Sermon delivered Sunday, March 12, 2017 (Second Sunday in Lent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
Sermon Text(s): Genesis 12:1-4, Romans 4:1-5, 13-17, John 3:1-17
The season of Lent calls us to be intentional about our spiritual lives: to spend time in prayer, in reading the scriptures, and in self-examination and reflection. One could say that Lent calls us to deepen our faith.
Our readings for today convey the message that our faith is what makes us right with God. These passages represent one side of the classic debate between faith and works – is it our faith, our beliefs, that put us into right relationship with God, or is it our works, our actions, the things we do in this world? Our scriptures for today clearly come down on the “faith” side of the question.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul argues that Abraham was justified – made right with God – not by anything he did, but by having faith – by trusting God’s promise to him. In making this argument, Paul is commenting on a passage from Genesis, chapter 15, just a few chapters after our reading from the Hebrew Bible for today. Chapter 15 includes the famous scene where God shows Abraham a vision – that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky – and after that vision, the scripture tells us that “[Abraham] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). Paul builds his argument for justification by faith on this line from Genesis. He points out that Abraham was considered “righteous” before God officially made the covenant with Abraham, so Abraham’s righteousness did not come through the law, which was given later, but through his simple trusting in the word he heard from God.
In our Gospel passage, Jesus encounters a prominent leader of Israel named Nicodemus. Nicodemus goes to visit Jesus by night – perhaps because he does not want to be seen associating with this “rabble rouser” in the light of day – but the fact that he goes to him at all shows that he is drawn to him in some way. He acknowledges that Jesus is “a teacher who has come from God,” showing that he does not entirely reject Jesus and his teachings. But Jesus doesn’t give Nicodemus any gold stars for acknowledging him as a teacher. Instead, he launches into a statement about the importance of being “born from above” in order to “see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3).
Jesus can tell that Nicodemus has not yet “gotten it,” so to speak. Perhaps his concern with observance of the law has gotten in the way of his understanding the deeper spiritual message; we don’t know. But Jesus is not impressed with Nicodemus’s tentative praise of him. The passage concludes with one of the most famous lines in Scripture – John 3:16 – “for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Again, we are brought back to the importance of faith – everyone who believes in him will have eternal life, just as Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.
So, the call to us is to have faith, to believe. In Christian circles, this idea is often presented as much easier than “earning” our way into salvation by our works: “What great news – we are saved by faith alone! All we have to do is believe!” But as anyone who has ever struggled with serious doubts knows, it is often much easier to do “good works” than it is to believe in what are some pretty incredible statements that the church holds up as true. This is why plenty of people can go out and feed the hungry and advocate for justice but can’t bring themselves to say the Nicene Creed. It is often easier to do something than it is to believe something.
I’m very interested in why it is that certain people find it easy to believe, to have faith, while other people find themselves stuck, unable to move past their doubt and skepticism to surrender to the life of faith. What made Peter, Andrew, James, and John willing to drop everything and follow Jesus when he called their names, while Nicodemus was drawn to Jesus, but not willing to leave everything to follow him? Why are you all here week after week, active in the life of the church, while you may have friends or family members who were raised with the same exposure to the church and the Christian faith, who are not active in church, and perhaps even skeptical about religion in general? If faith is what makes us right with God, how do we get it? What makes it possible for us to have faith?
I used to believe that faith was entirely a choice: God has created us with free will, so we have the freedom to choose faith or to choose unbelief. From this perspective, the burden of action is entirely ours. God has already acted in history, through the resurrection of Jesus; now it is our choice whether we accept or reject that gift of life.
But as my faith developed, I began to question the notion that my faith was entirely my choice. Yes, I did choose to follow Jesus when I was a teenager and have continued to try to follow him, but why was I drawn to pursue a spiritual path at all? I no more chose my natural inclination toward thinking theologically than I chose my affinity for strawberries or for the color purple. Those things were planted in me from the beginning, it seems, part of my personality, something I did nothing to create.
So I began to think that perhaps the ability to have faith at all is a gift from God. One commentator on this passage from John points out that Jesus’s use of the birth metaphor points to the initiative in matters of faith coming from God rather than from us. Just as babies do not choose to be born, so we cannot choose to be “born again” – such an experience is a gift from God that is bestowed on us. Jesus says to Nicodemus, “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). Just as we cannot control the wind, we cannot control how God’s Spirit moves in our lives and in the lives of others.
Looking at it this way allows us to let go of feeling like the burden is all on us – to have faith and to lead others to have faith. A friend who was going through a difficult time once told me that she had to believe that God chooses her, rather than the other way around. “I CANNOT choose faith right now,” she said. “So I have to trust that God chooses me.” From that theological perspective, the burden of action is entirely God’s. If we have faith, it is only because God has created and planted that faith in us.
But that idea is not entirely satisfactory, either, for it runs the risk of falling into fatalism and making a mockery of human choice, making us into puppets stripped of any kind of real freedom.
And so, I’m coming to think that perhaps the truth is somewhere in between those two viewpoints. In true Episcopal fashion, I’m proposing a via media, a "middle way," between two extremes. Rather than asserting that faith is entirely our choice or entirely a gift, I’m proposing that it’s both. Somehow at the same time it’s both a choice we make and a gift from God.
The problem with the other two scenarios is that in both of them, there is only one active party in the equation: either faith is entirely up to us, or faith is entirely up to God. But faith in God is a relationship, and a relationship requires action by both parties. For a life of faith to flourish, both we and God need to act. The key is remembering that we control only our side of the relationship.
We can smile and act friendly toward someone, but that does not guarantee that that person will become our friend. We cannot control how the other person will respond to us. The same is true in our relationship with God. We can pray and come to Eucharist and say all the right words and do all the right things, but that does not guarantee that in our heart of hearts, we will truly believe and feel close to God. We still have to wait for God to show up, for God to act on God’s side of the relationship. Despite what our liturgies sometimes lead us to believe, we cannot MAKE God show up by saying certain magic words or making certain gestures with our hands. God is not a robot or a vending machine. We cannot force God’s action in our lives, and we cannot force ourselves to have faith.
So perhaps what we are called to do during Lent is not to deepen our faith, but to deepen our spiritual practice. What we can control is our actions and choices on our side of the relationship. We can choose to show up wherever it is that we feel most likely to encounter God – in the church, out in nature, in the midst of our family and friends – and wait. This might mean we spend more time in silence, more time listening rather than speaking in our prayer life. But whatever the practices that work best for us, we can do them with a posture of openness – perhaps literally, praying with open hands, open palms, or metaphorically, opening our hearts – so that we become more receptive to God’s presence and action within and around us, so that we are primed and prepped to notice when God does choose to show up.
Jesus told Nicodemus, “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). In our life of spiritual practice, we are building ourselves a wind turbine, so that when God’s Spirit does blow in our lives, we have the mechanism ready to capture its energy and allow it to fuel us.
This is what spiritual practice is all about – it is quite literally a practice to prepare ourselves to be ready for those moments when we receive a vision, or a strong inner sense of God’s call, or a deep abiding sense of God’s love and comfort – all of which are pure gifts of grace. We cannot make those experiences happen, but we can keep the lines of communication open. And that’s all we are asked to do on the spiritual path – to show up, to be open – and to leave the rest to God.
Showing posts with label faith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label faith. Show all posts
Sunday, March 12, 2017
Sunday, December 18, 2016
What was Joseph's influence on Jesus as a father?
Sermon delivered Sunday, Dec. 18, 2016 (Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
Sermon Text(s): Matthew 1:18-25
Much of our focus during the season of Advent is on Mary. She is, after all, the one who carried Jesus in her womb, the one who waited for his birth like no one else ever has, like only an expectant mother can do.
Earlier this season I mentioned that using blue during Advent instead of purple emphasizes that Advent is not simply a mini-Lent, that the season of Advent is about waiting, watching, hoping, longing, not just about repentance. But for some, using blue during Advent also is about drawing our attention to Mary, since blue is the color traditionally associated with her in art and iconography. The Virgin Mary, “great with child,” is our icon of the season of Advent, the personification of what it means to wait and watch expectantly.
But today’s Gospel reading invites us to focus on Joseph rather than Mary as we consider the story of Jesus’s birth.
We don’t actually know a whole lot about Joseph, Mary’s husband, who was Jesus’s earthly father in a practical sense if not biologically. The scriptures mention him only a few times, mostly in the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke. Perhaps as the official theology of the church about the Virgin Birth began to form, Joseph’s presence in the narrative made some people uncomfortable. If it’s a Virgin Birth, why is there a man in the story at all?
Well, uh… because in that culture a woman couldn’t be pregnant and single without being at risk for her life, so maybe Joseph was more like a guardian for Mary. And since it was probably an arranged marriage, and Joseph was probably a lot older than Mary (some traditions say he was as old as 90 when he became engaged to a teenaged Mary!), maybe they never slept together at all and she was a “perpetual virgin” – as the Catholic Church later came to hold as official doctrine.
Let’s face it, the story’s really all about Mary, the Holy Spirit, and the miraculous birth. Joseph’s kind of a third wheel, an inconvenient interloper, an awkward stepfather to God’s son. Christian tradition has tended to let him fade into the background as the spotlight shines on Mary and the Christ Child. Joseph becomes just a placeholder in a society where a woman couldn’t exist without a man’s protection.
But what if there was more to Joseph’s role than that? While we’ll never know specific details of what his day-to-day relationship with Mary or Jesus was like (unless an archeologist discovers Joseph’s diary in a cave in the Middle East somewhere!), we do know that in a society in which he would have had every right to reject Mary when she shows up pregnant with a child he knows is not his, he not only accepts her as his wife, but raises the child as his own. He chooses mercy over strict obedience of the law; if he’d been a stickler for the law he would have called for Mary to be stoned to death when he discovered her pregnancy.
He goes to great lengths to protect Jesus; as the story continues in Matthew, Joseph moves the entire family to Egypt to escape King Herod’s attempt to kill the child that he feared might be a threat to his throne.
When he and Mary take Jesus to the Temple to dedicate him to God, Joseph offers the sacrifice prescribed for the poor: two turtle doves, rather than a year-old lamb, which was the sacrifice expected of all who could afford it. This tells us he was likely a man of humble means, but even so, according to Luke, he took the family to Jerusalem every year for the Passover. The fact that he made this long, expensive trip every year despite the fact that it would have stretched his budget shows that he prioritized the practice of his faith over other things in life.
Matthew calls him a “righteous man.” But his way of being righteous, his way of practicing his faith, seems to have been a way that always focused on what matters most, a way that never allowed rituals to get in the way of relationships, a way that emphasized mercy over sacrifice, a way that focused on compassion and protecting the vulnerable. Maybe Jesus learned those things not only from his Father in heaven, but from his father on earth.
