Sermon delivered Sunday, July 10, 2016 (The Sixth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 10, Year C (Track 2)) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
“Who is my neighbor?”
“Who is my neighbor?”
I know that I’m supposed to love God and love my neighbor, says the lawyer, but who is my neighbor? Who is it, exactly, who I’m supposed to love?
Have you ever noticed that Jesus doesn’t actually answer that question? In his clever way, Jesus is always doing that, somehow sidestepping the question people are asking to answer another question they’re not asking but should be. Giving them the answer they need rather than the answer they seek.
So when the lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor,” Jesus sees that what is behind the lawyer’s question is, as the scripture tells us, a need to “justify himself.” The lawyer is actually more concerned about himself and his own personal salvation – what he needs to do to “inherit eternal life” – than he is with anyone else’s wellbeing. The very fact that he even asks, “who is my neighbor” shows that he has not quite gotten the point of the commandment.
But Jesus doesn’t answer him in a straightforward way. He doesn’t say, “Everyone is your neighbor. All lives matter. You must love everyone.”
Instead, he tells a story that gets right to the heart of the lawyer’s biases, of his need to divide the world into “us” and “them,” to figure out who’s in and who’s out, to determine who is “worthy” of our love and who is not.
He tells a story about someone who is in need, someone who has been hurt and has been left vulnerable, someone who has been a victim of violence. Interestingly, Jesus does not tell us anything about the person who was hurt, besides the fact that he was “a man.” He doesn’t tell us anything about the man’s ethnicity, religion, profession, political affiliation, or any other marker of identity. But he does tell us about some identity markers of the people who come across him on the road. The two who pass by the hurt man, who even cross over to the other side of the road to avoid coming into contact with him, were of the highly respected classes of Jewish society, the priests and Levites, the “good people,” the “righteous people,” the people who knew the answer to the lawyer’s question “what must I do to inherit eternal life” backwards and forwards, the ones who talked all day long about loving God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind, and loving your neighbor as yourself – but they walked right past this man in need, this person who had been hurt, attacked, this victim of violence – and they did nothing. They said nothing. They avoided the pain.
The person who stops to help him is a Samaritan, and this word has become so synonymous with “good” in our society because of the ways this parable has influenced popular culture that we miss the fact that “Good Samaritan” most likely sounded like an oxymoron to the audience to whom Jesus was speaking.
The Samaritans were rivals, enemies, of Jesus’s community. But contrary to how they often are portrayed, they were not an entirely different ethnic or religious group, another nation like the Egyptians or the Assyrians. They were actually another sect of Judaism, who had different ideas about where and how the God of Israel should be worshipped, and who claimed to be the true, most authentic representation of the religion of Israel from before the Israelites were exiled into Babylon. The Samaritans were the folks who managed to avoid the exile and stayed in the land and continued the practices as they had been going on before the exile, and when the other folks returned from exile, a lot of things had changed about how they practiced the faith, and a conflict began.
It was an internal fight, and we all know how those can be all the more difficult and painful. A modern equivalent for us in the Episcopal Church might be the conflict between us and the “Anglicans,” the American Episcopalians who left the Episcopal Church to affiliate with other parts of the Anglican Communion.
Think about the vitriol and bitterness that comes out of some people in our denomination when they talk about “the Anglicans.” That’s probably something similar to how the people in Jesus’s community talked about “the Samaritans.” They were the people who didn’t “get it” religiously, who were doing things all wrong, who were clearly not as “enlightened” as “we” are in all things religious.
And yet, in Jesus’s story, it is a Samaritan who stopped to help someone in need. Jesus holds up the Samaritan as the example of what it means to live out the essential elements of the faith. Jesus uses a person from the group most unlikely to be seen as sacred, holy, or righteous, from the group that is hated and vilified, from the group who is “the other” and says, “Look at this. This person gets it. You, with your focus on ‘who is my neighbor,’ you don’t get it. But precisely the person you assume is the problem, they get it.”
So the question for us, then, is not “who is my neighbor,” but “who is the Samaritan”? Who is our “other,” the one in whom it is most difficult for us to see the face of God?
Think about that for a moment. Who do you consider the enemy, the other, the problem? We all have those people in our minds, no matter how much we like to profess that we “love everyone.” There is always someone that, despite what we say outwardly, inwardly we find ourselves seething with anger toward that person or that group. Now, consider Jesus’s story with that person in the role of the Samaritan.
Close your eyes for a moment and picture this. A man is beaten, robbed, left for dead, shot and bloodied, perhaps just down the road on MacArthur Boulevard. And several people from your group, people who look like you, talk like you, think like you, believe like you, maybe other Episcopalians, maybe people from this church, they walk right past him and do nothing. But then this person, this person who is part of that group that you consider the problem, the other, the enemy, this person who stirs up anger and negative emotions in your heart whenever you think of them, that person walks up, sees the hurt person, and stops to help. They don’t avoid the pain. They get up close and personal. They use their jacket to try to stop the flow of blood. They pick him up in their car and drive him to a hospital. They pay his medical bills, spending up to about a quarter of their salary for that week on this person they’ve never met before in their life.
What does it feel like to imagine that person, part of that group that you have such difficulty feeling compassion for, doing something compassionate? What emotions ran through your body as you saw that scene? And how does the lawyer’s question, “who is my neighbor?” sound different to you now?
History is full of these stories. In spite of the divisions that pit one group against another, there are always people who are able to see beyond the divides and recognize our common humanity. Whether it’s Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved thousands of Jews from death during the Holocaust, or Keisha Thomas, the black woman who threw herself over a white man at a KKK rally to protect him from counter-protestors who had turned violent, shouting, “Kill the Nazi!,” or Nick Kelton, one of the inmates who broke out of a holding cell in a Parker County, Texas courthouse last month to save a guard who had collapsed from a heart attack, these people would have never thought to ask the question, “Who is my neighbor?” They saw human need, and they acted. No matter who the person was who was in need.
When interviewed by the press, Nick Kelton acknowledged that the inmates realized that they could have potentially lost their own lives in trying to help the guard.
“We were worried they were going to come with guns drawn on us,” he said, and indeed, the deputies who heard the commotion the inmates were making assumed a fight had broken out, and when they arrived and saw inmates broken out of their cell surrounding an unconscious guard, the first thing that went through their minds was probably not that these inmates were trying to help that guard. But the deputies exercised restraint, and they herded the inmates back into the cell, and assessed the situation before responding with more violence, and all parties involved came out alive.
When asked why they did this, Kelton gave a surprising response.
“Cause that’s a good man,” he said, pointing out toward the hallway where the guard had been sitting. “He saves lives.”
He elaborated further, “I mean, it never crossed my mind… whether he’s got a gun or a badge, if he falls down, I’m gonna help him.”
Another inmate added, “It just seems natural to me.”
Keisha Thomas expressed a similar sentiment when asked why she acted to protect a man who represented an ideology that saw her as inferior.
“Violence is violence,” she said. “Nobody deserves to be hurt, especially not for an idea.”
She also indicated that her own experience of being the victim of violence motivated her to help.
“I knew what it was like to be hurt,” she said. “The many times that happened, I wish someone would have stood up for me.”
She also acknowledged how violence can be a vicious cycle, and how necessary it is to intervene to prevent the cycle from spiraling out of hand.
“Let’s say they had killed him or hurt him really bad,” she says. “How does the son feel? Does he carry on the violence?”
As it happened, a man in a coffee shop one day came up to her and said thank you. “What for?” she said. “That was my dad,” he said.
In the midst of the divide and turmoil that has shaken our country this week, there will be no way forward without solidarity across the historic divides.
Forty eight years ago, Martin Luther King gave a sermon the night before his death, a sermon in which he commented on this parable of the Good Samaritan. He said that in fighting for justice, we must be willing to develop “a dangerous kind of unselfishness.” The people who didn’t stop to help the man on the road might have been worried that the robbers were still nearby, that their own lives could have been in danger if they stopped. Dr. King said that when they saw man on the side of the road, they asked the question, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?”, and it was their fear that kept them from acting. But the Samaritan asked a different question. He asked, “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
In his context in Memphis in 1968, Dr. King was fighting for the rights of the sanitation workers who were on strike, and he asked the congregation gathered to consider that situation in light of this parable:
“[T]he question before you tonight… [is] [n]ot, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?” Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" The question is, "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.”
