Sermon delivered Sunday, Jan. 20, 2013 (Second Sunday After the Epiphany, Year C) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN. (Isaiah 62:1-5, Psalm 36:5-10, 1 Corinthians 12:1-11, John 2:1-11)
The theme of the season of Epiphany is the manifestation of Christ to the world – the revelation of Jesus’s identity as the Son of God and the Messiah. The passages from the Gospels that we read during this season all describe events that revealed Jesus’s identity to those around him.
We began with the Feast Day of the Epiphany, when the star of Bethlehem made the birth of Christ known to the world and drew recognition from kings in the East. We then moved to Jesus’s baptism, which in all of the Gospels is a significant turning point in Jesus’s life, the moment when the heavens are opened and God declares Jesus to be his Son. Following Jesus’s baptism, we hear stories about his healing and teaching ministry in Galilee, with an emphasis on the “firsts” – his first teaching in the synagogue in his hometown, his first healing, the calling of his first disciples – the things that first revealed who he was to the people around him and began the movement of his followers that eventually became the Church. The story we heard today is of his first public miracle, according to John’s Gospel: changing the water into wine at the wedding in Cana.
The season always concludes on the Last Sunday of the Epiphany with the story of the Transfiguration – the ultimate revelation of Jesus’s identity on the mountaintop, with bright light and clouds and a booming voice from heaven proclaiming, “This is my Son; listen to him!” The season of Epiphany is “book ended” with two great divine revelations of Jesus’s identity: God speaks and declares Jesus his Son at the beginning of his ministry, at his baptism, and right before the end of his ministry, at the Transfiguration. The Transfiguration is the last major event of Jesus’s ministry in Galilee, before he heads to Jerusalem for what will be the last days of his earthly life and his journey to the cross – the themes we shift to exploring during Lent.
But the season of Epiphany is not only about remembering the ways Christ revealed his identity and made himself known during his earthly ministry. It is also about calling us to consider the ways we make Christ known in the world today, through our lives. The collect for today asks that God’s people “may shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory, that he may be known, worshiped and obeyed to the ends of the earth,” and the Epiphany blessing at the end of the service says, “May Christ the Son of God be manifest in you, that your lives may be a light to the world.”
The number of people in history who had a chance to actually encounter Jesus in the flesh and receive revelation of his identity directly from him is incredibly small in comparison with the number of Christians who have lived and died in the thousands of years after his earthly ministry. All of those Christians had to encounter Christ not directly in the first-century person of Jesus of Nazareth, but in the lives of those who sought to follow him in their own day. And until Jesus comes again and we have another opportunity to experience him directly on this earth, we will continue to experience him primarily as he lives in the lives of his followers today.
Of course, the Scriptures do serve as another primary vehicle through which Christ is made known, but for many people who do not read the Bible, our lives will be the only thing they have to reveal Christ to them. As the saying goes, “Be careful how you live. You may be the only Bible some people will ever read.” Or, as the 16th century mystic Teresa of Avila put it, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours, yours are the eyes through which Christ's compassion is to look out to the earth, yours are the feet by which He is to go about doing good and yours are the hands by which He is to bless us now.” In other words, it is up to us, the church, the body of Christ, to manifest Christ to the world, to make him known and call others to love and to follow him.
This task can seem daunting or stressful if we do not remember the wisdom that the Apostle Paul left for us in his writings on spiritual gifts, such as our passage from 1 Corinthians today. Paul says that “there are a variety of gifts, but the same Spirit, and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone” (1 Cor. 12:4-6). In other words, we all have gifts from God that we can use to make Christ known in the world. Our gifts may be different – in fact, they will be different – from the gifts of our neighbors, but that is ok – in fact, it is part of God’s great design. Later in chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians, Paul uses the metaphor of the body to illustrate this. The church is the “body of Christ,” and going with that metaphor, he says, “If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?” (1 Cor. 12:17). We need all the parts of the body to be whole, and each part contributes something different but essential to the well-being of the body.
So how can someone figure out what his or her spiritual gifts are? Paul gives us a list in this passage of some spiritual gifts: the gifts of wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, working miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits, tongues, and the interpretation of tongues. In Romans 12, he lists other gifts as well: ministry, exhortation, giving, leadership, compassion. There are a variety of “spiritual gifts assessment tools” out there, tests that you can take that will try to help you place your particular tendencies and preferences into one or more of the biblical lists of spiritual gifts, but it’s important to realize that the biblical lists of “spiritual gifts” are not exhaustive; people do have other gifts that do not appear on any lists in Scripture, and those gifts can also be used for the purpose of making Christ known to the world. The spiritual gifts inventory that we use in the Faith Leader program here at St. Paul’s adds in several gifts that are not explicitly mentioned in Scripture, but which the authors of that program felt are certainly gifts from God, such as the gift of administrative skill, artistry, music, and even humor. Spiritual gifts inventories can be limiting, though, and perhaps the best way to discern what your spiritual gifts are is to think about the things that come most easily to you and bring you the most fulfillment.
Though our popular culture places a higher value on things one has to work hard for or struggle for, the things we are gifted in are precisely those things that are not difficult or onerous for us to do. We often downplay these skills in our lives, either because we think they must come easily to everyone, or because we think they are not valuable if we haven’t had to “work hard” on them. “Oh, that’s nothing,” we’ll say when someone compliments us on a skill that we have. “If I can do it, anyone can do it.” But that is not necessarily true!