Last Sunday, Father John talked about how devotion to and veneration of Mary has given the church a counterbalance to the traditionally masculine imagery attributed to God. It’s given us a way to remember that the more traditionally feminine qualities – “nurturing, supporting, protecting, healing, loving” – are also part of God, however much human nature has tended to focus on the “masculine” qualities of “aggressiveness, anger, judgment, decisions, and action” when thinking about God.
This is certainly true, but in reflecting on Joseph this week, I’ve been noticing how much Joseph emphasizes those nurturing, supporting, protective, healing, loving parts of God.
John told us a joke last week to illustrate his point: a man dies and is greeted at the pearly gates with judgment, with an accounting of everything he did wrong in his life. The man pauses, thinks for a moment and replies, “Um, excuse me, could I please speak to Mary?” Behind this joke, John says, is “a sense that the male judgment may happen, but Mary will soothe and calm and ease the situation and will be forgiving.” But based on our Gospel reading for today and what we know about Joseph from the rest of the scriptural witness, I think I’d be just as likely to ask for Joseph at the pearly gates as I would Mary if I were looking for compassion and forgiveness.
It’s always bothered me that our society characterizes qualities as “masculine” and “feminine” the way that it does, in a way that stereotypes men as aggressive and judgmental and women as nurturing and compassionate. Because, of course, it’s not that simple. I’m sure we’ve all known women who are aggressive and judgmental and men who are nurturing and compassionate. No human quality is exclusively the purview of any one sex or gender. And Joseph is a particular illustration of that case in point.
Critique of the image of God as “Father” has rested on the assumption that a “Father” is a stern, emotionally distant figure associated with rules and punishment. We need a female image of God to balance this stern male Father figure, feminist biblical scholars have argued. But from what we know of him, Jesus’s earthly father didn’t fit that stereotype. So to the extent that as a human being, Jesus’s concept of what a “father” was came from his own earthly father, it seems that what he meant when he talked about God as a father was someone who was kind, loving, compassionate, forgiving – someone who would put his life at risk to protect his son’s, someone who chooses mercy over judgment. Joseph is a reminder to us that those qualities are just as essential to what it means to be a man and a father as they are to what it means to be a woman and a mother.
Sermon Text(s): Matthew 1:18-25
Much of our focus during the season of Advent is on Mary. She is, after all, the one who carried Jesus in her womb, the one who waited for his birth like no one else ever has, like only an expectant mother can do.
Earlier this season I mentioned that using blue during Advent instead of purple emphasizes that Advent is not simply a mini-Lent, that the season of Advent is about waiting, watching, hoping, longing, not just about repentance. But for some, using blue during Advent also is about drawing our attention to Mary, since blue is the color traditionally associated with her in art and iconography. The Virgin Mary, “great with child,” is our icon of the season of Advent, the personification of what it means to wait and watch expectantly.
But today’s Gospel reading invites us to focus on Joseph rather than Mary as we consider the story of Jesus’s birth.
We don’t actually know a whole lot about Joseph, Mary’s husband, who was Jesus’s earthly father in a practical sense if not biologically. The scriptures mention him only a few times, mostly in the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke. Perhaps as the official theology of the church about the Virgin Birth began to form, Joseph’s presence in the narrative made some people uncomfortable. If it’s a Virgin Birth, why is there a man in the story at all?
Well, uh… because in that culture a woman couldn’t be pregnant and single without being at risk for her life, so maybe Joseph was more like a guardian for Mary. And since it was probably an arranged marriage, and Joseph was probably a lot older than Mary (some traditions say he was as old as 90 when he became engaged to a teenaged Mary!), maybe they never slept together at all and she was a “perpetual virgin” – as the Catholic Church later came to hold as official doctrine.
Let’s face it, the story’s really all about Mary, the Holy Spirit, and the miraculous birth. Joseph’s kind of a third wheel, an inconvenient interloper, an awkward stepfather to God’s son. Christian tradition has tended to let him fade into the background as the spotlight shines on Mary and the Christ Child. Joseph becomes just a placeholder in a society where a woman couldn’t exist without a man’s protection.
But what if there was more to Joseph’s role than that? While we’ll never know specific details of what his day-to-day relationship with Mary or Jesus was like (unless an archeologist discovers Joseph’s diary in a cave in the Middle East somewhere!), we do know that in a society in which he would have had every right to reject Mary when she shows up pregnant with a child he knows is not his, he not only accepts her as his wife, but raises the child as his own. He chooses mercy over strict obedience of the law; if he’d been a stickler for the law he would have called for Mary to be stoned to death when he discovered her pregnancy.
He goes to great lengths to protect Jesus; as the story continues in Matthew, Joseph moves the entire family to Egypt to escape King Herod’s attempt to kill the child that he feared might be a threat to his throne.
When he and Mary take Jesus to the Temple to dedicate him to God, Joseph offers the sacrifice prescribed for the poor: two turtle doves, rather than a year-old lamb, which was the sacrifice expected of all who could afford it. This tells us he was likely a man of humble means, but even so, according to Luke, he took the family to Jerusalem every year for the Passover. The fact that he made this long, expensive trip every year despite the fact that it would have stretched his budget shows that he prioritized the practice of his faith over other things in life.
Matthew calls him a “righteous man.” But his way of being righteous, his way of practicing his faith, seems to have been a way that always focused on what matters most, a way that never allowed rituals to get in the way of relationships, a way that emphasized mercy over sacrifice, a way that focused on compassion and protecting the vulnerable. Maybe Jesus learned those things not only from his Father in heaven, but from his father on earth.
Last Sunday, Father John talked about how devotion to and veneration of Mary has given the church a counterbalance to the traditionally masculine imagery attributed to God. It’s given us a way to remember that the more traditionally feminine qualities – “nurturing, supporting, protecting, healing, loving” – are also part of God, however much human nature has tended to focus on the “masculine” qualities of “aggressiveness, anger, judgment, decisions, and action” when thinking about God.
This is certainly true, but in reflecting on Joseph this week, I’ve been noticing how much Joseph emphasizes those nurturing, supporting, protective, healing, loving parts of God.
John told us a joke last week to illustrate his point: a man dies and is greeted at the pearly gates with judgment, with an accounting of everything he did wrong in his life. The man pauses, thinks for a moment and replies, “Um, excuse me, could I please speak to Mary?” Behind this joke, John says, is “a sense that the male judgment may happen, but Mary will soothe and calm and ease the situation and will be forgiving.” But based on our Gospel reading for today and what we know about Joseph from the rest of the scriptural witness, I think I’d be just as likely to ask for Joseph at the pearly gates as I would Mary if I were looking for compassion and forgiveness.
It’s always bothered me that our society characterizes qualities as “masculine” and “feminine” the way that it does, in a way that stereotypes men as aggressive and judgmental and women as nurturing and compassionate. Because, of course, it’s not that simple. I’m sure we’ve all known women who are aggressive and judgmental and men who are nurturing and compassionate. No human quality is exclusively the purview of any one sex or gender. And Joseph is a particular illustration of that case in point.
Critique of the image of God as “Father” has rested on the assumption that a “Father” is a stern, emotionally distant figure associated with rules and punishment. We need a female image of God to balance this stern male Father figure, feminist biblical scholars have argued. But from what we know of him, Jesus’s earthly father didn’t fit that stereotype. So to the extent that as a human being, Jesus’s concept of what a “father” was came from his own earthly father, it seems that what he meant when he talked about God as a father was someone who was kind, loving, compassionate, forgiving – someone who would put his life at risk to protect his son’s, someone who chooses mercy over judgment. Joseph is a reminder to us that those qualities are just as essential to what it means to be a man and a father as they are to what it means to be a woman and a mother.
Sunday, June 5, 2016
Gun Violence Awareness Sunday: Our faith calls us to more than just words
Sermon delivered Sunday, June 5, 2016 (The Third Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 5, Year C), at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
The women in the first reading and in the Gospel today are both grieving over lost sons. This is not an uncommon theme in the Bible; we could turn to any number of books in the Bible and find stories of grief over lost loved ones. In both passages today, the cause of death was illness or natural causes, but in many other parts of the Bible we have graphic stories of violent death and the mourning that follows when life is cut too short -- not because of natural causes, but because of the sinfulness of people.
This past Thursday, June 2, was National Gun Violence Awareness Day. This is a relatively new observance; only the second annual. And it came into existence not because of some government decree or some organization pronouncing it would be so, but through the grassroots organizing of a group of high school students in Chicago.
After losing their friend Hadiya Pendleton to a random shooting in January of 2013, Hadiya’s friends started a movement to raise awareness about gun violence. They encouraged their classmates to wear orange – the color hunters wear to protect themselves in the woods, the color of gun safety, the color that indicates that someone is not a target or something is not a weapon – they encouraged their classmates to wear orange on June 2, which was Hadiya’s birthday. The movement has gained momentum, and now people all over the country are wearing orange on June 2 to raise awareness about the toll gun violence is taking on our nation and to advocate for gun safety. And today, clergy all over the Episcopal Church are wearing orange stoles to stand in solidarity with this movement.
So as I looked at our lessons today, I noticed these grieving mothers. In these stories, both mothers get their sons back – God restores them to life, through the prayer of Elijah and the command of Jesus. These resurrection narratives remind us that death does not have the last word. We are given a promise that life will overcome death, that death cannot defeat us.
But what about Hadiya's parents? What about those mothers and fathers in Newtown, who will never see their children master reading, or get braces, or take the SATs? What about the mothers and fathers in Columbine, whose children never got to graduate from high school, who would have been my age now, had they lived, with careers and families and who knows what else? What about those children at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, whose parents were gunned down while they worshipped, whose parents will not be there to see them graduate, get married, have children? God hasn’t brought back their sons, their daughters, their mothers, their fathers, from the dead. What does resurrection mean for them? What does resurrection look like for them?
As a priest, I have a duty to remind the church of the power of the resurrection, to remind us that death does not have the last word. But sometimes that is difficult to do when all evidence around us seems to point to the contrary. Sometimes mere words don’t feel like enough. It’s not enough to say that death triumphs over life, it’s not enough to read the stories of Jesus raising someone’s son from the dead and hope against hope that this can happen for our loved ones, too. The purpose of our faith is not only to give comfort in times of despair, but to stir us to action, to work to prevent the preventable tragedies of this life. To demand that action be taken, to say “not one more!” Not one more life lost to preventable, unnecessary violence, to gun-related accidents, or to suicide.