And for us, today, this week, the question is not, “If we stop to stand up for black men who are murdered at a disproportionate rate by police, what will happen to us? To our jobs? To our friendships?” The question is, “If we do NOT stand up and say that Black Lives Matter just as much as any other life, if we do NOT stand up for our black brothers and sisters – and in an increasingly multiracial world, that “brother” and “sister” rhetoric is becoming increasingly less metaphorical and more literal – what will happen to them?” What would have happened if those inmates in Texas looked less like the white guard and deputies who had authority over them and more like my cousin Kaliq, son of a white mother and a black father, whose dark skin and afro would have made him “other” to those in authority? Would that situation have ended with everyone still alive and unharmed?
On Thursday, Ric Hudgens, a poet and pastor in Evanston, Illinois, just outside Chicago, posted this poem to his blog:
What It Will Take (Poem)
My eighty-year old neighbor,
a man of deep, abiding faith,
now frail and bent with age,
who marched
when marching made a difference,
once upon a time
late at night
heard a yell
from our alley.
A black man
screamed for mercy
as policeman raised their clubs.
My neighbor left his bed,
entered the alley,
threw his body over his neighbor
making himself a shield.
The police stopped.
This is what it will take.
White men
throwing our bodies
in between.
Making them break us
before
they break our brothers.
If there’s anyone in the world who should understand this, it is we who call ourselves Christians. For we follow a savior who also “threw his body in between,” who allowed himself to be murdered rather than respond to violence with violence, who sacrificed himself for a world that rejected him. Who died to save not just his friends, but those who considered themselves his enemies. Who called us to not be afraid, to see beyond the divides, to love God and to love neighbor, and to show mercy. He has called us to “go and do likewise.”
Showing posts with label compassion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label compassion. Show all posts
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Overcoming Adversity
Sermon delivered Sunday, June 21, 2015, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN at The Gathering Eucharist (alternative service), 10 a.m., held outside the side courtyard (usually in Otey Hall). 4 Pentecost, Proper 7, Year B (1 Samuel 17:(1a, 4-11, 19-23), 32-49, 2 Cor. 6:1-13, Mark 4:35-41)
The loose offering from this service was designated for the Mother Emanuel Hope Fund, to provide support to the families of the victims of the shootings in Charleston, SC.
Afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, and hunger.
Paul’s list in today’s passage from 2 Corinthians of all he has endured for the sake of the Gospel is not exactly a great selling point for following Jesus. “Come join us, and you too can experience afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, and hunger!” Oh goodie, where do I sign up?
Many of us often think that if we are following God and doing all the right things, no harm will come to us, and perhaps it’s not surprising we think this way, since there are many parts of the scriptures that affirm this correlation between good behavior or righteousness and prosperity and safety. Countless times throughout the “wisdom literature” of the Bible, which includes the books of Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and the psalms, we hear some version of the idea that the righteous will prosper and the wicked will perish, that those who follow God will be rewarded and those who do not will be punished. That certainly sounds like an appealing system, one where our experiences are predictable and directly related to our actions, where people “get what they deserve,” so to speak, where the world is just.
But the reality of life is often quite different. It is easy to claim from an abstract philosophical perspective that we will be rewarded if we do good and punished if we do bad, but often our experiences don’t line up with those beliefs. A pillar of the community who has supported countless people and changed lives receives a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness and is dead within six months. A tornado drops out of nowhere and destroys the home of a young, struggling family who had just managed to purchase their first house. A young man from my hometown in South Carolina walks into a church in Charleston and kills nine people while they are gathered for prayer and Bible study.
Our reaction when we encounter such tragedies is often, “Why me?” or “Why them?”– especially if we think we or they were good people who didn’t “deserve” this. We can see this reaction from the disciples in today’s Gospel passage. Despite the fact that they have done everything “right” by following Jesus and doing what he asked in getting into the boat to cross to the other side of the lake, they are indignant with him when they encounter calamity along the way. When a storm threatens to capsize their boat, they wake up Jesus with the accusing statement, “Do you not care that we are perishing?” This is often our reaction to what we see as undeserved suffering. “What did I ever do to you, God? Do you not CARE that we are suffering? Why don’t you do something to stop it?” But our passage from 2 Corinthians offers another approach.
The suffering Paul and his companions experienced is not insignificant. We’re not talking about so-called “first world problems” like getting pickles on their sandwiches when they asked for no pickles, or their houses being so big they had to get two wireless routers. We’re talking some pretty horrific things -- afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, and hunger – and yet, he nonetheless proclaims that even in the midst of such suffering, they are truly blessed. No matter how awful their circumstances may appear from the outside, they are able to continue to praise God because they know the paradoxical truth of the Gospel, that through suffering can come new life, that there can be blessings even in the most unspeakable suffering. Although they are punished, they are not killed; although they are sorrowful, they always rejoice even in the midst of it; although they are poor, they are making many rich – maybe not literally, but in the truest sense of the word, through spiritual transformation; although they have nothing by physical standards, they actually possess everything that matters by spiritual standards through their faith in Jesus Christ and the assurance of new life that they have through him. No matter what people may say about them or what suffering they might encounter, their faith is not shaken.
Our passage from the Hebrew Bible today also gives us an example of keeping the faith in the midst of adversity. In the classic story of David and Goliath, David does not cower before a seemingly unconquerable obstacle. Though he is young and small and by all external standards seems a poor match for the giant warrior Goliath, he steps forward and agrees to meet Goliath’s challenge, trusting that God is with him despite his youth and lack of experience in battle.
Paul’s inspiring proclamation of faith and David’s heroism stand in direct contrast to the disciples in the Gospel passage, who panic in the face of the storm, who expect Jesus to keep them from ever suffering, who cannot trust that they will come through the storm with God’s help.
Where are you in these stories? Are you cowering with the disciples in the boat or proclaiming faith boldly in the midst of adversity with Paul? Are you like the disciples indignant that trouble has come their way, or like David striding confidently forward with only a few stones to defend himself?
Those of us who have had the good fortune of not experiencing much pain and suffering in this life are more likely to find ourselves cowering and indignant with the disciples in the boat when trouble comes our way. But those of us who have been people of sorrows and acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3) are likely to know something about what it takes to muster up courage and faith in the midst of adversity.
This weekend, the world is watching and mourning with our brothers and sisters in the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, after the horrific shootings there on Wednesday night. Unfortunately, our brothers and sisters in the black church are no strangers to suffering and grief. Their list of all they have endured over the years in terms of violence and intimidation could rival Paul’s list from 2 Corinthians, especially during the years of slavery and the civil rights movement: afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger. This list, foreign to so many of us in predominantly white churches, is all too familiar to many of our brothers and sisters in the black churches. And yet, somehow, many of them have managed to draw upon a deep reserve of faith that has seen them through these adversities and kept their hearts from being hardened by resentment and hate. On Friday, at the court hearing of shooter Dylann Roof, family members of those killed gathered to speak to him and told him they forgave him. What kind of faith gives you the strength to look your mother or son’s killer in the eyes and say, “I forgive you, may God have mercy on your soul?” Faith that has been refined through hardship; faith that knows that hate will never drive out hate, only love can do that; faith that knows that God can make a way where there is no way, as the saying goes.
And that’s exactly the kind of faith Paul and David had in our readings for today. They put their trust in God and drew upon the resources they had to find a way when many would have said there was no way.
In the story of David and Goliath, there is one small detail I have always overlooked that I’d like to lift up as a metaphor for our own abilities to overcome adversity. After rejecting Saul’s heavy armor because he wasn’t used to it, David goes to the river and picks out five smooth stones that he carries with them as his only weapons as he goes out to meet Goliath. Rather than putting his trust in the sword and spear and javelin, as his enemies did, David put his trust in God, and walks out completely unprotected, holding only a few stones. But those seemingly ineffective weapons actually give him victory over the giant.