I remember when my eyes were first opened to this truth. During my second year of college, I was feeling a bit guilty for becoming an English major, because it seemed too “easy” and “fun” for my whole “job” to be reading great literature and writing papers on it. I thought the science majors were all working much harder than I was. And then one day I was having a conversation with one of my good friends who was a biology major, and she said, “I just don’t know how you English majors do it. I can’t imagine writing all those papers all the time.”
“What?” I said. “But that’s no big deal. That’s easy stuff! You’re the one slaving away in the lab and doing math and working with numbers and stuff! That’s the really hard work!”
“Easy??” She replied. “I hate reading, and writing papers is a chore for me. I’d much rather do a problem set in biology any day than write a paper on a piece of literature!”
It was the first time I realized that what came easily to me and brought me enjoyment did not do so for everyone. And it helped me to feel less guilty for doing what came easily to me, because I realized that in doing what I enjoyed, I was using the gifts God had given me – just as my science-major friend was using the gifts God had given her.
After we have discerned what our spiritual gifts are, it is important to remember the purpose for which they are given to us. In our passage from 1 Corinthians, Paul says that spiritual gifts are given “for the common good” of the church (1 Cor. 12:7). The author of the letter to the Ephesians elaborates on this by saying that spiritual gifts are given “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12-13). In other words, our spiritual gifts are given to us for the purpose of making Christ manifest in the world, and we should use them in accordance with that purpose – not for building ourselves up, but for building up the body of Christ.
During this season of Epiphany, I invite you to take time to look around you and observe the ways in which your fellow parishioners, friends, and family are making Christ known in the world through using their gifts, and let them know that you notice. That last part is key – don’t just make silent observations in your head, but actually tell them what you see! This is a twist on the usual call for self-examination, but instead of asking you to think about your use of your own gifts, I’m asking you to notice them in others precisely because of how difficult it often is to acknowledge our own gifts. My prayer is that as you begin to notice how others are using their gifts and hold that up for them, those around you will notice the ways you are using your gifts and hold that up for you. In this way, we can join together in “building up the body of Christ,” in supporting one another in our work for the “common good” of the church: to manifest the light and love of Christ to the world.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Reading Scripture with people of other faiths
Sermon delivered Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013 (Thursday in the Week of the Epiphany) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN, during a Eucharist in which members of the Sikh community in Nashville were invited to be present to observe and/or participate in our worship, as part of an on-going interfaith dialogue. The scriptures appointed by the Daily Eucharistic Lectionary for this day were: Isaiah 65:1-9; Psalm 147; 1 John 4:19-5:4; and Luke 4:14-22.
It is an interesting spiritual practice to read the sacred texts of your religion with people of a different religion. When I have done this in the past, I always come away with new perspectives and insights that I don’t think I would have been able to see without the presence and perspective of my partners in dialogue.
There are inevitably excited exclamations over the similarities we find between our texts and the texts of others: at a recent clergy interfaith scripture study circle here in Nashville, some Christian pastors were describing the story in Matthew 25 – where Jesus says that whoever has fed the hungry, cared for the sick, visited those in prison, has done these things to Jesus himself – when an imam of one of the local Muslim communities cried out excitedly, “Yes, we have it too! Almost exactly the same story! That in serving others, in serving the poor, you are serving God himself.”
Given what I know about the Sikh faith, I might be bold enough to guess that our Sikh brothers and sisters with us here tonight may have found themselves nodding with recognition at some of the themes that emerged in our sacred texts for this evening: To love God we must love one another and obey the commandments that God gives us. If someone says they love God but treats their brother or sister unkindly, they are not truly loving God. And Jesus’s words in the Gospel today might have sounded like something Guru Nanak would have said: God’s spirit sends us out to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, freedom to the oppressed. It is a wonderful and exciting thing to hear the Word of God as you know it proclaimed through another religion’s texts. “Yes, we have that one, too!” we say, delighting to see God’s truth showing up in ways we had no idea it was showing up, to people we didn’t know were hearing it.
It is especially delightful to experience this when there are other parts of our sacred texts that would say it is not so, that God does not show up in other religions. Tonight we also read some texts that emphasize God’s unique and exclusive relationship with the people of Israel. The psalm appointed for today ended with the proclamation that God “declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and his judgments to Israel. He has not done so to any other nation; to them he has not revealed his judgments” (Psalm 147:20-21). In contrast to the delight we feel when we encounter similarities in the messages of our sacred texts, it is often uncomfortable to read texts like these in “mixed company.” How many of you felt comfortable saying these words just now while you knew there were people sitting with you who were not part of the nation or spiritual lineage of Israel? “God has only revealed himself to us, not you,” we basically just said to the Sikhs. And then we followed it with, “Hallelujah!”
The more exclusive parts of our tradition can be uncomfortable for us to address in interfaith settings. The temptation is to water things down, to only present the more inclusive parts of our tradition to those we are in dialogue with. But if we do that, we are only allowing our neighbors to see part of the picture. I believe that authentic dialogue happens only when we bring our whole selves and our whole traditions to the conversation – the open and the closed parts of ourselves and our traditions, our delights and the things that make us uncomfortable.
