is truly eternal. “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). With God there is “no variation or shadow due to change.” It is only in God that we find permanence, constancy, a true illustration of the word “forever.” Although “tower and temple fall to dust,” in the hymn text we go on to proclaim, “But God’s power, hour by hour, is my temple and my tower.” In the midst of this ever-changing tide of seasons that flows through our lives, bringing good and bad, life and death, we must always remember to turn our attention to the one “fixed point” in the midst of all the changes: God’s love, God’s mercy, God’s power, God’s eternal presence, the fount of all being, sustaining and guiding us as our life unfolds.
One of my favorite prayers in the prayer book is in the service of Compline, that service in the Daily Office intended for use right before bedtime. It says:
“Be present, O merciful God, and protect us through the hours of this night, so that we who are wearied by the changes and chances of this life may rest in your eternal changelessness; through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (BCP 133).
“We who are wearied by the changes and chances of this life” – that is such a vivid turn of phrase, isn’t it? Who among us can’t relate to the feeling of being “wearied by the changes and chances of this life” – this life which can change in an instant, in which things we spend hours and years building can be destroyed overnight, this life in which friends and relatives can betray our trust, drift away from us, or get sick and die, this life which offers us no guarantees except for the fact of change itself.
But even in the midst of all that, God remains constant. As the collect says, we can rest in God’s “eternal changelessness,” that solid foundation at the center of our faith. And as Christians, we are an Easter people, a Resurrection people. Change and transformation are at the heart of what we understand God to be about in the world, bringing new life from death. The year I graduated high school, the song “Closing Time” by SemiSonic was at the top of the radio playlists, and I have always remembered a line from that song during times of transition in my life: “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” SemiSonic didn’t come up with that line; it is actually an ancient saying often attributed to the 1st century Roman philosopher Seneca. But it could very well be the slogan for the Christian faith: “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” Or as Jesus puts it in the Gospel of John, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24)
On Ash Wednesday and at every funeral liturgy we are reminded that “we are dust, and to dust we shall return.” As we commend a loved one to the Lord, we say to God: “You only are immortal, the creator and maker of mankind; and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we return” (BCP 499). Our opening hymn today reminded us, in words that echo lines from the psalms and the prophet Isaiah, that “we blossom and flourish like leaves on the tree; then wither and perish, but nought changeth thee.”
Nought changeth thee. The author of the letter to the Hebrews put it this way: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). The scriptures say in various places that Christ is our foundation, our cornerstone, our rock. God is the one thing we can count on not to change, no matter what. But for everything else, there is a season…
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.
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