The question in our walk of faith is not if we will suffer, but when. It’s not, “What can we do to avoid suffering?”, but, “How will we deal with suffering when it comes?” What resources will we draw upon to enable us to be able to say with the members of Emmanuel AME and the apostle Paul, “we are punished, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything”? Those resources might be our faith, the scriptures, our friends and families, a good counselor or spiritual director, spiritual practices that ground and center us, a special place we can go that brings us peace and comfort, or any number of other things. Those resources are the “stones” in our arsenal, or in our “toolkit,” if you prefer a less violent metaphor, that we put in our shepherd’s bag to take with us as we walk boldly toward the obstacles and the adversities that come our way.
What are your five smooth stones that you take with you to confront the adversities in your life? What resources help you to defeat the giant enemies in your spiritual walk?
In your bulletins you may have noticed a yellow piece of paper labeled, “My Five Smooth Stones.” If you noticed it, you probably had no idea what that was about, but now it should all be becoming clear to you. I’d like to invite you all to take a few moments to reflect on what your five smooth stones are (it doesn’t have to be exactly five; it could be more or less) that equip you to face adversity with faith and courage. And as you do that, I’ll be passing around this bowl full of candy stones, and ask you to each take a few to remind you of those resources in your lives that keep you strong. And if you’re missing any resources or think of ones you don’t have, make a commitment to reaching out and establishing those support systems for yourselves so you will be ready for the next giant or storm that comes your way.
The loose offering from this service was designated for the Mother Emanuel Hope Fund, to provide support to the families of the victims of the shootings in Charleston, SC.
Afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, and hunger.
Paul’s list in today’s passage from 2 Corinthians of all he has endured for the sake of the Gospel is not exactly a great selling point for following Jesus. “Come join us, and you too can experience afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, and hunger!” Oh goodie, where do I sign up?
Many of us often think that if we are following God and doing all the right things, no harm will come to us, and perhaps it’s not surprising we think this way, since there are many parts of the scriptures that affirm this correlation between good behavior or righteousness and prosperity and safety. Countless times throughout the “wisdom literature” of the Bible, which includes the books of Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and the psalms, we hear some version of the idea that the righteous will prosper and the wicked will perish, that those who follow God will be rewarded and those who do not will be punished. That certainly sounds like an appealing system, one where our experiences are predictable and directly related to our actions, where people “get what they deserve,” so to speak, where the world is just.
But the reality of life is often quite different. It is easy to claim from an abstract philosophical perspective that we will be rewarded if we do good and punished if we do bad, but often our experiences don’t line up with those beliefs. A pillar of the community who has supported countless people and changed lives receives a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness and is dead within six months. A tornado drops out of nowhere and destroys the home of a young, struggling family who had just managed to purchase their first house. A young man from my hometown in South Carolina walks into a church in Charleston and kills nine people while they are gathered for prayer and Bible study.
Our reaction when we encounter such tragedies is often, “Why me?” or “Why them?”– especially if we think we or they were good people who didn’t “deserve” this. We can see this reaction from the disciples in today’s Gospel passage. Despite the fact that they have done everything “right” by following Jesus and doing what he asked in getting into the boat to cross to the other side of the lake, they are indignant with him when they encounter calamity along the way. When a storm threatens to capsize their boat, they wake up Jesus with the accusing statement, “Do you not care that we are perishing?” This is often our reaction to what we see as undeserved suffering. “What did I ever do to you, God? Do you not CARE that we are suffering? Why don’t you do something to stop it?” But our passage from 2 Corinthians offers another approach.
The suffering Paul and his companions experienced is not insignificant. We’re not talking about so-called “first world problems” like getting pickles on their sandwiches when they asked for no pickles, or their houses being so big they had to get two wireless routers. We’re talking some pretty horrific things -- afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, and hunger – and yet, he nonetheless proclaims that even in the midst of such suffering, they are truly blessed. No matter how awful their circumstances may appear from the outside, they are able to continue to praise God because they know the paradoxical truth of the Gospel, that through suffering can come new life, that there can be blessings even in the most unspeakable suffering. Although they are punished, they are not killed; although they are sorrowful, they always rejoice even in the midst of it; although they are poor, they are making many rich – maybe not literally, but in the truest sense of the word, through spiritual transformation; although they have nothing by physical standards, they actually possess everything that matters by spiritual standards through their faith in Jesus Christ and the assurance of new life that they have through him. No matter what people may say about them or what suffering they might encounter, their faith is not shaken.
Our passage from the Hebrew Bible today also gives us an example of keeping the faith in the midst of adversity. In the classic story of David and Goliath, David does not cower before a seemingly unconquerable obstacle. Though he is young and small and by all external standards seems a poor match for the giant warrior Goliath, he steps forward and agrees to meet Goliath’s challenge, trusting that God is with him despite his youth and lack of experience in battle.
Paul’s inspiring proclamation of faith and David’s heroism stand in direct contrast to the disciples in the Gospel passage, who panic in the face of the storm, who expect Jesus to keep them from ever suffering, who cannot trust that they will come through the storm with God’s help.
Where are you in these stories? Are you cowering with the disciples in the boat or proclaiming faith boldly in the midst of adversity with Paul? Are you like the disciples indignant that trouble has come their way, or like David striding confidently forward with only a few stones to defend himself?
Those of us who have had the good fortune of not experiencing much pain and suffering in this life are more likely to find ourselves cowering and indignant with the disciples in the boat when trouble comes our way. But those of us who have been people of sorrows and acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3) are likely to know something about what it takes to muster up courage and faith in the midst of adversity.
This weekend, the world is watching and mourning with our brothers and sisters in the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, after the horrific shootings there on Wednesday night. Unfortunately, our brothers and sisters in the black church are no strangers to suffering and grief. Their list of all they have endured over the years in terms of violence and intimidation could rival Paul’s list from 2 Corinthians, especially during the years of slavery and the civil rights movement: afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger. This list, foreign to so many of us in predominantly white churches, is all too familiar to many of our brothers and sisters in the black churches. And yet, somehow, many of them have managed to draw upon a deep reserve of faith that has seen them through these adversities and kept their hearts from being hardened by resentment and hate. On Friday, at the court hearing of shooter Dylann Roof, family members of those killed gathered to speak to him and told him they forgave him. What kind of faith gives you the strength to look your mother or son’s killer in the eyes and say, “I forgive you, may God have mercy on your soul?” Faith that has been refined through hardship; faith that knows that hate will never drive out hate, only love can do that; faith that knows that God can make a way where there is no way, as the saying goes.
And that’s exactly the kind of faith Paul and David had in our readings for today. They put their trust in God and drew upon the resources they had to find a way when many would have said there was no way.
In the story of David and Goliath, there is one small detail I have always overlooked that I’d like to lift up as a metaphor for our own abilities to overcome adversity. After rejecting Saul’s heavy armor because he wasn’t used to it, David goes to the river and picks out five smooth stones that he carries with them as his only weapons as he goes out to meet Goliath. Rather than putting his trust in the sword and spear and javelin, as his enemies did, David put his trust in God, and walks out completely unprotected, holding only a few stones. But those seemingly ineffective weapons actually give him victory over the giant.
The question in our walk of faith is not if we will suffer, but when. It’s not, “What can we do to avoid suffering?”, but, “How will we deal with suffering when it comes?” What resources will we draw upon to enable us to be able to say with the members of Emmanuel AME and the apostle Paul, “we are punished, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything”? Those resources might be our faith, the scriptures, our friends and families, a good counselor or spiritual director, spiritual practices that ground and center us, a special place we can go that brings us peace and comfort, or any number of other things. Those resources are the “stones” in our arsenal, or in our “toolkit,” if you prefer a less violent metaphor, that we put in our shepherd’s bag to take with us as we walk boldly toward the obstacles and the adversities that come our way.
What are your five smooth stones that you take with you to confront the adversities in your life? What resources help you to defeat the giant enemies in your spiritual walk?
In your bulletins you may have noticed a yellow piece of paper labeled, “My Five Smooth Stones.” If you noticed it, you probably had no idea what that was about, but now it should all be becoming clear to you. I’d like to invite you all to take a few moments to reflect on what your five smooth stones are (it doesn’t have to be exactly five; it could be more or less) that equip you to face adversity with faith and courage. And as you do that, I’ll be passing around this bowl full of candy stones, and ask you to each take a few to remind you of those resources in your lives that keep you strong. And if you’re missing any resources or think of ones you don’t have, make a commitment to reaching out and establishing those support systems for yourselves so you will be ready for the next giant or storm that comes your way.