Unlike Sikhism, Christianity is at its heart a missionary religion: a religion that instructs its followers to actively seek converts. Jesus told his followers to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19-20). We call it the “Great Commission,” and it shapes how we understand our mission and purpose as Christians: we are called by God to share the good news of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ – that after being killed by the authorities, Jesus rose from the dead and inaugurated the start of a new creation that offers life and hope to the world. The New Testament contains many passages that insist that in order to receive salvation, one must believe in and follow Jesus. And so some Christians are convinced that no matter how many similarities we might find between Christianity and the ethical teachings of other religions, ultimately none of those similarities matter if the people of those other faiths do not ultimately decide to follow Jesus.
I have a friend named Valarie who grew up as a Sikh in central California surrounded by Christians who held this perspective. For years, she heard from friends and even teachers in school that she would go to hell if she did not accept Jesus as her Savior. These experiences were disturbing to her, but she always thought that these Christians were misinterpreting their own religion, that they were taking it to an extreme or denying the message of love and acceptance of all people that she believed was at the heart of all religions, since her Sikh faith had taught her that this was so. And then, as an adult, she actually read the New Testament scriptures for herself, during her time at Harvard Divinity School, where she and I were classmates.
When she read the Christian scriptures, she suddenly understood why all those friends and teachers had felt so urgently the need to convert her to Christianity. She read passages that said that those who do not believe in or accept Jesus are condemned. Even books like 1 John, which we read from tonight, that contain very inclusive passages like, “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God,” (1 John 4:7) also go on to say things like, “Whoever has the Son [that is, Jesus] has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:12). She was deeply disturbed, because she realized that Christianity did not have the same respect for all religious paths written into its sacred texts as her own Sikh faith did.
And so she called me, her Christian friend who was at the time just beginning to discern a call to the priesthood, to ask me how I understood these texts. “Now I understand why they wanted to convert me,” she said to me. “They were just doing what the book says!” She saw that these Christians were not acting out of an intentional mean-spiritedness, but were attempting to be faithful to the teachings of their own religion. She wanted to know how I as a Christian could advocate for a more open perspective, given the content of my sacred texts.
My answer -- and it is just my answer, not the answer of all Christians -- as I have come to articulate it over the years, has to do with different theological motifs in Scripture and in Christian tradition. I believe there are actually two main motifs that are in tension with one another throughout the Bible and the Christian tradition. One asserts that we are the chosen people, that those who are not part of the people of Israel and do not worship the God of Israel will be destroyed, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies. The other motif asserts that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32). I believe it is up to each one of us, both as individuals and collectively as a church, to choose which motif we will privilege over the other as we interpret scripture.
Because I am part of a Christian denomination that recognizes reason and experience in addition to Scripture and tradition as valid ingredients in crafting a theological perspective, I bring my own experiences with interfaith dialogue and interfaith friendships to the way I read the sacred texts. I cannot deny that I have seen God working in and through people of other religious traditions and that I have heard God’s word through the sacred texts of other traditions as well. I am reminded of what Jesus said to the Roman solider who came to him to ask him to heal his servant who was ill. “In all of Israel I have not found such faith!” Jesus says (Matthew 8:10), acknowledging in this “outsider,” who was most likely a practitioner of pagan Roman beliefs, a more authentic faith than many in Jesus’s own religious community. As I have met and gotten to know faithful Jews, Muslims, Baha’is, Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists through years of interfaith dialogue, I have often been moved to say, “Not even in the church have I found such faith!” I often see in my brothers and sisters of other religions a devotion and connection with God that equals or surpasses what I have seen in fellow Christians.
And although as a Christian I do believe that salvation comes to the world through Jesus Christ, I understand that to occur ultimately on a cosmic and communal level that transcends the individual, personal level. Although some Christians insist that in order to be “saved” and go to heaven, each individual person must accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and if not, they will suffer in hell for all eternity, I prefer another strain in Christian tradition which asserts that has Jesus in essence transformed the very creation itself, an act that is not contingent upon the intellectual belief systems of particular individuals. We are still called to put our faith in Jesus and to follow his teachings, and we still encourage and invite others to do so as well, but the salvation of the world is not contingent upon whether we do or not: the salvation of the world has already been accomplished by Christ, and in the task of evangelizing we are calling people to tap into that cosmic redemption that is already inherent in every aspect of creation. For me as a Christian, interfaith dialogue is an opportunity to recognize and celebrate all the ways in the redemptive work of Christ is moving and present in all of God’s people.
It is an interesting spiritual practice to read the sacred texts of your religion with people of a different religion. When I have done this in the past, I always come away with new perspectives and insights that I don’t think I would have been able to see without the presence and perspective of my partners in dialogue.
There are inevitably excited exclamations over the similarities we find between our texts and the texts of others: at a recent clergy interfaith scripture study circle here in Nashville, some Christian pastors were describing the story in Matthew 25 – where Jesus says that whoever has fed the hungry, cared for the sick, visited those in prison, has done these things to Jesus himself – when an imam of one of the local Muslim communities cried out excitedly, “Yes, we have it too! Almost exactly the same story! That in serving others, in serving the poor, you are serving God himself.”
Given what I know about the Sikh faith, I might be bold enough to guess that our Sikh brothers and sisters with us here tonight may have found themselves nodding with recognition at some of the themes that emerged in our sacred texts for this evening: To love God we must love one another and obey the commandments that God gives us. If someone says they love God but treats their brother or sister unkindly, they are not truly loving God. And Jesus’s words in the Gospel today might have sounded like something Guru Nanak would have said: God’s spirit sends us out to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, freedom to the oppressed. It is a wonderful and exciting thing to hear the Word of God as you know it proclaimed through another religion’s texts. “Yes, we have that one, too!” we say, delighting to see God’s truth showing up in ways we had no idea it was showing up, to people we didn’t know were hearing it.