Some tragedies in this life are beyond our control, like natural disasters – hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes – or many kinds of illnesses. For those things there will always be a theological question around why God allows these things to happen. But some things we can control. Some tragedies are due to human behavior, human sin, things that could be different if we were to be intentional about the choices we make and the actions we take. Gun violence is one of those tragedies. We CAN change it. It is within our power. We can’t blame God for it. We have to take responsibility for the ways we, as a species, have endlessly invented ways to harm each other and ourselves. We created the gun, and we are responsible for its misuse. We must, as our confession in the liturgy says, “repent of the evil that enslaves us – the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” And to repent means to CHANGE. To change direction. To turn around completely. To do something different. Not to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, which as we all know, is the definition of insanity. We must raise our voices and say, “enough is enough.”
In 2013, I led a Lenten series called “Christian Responses to Gun Violence.” It was right after 2012, a particularly bloody year in terms of mass shootings: the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in July, the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in August, and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December. We took the traditional Anglican “three-legged stool” approach and looked at what scripture, tradition, and reason had to say about the use of weapons and violent force. We realized that faithful Christians can and do disagree on the best way to protect innocent life, and that Christian ethics has historically had two different “positions” on the use of weapons and violent force: the pacifist perspective, which says that violence is never justified, and the just war theory, which says that violent force is justified in some circumstances, if the scenario meets a certain set of criteria, including that the violence is used as a last resort, that violence is done in service of the common good, and that only the minimal amount of violence necessary to bring about the desired result is used.
After considering all this, we got to the “so what” question – the question I want to hold up for you today. What does our faith call us to do in response to the tragic loss of life in our cities and towns due to gun violence? Surely our location on the edge of East Oakland, one of the most notorious neighborhoods in the country for gun violence -- makes this issue relevant and important to us as we seek to bring God’s justice and mercy to the communities around us.
In my research on how Christians of all sorts have responded to gun violence, I noticed three basic ways they have done so:
• political advocacy
• prayer and witness
• community development and empowerment.
The Episcopal Church has a public policy network that focuses exclusively on activism through political advocacy. They lobby Congress and advocate for certain courses of action that they believe are most congruous with the values of our faith. A group of bishops that formed after Newtown, led by the bishops of Connecticut, called Bishops United Against Gun Violence, and another group of lay people called Episcopalians Against Gun Violence, fall into this category. There are many ways to get involved in their work if political advocacy is where you are feeling called.
In the prayer and witness category, a church in New Orleans stands out. St. Anna’s Episcopal Church on the outskirts of the French Quarter has become known for their “murder board,” (click the word "murder board" for a link to a video about this ministry) a wall on the outside of the church where they record the name, age, and method of death for all local murder victims each week. In a city that has one of the highest murder rates in the country, this church is bearing public witness to the very human toll of urban violence, reminding the community that each one of the statistics is a human being with a name and a face and a family. They pray for each week’s victims by name in the Prayers of the People on Sundays as part of their liturgy.
Another example in this category would be this new icon (pictured at right). This is “Our Lady Mother of Ferguson and All Killed By Guns.” It was commissioned by Mark Bozzuti-Jones, a priest at Trinity Wall Street, and was written by Mark Dukes, the iconographer who wrote the dancing saints icons at St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco. This image powerfully speaks to how sacred and valuable every life lost to gun violence is, and gives voice, through visual representation, to the grief of those who remain to mourn their loss.
Finally, community development and empowerment. When I led the Lenten series in Nashville in 2013, I highlighted the work of a trauma surgeon who had started a violence prevention program in the public schools after seeing too many young people come through the ER as gunshot victims. He wanted to address the root causes of violence – poverty, lack of education, lack of positive mentors and role models, and so on – to try to help prevent these kids from winding up on his operating table in the ER.
One organization I’ve discovered here in Oakland that’s doing a similar kind of work is a program called Oakland Unite, part of the Department of Human Services for the City of Oakland, that leads violence prevention and intervention programs in the most at-risk parts of Oakland – but I turn to you all, the experts on this area, to let each other know about other initiatives you are familiar with that are doing good work to address the root causes of violence.
So, whether it’s political advocacy, prayer and witness, community development and empowerment, or all three, there is bound to be some way in which your gifts can be used to address this issue. And who knows? Some of you may be called to go even deeper and take a leadership role in this area. Or maybe St. Cuthbert’s as a community might be called to be God’s hands and feet in addressing violence in the neighborhoods that surround our church. That could be a critical part of our way forward. Again, we must listen for God’s call to us – taking the time for discernment is key. Where is the Holy Spirit calling you, calling us, on this issue, if anywhere? The psalmist reminds us today that “Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.” How can you, how can we, turn weeping into dancing for our brothers and sisters who live in constant fear of gun violence, especially our neighbors in East Oakland? Because our faith calls us to more than just words.
The women in the first reading and in the Gospel today are both grieving over lost sons. This is not an uncommon theme in the Bible; we could turn to any number of books in the Bible and find stories of grief over lost loved ones. In both passages today, the cause of death was illness or natural causes, but in many other parts of the Bible we have graphic stories of violent death and the mourning that follows when life is cut too short -- not because of natural causes, but because of the sinfulness of people.
This past Thursday, June 2, was National Gun Violence Awareness Day. This is a relatively new observance; only the second annual. And it came into existence not because of some government decree or some organization pronouncing it would be so, but through the grassroots organizing of a group of high school students in Chicago.
After losing their friend Hadiya Pendleton to a random shooting in January of 2013, Hadiya’s friends started a movement to raise awareness about gun violence. They encouraged their classmates to wear orange – the color hunters wear to protect themselves in the woods, the color of gun safety, the color that indicates that someone is not a target or something is not a weapon – they encouraged their classmates to wear orange on June 2, which was Hadiya’s birthday. The movement has gained momentum, and now people all over the country are wearing orange on June 2 to raise awareness about the toll gun violence is taking on our nation and to advocate for gun safety. And today, clergy all over the Episcopal Church are wearing orange stoles to stand in solidarity with this movement.
So as I looked at our lessons today, I noticed these grieving mothers. In these stories, both mothers get their sons back – God restores them to life, through the prayer of Elijah and the command of Jesus. These resurrection narratives remind us that death does not have the last word. We are given a promise that life will overcome death, that death cannot defeat us.
But what about Hadiya's parents? What about those mothers and fathers in Newtown, who will never see their children master reading, or get braces, or take the SATs? What about the mothers and fathers in Columbine, whose children never got to graduate from high school, who would have been my age now, had they lived, with careers and families and who knows what else? What about those children at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, whose parents were gunned down while they worshipped, whose parents will not be there to see them graduate, get married, have children? God hasn’t brought back their sons, their daughters, their mothers, their fathers, from the dead. What does resurrection mean for them? What does resurrection look like for them?
As a priest, I have a duty to remind the church of the power of the resurrection, to remind us that death does not have the last word. But sometimes that is difficult to do when all evidence around us seems to point to the contrary. Sometimes mere words don’t feel like enough. It’s not enough to say that death triumphs over life, it’s not enough to read the stories of Jesus raising someone’s son from the dead and hope against hope that this can happen for our loved ones, too. The purpose of our faith is not only to give comfort in times of despair, but to stir us to action, to work to prevent the preventable tragedies of this life. To demand that action be taken, to say “not one more!” Not one more life lost to preventable, unnecessary violence, to gun-related accidents, or to suicide.
Some tragedies in this life are beyond our control, like natural disasters – hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes – or many kinds of illnesses. For those things there will always be a theological question around why God allows these things to happen. But some things we can control. Some tragedies are due to human behavior, human sin, things that could be different if we were to be intentional about the choices we make and the actions we take. Gun violence is one of those tragedies. We CAN change it. It is within our power. We can’t blame God for it. We have to take responsibility for the ways we, as a species, have endlessly invented ways to harm each other and ourselves. We created the gun, and we are responsible for its misuse. We must, as our confession in the liturgy says, “repent of the evil that enslaves us – the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” And to repent means to CHANGE. To change direction. To turn around completely. To do something different. Not to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, which as we all know, is the definition of insanity. We must raise our voices and say, “enough is enough.”
In 2013, I led a Lenten series called “Christian Responses to Gun Violence.” It was right after 2012, a particularly bloody year in terms of mass shootings: the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in July, the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in August, and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December. We took the traditional Anglican “three-legged stool” approach and looked at what scripture, tradition, and reason had to say about the use of weapons and violent force. We realized that faithful Christians can and do disagree on the best way to protect innocent life, and that Christian ethics has historically had two different “positions” on the use of weapons and violent force: the pacifist perspective, which says that violence is never justified, and the just war theory, which says that violent force is justified in some circumstances, if the scenario meets a certain set of criteria, including that the violence is used as a last resort, that violence is done in service of the common good, and that only the minimal amount of violence necessary to bring about the desired result is used.
After considering all this, we got to the “so what” question – the question I want to hold up for you today. What does our faith call us to do in response to the tragic loss of life in our cities and towns due to gun violence? Surely our location on the edge of East Oakland, one of the most notorious neighborhoods in the country for gun violence -- makes this issue relevant and important to us as we seek to bring God’s justice and mercy to the communities around us.
In my research on how Christians of all sorts have responded to gun violence, I noticed three basic ways they have done so:
• political advocacy
• prayer and witness
• community development and empowerment.
The Episcopal Church has a public policy network that focuses exclusively on activism through political advocacy. They lobby Congress and advocate for certain courses of action that they believe are most congruous with the values of our faith. A group of bishops that formed after Newtown, led by the bishops of Connecticut, called Bishops United Against Gun Violence, and another group of lay people called Episcopalians Against Gun Violence, fall into this category. There are many ways to get involved in their work if political advocacy is where you are feeling called.
In the prayer and witness category, a church in New Orleans stands out. St. Anna’s Episcopal Church on the outskirts of the French Quarter has become known for their “murder board,” (click the word "murder board" for a link to a video about this ministry) a wall on the outside of the church where they record the name, age, and method of death for all local murder victims each week. In a city that has one of the highest murder rates in the country, this church is bearing public witness to the very human toll of urban violence, reminding the community that each one of the statistics is a human being with a name and a face and a family. They pray for each week’s victims by name in the Prayers of the People on Sundays as part of their liturgy.
Finally, community development and empowerment. When I led the Lenten series in Nashville in 2013, I highlighted the work of a trauma surgeon who had started a violence prevention program in the public schools after seeing too many young people come through the ER as gunshot victims. He wanted to address the root causes of violence – poverty, lack of education, lack of positive mentors and role models, and so on – to try to help prevent these kids from winding up on his operating table in the ER.