Sunday, March 8, 2015
Be angry, but do not sin -- a reflection on the "heart-anger" of Jesus and the prophets
Sermon delivered Sunday, March 8, 2015 (3rd Sunday in Lent, Year B), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Exodus 20:1-17, Ps. 19, 1 Cor. 1:18-25, John 2:13-22).
“Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables” (John 2:15, NRSV).
The story of Jesus “cleansing the temple,” as today’s Gospel passage is often called, gives us glimpse of a side of Jesus that can make us uncomfortable: his anger. Popular images of Jesus tend to picture him as quiet and serene, holding soft, fluffy lambs or cradling children, or sitting in a field of lilies like the image we have in this stained glass window up front here. You don’t see many stained glass windows showing an image of Jesus chasing people and animals with a whip! Even a quick Google search for images of “angry Jesus” pulled up thousands of images where Jesus looks only mildly miffed, or perhaps not even angry at all, but simply serious. This picture (see image at right) was the only picture I could find of a depiction of Jesus where his face showed something recognizable as actual anger.
Why this reluctance to acknowledge that Jesus got angry sometimes? Well, for one thing, we generally do not think of anger as a good thing. The church has historically named anger as one of the seven deadly sins, and if we claim that Jesus lived among us as “one without sin,” then if anger is a sin, surely Jesus could never have ever gotten angry. This story makes us uncomfortable because it’s embarrassing when the Son of God suddenly starts acting like a two-year-old having a temper tantrum, so our strategy for dealing with it has generally been to either avoid talking about it and try to distract the masses with other, nicer stories about Jesus: “Look over here! Jesus said to love the little children and let them come unto me!” – or to spiritualize the story by saying that Jesus wasn’t really mad when he did this, that it was a purely symbolic action to show that his death would do away with the system of animal sacrifice or that his message was really about our need to cleanse the “temple” of our bodies and purify our thoughts and intentions in worship rather than an instance of him losing his temper.
But to the discerning reader, none of these responses to the story seem to hold much water. It seems pretty clear that this is a story about an angry Jesus, and besides that, we have all those images of an angry God in the Hebrew Bible to deal with as well. Anger is not a concept foreign to God, at least not as the Judeo-Christian tradition has understood God throughout the centuries. So have we simply projected human thoughts and feelings like anger onto God, or is anger actually an attribute of God?
And if anger is an attribute of God, how did it become labeled as a sin for humanity? Is there a way to be angry as a human being and not be sinful? It is interesting that we read this story of Jesus’s anger during the season of Lent, a season when we are encouraged to name and acknowledge our sins and repent of them. If we have been doing that this Lent, anger has probably appeared many times on our list of sins as we reflect on our lives, and we’re probably trying to think of ways to not be angry or to let go of our anger. But perhaps this story about Jesus’s anger offers us another approach to our anger, an approach that seeks not to repress or deny it, but to redeem it, to direct it toward holy purposes.
If we examine scriptural perspectives on anger, the Bible does not say unequivocally that all anger is sinful. Certainly, it gives many warnings about the close connection between anger and sin, especially in the wisdom literature like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Proverbs 29:11 (NIV) says, “A fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise man keeps himself under control,” and Ecclesiastes 7:9 (NIV) says, “Do not be quickly provoked in your spirit, for anger resides in the lap of fools.” The New Testament epistles warn against the dangers of anger as well: James writes that we should be “quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry, for man’s anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires” (James 1:19-20, NIV), and the author of Colossians instructs the people to “rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips” (Colossians 3:8, NIV). Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that love is “not easily angered” (1 Corinthians 13:5), and Jesus himself warns against anger when he says in the Sermon on the Mount, “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment” (Matthew 5:21). So how do we square this teaching of Jesus with his actions in today’s Gospel passage? All four Gospels record the incident in the temple, so we can’t say that the author of Matthew’s Gospel was unaware of it as he simultaneously recorded Jesus’s words about not being angry in the Sermon on the Mount. So how can both be an accurate representation of Jesus’s teachings and actions, of the message he taught and embodied?
Perhaps the key lies in a distinction implied in a passage from Ephesians where the author is instructing the community on proper Christian behavior. In chapter 4, verses 26-27, he writes, “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.” The wording of this instruction indicates that although the author sees a close connection between anger and sin, he still believes it is possible to be angry but not sin. And I find it interesting that the 10 Commandments, which we heard in our first reading for today, do NOT include a prohibition against anger per se. Despite the fact that Jesus says in his commentary on the 10 Commandments in the Sermon on the Mount that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister is liable for judgment, there is not a commandment that says, “Thou shalt not be angry.” I believe Jesus’s point in his rhetorical intensifying of the commandments is not to say “thou shalt not be angry,” which really would not be humanly possible or realistic, but to remind us that we should purify our inner thoughts as well as our outward actions. His point is that even if we refrain from killing, if we are seething with hateful thoughts toward our neighbor, we are still doing a kind of violence toward them.
Robert Masters, a psychologist in Vancouver, Canada, has written about the distinctions between different kinds of anger and the debate about whether openly expressing anger is a good or a bad thing psychologically. While secular psychological literature tends to teach that it is better to control anger than to openly express it, he points out that religious literature includes examples of anger that can be used for good, the kind of “anger without sin” that we have been considering. He calls this kind of anger “heart-anger,” which he defines as anger that is rooted not in a selfish sense of wrongs done to me, but in a deep concern for others and what is right for society as a whole. Heart-anger, he writes, is a kind of “wrathful compassion – a potent, often fiery caring” [1]. He specifically uses the example of Jesus cleansing the temple as an illustration of heart-anger, and also puts the anger of the Hebrew prophets in this category, as well as the anger of various Eastern sages at their disciples [2].
This heart-anger, however, is not simply a raging against the injustices of the world. It is not exactly what we mean when we talk about “righteous anger,” which too often seems to be “self-righteous anger” rather than anything truly sacred. People have rightly observed that those who fight injustice out of a sense of deep anger often wind up in a miserable state of mind, constantly angry people who seem to have no peace and whose life is centered around the very thing they are fighting against. Thus, an anti-war protester’s life is all about war, and their techniques, however different, often mirror the very behaviors they say they want to eliminate in others. Heart-anger, as Masters describes it, is a highly advanced mental and emotional state that requires much intentional spiritual discipline to cultivate. Those who express heart-anger have the ability to completely and fully control their anger, but they make the conscious choice to express it openly and fully because “sometimes what is needed in order to awaken others is a shock” [3]. Heart-anger is a spiritual anger, and spiritual anger always has the objective of stimulating repentance and thus contributing to the spiritual growth of the person [4]. It is not unlike what we might call “tough love,” doing something we know will appear hurtful to another person because we know it is ultimately for their own good, like Annie Sullivan imposing strict disciplinary measures on the deaf and blind Helen Keller to help her crack the code of sign language pressed into her palm to open her world to the gift of communication with others [5]. Masters writes that heart-anger is “pure compassion in action” [6]. Building on the paradoxes expressed in our epistle reading for today from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, we might add that just as “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25), so God’s anger is more compassionate than human compassion.
Given the close connection between anger and sin, however, we should be careful about using the concept of heart-anger to justify and sanctify our all-too-often unholy expressions of anger. We should not fool ourselves into thinking we are expressing heart-anger when what we are actually doing is venting unrefined, destructive anger. Masters says that the goal of the expression of heart-anger is always healing and intimacy [7], and that expressing heart-anger requires a high degree of self-awareness, which is cultivated in an ongoing spiritual practice like meditation or contemplative prayer that allows us to examine our anger and be aware of the root cause and nature of it before we begin to give expression to it [8].
The good news, however, is that it is possible to cultivate anger without sin. So when we feel our tempers flare, we can take a deep breath, think about whether our anger is rooted in selfish or unselfish concerns, and pray that we can direct our anger toward spiritual use, like Jesus in the temple or the prophets calling the people to repentance. We can turn to Jesus and pray that our once-angry human Savior would activate in us the anger redeemed through his incarnation, an anger that is pure compassion in action.
[1] Robert Augustus Masters, “Compassionate Wrath: Transpersonal Approaches to Anger,” The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2000 (Vol. 31, No. 1), 34.