It is especially delightful to experience this when there are other parts of our sacred texts that would say it is not so, that God does not show up in other religions. Tonight we also read some texts that emphasize God’s unique and exclusive relationship with the people of Israel. The psalm appointed for today ended with the proclamation that God “declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and his judgments to Israel. He has not done so to any other nation; to them he has not revealed his judgments” (Psalm 147:20-21). In contrast to the delight we feel when we encounter similarities in the messages of our sacred texts, it is often uncomfortable to read texts like these in “mixed company.” How many of you felt comfortable saying these words just now while you knew there were people sitting with you who were not part of the nation or spiritual lineage of Israel? “God has only revealed himself to us, not you,” we basically just said to the Sikhs. And then we followed it with, “Hallelujah!”
The more exclusive parts of our tradition can be uncomfortable for us to address in interfaith settings. The temptation is to water things down, to only present the more inclusive parts of our tradition to those we are in dialogue with. But if we do that, we are only allowing our neighbors to see part of the picture. I believe that authentic dialogue happens only when we bring our whole selves and our whole traditions to the conversation – the open and the closed parts of ourselves and our traditions, our delights and the things that make us uncomfortable.
Unlike Sikhism, Christianity is at its heart a missionary religion: a religion that instructs its followers to actively seek converts. Jesus told his followers to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19-20). We call it the “Great Commission,” and it shapes how we understand our mission and purpose as Christians: we are called by God to share the good news of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ – that after being killed by the authorities, Jesus rose from the dead and inaugurated the start of a new creation that offers life and hope to the world. The New Testament contains many passages that insist that in order to receive salvation, one must believe in and follow Jesus. And so some Christians are convinced that no matter how many similarities we might find between Christianity and the ethical teachings of other religions, ultimately none of those similarities matter if the people of those other faiths do not ultimately decide to follow Jesus.
I have a friend named Valarie who grew up as a Sikh in central California surrounded by Christians who held this perspective. For years, she heard from friends and even teachers in school that she would go to hell if she did not accept Jesus as her Savior. These experiences were disturbing to her, but she always thought that these Christians were misinterpreting their own religion, that they were taking it to an extreme or denying the message of love and acceptance of all people that she believed was at the heart of all religions, since her Sikh faith had taught her that this was so. And then, as an adult, she actually read the New Testament scriptures for herself, during her time at Harvard Divinity School, where she and I were classmates.
When she read the Christian scriptures, she suddenly understood why all those friends and teachers had felt so urgently the need to convert her to Christianity. She read passages that said that those who do not believe in or accept Jesus are condemned. Even books like 1 John, which we read from tonight, that contain very inclusive passages like, “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God,” (1 John 4:7) also go on to say things like, “Whoever has the Son [that is, Jesus] has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:12). She was deeply disturbed, because she realized that Christianity did not have the same respect for all religious paths written into its sacred texts as her own Sikh faith did.
And so she called me, her Christian friend who was at the time just beginning to discern a call to the priesthood, to ask me how I understood these texts. “Now I understand why they wanted to convert me,” she said to me. “They were just doing what the book says!” She saw that these Christians were not acting out of an intentional mean-spiritedness, but were attempting to be faithful to the teachings of their own religion. She wanted to know how I as a Christian could advocate for a more open perspective, given the content of my sacred texts.
My answer -- and it is just my answer, not the answer of all Christians -- as I have come to articulate it over the years, has to do with different theological motifs in Scripture and in Christian tradition. I believe there are actually two main motifs that are in tension with one another throughout the Bible and the Christian tradition. One asserts that we are the chosen people, that those who are not part of the people of Israel and do not worship the God of Israel will be destroyed, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies. The other motif asserts that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32). I believe it is up to each one of us, both as individuals and collectively as a church, to choose which motif we will privilege over the other as we interpret scripture.
Because I am part of a Christian denomination that recognizes reason and experience in addition to Scripture and tradition as valid ingredients in crafting a theological perspective, I bring my own experiences with interfaith dialogue and interfaith friendships to the way I read the sacred texts. I cannot deny that I have seen God working in and through people of other religious traditions and that I have heard God’s word through the sacred texts of other traditions as well. I am reminded of what Jesus said to the Roman solider who came to him to ask him to heal his servant who was ill. “In all of Israel I have not found such faith!” Jesus says (Matthew 8:10), acknowledging in this “outsider,” who was most likely a practitioner of pagan Roman beliefs, a more authentic faith than many in Jesus’s own religious community. As I have met and gotten to know faithful Jews, Muslims, Baha’is, Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists through years of interfaith dialogue, I have often been moved to say, “Not even in the church have I found such faith!” I often see in my brothers and sisters of other religions a devotion and connection with God that equals or surpasses what I have seen in fellow Christians.