One organization I’ve discovered here in Oakland that’s doing a similar kind of work is a program called Oakland Unite, part of the Department of Human Services for the City of Oakland, that leads violence prevention and intervention programs in the most at-risk parts of Oakland – but I turn to you all, the experts on this area, to let each other know about other initiatives you are familiar with that are doing good work to address the root causes of violence.
So, whether it’s political advocacy, prayer and witness, community development and empowerment, or all three, there is bound to be some way in which your gifts can be used to address this issue. And who knows? Some of you may be called to go even deeper and take a leadership role in this area. Or maybe St. Cuthbert’s as a community might be called to be God’s hands and feet in addressing violence in the neighborhoods that surround our church. That could be a critical part of our way forward. Again, we must listen for God’s call to us – taking the time for discernment is key. Where is the Holy Spirit calling you, calling us, on this issue, if anywhere? The psalmist reminds us today that “Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.” How can you, how can we, turn weeping into dancing for our brothers and sisters who live in constant fear of gun violence, especially our neighbors in East Oakland? Because our faith calls us to more than just words.
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, August 10, 2014
Walking on water: Overcoming fear to do things we didn't think we could do
Sermon delivered Sunday, August 10, 2014 (9 Pentecost, Year A, Proper 14), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN. (Text: Matthew 14:22-33)
Today’s Gospel reading about Jesus walking on water is one of the most famous stories in scripture. There are countless representations of it in art, and it has made its way into our everyday language as an idiomatic expression for being idolized or worshipped: “His fans think he can walk on water!” We often read this passage as a story about Jesus’s divinity, but today I’m going to suggest we look at it from another perspective: as a story about Peter, and by extension, all of us, and our life of faith.
Although we tend to think of Jesus’s ability to walk on water as one of the “proofs” that he was God, we forget that, according to Matthew’s account, Peter was also able to walk on water, however short-lived his journey out of the boat was. If this is true, then walking on water must not be something only God can do, since Peter clearly was not God. Perhaps this was Jesus’s way of showing the disciples what amazing things they would be capable of doing if they could let go of fear and be completely and totally focused on God.
Notice what happens to Peter. He is able to walk on the water after Jesus calls him, but when he notices the strong wind and becomes frightened, he starts to sink. It is his fear, and the distraction from his focus that that fear causes, that thwarts his attempt to walk on water.
I can imagine a bit of what Peter might have felt in that moment, and I bet you can too. If you have ever learned to ride a bike or helped a child learn to ride a bike, you know how much of that initial inability to balance is psychological, how much fear plays into the constant falls and skinned knees.
I remember how terrified I was when the training wheels first came off my bike when I was a child. The first time I got on a bike without training wheels, I put my feet up on the pedals and promptly fell over sideways. After slamming into the concrete, I was wary about getting back in the saddle again, so my father quickly intervened and assured me that he would hold on to the back of my seat while I pedaled, to keep me upright and balanced. He did so, and knowing that my dad was behind me, holding on to me so that I couldn’t fall, I pedaled happily around the driveway for some time, enjoying myself and feeling safe, until suddenly I noticed my dad was on the other side of the driveway! And he wasn’t holding on to me anymore! My parents beamed with pride – “Look, you’re doing it!” they cried – and then of course, I promptly fell over again.
As soon as I realized I wasn’t being held, as soon as I realized what I was actually doing, the fear returned. It distracted me from my focus, and I fell. More recently, I’ve experienced this dynamic in my practice of yoga. As I’ve begun to work on some of the balancing poses, trying to perch my body on top of my forearms or do a headstand, I’ve found that fear is the biggest obstacle, more so than physical strength. When the teacher instructs us to lean forward into the pose, it’s difficult to do so when that feels like it’s going to make you fall flat on your face – but if I listen and do what they say, I find that they’re right – the balance point is there, just a bit farther forward than feels comfortable. Just this week I was working on a headstand in class, and had the teacher spot me – and once I realized she wasn’t holding on to me anymore, that I was actually there, hanging out in a headstand, I started to fall. It was like being a child learning to ride that bike all over again – “Look, I’m doing it – um, wait a minute – help!!”
I’m sure many of you know the feeling of that moment – that moment where you realize you’re doing something you didn’t think you could do, without the support you thought you had, and the realization of that shakes you – the fear returns, it makes you lose your focus, and suddenly you fall. I can imagine that that feeling is what Peter felt in that moment where he suddenly realized, “Look! I’m walking on water here in the middle of a storm…. um, wait a minute, HELP!”
Fear is the ultimate issue here, whether learning to ride a bike or to live as a follower of Jesus Christ. In the Gospel story, it wasn’t just Peter who was afraid, but all the disciples in the boat. The text says they were “terrified” and “cried out in fear,” and of course it is fear that causes Peter to slip. Jesus’s response to Peter, after rescuing him, is, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” The doubt he’s referring to is not about intellectual questions, but about a lack of focus and trust, about allowing fear to take over. His question to Peter is not, “Why did you have questions about what you believe,” but “Why did you allow your fear to be stronger than your trust in me?” Jesus had just said to them, “It is I; do not be afraid,” and almost universally throughout the scriptures, the message from heavenly beings when they first appear to humans is, “Do not be afraid. Do not fear.” The divine messengers first tell us not to be afraid because God knows we cannot do anything until we are able to overcome our fear.
In our life of faith, we are constantly learning to walk on water – to do what seems impossible to us, to let go of fear and step out in trust. We are learning to do things that are counter to what our natural inclinations might be, counter to how we might do things if we relied solely on our own thought processes and reasoning: love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, if someone takes from you your coat, give him your cloak also – all these teachings of Jesus can seem just as difficult as walking on water, and require just as much trust. And sometimes, when we begin to live our lives the Gospel way, we get scared – we suddenly look back and realize we’re doing something that we didn’t think we could do, or something that seems crazy to us. “What did I just do? I just gave up an opportunity to get revenge on someone who hurt me? What if they hurt me again?” We feel vulnerable, and we get scared, and we start to sink. But the good news is that Jesus is always there, ready to catch us, saying, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” And as he catches us, he reminds us of where our focus ought to be: on him. It was when Peter was completely and totally focused on Jesus that he was able to step out onto the stormy waters and not be overtaken by them. We too must have that kind of focus on Jesus, so that we can overcome the fear that would prevent us from living Gospel lives.
If we can let go of fear and turn our complete focus on Jesus, we too can prevail over the stormy waters. And as we step out of the boat, we will look over and see the Father beaming with pride and saying, “Look! You’re doing it!” And this time, maybe we won’t fall.
Today’s Gospel reading about Jesus walking on water is one of the most famous stories in scripture. There are countless representations of it in art, and it has made its way into our everyday language as an idiomatic expression for being idolized or worshipped: “His fans think he can walk on water!” We often read this passage as a story about Jesus’s divinity, but today I’m going to suggest we look at it from another perspective: as a story about Peter, and by extension, all of us, and our life of faith.
Although we tend to think of Jesus’s ability to walk on water as one of the “proofs” that he was God, we forget that, according to Matthew’s account, Peter was also able to walk on water, however short-lived his journey out of the boat was. If this is true, then walking on water must not be something only God can do, since Peter clearly was not God. Perhaps this was Jesus’s way of showing the disciples what amazing things they would be capable of doing if they could let go of fear and be completely and totally focused on God.
Notice what happens to Peter. He is able to walk on the water after Jesus calls him, but when he notices the strong wind and becomes frightened, he starts to sink. It is his fear, and the distraction from his focus that that fear causes, that thwarts his attempt to walk on water.
I can imagine a bit of what Peter might have felt in that moment, and I bet you can too. If you have ever learned to ride a bike or helped a child learn to ride a bike, you know how much of that initial inability to balance is psychological, how much fear plays into the constant falls and skinned knees.
I remember how terrified I was when the training wheels first came off my bike when I was a child. The first time I got on a bike without training wheels, I put my feet up on the pedals and promptly fell over sideways. After slamming into the concrete, I was wary about getting back in the saddle again, so my father quickly intervened and assured me that he would hold on to the back of my seat while I pedaled, to keep me upright and balanced. He did so, and knowing that my dad was behind me, holding on to me so that I couldn’t fall, I pedaled happily around the driveway for some time, enjoying myself and feeling safe, until suddenly I noticed my dad was on the other side of the driveway! And he wasn’t holding on to me anymore! My parents beamed with pride – “Look, you’re doing it!” they cried – and then of course, I promptly fell over again.
As soon as I realized I wasn’t being held, as soon as I realized what I was actually doing, the fear returned. It distracted me from my focus, and I fell. More recently, I’ve experienced this dynamic in my practice of yoga. As I’ve begun to work on some of the balancing poses, trying to perch my body on top of my forearms or do a headstand, I’ve found that fear is the biggest obstacle, more so than physical strength. When the teacher instructs us to lean forward into the pose, it’s difficult to do so when that feels like it’s going to make you fall flat on your face – but if I listen and do what they say, I find that they’re right – the balance point is there, just a bit farther forward than feels comfortable. Just this week I was working on a headstand in class, and had the teacher spot me – and once I realized she wasn’t holding on to me anymore, that I was actually there, hanging out in a headstand, I started to fall. It was like being a child learning to ride that bike all over again – “Look, I’m doing it – um, wait a minute – help!!”
I’m sure many of you know the feeling of that moment – that moment where you realize you’re doing something you didn’t think you could do, without the support you thought you had, and the realization of that shakes you – the fear returns, it makes you lose your focus, and suddenly you fall. I can imagine that that feeling is what Peter felt in that moment where he suddenly realized, “Look! I’m walking on water here in the middle of a storm…. um, wait a minute, HELP!”
Fear is the ultimate issue here, whether learning to ride a bike or to live as a follower of Jesus Christ. In the Gospel story, it wasn’t just Peter who was afraid, but all the disciples in the boat. The text says they were “terrified” and “cried out in fear,” and of course it is fear that causes Peter to slip. Jesus’s response to Peter, after rescuing him, is, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” The doubt he’s referring to is not about intellectual questions, but about a lack of focus and trust, about allowing fear to take over. His question to Peter is not, “Why did you have questions about what you believe,” but “Why did you allow your fear to be stronger than your trust in me?” Jesus had just said to them, “It is I; do not be afraid,” and almost universally throughout the scriptures, the message from heavenly beings when they first appear to humans is, “Do not be afraid. Do not fear.” The divine messengers first tell us not to be afraid because God knows we cannot do anything until we are able to overcome our fear.