[2] Ibid., 39.
[3] Ibid., 42.
[4] Ibid., 43 (quoting Tibetan spiritual master Marpa).
[5] Helen Keller example given in Jim McGuiggan, Celebrating the Wrath of God: Reflections on the Agony and the Ecstacy of His Relentless Love, (Colorado Springs, CO: WaterBrook Press, 2001), 69.
[6] Masters, 48.
[7] Ibid., 44.
[8] Ibid.
“Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables” (John 2:15, NRSV).
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| "Angry Jesus" by Manuel Guzman |
Why this reluctance to acknowledge that Jesus got angry sometimes? Well, for one thing, we generally do not think of anger as a good thing. The church has historically named anger as one of the seven deadly sins, and if we claim that Jesus lived among us as “one without sin,” then if anger is a sin, surely Jesus could never have ever gotten angry. This story makes us uncomfortable because it’s embarrassing when the Son of God suddenly starts acting like a two-year-old having a temper tantrum, so our strategy for dealing with it has generally been to either avoid talking about it and try to distract the masses with other, nicer stories about Jesus: “Look over here! Jesus said to love the little children and let them come unto me!” – or to spiritualize the story by saying that Jesus wasn’t really mad when he did this, that it was a purely symbolic action to show that his death would do away with the system of animal sacrifice or that his message was really about our need to cleanse the “temple” of our bodies and purify our thoughts and intentions in worship rather than an instance of him losing his temper.
But to the discerning reader, none of these responses to the story seem to hold much water. It seems pretty clear that this is a story about an angry Jesus, and besides that, we have all those images of an angry God in the Hebrew Bible to deal with as well. Anger is not a concept foreign to God, at least not as the Judeo-Christian tradition has understood God throughout the centuries. So have we simply projected human thoughts and feelings like anger onto God, or is anger actually an attribute of God?
And if anger is an attribute of God, how did it become labeled as a sin for humanity? Is there a way to be angry as a human being and not be sinful? It is interesting that we read this story of Jesus’s anger during the season of Lent, a season when we are encouraged to name and acknowledge our sins and repent of them. If we have been doing that this Lent, anger has probably appeared many times on our list of sins as we reflect on our lives, and we’re probably trying to think of ways to not be angry or to let go of our anger. But perhaps this story about Jesus’s anger offers us another approach to our anger, an approach that seeks not to repress or deny it, but to redeem it, to direct it toward holy purposes.
If we examine scriptural perspectives on anger, the Bible does not say unequivocally that all anger is sinful. Certainly, it gives many warnings about the close connection between anger and sin, especially in the wisdom literature like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Proverbs 29:11 (NIV) says, “A fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise man keeps himself under control,” and Ecclesiastes 7:9 (NIV) says, “Do not be quickly provoked in your spirit, for anger resides in the lap of fools.” The New Testament epistles warn against the dangers of anger as well: James writes that we should be “quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry, for man’s anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires” (James 1:19-20, NIV), and the author of Colossians instructs the people to “rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips” (Colossians 3:8, NIV). Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that love is “not easily angered” (1 Corinthians 13:5), and Jesus himself warns against anger when he says in the Sermon on the Mount, “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment” (Matthew 5:21). So how do we square this teaching of Jesus with his actions in today’s Gospel passage? All four Gospels record the incident in the temple, so we can’t say that the author of Matthew’s Gospel was unaware of it as he simultaneously recorded Jesus’s words about not being angry in the Sermon on the Mount. So how can both be an accurate representation of Jesus’s teachings and actions, of the message he taught and embodied?
Perhaps the key lies in a distinction implied in a passage from Ephesians where the author is instructing the community on proper Christian behavior. In chapter 4, verses 26-27, he writes, “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.” The wording of this instruction indicates that although the author sees a close connection between anger and sin, he still believes it is possible to be angry but not sin. And I find it interesting that the 10 Commandments, which we heard in our first reading for today, do NOT include a prohibition against anger per se. Despite the fact that Jesus says in his commentary on the 10 Commandments in the Sermon on the Mount that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister is liable for judgment, there is not a commandment that says, “Thou shalt not be angry.” I believe Jesus’s point in his rhetorical intensifying of the commandments is not to say “thou shalt not be angry,” which really would not be humanly possible or realistic, but to remind us that we should purify our inner thoughts as well as our outward actions. His point is that even if we refrain from killing, if we are seething with hateful thoughts toward our neighbor, we are still doing a kind of violence toward them.
Robert Masters, a psychologist in Vancouver, Canada, has written about the distinctions between different kinds of anger and the debate about whether openly expressing anger is a good or a bad thing psychologically. While secular psychological literature tends to teach that it is better to control anger than to openly express it, he points out that religious literature includes examples of anger that can be used for good, the kind of “anger without sin” that we have been considering. He calls this kind of anger “heart-anger,” which he defines as anger that is rooted not in a selfish sense of wrongs done to me, but in a deep concern for others and what is right for society as a whole. Heart-anger, he writes, is a kind of “wrathful compassion – a potent, often fiery caring” [1]. He specifically uses the example of Jesus cleansing the temple as an illustration of heart-anger, and also puts the anger of the Hebrew prophets in this category, as well as the anger of various Eastern sages at their disciples [2].
This heart-anger, however, is not simply a raging against the injustices of the world. It is not exactly what we mean when we talk about “righteous anger,” which too often seems to be “self-righteous anger” rather than anything truly sacred. People have rightly observed that those who fight injustice out of a sense of deep anger often wind up in a miserable state of mind, constantly angry people who seem to have no peace and whose life is centered around the very thing they are fighting against. Thus, an anti-war protester’s life is all about war, and their techniques, however different, often mirror the very behaviors they say they want to eliminate in others. Heart-anger, as Masters describes it, is a highly advanced mental and emotional state that requires much intentional spiritual discipline to cultivate. Those who express heart-anger have the ability to completely and fully control their anger, but they make the conscious choice to express it openly and fully because “sometimes what is needed in order to awaken others is a shock” [3]. Heart-anger is a spiritual anger, and spiritual anger always has the objective of stimulating repentance and thus contributing to the spiritual growth of the person [4]. It is not unlike what we might call “tough love,” doing something we know will appear hurtful to another person because we know it is ultimately for their own good, like Annie Sullivan imposing strict disciplinary measures on the deaf and blind Helen Keller to help her crack the code of sign language pressed into her palm to open her world to the gift of communication with others [5]. Masters writes that heart-anger is “pure compassion in action” [6]. Building on the paradoxes expressed in our epistle reading for today from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, we might add that just as “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25), so God’s anger is more compassionate than human compassion.
Given the close connection between anger and sin, however, we should be careful about using the concept of heart-anger to justify and sanctify our all-too-often unholy expressions of anger. We should not fool ourselves into thinking we are expressing heart-anger when what we are actually doing is venting unrefined, destructive anger. Masters says that the goal of the expression of heart-anger is always healing and intimacy [7], and that expressing heart-anger requires a high degree of self-awareness, which is cultivated in an ongoing spiritual practice like meditation or contemplative prayer that allows us to examine our anger and be aware of the root cause and nature of it before we begin to give expression to it [8].
The good news, however, is that it is possible to cultivate anger without sin. So when we feel our tempers flare, we can take a deep breath, think about whether our anger is rooted in selfish or unselfish concerns, and pray that we can direct our anger toward spiritual use, like Jesus in the temple or the prophets calling the people to repentance. We can turn to Jesus and pray that our once-angry human Savior would activate in us the anger redeemed through his incarnation, an anger that is pure compassion in action.
[1] Robert Augustus Masters, “Compassionate Wrath: Transpersonal Approaches to Anger,” The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2000 (Vol. 31, No. 1), 34.
[2] Ibid., 39.
[3] Ibid., 42.
[4] Ibid., 43 (quoting Tibetan spiritual master Marpa).
[5] Helen Keller example given in Jim McGuiggan, Celebrating the Wrath of God: Reflections on the Agony and the Ecstacy of His Relentless Love, (Colorado Springs, CO: WaterBrook Press, 2001), 69.
[6] Masters, 48.
[7] Ibid., 44.