And although as a Christian I do believe that salvation comes to the world through Jesus Christ, I understand that to occur ultimately on a cosmic and communal level that transcends the individual, personal level. Although some Christians insist that in order to be “saved” and go to heaven, each individual person must accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and if not, they will suffer in hell for all eternity, I prefer another strain in Christian tradition which asserts that has Jesus in essence transformed the very creation itself, an act that is not contingent upon the intellectual belief systems of particular individuals. We are still called to put our faith in Jesus and to follow his teachings, and we still encourage and invite others to do so as well, but the salvation of the world is not contingent upon whether we do or not: the salvation of the world has already been accomplished by Christ, and in the task of evangelizing we are calling people to tap into that cosmic redemption that is already inherent in every aspect of creation. For me as a Christian, interfaith dialogue is an opportunity to recognize and celebrate all the ways in the redemptive work of Christ is moving and present in all of God’s people.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Sermon for Sunday, Dec. 30, 2012 (First Sunday After Christmas, Year C: Isaiah 61:10-62:3, Psalm 147, Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7, John 1:1-18). I was sick on Dec. 30 and did not get to deliver this sermon publicly, but I publish it here in written form for the edification of any who might come across it.
On this First Sunday After Christmas, we hear a very different version of the Christmas story than the one we heard on Christmas Eve. Rather than shepherds and angels and a family sent to the stable because there was no room for them at the inn, we hear John’s version of “the beginning” of Jesus’s story, a beginning that began not in Bethlehem, but at the beginning of all time, before the creation of the world. John’s account is a cosmic creation story, a magnificent theological poem about the very essence of the Divine breaking into the depths of our world: “the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14).
And in this artistic proclamation of the origins of the Christ, the author of John’s Gospel gives us what I believe to be one of the most powerful summaries of the Christian message in all of Scripture:
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5).
In that one sentence lies the heart of the Gospel: the power of light over darkness, of love over hate, of life over death. Jesus’s Resurrection is the ultimate expression of this truth. Death itself could not extinguish the light that came into the world with the birth of Christ, and it continues to shine through all the ages, despite countless attempts and threats to extinguish it.
This is the heart of the Gospel, the Good News that we proclaim as Christians: that nothing will be able to extinguish the light of God that shines in all creation. The Apostle Paul said in his letter to the Romans that he was convinced “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38). This is the message we are called as Christians to proclaim to a broken and hurting world: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). And we are called to proclaim this message precisely during those times when we cannot see the light, when all seems to be darkness, when the world around us tells us there is no joy, no hope, and no love.
In the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut two weeks ago, many people around the country have questioned how they could go on with Christmas preparations and celebrations in the midst of such unspeakable loss.
One of my colleagues from seminary told me that a sermon preparation resource she reads sent out a message to their subscribers suggesting that they not light the “Candle of Joy” for the Third Sunday of Advent this year, given the deep dissonance many would feel in proclaiming a Sunday of “joy” just two days after such a horrific event.
In the news coverage of the observation of Christmas in Newtown this year, reporters talked to people gathered at makeshift memorials, keeping vigil beside twenty-six candles kept lit all night from Christmas Eve through Christmas morning. Some said it felt too sad to be Christmas this year. One woman said it had taken her longer than usual to finish her preparations for Christmas. “I just felt like my heart wasn’t in it,” she said. Another man said he felt celebrating Christmas at all was inappropriate, given the town’s grief. “Christmas shouldn’t even be happening,” he said. “Life has changed as we know it.”
But it is precisely during those times when the darkness seems to have won, when our hearts just aren’t into the proclamations of joy, when we do not know how we can possibly affirm the goodness of the world and the goodness of God’s providence, that we most need to do so. To not light that Advent candle of Joy on December 16 would have been to affirm the truth of the world rather than the truth of the Gospel. To not celebrate Christmas Eve on December 24 would have been to say that the darkness had overcome the light.
Monsignor Bob Weiss, pastor of St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Newtown, encouraged his parish that there was still reason to celebrate Christmas in Newtown, even after he and the community spent the week before Christmas burying eight children from their parish, sometimes conducting two children’s funerals in one day. In the midst of what was surely one of the darkest weeks in the history of that church, Weiss wrote these words to the parish in his annual Christmas message:
This is a difficult task, to be sure, and I dare say it would be impossible for any one person to do. But the good news is that none of us is called to carry the light of Christ alone. We are part of a community of faith, the Church, which is the very Body of Christ, which will go on proclaiming the good news of the Gospel even when we as individuals are not able to proclaim it ourselves. When we fall into despair and find ourselves quite literally unable to say the words of faith, when we have no will power to pray, and when we can affirm nothing but the existence of the darkness around us, the corporate prayer of the Church goes on in endless praise of the One who is the Light even in the midst of the darkness.
What a relief it is to experience the corporate and communal nature of our faith! When we cannot see the light ourselves, we come to church to allow others to hold it up for us. When we cannot find the words to pray, we allow the community to pray for us until we are able to join in again. We are able to carry the light of Christ through the darkness only to the degree in which we are willing to carry one another through the difficult times.
And, thanks be to God, the truth of the Gospel does not depend on our emotional state of being. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it,” whether or not we believe that is true, whether or not our hearts are in it when we say that statement. Trusting in the truth of the Gospel, a truth that comes from outside ourselves, we continue to say it, even when the world around us screams that the light has gone out. We light the candles of joy, faith, hope, and love even when the world says there is no joy, faith, hope and love. We sing songs of praise and joy even in the midst of great loss. “Even at the grave we make our song, ‘Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia’” (BCP 499). We do so because we are an Easter people. We do so because at the center of our faith lies the proclamation of a Truth that is greater than the truth of the world: “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
On this First Sunday After Christmas, we hear a very different version of the Christmas story than the one we heard on Christmas Eve. Rather than shepherds and angels and a family sent to the stable because there was no room for them at the inn, we hear John’s version of “the beginning” of Jesus’s story, a beginning that began not in Bethlehem, but at the beginning of all time, before the creation of the world. John’s account is a cosmic creation story, a magnificent theological poem about the very essence of the Divine breaking into the depths of our world: “the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14).