In our life of faith, we are constantly learning to walk on water – to do what seems impossible to us, to let go of fear and step out in trust. We are learning to do things that are counter to what our natural inclinations might be, counter to how we might do things if we relied solely on our own thought processes and reasoning: love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, if someone takes from you your coat, give him your cloak also – all these teachings of Jesus can seem just as difficult as walking on water, and require just as much trust. And sometimes, when we begin to live our lives the Gospel way, we get scared – we suddenly look back and realize we’re doing something that we didn’t think we could do, or something that seems crazy to us. “What did I just do? I just gave up an opportunity to get revenge on someone who hurt me? What if they hurt me again?” We feel vulnerable, and we get scared, and we start to sink. But the good news is that Jesus is always there, ready to catch us, saying, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” And as he catches us, he reminds us of where our focus ought to be: on him. It was when Peter was completely and totally focused on Jesus that he was able to step out onto the stormy waters and not be overtaken by them. We too must have that kind of focus on Jesus, so that we can overcome the fear that would prevent us from living Gospel lives.
If we can let go of fear and turn our complete focus on Jesus, we too can prevail over the stormy waters. And as we step out of the boat, we will look over and see the Father beaming with pride and saying, “Look! You’re doing it!” And this time, maybe we won’t fall.
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Is faith a choice or a gift?
Sermon delivered Sunday, March 16, 2014 (Second Sunday in Lent, Year A), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Genesis 12:1-4; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17).
The season of Lent calls us to be intentional about our spiritual lives: to spend time in prayer, in reading the scriptures, and in self-examination and reflection. One could say that Lent calls us to deepen our faith.
Our readings for today convey the message that our faith is what makes us right with God. These passages represent one side of the classic debate between faith and works – is it our faith, our beliefs, that put us into right relationship with God, or is it our works, our actions, the things we do in this world? Our scriptures for today clearly come down on the “faith” side of the question.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul argues that Abraham was justified – made right with God – not by anything he did, but by having faith – by trusting God’s promise to him. In making this argument, Paul is commenting on a passage from Genesis, chapter 15, just a few chapters after our reading from the Hebrew Bible for today. Chapter 15 includes the famous scene where God shows Abraham a vision – that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky – and after that vision, the scripture tells us that “[Abraham] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). Paul builds his argument for justification by faith on this line from Genesis. He points out that Abraham was considered “righteous” before God officially made the covenant with Abraham, so Abraham’s righteousness did not come through the law, which was given later, but through his simple trusting in the word he heard from God.
In our Gospel passage, Jesus encounters a prominent leader of Israel named Nicodemus. Nicodemus goes to visit Jesus by night – perhaps because he does not want to be seen associating with this “rabble rouser” in the light of day – but the fact that he goes to him at all shows that he is drawn to him in some way. He acknowledges that Jesus is “a teacher who has come from God,” showing that he does not entirely reject Jesus and his teachings. But Jesus doesn’t give Nicodemus any gold stars for acknowledging him as a teacher. Instead, he launches into a statement about the importance of being “born from above” in order to “see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). Jesus can tell that Nicodemus has not yet “gotten it,” so to speak. Perhaps his concern with observance of the law has gotten in the way of his understanding the deeper spiritual message; we don’t know. But Jesus is not impressed with Nicodemus’s tentative praise of him. The passage concludes with one of the most famous lines in Scripture – John 3:16 – “for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Again, we are brought back to the importance of faith – everyone who believes in him will have eternal life, just as Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.
So, the call to us is to have faith, to believe. In Christian circles, this idea is often presented as much easier than “earning” our way into salvation by our works: “What great news – we are saved by faith alone! All we have to do is believe!” But as anyone who has ever struggled with serious doubts knows, it is often much easier to do “good works” than it is to believe in what are some pretty incredible statements that the church holds up as true. This is why plenty of people can go out and feed the hungry and advocate for justice but can’t bring themselves to say the Nicene Creed. It is often easier to do something than it is to believe something.
I’m very interested in why it is that certain people find it easy to believe, to have faith, while other people find themselves stuck, unable to move past their doubt and skepticism to surrender to the life of faith. What made Peter, Andrew, James, and John willing to drop everything and follow Jesus when he called their names, while Nicodemus was drawn to Jesus, but not willing to leave everything to follow him? Why are you all here week after week, active in the life of the church, while you may have friends or family members who were raised with the same exposure to the church and the Christian faith, who are not active in church, and perhaps even skeptical about religion in general? If faith is what makes us right with God, how do we get it? What makes it possible for us to have faith?
I used to believe that faith was entirely a choice: God has created us with free will, so we have the freedom to choose faith or to choose unbelief. From this perspective, the burden of action is entirely ours. God has already acted in history, through the resurrection of Jesus; now it is our choice whether we accept or reject that gift of life.
But as my faith developed, I began to question the notion that my faith was entirely my choice. Yes, I did choose to follow Jesus when I was a teenager and have continued to try to follow him, but why was I drawn to pursue a spiritual path at all? I no more chose my natural inclination toward thinking theologically than I chose my affinity for strawberries or for the color purple. Those things were planted in me from the beginning, it seems, part of my personality, something I did nothing to create.
So I began to think that perhaps the ability to have faith at all is a gift from God. One commentator on this passage from John points out that Jesus’s use of the birth metaphor points to the initiative in matters of faith coming from God rather than from us. Just as babies do not choose to be born, so we cannot choose to be “born again” [1] – such an experience is a gift from God that is bestowed on us. Jesus says to Nicodemus, “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). Just as we cannot control the wind, we cannot control how God’s Spirit moves in our lives and in the lives of others.
Looking at it this way allows us to let go of feeling like the burden is all on us – to have faith and to lead others to have faith. A friend who was going through a difficult time once said to me that in her dark moments, she has to believe that God chooses her, rather than the other way around. “I CANNOT choose faith right now,” she said. “So I have to trust that God chooses me.” From that theological perspective, the burden of action is entirely God’s. If we have faith, it is only because God has created and planted that faith in us.
But that idea is not entirely satisfactory, either, for it runs the risk of falling into fatalism and making a mockery of human choice, making us into puppets stripped of any kind of real freedom.
And so, I’m coming to think that perhaps the truth is somewhere in between those two viewpoints. In true Episcopal fashion, I’m proposing a via media, a "middle way," which is that faith is neither entirely our choice nor entirely a gift from God, but some complicated combination of the two. The problem with the other two scenarios is that in both of them, there is only one active party in the equation: either faith is entirely up to us, or faith is entirely up to God. But faith in God is a relationship, and a relationship requires action by both parties. For a life of faith to flourish, both we and God need to act. The key is remembering that we control only our side of the relationship.
We can smile and act friendly toward someone, but that does not guarantee that that person will become our friend. We cannot control how the other person will respond to us. The same is true in our relationship with God. We can pray and come to Eucharist and say all the right words and do all the right things, but that does not guarantee that in our heart of hearts, we will truly believe and feel close to God. We still have to wait for God to show up, for God to act on God’s side of the relationship. Despite what our liturgies sometimes lead us to believe, we cannot make God show up by saying certain magic words or making certain gestures with our hands. God is not a robot or a vending machine. We cannot force God’s action in our lives, any more than we can force ourselves to have faith.
So perhaps what we are called to do during Lent is not to deepen our faith, but to deepen our spiritual practice. What we can control is our actions and choices on our side of the relationship. We can choose to show up wherever it is that we feel most likely to encounter God – in the church, out in nature, in the midst of our family and friends – and wait. This might mean we spend more time in silence, more time listening rather than speaking in our prayer life. But whatever the practices that work best for us, we can do them with a posture of openness – perhaps literally, praying with open hands, open palms, or metaphorically, opening our hearts – so that we become more receptive to God’s presence and action within and around us, so that we are primed and prepped to notice when God does choose to show up.
Jesus told Nicodemus, “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). In our spiritual practice, we are building ourselves a wind turbine, so that when God’s Spirit does blow in our lives, we have the mechanism ready to capture its energy and allow it to fuel us.
This is what spiritual practice is all about – it is quite literally a practice to prepare ourselves to be ready for those moments when we receive a vision, or a strong inner sense of God’s call, or a deep abiding sense of God’s love and comfort – all of which are pure gifts of grace. We cannot make those experiences happen, but we can keep the lines of communication open. And that’s all we are asked to do on the spiritual path – to show up, to be open – and to leave the rest to God.
----
[1] Dick Donovan, Sermon Writer (www.sermonwriter.com).
The season of Lent calls us to be intentional about our spiritual lives: to spend time in prayer, in reading the scriptures, and in self-examination and reflection. One could say that Lent calls us to deepen our faith.
Our readings for today convey the message that our faith is what makes us right with God. These passages represent one side of the classic debate between faith and works – is it our faith, our beliefs, that put us into right relationship with God, or is it our works, our actions, the things we do in this world? Our scriptures for today clearly come down on the “faith” side of the question.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul argues that Abraham was justified – made right with God – not by anything he did, but by having faith – by trusting God’s promise to him. In making this argument, Paul is commenting on a passage from Genesis, chapter 15, just a few chapters after our reading from the Hebrew Bible for today. Chapter 15 includes the famous scene where God shows Abraham a vision – that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky – and after that vision, the scripture tells us that “[Abraham] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). Paul builds his argument for justification by faith on this line from Genesis. He points out that Abraham was considered “righteous” before God officially made the covenant with Abraham, so Abraham’s righteousness did not come through the law, which was given later, but through his simple trusting in the word he heard from God.
In our Gospel passage, Jesus encounters a prominent leader of Israel named Nicodemus. Nicodemus goes to visit Jesus by night – perhaps because he does not want to be seen associating with this “rabble rouser” in the light of day – but the fact that he goes to him at all shows that he is drawn to him in some way. He acknowledges that Jesus is “a teacher who has come from God,” showing that he does not entirely reject Jesus and his teachings. But Jesus doesn’t give Nicodemus any gold stars for acknowledging him as a teacher. Instead, he launches into a statement about the importance of being “born from above” in order to “see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). Jesus can tell that Nicodemus has not yet “gotten it,” so to speak. Perhaps his concern with observance of the law has gotten in the way of his understanding the deeper spiritual message; we don’t know. But Jesus is not impressed with Nicodemus’s tentative praise of him. The passage concludes with one of the most famous lines in Scripture – John 3:16 – “for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Again, we are brought back to the importance of faith – everyone who believes in him will have eternal life, just as Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.
So, the call to us is to have faith, to believe. In Christian circles, this idea is often presented as much easier than “earning” our way into salvation by our works: “What great news – we are saved by faith alone! All we have to do is believe!” But as anyone who has ever struggled with serious doubts knows, it is often much easier to do “good works” than it is to believe in what are some pretty incredible statements that the church holds up as true. This is why plenty of people can go out and feed the hungry and advocate for justice but can’t bring themselves to say the Nicene Creed. It is often easier to do something than it is to believe something.