[8] Ibid.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Seeing with "kingdom eyes"
Sermon delivered Sunday, Sept. 1, 2013 (15 Pentecost, Year C, Proper 17), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Luke 14:1, 7-14).
Both our readings from the New Testament today focus on the themes of hospitality and solidarity with both neighbors and strangers.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews encourages us to “let mutual love continue,” and reminds us “not to neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” We are also encouraged to “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though [we ourselves] were being tortured.” In the Gospel passage from Luke, Jesus encourages us to choose humility over arrogance, and to invite and include the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society in our community gatherings.
We should give to others and extend hospitality not only when we can expect to receive it in return, but even when we know the recipients cannot reciprocate. For in doing so, we mirror God’s love to us – God gives to us freely, despite the inability of human beings to “repay” God for the gift of our life.
And we also offer a foretaste of that kingdom to come where all people will stand equal as children of God, where we will treat one another with love and respect not out of a desire to receive anything in return, not out of an attempt to lift ourselves up, but out of a recognition that we are all brothers and sisters in the family of God. With our worldly eyes, we see inequalities, separateness, and divisions, but with kingdom eyes, we will be able to see the oneness of humanity and the equal value of every human being.
Our faith gives us the opportunity to see with kingdom eyes now; we don’t have to wait for the kingdom to come. In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray for God’s will to be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” As we strive to live out our faith and follow the teachings of Jesus, God will use us to bring a glimpse of that kingdom to the world here and now, on earth as it is in heaven.
Because our natural tendencies as human beings can be so contrary to kingdom values, in order to do this, we must be intentional about our behavior. We must choose to see with kingdom eyes. We must choose to offer hospitality to strangers and neighbors alike – to push against our natural inclinations to speak only to those people we already know, to invite only our friends to our parties, and instead, choose to see the stranger as a brother and a friend.
The letter to the Hebrews tells us that we should “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though [we ourselves] were being tortured.” The kingdom reality is that all Christians are one body in Christ, and when one member suffers, the whole body suffers with it. The kingdom reality is that all people – Christians and non-Christians alike – are God’s children and thus part of the greater family of God. When one of us is hurting, we all hurt. But so often, we don’t even know that one of us is hurting, because we don’t know one another. We see each other with worldly eyes, as “other,” as “different,” as “stranger,” as a statistic rather than a human being, and our empathy fades. But if we take the time to get to know one another as fellow human beings, as brothers and sisters in the family of God, we begin to hurt when others hurt, to care when our brothers and sisters are in prison, or tortured, or murdered, or deported, or slandered. When we know one another, when we hear one another’s stories, we can begin to see with kingdom eyes – we can recognize one another as a brother or a sister.
Allow me to share an example of this with you from my own life. Shortly after 9/11, I heard that a Sikh man had been murdered at a gas station in Arizona. I had never heard of Sikhism, and when my religion professor explained that Sikh men wear turbans and beards as part of their religious faith and that this man had been mistaken for a “terrorist” because his shooter thought he looked like Osama bin Laden, I shook my head at what sounded like an awful situation, but it quickly faded to the back of my mind. Two years later, I happened to be at a conference where a young Sikh woman presented a collection of video footage of interviews with the relatives of this man, as well as interviews with other people who had experienced discrimination and hate crimes in the weeks and months after 9/11. As I listened to story after story of people who had been yelled at, beaten, shot, and killed simply because of the way they looked, I felt like the Apostle Paul when the scales fell from his eyes at his conversion experience (Acts 9:18). I had had no idea about what had been happening to the Sikh community, the Muslim community, the Hispanic community – really, anyone with brown skin – in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, because I didn’t know them. Our paths never crossed, and so I had never heard their stories. I had been seeing with worldly eyes rather than with kingdom eyes. I hadn’t known that my brothers and sisters were suffering.
After the screening, I introduced myself to the woman who had shown the footage, whose name was Valarie Kaur. Her goal was to take this footage, which she had collected for a project as a college student in the year after 9/11, and turn it into a feature-length documentary film. I offered to help in whatever way I could, and eventually became the film’s communications director through a second stage of production and its eventual national tour. It was my work with that film that made me so sensitive to the shootings that happened last August at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, that motivated me to buy those sympathy cards for you all to sign and to take a group of you to visit the gurdwara here in Nashville.
In the middle of the film, which we titled “Divided We Fall,” there is a scene where a college-aged Valarie and her 18-year-old turbaned cousin Sonny, who was her cameraman for the project, discuss what the turban means to them as Sikhs. When it is Valarie’s turn, she says, “I see somebody with a turban, and I say, ‘There’s a sadar, he’s a Sikh man. He’s like my uncle, he’s like my brother, he’s like my grandfather. I know him. We come from the same place. He probably speaks Punjabi. He says the same prayers that I do.” She looks down, with a pensive look on her face. Her cousin pauses, then asks, “Why are we making this documentary?” Valarie looks away thoughtfully, smiles, then looks directly into the camera and says, “So other people don’t look at the turban and see fear, hatred, something laughable, something less than human… so that other people don’t look at the turban and see an enemy where I see a brother.”
I wonder if that isn’t why Jesus asked us to invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,” to our luncheons and dinners – so that we wouldn’t look at them and see something laughable, something less than human – so that we wouldn’t look at them and see fear where Jesus sees a brother. So that, as we ate together, we could hear their stories, stories that would make us human to one another, stories that would allow us to see each other with kingdom eyes, as brothers and sisters in the family of God.
This is what we’re about as a church whenever we go to Church in the Yard and listen to the stories of people who are experiencing homelessness, or when we sit down at Spring Street to share a meal with our African-American neighbors, or when we visit the mosque or gurdwara and share tea with Muslims and Sikhs. We are intentionally connecting and building relationships with people we might not otherwise get to know. We are pushing back against the default mode of society that keeps us apart in separate circles of community that never touch one another. We are choosing to see one another with kingdom eyes, so that we will know when one of our brothers and sisters is suffering and remember them as if we were suffering ourselves.
Jesus says that if we show hospitality to those whom society separates from us, we will be blessed, and will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. But, as I’m sure anyone who has participated in any of the ministries I just mentioned could tell you, the blessings are also available here and now. Because as we extend hospitality to both neighbors and strangers, we discover that there are no strangers in the kingdom of God, and we are able to touch a glimpse of the kingdom, breaking in to our everyday lives, on earth as it is in heaven.
Both our readings from the New Testament today focus on the themes of hospitality and solidarity with both neighbors and strangers.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews encourages us to “let mutual love continue,” and reminds us “not to neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” We are also encouraged to “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though [we ourselves] were being tortured.” In the Gospel passage from Luke, Jesus encourages us to choose humility over arrogance, and to invite and include the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society in our community gatherings.
We should give to others and extend hospitality not only when we can expect to receive it in return, but even when we know the recipients cannot reciprocate. For in doing so, we mirror God’s love to us – God gives to us freely, despite the inability of human beings to “repay” God for the gift of our life.
And we also offer a foretaste of that kingdom to come where all people will stand equal as children of God, where we will treat one another with love and respect not out of a desire to receive anything in return, not out of an attempt to lift ourselves up, but out of a recognition that we are all brothers and sisters in the family of God. With our worldly eyes, we see inequalities, separateness, and divisions, but with kingdom eyes, we will be able to see the oneness of humanity and the equal value of every human being.
Our faith gives us the opportunity to see with kingdom eyes now; we don’t have to wait for the kingdom to come. In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray for God’s will to be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” As we strive to live out our faith and follow the teachings of Jesus, God will use us to bring a glimpse of that kingdom to the world here and now, on earth as it is in heaven.
Because our natural tendencies as human beings can be so contrary to kingdom values, in order to do this, we must be intentional about our behavior. We must choose to see with kingdom eyes. We must choose to offer hospitality to strangers and neighbors alike – to push against our natural inclinations to speak only to those people we already know, to invite only our friends to our parties, and instead, choose to see the stranger as a brother and a friend.