And in this artistic proclamation of the origins of the Christ, the author of John’s Gospel gives us what I believe to be one of the most powerful summaries of the Christian message in all of Scripture:
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5).
In that one sentence lies the heart of the Gospel: the power of light over darkness, of love over hate, of life over death. Jesus’s Resurrection is the ultimate expression of this truth. Death itself could not extinguish the light that came into the world with the birth of Christ, and it continues to shine through all the ages, despite countless attempts and threats to extinguish it.
This is the heart of the Gospel, the Good News that we proclaim as Christians: that nothing will be able to extinguish the light of God that shines in all creation. The Apostle Paul said in his letter to the Romans that he was convinced “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38). This is the message we are called as Christians to proclaim to a broken and hurting world: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). And we are called to proclaim this message precisely during those times when we cannot see the light, when all seems to be darkness, when the world around us tells us there is no joy, no hope, and no love.
In the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut two weeks ago, many people around the country have questioned how they could go on with Christmas preparations and celebrations in the midst of such unspeakable loss.
One of my colleagues from seminary told me that a sermon preparation resource she reads sent out a message to their subscribers suggesting that they not light the “Candle of Joy” for the Third Sunday of Advent this year, given the deep dissonance many would feel in proclaiming a Sunday of “joy” just two days after such a horrific event.
In the news coverage of the observation of Christmas in Newtown this year, reporters talked to people gathered at makeshift memorials, keeping vigil beside twenty-six candles kept lit all night from Christmas Eve through Christmas morning. Some said it felt too sad to be Christmas this year. One woman said it had taken her longer than usual to finish her preparations for Christmas. “I just felt like my heart wasn’t in it,” she said. Another man said he felt celebrating Christmas at all was inappropriate, given the town’s grief. “Christmas shouldn’t even be happening,” he said. “Life has changed as we know it.”
But it is precisely during those times when the darkness seems to have won, when our hearts just aren’t into the proclamations of joy, when we do not know how we can possibly affirm the goodness of the world and the goodness of God’s providence, that we most need to do so. To not light that Advent candle of Joy on December 16 would have been to affirm the truth of the world rather than the truth of the Gospel. To not celebrate Christmas Eve on December 24 would have been to say that the darkness had overcome the light.
Monsignor Bob Weiss, pastor of St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Newtown, encouraged his parish that there was still reason to celebrate Christmas in Newtown, even after he and the community spent the week before Christmas burying eight children from their parish, sometimes conducting two children’s funerals in one day. In the midst of what was surely one of the darkest weeks in the history of that church, Weiss wrote these words to the parish in his annual Christmas message:
“I have been asked so often how do we celebrate Christmas this year. I believe that we celebrate it in its truest sense, putting aside all the secularity and simply sitting in silence and praying that the hope, healing and peace promised to us by Christ will be given to us in abundance… We need to know that even in these darkest hours, there is still light, light that is brighter than that great star over Bethlehem, which will take us to the place where we need to be… it will take us to the heart of Christ who will heal our brokenness, remove our anger and hurt and fill us with the peace and strength we need to not just move forward but to reclaim the life that is ours as a community in Christ Jesus.”The only time we let the light go out in our churches is on Good Friday – in a symbolic recreation of the darkness of the crucifixion, when the disciples thought the light really had gone out, when that light of the world that John’s Gospel speaks of was, for a time, absent. But the light did come back – it burst forth from the tomb in the body of the Resurrected Christ and set ablaze the light that the church has carried ever since, through times of deepest darkness. In the Church, we are an Easter people, a Resurrection people. Except for the one liturgical exception of Good Friday, no matter what else is going on in the world around us, we come to church to see the light. Our calling as Christians is to carry that light even when the darkness creeps in around us and we are certain it will extinguish the light.
This is a difficult task, to be sure, and I dare say it would be impossible for any one person to do. But the good news is that none of us is called to carry the light of Christ alone. We are part of a community of faith, the Church, which is the very Body of Christ, which will go on proclaiming the good news of the Gospel even when we as individuals are not able to proclaim it ourselves. When we fall into despair and find ourselves quite literally unable to say the words of faith, when we have no will power to pray, and when we can affirm nothing but the existence of the darkness around us, the corporate prayer of the Church goes on in endless praise of the One who is the Light even in the midst of the darkness.
What a relief it is to experience the corporate and communal nature of our faith! When we cannot see the light ourselves, we come to church to allow others to hold it up for us. When we cannot find the words to pray, we allow the community to pray for us until we are able to join in again. We are able to carry the light of Christ through the darkness only to the degree in which we are willing to carry one another through the difficult times.