I’m very interested in why it is that certain people find it easy to believe, to have faith, while other people find themselves stuck, unable to move past their doubt and skepticism to surrender to the life of faith. What made Peter, Andrew, James, and John willing to drop everything and follow Jesus when he called their names, while Nicodemus was drawn to Jesus, but not willing to leave everything to follow him? Why are you all here week after week, active in the life of the church, while you may have friends or family members who were raised with the same exposure to the church and the Christian faith, who are not active in church, and perhaps even skeptical about religion in general? If faith is what makes us right with God, how do we get it? What makes it possible for us to have faith?
I used to believe that faith was entirely a choice: God has created us with free will, so we have the freedom to choose faith or to choose unbelief. From this perspective, the burden of action is entirely ours. God has already acted in history, through the resurrection of Jesus; now it is our choice whether we accept or reject that gift of life.
But as my faith developed, I began to question the notion that my faith was entirely my choice. Yes, I did choose to follow Jesus when I was a teenager and have continued to try to follow him, but why was I drawn to pursue a spiritual path at all? I no more chose my natural inclination toward thinking theologically than I chose my affinity for strawberries or for the color purple. Those things were planted in me from the beginning, it seems, part of my personality, something I did nothing to create.
So I began to think that perhaps the ability to have faith at all is a gift from God. One commentator on this passage from John points out that Jesus’s use of the birth metaphor points to the initiative in matters of faith coming from God rather than from us. Just as babies do not choose to be born, so we cannot choose to be “born again” [1] – such an experience is a gift from God that is bestowed on us. Jesus says to Nicodemus, “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). Just as we cannot control the wind, we cannot control how God’s Spirit moves in our lives and in the lives of others.
Looking at it this way allows us to let go of feeling like the burden is all on us – to have faith and to lead others to have faith. A friend who was going through a difficult time once said to me that in her dark moments, she has to believe that God chooses her, rather than the other way around. “I CANNOT choose faith right now,” she said. “So I have to trust that God chooses me.” From that theological perspective, the burden of action is entirely God’s. If we have faith, it is only because God has created and planted that faith in us.
But that idea is not entirely satisfactory, either, for it runs the risk of falling into fatalism and making a mockery of human choice, making us into puppets stripped of any kind of real freedom.
And so, I’m coming to think that perhaps the truth is somewhere in between those two viewpoints. In true Episcopal fashion, I’m proposing a via media, a "middle way," which is that faith is neither entirely our choice nor entirely a gift from God, but some complicated combination of the two. The problem with the other two scenarios is that in both of them, there is only one active party in the equation: either faith is entirely up to us, or faith is entirely up to God. But faith in God is a relationship, and a relationship requires action by both parties. For a life of faith to flourish, both we and God need to act. The key is remembering that we control only our side of the relationship.
We can smile and act friendly toward someone, but that does not guarantee that that person will become our friend. We cannot control how the other person will respond to us. The same is true in our relationship with God. We can pray and come to Eucharist and say all the right words and do all the right things, but that does not guarantee that in our heart of hearts, we will truly believe and feel close to God. We still have to wait for God to show up, for God to act on God’s side of the relationship. Despite what our liturgies sometimes lead us to believe, we cannot make God show up by saying certain magic words or making certain gestures with our hands. God is not a robot or a vending machine. We cannot force God’s action in our lives, any more than we can force ourselves to have faith.
So perhaps what we are called to do during Lent is not to deepen our faith, but to deepen our spiritual practice. What we can control is our actions and choices on our side of the relationship. We can choose to show up wherever it is that we feel most likely to encounter God – in the church, out in nature, in the midst of our family and friends – and wait. This might mean we spend more time in silence, more time listening rather than speaking in our prayer life. But whatever the practices that work best for us, we can do them with a posture of openness – perhaps literally, praying with open hands, open palms, or metaphorically, opening our hearts – so that we become more receptive to God’s presence and action within and around us, so that we are primed and prepped to notice when God does choose to show up.
This is what spiritual practice is all about – it is quite literally a practice to prepare ourselves to be ready for those moments when we receive a vision, or a strong inner sense of God’s call, or a deep abiding sense of God’s love and comfort – all of which are pure gifts of grace. We cannot make those experiences happen, but we can keep the lines of communication open. And that’s all we are asked to do on the spiritual path – to show up, to be open – and to leave the rest to God.
----
[1] Dick Donovan, Sermon Writer (www.sermonwriter.com).
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Two widow's sons raised, two similar yet different messages
Sermon delivered Sunday, June 9, 2013 (3rd Sunday After Pentecost, Year C, Proper 5) at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN. (1 Kings 17:8-24, Luke 7:11-17)
It’s no coincidence that our lectionary pairs today’s reading from 1 Kings with our Gospel passage from Luke. Jesus’s actions in raising the widow’s son at Nain are in some ways an echo of the story of Elijah raising the widow’s son at Zarephath – and certainly, his Jewish followers and audience would have seen “Elijah themes” in this event in Jesus’s ministry.
The stories about Elijah were and still are some of the most beloved stories of the Jewish faith. Elijah is considered one of the greatest prophets, and is closely connected with prophecies about the Messiah: it is believed that Elijah must return before the coming of the Messiah. This is why Elijah pops up in discussion frequently in the New Testament stories. As Jesus’s followers and the community around him began to connect him with messianic prophecies, they struggled to figure out who Jesus was in connection to Elijah.
You may remember that Elijah’s earthly life ended when he was taken up into heaven in a chariot of fire (2 Kings 2:1-15). Tradition held that he would return on his chariot from heaven before the coming of the Messiah. Even though there were many messianic-like things about Jesus, no one had seen any chariots of fire yet, which led to two possible conclusions: either Jesus wasn’t the messiah because Elijah hadn’t come back yet, or maybe Elijah had come back in a different way. Stories like this one about Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain had enough parallels with stories about Elijah that some people began to think, “Hmm – well maybe this guy isn’t actually the messiah, but is Elijah come back again!”
Immediately after the story of the raising of the widow’s son in Luke, the disciples of John the Baptist go to Jesus and ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Lk. 7:19) That seemingly vague statement was actually a very specific question about Jesus’s identity: Are you the messiah, or are you Elijah? Are you “the one,” the promised messiah to come, or are you Elijah, the messenger who has come to announce that “the one” is near? Jesus’s response to the questioners is, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (Mt. 11:4, Lk. 7:22) – all of which were things that the messiah was expected to do (see Isaiah 61:1-3, 42:7). Although he does not say directly, “Yes, I am the one who is to come, the messiah,” they would have gotten the message as Jesus identified himself with the prophecies about the promised messiah.
In Matthew’s version of the story, after Jesus identifies himself with the messianic prophecies in his answer to John’s disciples, he goes on to explicitly identify John the Baptist as the returned Elijah figure. In both Matthew and Luke, Jesus calls John the Baptist “more than a prophet” (Mt. 11:9, Lk. 7:26), “the one about whom it is written, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you’ (Mt. 11:10, Lk. 7:27) – the role that Elijah was to play for the messiah. But in Matthew’s version of the story, he goes on to say specifically, “For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John came, and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come” (Mt. 11:13).
In pairing these two stories together in our lectionary, of Elijah raising the widow’s son at Zarephath and Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain, we are invited to notice the parallels but also the differences between Elijah and Jesus. In noticing the parallels between the stories, we can begin to understand why some people in Jesus’s day would have confused him with the prophet Elijah, but we also notice a key difference between the stories. While Elijah appears confused and upset by the death of the widow’s son and questions why God has brought calamity on this woman by killing her son, Jesus does not seem confused and distraught by the death of the widow’s son. He has compassion on her, yes, but there is no impassioned plea like Elijah’s begging that God would restore life to the son. Instead, Jesus appears calm and in control. He does not plead with God to restore the man to life; he commands it to be so himself. “Young man, I say to you, rise!” (Lk. 7:14) Jesus says, which is quite different from Eljah’s prayer: “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again” (1 Kings 17:21). Jesus’s words presume an authority and omnipotence that Elijah’s do not. The story also refers to Jesus as “Lord,” and although that word could be used of earthly lords and masters, it was also the word that had come to be used to refer to God. Jesus commands the son to rise as if speaking with the authority of the Lord God himself. It is not entirely improbable that the disciples told the story of Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain in this way precisely to emphasize the distinction between Elijah and Jesus – Elijah was great, and there may be similarities between Elijah and Jesus, but Jesus is greater than Elijah.
Another interesting point of contrast between the two stories has nothing to do with the comparison between Elijah and Jesus, but speaks to our own struggles with prayers for assistance and healing. Although the Elijah story implies that the widow’s son is raised because his mother has shown hospitality to a prophet, and that righteous prophet prays for him to be raised, in the Gospel story we hear no mention of faith or righteousness as a prerequisite for Jesus raising the widow’s son. We are not told anything about the faith of the widow or of her son, although we might be able to safely assume that they were Jewish, since they lived in Nain, a town not too far from Jesus’s hometown of Nazareth in the Galilean region. But in contrast to so many biblical stories, the widow does not seek Jesus out and ask him to do anything for her. He simply happens to be passing by as the funeral procession comes out of the town and takes it upon himself to restore this man to life, without being asked to do anything.
To me, this is a rather refreshing reminder that sometimes God simply acts to bestow mercy and grace upon us, even without any action on our part. So often the theme of healing stories in the Gospels is, “your faith has made you well,” which can carry the implicit message that if you haven’t been made well, then perhaps it’s because your faith is not good enough or strong enough. What about those of us who pray earnestly without ceasing for healing, but healing never comes? We might begin to think that this a sign of God’s judgment on us, oh we of little faith.
But Jesus’s raising of the widow’s son at Nain shows that faith is not always a prerequisite for healing, and that in some cases, we don’t even have to ask for God’s healing for it to come to us. If this is so, then we can’t blame our lack of healing on a lack of faith.
Although this is somewhat freeing on the one hand – to think that it doesn’t all depend on us, that we don’t have to have the right kind of faith or a strong enough faith for God to heal us – it is also somewhat unsettling because it removes any sense of control that we might think we have over the situation. We are left at the mercy of a God who we cannot control through saying the right prayers or offering the right sacrifices.