The letter to the Hebrews tells us that we should “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though [we ourselves] were being tortured.” The kingdom reality is that all Christians are one body in Christ, and when one member suffers, the whole body suffers with it. The kingdom reality is that all people – Christians and non-Christians alike – are God’s children and thus part of the greater family of God. When one of us is hurting, we all hurt. But so often, we don’t even know that one of us is hurting, because we don’t know one another. We see each other with worldly eyes, as “other,” as “different,” as “stranger,” as a statistic rather than a human being, and our empathy fades. But if we take the time to get to know one another as fellow human beings, as brothers and sisters in the family of God, we begin to hurt when others hurt, to care when our brothers and sisters are in prison, or tortured, or murdered, or deported, or slandered. When we know one another, when we hear one another’s stories, we can begin to see with kingdom eyes – we can recognize one another as a brother or a sister.
Allow me to share an example of this with you from my own life. Shortly after 9/11, I heard that a Sikh man had been murdered at a gas station in Arizona. I had never heard of Sikhism, and when my religion professor explained that Sikh men wear turbans and beards as part of their religious faith and that this man had been mistaken for a “terrorist” because his shooter thought he looked like Osama bin Laden, I shook my head at what sounded like an awful situation, but it quickly faded to the back of my mind. Two years later, I happened to be at a conference where a young Sikh woman presented a collection of video footage of interviews with the relatives of this man, as well as interviews with other people who had experienced discrimination and hate crimes in the weeks and months after 9/11. As I listened to story after story of people who had been yelled at, beaten, shot, and killed simply because of the way they looked, I felt like the Apostle Paul when the scales fell from his eyes at his conversion experience (Acts 9:18). I had had no idea about what had been happening to the Sikh community, the Muslim community, the Hispanic community – really, anyone with brown skin – in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, because I didn’t know them. Our paths never crossed, and so I had never heard their stories. I had been seeing with worldly eyes rather than with kingdom eyes. I hadn’t known that my brothers and sisters were suffering.
After the screening, I introduced myself to the woman who had shown the footage, whose name was Valarie Kaur. Her goal was to take this footage, which she had collected for a project as a college student in the year after 9/11, and turn it into a feature-length documentary film. I offered to help in whatever way I could, and eventually became the film’s communications director through a second stage of production and its eventual national tour. It was my work with that film that made me so sensitive to the shootings that happened last August at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, that motivated me to buy those sympathy cards for you all to sign and to take a group of you to visit the gurdwara here in Nashville.
In the middle of the film, which we titled “Divided We Fall,” there is a scene where a college-aged Valarie and her 18-year-old turbaned cousin Sonny, who was her cameraman for the project, discuss what the turban means to them as Sikhs. When it is Valarie’s turn, she says, “I see somebody with a turban, and I say, ‘There’s a sadar, he’s a Sikh man. He’s like my uncle, he’s like my brother, he’s like my grandfather. I know him. We come from the same place. He probably speaks Punjabi. He says the same prayers that I do.” She looks down, with a pensive look on her face. Her cousin pauses, then asks, “Why are we making this documentary?” Valarie looks away thoughtfully, smiles, then looks directly into the camera and says, “So other people don’t look at the turban and see fear, hatred, something laughable, something less than human… so that other people don’t look at the turban and see an enemy where I see a brother.”
I wonder if that isn’t why Jesus asked us to invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,” to our luncheons and dinners – so that we wouldn’t look at them and see something laughable, something less than human – so that we wouldn’t look at them and see fear where Jesus sees a brother. So that, as we ate together, we could hear their stories, stories that would make us human to one another, stories that would allow us to see each other with kingdom eyes, as brothers and sisters in the family of God.
This is what we’re about as a church whenever we go to Church in the Yard and listen to the stories of people who are experiencing homelessness, or when we sit down at Spring Street to share a meal with our African-American neighbors, or when we visit the mosque or gurdwara and share tea with Muslims and Sikhs. We are intentionally connecting and building relationships with people we might not otherwise get to know. We are pushing back against the default mode of society that keeps us apart in separate circles of community that never touch one another. We are choosing to see one another with kingdom eyes, so that we will know when one of our brothers and sisters is suffering and remember them as if we were suffering ourselves.
Jesus says that if we show hospitality to those whom society separates from us, we will be blessed, and will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. But, as I’m sure anyone who has participated in any of the ministries I just mentioned could tell you, the blessings are also available here and now. Because as we extend hospitality to both neighbors and strangers, we discover that there are no strangers in the kingdom of God, and we are able to touch a glimpse of the kingdom, breaking in to our everyday lives, on earth as it is in heaven.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Repentance based on love, not fear
Sermon delivered Sunday, Feb. 24, 2013 (Second Sunday in Lent, Year C), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN. (Readings: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18, Psalm 27, Philippians 3:17-4:1, Luke 13:31-35)
Culturally, most people’s understanding of repentance probably has something to do with street preachers shaking their fists in judgment, holding up signs condemning the world, yelling at passers-by to “repent or perish!” Calls to repentance like these often come with a threat, a threat that if people do not change their ways, they will face destruction – either in this life or the next. It is a way of calling for change that relies on fear as a motivator – people respond to these calls out of a very real fear that if they do not do what the preacher says, their lives will be miserable and they will go to hell when they die.
However uncomfortable such methods might make us, this way of calling people to repentance is not entirely unbiblical. There are countless stories in the Bible of God threatening people with destruction if they do not change their ways, and actually following through on that threat if they do refuse to change. The texts of the Hebrew Bible tell us that God rained down fire and sulphur on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of their sinfulness (Genesis 19:24), that God drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea because the Pharaoh refused to free the Israelites from slavery (Exodus 14:26-29), and that God dispossessed the Canaanites and other peoples of their lands because of their wickedness (Deuteronomy 9:4-5), just to name a few of the better-known stories.
But this is not the only picture of God we receive in the Bible, a God who calls for change by using threats and fear. Mixed in with that portrayal of God is another image of God as a God who calls for change by humbling himself out of compassion and love. This is the biblical refrain that speaks of a God who turns society’s conventions upside down, who casts down the mighty and lifts up the lowly, who says that the last will be first and the first will be last. And, contrary to popular belief, this image of God does not appear only in the New Testament. It shows up as a constant refrain throughout the Hebrew Bible as well.
Today’s reading from the Hebrew Bible is one example of this image of God as one who motivates and communicates out of humility and love. When Abram doubts God’s promise that he will give the land to Abram’s descendants, God does not respond in anger, condemning Abram for not trusting God’s word. Instead, to prove his point, God radically humbles himself to show Abram just how serious he is about his promise.
When God asks Abram to bring the various animals to him for a sacrifice, he is setting the stage for a traditional way of making a treaty or covenant in ancient Near Eastern culture. This particular method comes out of Hittite culture and would have been the most serious way of making a covenant that Abram would have known. God is using the cultural conventions of Abram’s time to speak to him where he is.
Treaties between two parties who had been at war with one another in the ancient Near East would go something like this: After a war between two groups, the victors would be on the loser’s property, having just defeated them. The victors would offer a treaty to the losers that would consist of various demands: since you all are now under our rule, you must be loyal only to us and serve only us. There would be specific details about the things the losers were and weren’t allowed to do. Then, in order to ratify the treaty, they would take some animals and cut them in two and make the losers walk between the animal pieces while reciting the stipulations of the treaty. The implication was that if the losers did not abide by the stipulations of the treaty, the conquerors would do to them what had been done to the animals! [1]
If this were a story in the “repent or perish” tradition that uses threats and fear as a way to motivate, we would expect God to demand that Abram walk between the pieces to declare his utmost loyalty to God – with the accompanying threat that if Abram did not keep the stipulations of the covenant God was making with him, that God would make him look like the animal pieces. After all, in other parts of the Hebrew Bible, we do hear stories of God threatening destruction to the people if they do not keep the law and his commandments. But that’s not what happens in this story.
In this story, “When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.” (Genesis 15:17). It is not Abram who passes between the pieces, but the very presence of God. Smoke and fire were classic symbols for the appearance of the presence of God: think about Moses and the burning bush, or the pillar of cloud that accompanied the Israelites in the wilderness. In passing between the pieces, God is taking on the role of the weaker party in the covenant; God is playing the role of the “loser.” God could have easily demanded that Abram perform the traditional role of the weaker party in the covenant, and no doubt Abram would have thought this entirely appropriate. But instead, in response to Abram’s doubts, God humbles himself, makes himself vulnerable, in essence saying to Abram, “May I be made like these animal pieces if I do not keep my word to you.”