And, thanks be to God, the truth of the Gospel does not depend on our emotional state of being. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it,” whether or not we believe that is true, whether or not our hearts are in it when we say that statement. Trusting in the truth of the Gospel, a truth that comes from outside ourselves, we continue to say it, even when the world around us screams that the light has gone out. We light the candles of joy, faith, hope, and love even when the world says there is no joy, faith, hope and love. We sing songs of praise and joy even in the midst of great loss. “Even at the grave we make our song, ‘Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia’” (BCP 499). We do so because we are an Easter people. We do so because at the center of our faith lies the proclamation of a Truth that is greater than the truth of the world: “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Bear fruits worthy of repentance
Sermon delivered Sunday, Dec. 16, 2012 (Third Sunday of Advent, Year C), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Zephaniah 3:14-20, Isaiah 12:2-6, Philippians 4:4-7, Luke 3:7-18).
Although today is the Third Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of “joy,” and much of the scripture we heard today calls us to rejoice in the grace and love of God, we haven’t completely lost the Advent theme of repentance. In today’s Gospel reading, John the Baptist tells the people who come to him asking to be baptized that they must “bear fruits worthy of repentance.” His message is that all people need to repent, even those who are sure they are already part of God’s chosen people who have found favor with God.
Against any within the Jewish faith who might have felt that their lineage as sons and daughters of Abraham entitled them to a sort of “free pass” at the last judgment, who might have thought that they were worthy just by virtue of the fact that they were part of God’s “chosen people,” John reminds them that they must also live an authentic life of faith that bears visible fruit in their actions. Being a son or daughter of Abraham means nothing, John says, if your life does not bear witness to God’s justice and love.
According to John, bearing fruit is the standard by which we will be judged, not our membership within a particular religious community. We will be judged not by what we’ve said we believed, but by the testimony of our hearts and our lives.
I’m sure that at some point in your life you’ve heard someone comment on the good deeds and sound life of someone who professes no faith at all. The statement usually goes something like this: “I know some atheists who are better Christians than most Christians I know!” What they are pointing to is the issue of bearing fruit. They see many people who say they believe in Christ judging others, saying one thing and doing another, going to church on Sunday but engaging in corrupt business practices or questionable moral behavior during the week – while they see many people who say they have no religious faith feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, visiting the sick, working for justice – the very things Christians are called to do. And so, they sigh and say with frustration, “Some atheists are better Christians than most Christians I know!”
That’s actually a very biblical statement. It’s essentially what John the Baptist was saying to the first-century Jewish community, and what Jesus would wind up saying to them as well. “Tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you,” Jesus says to the religious leaders of his day (Matthew 21:31). In other words, the supposedly “unfaithful” can actually be more faithful than the faithful at times. This is why the prophets continually remind us that bearing fruit is of utmost importance.
But lest we think that “bearing fruit” is simply a matter of doing the right things, the prophets also remind us that doing the right things without the right intentions is equally as empty as trusting in the fact that you were born into the “right” religious community. “Bear fruits worthy of repentance,” John the Baptist says. Repentance is a matter of the heart, of the inner orientation and intentions underlying our actions. Not only is it not enough to be children of Abraham, but it is also not enough to observe the right rituals if our hearts are not in the right place.
“For you have no delight in sacrifice,” writes the psalmist, “if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:16-17). The prophet Amos brings this word of God to the people: “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them… but let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:21-22, 24). The prophet Hosea said God desires mercy, not sacrifice (Hosea 6:6), and Jesus quoted this in his teachings.
In all these passages, the issue is not that the rituals themselves were bad – the people believed God had commanded them to do them – but that the people were doing them without the proper intentions in their hearts, and their lives were not bearing the proper fruit. The apostle Paul echoed this theme in his first letter to the Corinthians, when he insisted that without love – without one’s heart being in the right place – all the most praiseworthy actions on behalf of spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ were utterly worthless. “If I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing,” he wrote (1 Corinthians 13:2). This is a common theme, from the earliest of the Hebrew prophets all the way through the New Testament. Although our faith engages our heads – in our assent to certain beliefs or doctrines – and our hands and feet – in our actions in the world – at the end of the day, the life of faith is ultimately a matter of the heart.
This is why we pray the Collect for Purity at the beginning of every Eucharist: “Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your Holy Name, through Christ our Lord.” We acknowledge that, as the book of 1 Samuel puts it, “The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). We might appear to be doing all the “right” things here, being in church, participating in a ritual that we believe Jesus commanded his followers to continue in his name, but if our hearts are not in the right place, our actions will not please God. And so we pray for God’s assistance in orienting ourselves toward God and cleansing our hearts of any sin within them so that our worship of God may be an authentic expression of love and praise.
The word “Advent,” from which this season of the church year takes its name, means “coming,” and the early church fathers spoke of three “advents” in the Christian religion: the first coming of Christ, in his birth at Bethlehem in the first century which we will commemorate at Christmas, the second coming of Christ to judge the world at the end of time, and the daily coming of Christ into the hearts of individual believers. Without that third advent, the first and second advents won’t have much meaning to us. In the season of Advent, we do not only remember what has already been and wait for what is to come, but celebrate what currently is: the presence of Christ with us every day in the hearts of believers around the world.
“Let every heart prepare him room,” says the Christmas hymn “Joy to the World,” and that is indeed the work of Advent, the work of examining our hearts and opening them to receive the coming of Christ that is available to us every day. In this way, John the Baptist’s calls to repentance are not incongruous with our theme of joy for this Third Sunday of Advent, for it is through the heart-cleansing work of repentance that we might discover the joy of the daily coming of Christ into our lives.