And it raises the question of why God deals differently with different people. Why does Jesus raise the widow’s son at Nain, but not the man’s father who asks Jesus if he can return home to bury his father before coming to follow Jesus (Lk. 9:59-60)? In the case of the widow at Nain, Jesus’s reaction to her loss is compassion and a restoration of her loved one to life, but when a man Jesus calls tells him he must first return home to bury his father, Jesus’s response is the classic, “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Lk. 9:60), in what comes across as a rather brusque and uncaring response to a man in grief. Why does Jesus raise the widow’s son and not this man’s father? Why are some people healed and others aren’t, when both are equally prayed for by the same community?
I wish I had answers to these questions, but I don’t. Ultimately, I think we have to trust that we are in the hands of a God much greater than we are, and even when it seems God has ignored our prayers or abandoned us, God is actually still working for what is best for each one of us.
The psalms are a model of this kind of trust in the midst of unknowing, of loyalty even to a God who doesn’t always give us what we want. The psalmist cries laments of pain, asking God why God has abandoned him, why God allows some people to prosper while others suffer, seemingly for no reason, but the psalmist always ultimately comes around to a statement of praise. Most poignant of all the psalms to us in the Christian tradition is Psalm 22, the one that Jesus cried on the cross. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” it begins in verse one. But by verse 21, the psalmist affirms that despite his suffering and apparent rejection by God, he will still praise God: “I will declare your Name to my brethren; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.” The psalmist always recognizes the sovereignty of God, that God is ultimately in charge, even if he doesn’t always like the way God is running things!
We don’t have to understand God’s ways in order to be able to stand in awe of him as the one “who made heaven and earth” (Psalm 146:5), and our faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead encourages us to affirm that even in the darkest moments of humanity can arise light and salvation. Even when all we see is silence and unanswered prayers, we can affirm with Paul in his letter to the Romans that “all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). And we can be encouraged by the fact it doesn’t all depend on our faith and our actions – that sometimes, like the widow at Nain, God may send blessings into our lives when we haven’t even asked for them.
It’s no coincidence that our lectionary pairs today’s reading from 1 Kings with our Gospel passage from Luke. Jesus’s actions in raising the widow’s son at Nain are in some ways an echo of the story of Elijah raising the widow’s son at Zarephath – and certainly, his Jewish followers and audience would have seen “Elijah themes” in this event in Jesus’s ministry.
The stories about Elijah were and still are some of the most beloved stories of the Jewish faith. Elijah is considered one of the greatest prophets, and is closely connected with prophecies about the Messiah: it is believed that Elijah must return before the coming of the Messiah. This is why Elijah pops up in discussion frequently in the New Testament stories. As Jesus’s followers and the community around him began to connect him with messianic prophecies, they struggled to figure out who Jesus was in connection to Elijah.
You may remember that Elijah’s earthly life ended when he was taken up into heaven in a chariot of fire (2 Kings 2:1-15). Tradition held that he would return on his chariot from heaven before the coming of the Messiah. Even though there were many messianic-like things about Jesus, no one had seen any chariots of fire yet, which led to two possible conclusions: either Jesus wasn’t the messiah because Elijah hadn’t come back yet, or maybe Elijah had come back in a different way. Stories like this one about Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain had enough parallels with stories about Elijah that some people began to think, “Hmm – well maybe this guy isn’t actually the messiah, but is Elijah come back again!”
Immediately after the story of the raising of the widow’s son in Luke, the disciples of John the Baptist go to Jesus and ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Lk. 7:19) That seemingly vague statement was actually a very specific question about Jesus’s identity: Are you the messiah, or are you Elijah? Are you “the one,” the promised messiah to come, or are you Elijah, the messenger who has come to announce that “the one” is near? Jesus’s response to the questioners is, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (Mt. 11:4, Lk. 7:22) – all of which were things that the messiah was expected to do (see Isaiah 61:1-3, 42:7). Although he does not say directly, “Yes, I am the one who is to come, the messiah,” they would have gotten the message as Jesus identified himself with the prophecies about the promised messiah.
In Matthew’s version of the story, after Jesus identifies himself with the messianic prophecies in his answer to John’s disciples, he goes on to explicitly identify John the Baptist as the returned Elijah figure. In both Matthew and Luke, Jesus calls John the Baptist “more than a prophet” (Mt. 11:9, Lk. 7:26), “the one about whom it is written, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you’ (Mt. 11:10, Lk. 7:27) – the role that Elijah was to play for the messiah. But in Matthew’s version of the story, he goes on to say specifically, “For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John came, and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come” (Mt. 11:13).
In pairing these two stories together in our lectionary, of Elijah raising the widow’s son at Zarephath and Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain, we are invited to notice the parallels but also the differences between Elijah and Jesus. In noticing the parallels between the stories, we can begin to understand why some people in Jesus’s day would have confused him with the prophet Elijah, but we also notice a key difference between the stories. While Elijah appears confused and upset by the death of the widow’s son and questions why God has brought calamity on this woman by killing her son, Jesus does not seem confused and distraught by the death of the widow’s son. He has compassion on her, yes, but there is no impassioned plea like Elijah’s begging that God would restore life to the son. Instead, Jesus appears calm and in control. He does not plead with God to restore the man to life; he commands it to be so himself. “Young man, I say to you, rise!” (Lk. 7:14) Jesus says, which is quite different from Eljah’s prayer: “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again” (1 Kings 17:21). Jesus’s words presume an authority and omnipotence that Elijah’s do not. The story also refers to Jesus as “Lord,” and although that word could be used of earthly lords and masters, it was also the word that had come to be used to refer to God. Jesus commands the son to rise as if speaking with the authority of the Lord God himself. It is not entirely improbable that the disciples told the story of Jesus raising the widow’s son at Nain in this way precisely to emphasize the distinction between Elijah and Jesus – Elijah was great, and there may be similarities between Elijah and Jesus, but Jesus is greater than Elijah.
Another interesting point of contrast between the two stories has nothing to do with the comparison between Elijah and Jesus, but speaks to our own struggles with prayers for assistance and healing. Although the Elijah story implies that the widow’s son is raised because his mother has shown hospitality to a prophet, and that righteous prophet prays for him to be raised, in the Gospel story we hear no mention of faith or righteousness as a prerequisite for Jesus raising the widow’s son. We are not told anything about the faith of the widow or of her son, although we might be able to safely assume that they were Jewish, since they lived in Nain, a town not too far from Jesus’s hometown of Nazareth in the Galilean region. But in contrast to so many biblical stories, the widow does not seek Jesus out and ask him to do anything for her. He simply happens to be passing by as the funeral procession comes out of the town and takes it upon himself to restore this man to life, without being asked to do anything.
To me, this is a rather refreshing reminder that sometimes God simply acts to bestow mercy and grace upon us, even without any action on our part. So often the theme of healing stories in the Gospels is, “your faith has made you well,” which can carry the implicit message that if you haven’t been made well, then perhaps it’s because your faith is not good enough or strong enough. What about those of us who pray earnestly without ceasing for healing, but healing never comes? We might begin to think that this a sign of God’s judgment on us, oh we of little faith.
But Jesus’s raising of the widow’s son at Nain shows that faith is not always a prerequisite for healing, and that in some cases, we don’t even have to ask for God’s healing for it to come to us. If this is so, then we can’t blame our lack of healing on a lack of faith.
Although this is somewhat freeing on the one hand – to think that it doesn’t all depend on us, that we don’t have to have the right kind of faith or a strong enough faith for God to heal us – it is also somewhat unsettling because it removes any sense of control that we might think we have over the situation. We are left at the mercy of a God who we cannot control through saying the right prayers or offering the right sacrifices.
And it raises the question of why God deals differently with different people. Why does Jesus raise the widow’s son at Nain, but not the man’s father who asks Jesus if he can return home to bury his father before coming to follow Jesus (Lk. 9:59-60)? In the case of the widow at Nain, Jesus’s reaction to her loss is compassion and a restoration of her loved one to life, but when a man Jesus calls tells him he must first return home to bury his father, Jesus’s response is the classic, “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Lk. 9:60), in what comes across as a rather brusque and uncaring response to a man in grief. Why does Jesus raise the widow’s son and not this man’s father? Why are some people healed and others aren’t, when both are equally prayed for by the same community?
I wish I had answers to these questions, but I don’t. Ultimately, I think we have to trust that we are in the hands of a God much greater than we are, and even when it seems God has ignored our prayers or abandoned us, God is actually still working for what is best for each one of us.
The psalms are a model of this kind of trust in the midst of unknowing, of loyalty even to a God who doesn’t always give us what we want. The psalmist cries laments of pain, asking God why God has abandoned him, why God allows some people to prosper while others suffer, seemingly for no reason, but the psalmist always ultimately comes around to a statement of praise. Most poignant of all the psalms to us in the Christian tradition is Psalm 22, the one that Jesus cried on the cross. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” it begins in verse one. But by verse 21, the psalmist affirms that despite his suffering and apparent rejection by God, he will still praise God: “I will declare your Name to my brethren; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.” The psalmist always recognizes the sovereignty of God, that God is ultimately in charge, even if he doesn’t always like the way God is running things!
We don’t have to understand God’s ways in order to be able to stand in awe of him as the one “who made heaven and earth” (Psalm 146:5), and our faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead encourages us to affirm that even in the darkest moments of humanity can arise light and salvation. Even when all we see is silence and unanswered prayers, we can affirm with Paul in his letter to the Romans that “all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). And we can be encouraged by the fact it doesn’t all depend on our faith and our actions – that sometimes, like the widow at Nain, God may send blessings into our lives when we haven’t even asked for them.
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Fearing the things we long for
Sermon delivered Sunday, Nov. 18, 2012 (25th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, Proper 28), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (1 Samuel 1:4-20, 1 Samuel 2:1-10, Hebrews 10:11-25, Mark 13:1-8)
The season of Advent is still two weeks away, but the Advent themes of expectant watching and waiting for the coming of Christ – both the remembrance of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem and the anticipation of his Second Coming – have already begun to seep into our liturgy. Have you noticed?
In last week’s collect, we prayed that we might purify ourselves as Christ is pure so that we may be made like him “when he comes again with power and great glory.” Our passage from Ruth (Ruth 4:13-17) told of the birth of Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of David – the lineage through which Jesus would come. (Think of how many Christmas songs refer to Jesse and David!) The passage from Hebrews last week concluded with a pronouncement that Jesus would “appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him” (Hebrews 9:28). As we continue reading in Hebrews today, we hear about the importance of encouraging one another as we see “the Day” – that is, the final judgment, the end times – approaching (Hebrews 10:25).