Fast forward several thousand years, and God’s willingness to humble himself goes a step further. God’s willingness to take human form in the person of Jesus Christ, to live as one of us, and to be willing even to die on the cross, is the ultimate act of divine humility. Like God’s willingness to walk between the animal pieces to show Abram how serious God was about the covenant he was making with Abram, God’s willingness to go to the cross shows us how serious God is about the covenant he makes with us in Jesus Christ. God voluntarily puts himself in a position of human weakness in order to profess his love for us.
These acts of humility and love also serve as calls to repentance – a call to change our ways in the face of a God who is willing to give up everything for us. In this biblical theme, God moves us to repentance not by beating us down and scaring us, but by making himself vulnerable and giving of himself for us. If we truly understand the implications and magnitude of such divine humility, I believe it generates a much more authentic repentance than threats of destruction do. So often, calls for repentance that are based in fear, threat, and judgment produce change motivated by a fearful desire to protect one’s own personal safety rather than an authentic love for God. But when God chooses not to exercise God’s power to destroy, but shows mercy and forgiveness instead, we are naturally moved to a change of heart and a reciprocal loving response. The words of an anonymous 17th century Spanish poem, Soneto a Cristo crucificado, “Sonnet to Christ crucified,” express this point well. As one English translation interprets it, the poet writes,
The poet turns to God not because he fears punishment if he does not, but because Jesus’s life, death, and Resurrection moves him and fills him with gratitude and love. The author of the first letter of John writes that “perfect love drives out all fear” (1 John 4:18). As Christians, I believe our primary call to repentance comes from Christ crucified, an act not of judgment or threats, but of perfect love. In turning our eyes to the cross, we can find the authentic repentance and change of heart and life that we seek during Lent. Perhaps no one has said it better than the great English hymn-writer Isaac Watts:
[1] Information about Hittite vassal treaties from lecture notes from Rebecca Abts Wright’s Old Testament class, fall 2009, The School of Theology at Sewanee: The University of the South.
Culturally, most people’s understanding of repentance probably has something to do with street preachers shaking their fists in judgment, holding up signs condemning the world, yelling at passers-by to “repent or perish!” Calls to repentance like these often come with a threat, a threat that if people do not change their ways, they will face destruction – either in this life or the next. It is a way of calling for change that relies on fear as a motivator – people respond to these calls out of a very real fear that if they do not do what the preacher says, their lives will be miserable and they will go to hell when they die.
However uncomfortable such methods might make us, this way of calling people to repentance is not entirely unbiblical. There are countless stories in the Bible of God threatening people with destruction if they do not change their ways, and actually following through on that threat if they do refuse to change. The texts of the Hebrew Bible tell us that God rained down fire and sulphur on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of their sinfulness (Genesis 19:24), that God drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea because the Pharaoh refused to free the Israelites from slavery (Exodus 14:26-29), and that God dispossessed the Canaanites and other peoples of their lands because of their wickedness (Deuteronomy 9:4-5), just to name a few of the better-known stories.
But this is not the only picture of God we receive in the Bible, a God who calls for change by using threats and fear. Mixed in with that portrayal of God is another image of God as a God who calls for change by humbling himself out of compassion and love. This is the biblical refrain that speaks of a God who turns society’s conventions upside down, who casts down the mighty and lifts up the lowly, who says that the last will be first and the first will be last. And, contrary to popular belief, this image of God does not appear only in the New Testament. It shows up as a constant refrain throughout the Hebrew Bible as well.
Today’s reading from the Hebrew Bible is one example of this image of God as one who motivates and communicates out of humility and love. When Abram doubts God’s promise that he will give the land to Abram’s descendants, God does not respond in anger, condemning Abram for not trusting God’s word. Instead, to prove his point, God radically humbles himself to show Abram just how serious he is about his promise.
When God asks Abram to bring the various animals to him for a sacrifice, he is setting the stage for a traditional way of making a treaty or covenant in ancient Near Eastern culture. This particular method comes out of Hittite culture and would have been the most serious way of making a covenant that Abram would have known. God is using the cultural conventions of Abram’s time to speak to him where he is.
Treaties between two parties who had been at war with one another in the ancient Near East would go something like this: After a war between two groups, the victors would be on the loser’s property, having just defeated them. The victors would offer a treaty to the losers that would consist of various demands: since you all are now under our rule, you must be loyal only to us and serve only us. There would be specific details about the things the losers were and weren’t allowed to do. Then, in order to ratify the treaty, they would take some animals and cut them in two and make the losers walk between the animal pieces while reciting the stipulations of the treaty. The implication was that if the losers did not abide by the stipulations of the treaty, the conquerors would do to them what had been done to the animals! [1]
If this were a story in the “repent or perish” tradition that uses threats and fear as a way to motivate, we would expect God to demand that Abram walk between the pieces to declare his utmost loyalty to God – with the accompanying threat that if Abram did not keep the stipulations of the covenant God was making with him, that God would make him look like the animal pieces. After all, in other parts of the Hebrew Bible, we do hear stories of God threatening destruction to the people if they do not keep the law and his commandments. But that’s not what happens in this story.
In this story, “When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.” (Genesis 15:17). It is not Abram who passes between the pieces, but the very presence of God. Smoke and fire were classic symbols for the appearance of the presence of God: think about Moses and the burning bush, or the pillar of cloud that accompanied the Israelites in the wilderness. In passing between the pieces, God is taking on the role of the weaker party in the covenant; God is playing the role of the “loser.” God could have easily demanded that Abram perform the traditional role of the weaker party in the covenant, and no doubt Abram would have thought this entirely appropriate. But instead, in response to Abram’s doubts, God humbles himself, makes himself vulnerable, in essence saying to Abram, “May I be made like these animal pieces if I do not keep my word to you.”
Fast forward several thousand years, and God’s willingness to humble himself goes a step further. God’s willingness to take human form in the person of Jesus Christ, to live as one of us, and to be willing even to die on the cross, is the ultimate act of divine humility. Like God’s willingness to walk between the animal pieces to show Abram how serious God was about the covenant he was making with Abram, God’s willingness to go to the cross shows us how serious God is about the covenant he makes with us in Jesus Christ. God voluntarily puts himself in a position of human weakness in order to profess his love for us.
These acts of humility and love also serve as calls to repentance – a call to change our ways in the face of a God who is willing to give up everything for us. In this biblical theme, God moves us to repentance not by beating us down and scaring us, but by making himself vulnerable and giving of himself for us. If we truly understand the implications and magnitude of such divine humility, I believe it generates a much more authentic repentance than threats of destruction do. So often, calls for repentance that are based in fear, threat, and judgment produce change motivated by a fearful desire to protect one’s own personal safety rather than an authentic love for God. But when God chooses not to exercise God’s power to destroy, but shows mercy and forgiveness instead, we are naturally moved to a change of heart and a reciprocal loving response. The words of an anonymous 17th century Spanish poem, Soneto a Cristo crucificado, “Sonnet to Christ crucified,” express this point well. As one English translation interprets it, the poet writes,
“I love thee, Lord, but not because
I hope for heaven thereby,
nor yet for fear that loving not
I might for ever die;
but for that thou didst all the world
upon the cross embrace;
for us didst bear the nails and spear,
and manifold disgrace,
and griefs and torments numberless,
and sweat of agony;
e'en death itself; and all for one
who was thine enemy.”
The poet turns to God not because he fears punishment if he does not, but because Jesus’s life, death, and Resurrection moves him and fills him with gratitude and love. The author of the first letter of John writes that “perfect love drives out all fear” (1 John 4:18). As Christians, I believe our primary call to repentance comes from Christ crucified, an act not of judgment or threats, but of perfect love. In turning our eyes to the cross, we can find the authentic repentance and change of heart and life that we seek during Lent. Perhaps no one has said it better than the great English hymn-writer Isaac Watts:
When I survey the wondrous cross
Where the young Prince of Glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss
And pour contempt on all my pride.
Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small
Love so amazing, so divine
Demands my soul, my life, my all.
[1] Information about Hittite vassal treaties from lecture notes from Rebecca Abts Wright’s Old Testament class, fall 2009, The School of Theology at Sewanee: The University of the South.
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