And today we also hear a story about the birth of a long-expected child: not Jesus just yet, but the prophet Samuel. Samuel is not crucial to the lineage of Jesus like Obed from last week’s reading, but his mother Hannah’s song of praise at his birth bears a striking similarity to the Virgin Mary’s famous song of praise, the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), that she sings after the Angel Gabriel tells her she will bear the Christ child. Both women sing of their soul rejoicing in God and exult in God’s power to bring down the proud and raise up the lowly, to turn the world’s social structures upside down and to bring hope and life from unexpected places.
And then in the Gospel passage for today, we’re back to that Second Coming, apocalyptic, end times kind of stuff. Jesus foresees the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and tells the disciples that much conflict and calamity will precede the end times and the renewal of creation. He tells them not to see social and physical upheaval as a sign that the end is near; though there will be wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes and famines, these things are “but the beginning of the birth pangs” (Mark 13:8).
Jesus’s use of birthing imagery is interesting, especially given the focus on birth in the Hebrew Bible passage for today, and the focus on birth that will come with the seasons of Advent and Christmas. Both Hannah and Mary rejoice in the birth of long-awaited sons, but Jesus’s words in Mark remind us of the fear and pain that often accompany birth. Before the joy of welcoming a new person into the world comes the pain of labor, the sweat and tears and blood, the worry about the health and safety of the child, the inner doubts about whether or not we will be capable caretakers of this utterly vulnerable life about to be entrusted to our care. The transition of this broken and sinful world into the promised world to come will be like this, Jesus tells us. The birthing of a new creation will bring the waves of pain and fear that women in labor experience in bringing new life into this world. Just as the birthing process is unpredictable – even with the marvels of modern medicine! – as to when it will begin and how long it will take, so is the birthing of the new creation. Just as the onset of contractions does not necessarily mean that the baby will arrive within minutes, so the pains of the conflict and suffering of this world do not mean that the end is here. Jesus’s use of the metaphor of “birth pangs” conveys the idea that wars, earthquakes, and other disasters will come in waves, like labor pains, each one seemingly unbearable while we are in the midst of it, and leading us to believe that surely things are almost over, but not necessarily immediately bringing forth the new life that we are so eagerly awaiting.
Like the birth of a new child, the coming of the new creation promised by God is something that we may both long for yet fear.
And although childbirth is our dominant metaphor this week, there are many other things in the human experience that we may find ourselves both longing for and fearing at the same time. This week, I asked several friends what they longed for yet feared, and got a variety of responses. One friend said the thing she longed for yet feared was “freedom. For everyone.” A friend in Nebraska who is a hunter said he longed for yet feared “a really big whitetail buck.” Several single friends said they longed for yet feared intimacy, a soulmate, a loving relationship. A friend with three children shared that she longed for yet feared having a fourth child. Other responses included longing for yet fearing a call from God, and longing to be with departed loved ones and friends but fearing death itself.
Looking at the themes that emerged in this survey, I wonder if the root of this archetypal fear of the very thing we desire is a fear of vulnerability, of loss of control. We know that in order to experience love, or to allow for the full flourishing of human life, or to let God into our lives to guide us, we must let go of our need to control outcomes and our desire to protect ourselves from pain and surrender to the power of something bigger than ourselves. And yet, we fear things that are bigger than we are, things that have the power to destroy us. So we hold on all the tighter to those “security blankets” and defense mechanisms that ironically, are actually keeping us from reaching or achieving the things we say we so long for.
Yes, we want that new heaven and new earth where there is no longer any mourning or pain or grief, where God himself will be our companion and comfort, where Christ will be king rather than the powers of this world. But between us and that beatific vision, according to the tradition we’ve been taught, lies the apocalypse, armageddon, the end of the world. Wars, earthquakes, and famines are just the beginning of it, Jesus says. That doesn’t sound like something we want! We want the reign of God on earth, we want peace and an end to humanity’s restless warring and relief from the natural disasters that devastate communities, but we fear the conflict and upheaval that Jesus tells us will inevitably precede it. We long for the new life, but we fear the birthing process.
But the word of hope for us in regard to all the things we long for yet fear, is that Jesus tells us not to be alarmed! Some of Jesus’s most common words in the Scriptures are words of comfort to his followers: “Do not be alarmed. Do not let your hearts be troubled. Do not fear.” Jesus promises to be with us, even to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). Trusting in that promise offers us the possibility of a life freed from the shackles of fear, in which we can experience the love, joy and peace that we so long for. When we encounter conflict or pain, instead of being paralyzed by fear and reacting as if it were the “end of the world” – literally or metaphorically – we can move through the fear and respond in love to whatever is struggling to be born. Rather than turning away from the disasters of our age with a detached fatalism, shrugging our shoulders and saying, “What can you do? Jesus told us that ‘these things must take place,’” we can step in like a calm, collected midwife, seeking to ease the pains of the birth of the new creation by helping with disaster relief, feeding the hungry, and advocating for peace. We can let go of our fear if we trust in God’s promises, opening ourselves to potential pain and conflict because we have full confidence that our ultimate longing will be fulfilled in the embrace of Christ.
The season of Advent is still two weeks away, but the Advent themes of expectant watching and waiting for the coming of Christ – both the remembrance of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem and the anticipation of his Second Coming – have already begun to seep into our liturgy. Have you noticed?
In last week’s collect, we prayed that we might purify ourselves as Christ is pure so that we may be made like him “when he comes again with power and great glory.” Our passage from Ruth (Ruth 4:13-17) told of the birth of Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of David – the lineage through which Jesus would come. (Think of how many Christmas songs refer to Jesse and David!) The passage from Hebrews last week concluded with a pronouncement that Jesus would “appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him” (Hebrews 9:28). As we continue reading in Hebrews today, we hear about the importance of encouraging one another as we see “the Day” – that is, the final judgment, the end times – approaching (Hebrews 10:25).
And today we also hear a story about the birth of a long-expected child: not Jesus just yet, but the prophet Samuel. Samuel is not crucial to the lineage of Jesus like Obed from last week’s reading, but his mother Hannah’s song of praise at his birth bears a striking similarity to the Virgin Mary’s famous song of praise, the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), that she sings after the Angel Gabriel tells her she will bear the Christ child. Both women sing of their soul rejoicing in God and exult in God’s power to bring down the proud and raise up the lowly, to turn the world’s social structures upside down and to bring hope and life from unexpected places.
And then in the Gospel passage for today, we’re back to that Second Coming, apocalyptic, end times kind of stuff. Jesus foresees the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and tells the disciples that much conflict and calamity will precede the end times and the renewal of creation. He tells them not to see social and physical upheaval as a sign that the end is near; though there will be wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes and famines, these things are “but the beginning of the birth pangs” (Mark 13:8).
Jesus’s use of birthing imagery is interesting, especially given the focus on birth in the Hebrew Bible passage for today, and the focus on birth that will come with the seasons of Advent and Christmas. Both Hannah and Mary rejoice in the birth of long-awaited sons, but Jesus’s words in Mark remind us of the fear and pain that often accompany birth. Before the joy of welcoming a new person into the world comes the pain of labor, the sweat and tears and blood, the worry about the health and safety of the child, the inner doubts about whether or not we will be capable caretakers of this utterly vulnerable life about to be entrusted to our care. The transition of this broken and sinful world into the promised world to come will be like this, Jesus tells us. The birthing of a new creation will bring the waves of pain and fear that women in labor experience in bringing new life into this world. Just as the birthing process is unpredictable – even with the marvels of modern medicine! – as to when it will begin and how long it will take, so is the birthing of the new creation. Just as the onset of contractions does not necessarily mean that the baby will arrive within minutes, so the pains of the conflict and suffering of this world do not mean that the end is here. Jesus’s use of the metaphor of “birth pangs” conveys the idea that wars, earthquakes, and other disasters will come in waves, like labor pains, each one seemingly unbearable while we are in the midst of it, and leading us to believe that surely things are almost over, but not necessarily immediately bringing forth the new life that we are so eagerly awaiting.
Like the birth of a new child, the coming of the new creation promised by God is something that we may both long for yet fear.
And although childbirth is our dominant metaphor this week, there are many other things in the human experience that we may find ourselves both longing for and fearing at the same time. This week, I asked several friends what they longed for yet feared, and got a variety of responses. One friend said the thing she longed for yet feared was “freedom. For everyone.” A friend in Nebraska who is a hunter said he longed for yet feared “a really big whitetail buck.” Several single friends said they longed for yet feared intimacy, a soulmate, a loving relationship. A friend with three children shared that she longed for yet feared having a fourth child. Other responses included longing for yet fearing a call from God, and longing to be with departed loved ones and friends but fearing death itself.
Looking at the themes that emerged in this survey, I wonder if the root of this archetypal fear of the very thing we desire is a fear of vulnerability, of loss of control. We know that in order to experience love, or to allow for the full flourishing of human life, or to let God into our lives to guide us, we must let go of our need to control outcomes and our desire to protect ourselves from pain and surrender to the power of something bigger than ourselves. And yet, we fear things that are bigger than we are, things that have the power to destroy us. So we hold on all the tighter to those “security blankets” and defense mechanisms that ironically, are actually keeping us from reaching or achieving the things we say we so long for.
Yes, we want that new heaven and new earth where there is no longer any mourning or pain or grief, where God himself will be our companion and comfort, where Christ will be king rather than the powers of this world. But between us and that beatific vision, according to the tradition we’ve been taught, lies the apocalypse, armageddon, the end of the world. Wars, earthquakes, and famines are just the beginning of it, Jesus says. That doesn’t sound like something we want! We want the reign of God on earth, we want peace and an end to humanity’s restless warring and relief from the natural disasters that devastate communities, but we fear the conflict and upheaval that Jesus tells us will inevitably precede it. We long for the new life, but we fear the birthing process.
But the word of hope for us in regard to all the things we long for yet fear, is that Jesus tells us not to be alarmed! Some of Jesus’s most common words in the Scriptures are words of comfort to his followers: “Do not be alarmed. Do not let your hearts be troubled. Do not fear.” Jesus promises to be with us, even to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). Trusting in that promise offers us the possibility of a life freed from the shackles of fear, in which we can experience the love, joy and peace that we so long for. When we encounter conflict or pain, instead of being paralyzed by fear and reacting as if it were the “end of the world” – literally or metaphorically – we can move through the fear and respond in love to whatever is struggling to be born. Rather than turning away from the disasters of our age with a detached fatalism, shrugging our shoulders and saying, “What can you do? Jesus told us that ‘these things must take place,’” we can step in like a calm, collected midwife, seeking to ease the pains of the birth of the new creation by helping with disaster relief, feeding the hungry, and advocating for peace. We can let go of our fear if we trust in God’s promises, opening ourselves to potential pain and conflict because we have full confidence that our ultimate longing will be fulfilled in the embrace of Christ.
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