Although today is the Third Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of “joy,” and much of the scripture we heard today calls us to rejoice in the grace and love of God, we haven’t completely lost the Advent theme of repentance. In today’s Gospel reading, John the Baptist tells the people who come to him asking to be baptized that they must “bear fruits worthy of repentance.” His message is that all people need to repent, even those who are sure they are already part of God’s chosen people who have found favor with God.
Against any within the Jewish faith who might have felt that their lineage as sons and daughters of Abraham entitled them to a sort of “free pass” at the last judgment, who might have thought that they were worthy just by virtue of the fact that they were part of God’s “chosen people,” John reminds them that they must also live an authentic life of faith that bears visible fruit in their actions. Being a son or daughter of Abraham means nothing, John says, if your life does not bear witness to God’s justice and love.
According to John, bearing fruit is the standard by which we will be judged, not our membership within a particular religious community. We will be judged not by what we’ve said we believed, but by the testimony of our hearts and our lives.
I’m sure that at some point in your life you’ve heard someone comment on the good deeds and sound life of someone who professes no faith at all. The statement usually goes something like this: “I know some atheists who are better Christians than most Christians I know!” What they are pointing to is the issue of bearing fruit. They see many people who say they believe in Christ judging others, saying one thing and doing another, going to church on Sunday but engaging in corrupt business practices or questionable moral behavior during the week – while they see many people who say they have no religious faith feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, visiting the sick, working for justice – the very things Christians are called to do. And so, they sigh and say with frustration, “Some atheists are better Christians than most Christians I know!”
That’s actually a very biblical statement. It’s essentially what John the Baptist was saying to the first-century Jewish community, and what Jesus would wind up saying to them as well. “Tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you,” Jesus says to the religious leaders of his day (Matthew 21:31). In other words, the supposedly “unfaithful” can actually be more faithful than the faithful at times. This is why the prophets continually remind us that bearing fruit is of utmost importance.
But lest we think that “bearing fruit” is simply a matter of doing the right things, the prophets also remind us that doing the right things without the right intentions is equally as empty as trusting in the fact that you were born into the “right” religious community. “Bear fruits worthy of repentance,” John the Baptist says. Repentance is a matter of the heart, of the inner orientation and intentions underlying our actions. Not only is it not enough to be children of Abraham, but it is also not enough to observe the right rituals if our hearts are not in the right place.
“For you have no delight in sacrifice,” writes the psalmist, “if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:16-17). The prophet Amos brings this word of God to the people: “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them… but let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:21-22, 24). The prophet Hosea said God desires mercy, not sacrifice (Hosea 6:6), and Jesus quoted this in his teachings.
In all these passages, the issue is not that the rituals themselves were bad – the people believed God had commanded them to do them – but that the people were doing them without the proper intentions in their hearts, and their lives were not bearing the proper fruit. The apostle Paul echoed this theme in his first letter to the Corinthians, when he insisted that without love – without one’s heart being in the right place – all the most praiseworthy actions on behalf of spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ were utterly worthless. “If I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing,” he wrote (1 Corinthians 13:2). This is a common theme, from the earliest of the Hebrew prophets all the way through the New Testament. Although our faith engages our heads – in our assent to certain beliefs or doctrines – and our hands and feet – in our actions in the world – at the end of the day, the life of faith is ultimately a matter of the heart.
This is why we pray the Collect for Purity at the beginning of every Eucharist: “Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your Holy Name, through Christ our Lord.” We acknowledge that, as the book of 1 Samuel puts it, “The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). We might appear to be doing all the “right” things here, being in church, participating in a ritual that we believe Jesus commanded his followers to continue in his name, but if our hearts are not in the right place, our actions will not please God. And so we pray for God’s assistance in orienting ourselves toward God and cleansing our hearts of any sin within them so that our worship of God may be an authentic expression of love and praise.
The word “Advent,” from which this season of the church year takes its name, means “coming,” and the early church fathers spoke of three “advents” in the Christian religion: the first coming of Christ, in his birth at Bethlehem in the first century which we will commemorate at Christmas, the second coming of Christ to judge the world at the end of time, and the daily coming of Christ into the hearts of individual believers. Without that third advent, the first and second advents won’t have much meaning to us. In the season of Advent, we do not only remember what has already been and wait for what is to come, but celebrate what currently is: the presence of Christ with us every day in the hearts of believers around the world.
“Let every heart prepare him room,” says the Christmas hymn “Joy to the World,” and that is indeed the work of Advent, the work of examining our hearts and opening them to receive the coming of Christ that is available to us every day. In this way, John the Baptist’s calls to repentance are not incongruous with our theme of joy for this Third Sunday of Advent, for it is through the heart-cleansing work of repentance that we might discover the joy of the daily coming of Christ into our lives.
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.
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Sermon for All Saints' Sunday
Sermon delivered Sunday, Nov. 4, 2012, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, Tenn.
All Saints’ Sunday, Year B (Wis. 3:1-9, Ps. 24, Rev. 21:1-6a, Jn. 11:32-44)
Today is All Saints’ Sunday, the day we commemorate the lives of all the saints who have gone before us, whose lives have been a testament to the power of the Gospel and an example of godly life and faith. All Saints’ Day is one of the seven principle feast days of the church, along with Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension Day, the Day of Pentecost, and Trinity Sunday. These seven days are the most important days in the church year, highlighting what is central to Christian faith and the life of the church.
All Saints’ Day and Trinity Sunday are the only two on the list that do not commemorate a specific event in the life of Jesus, but they also highlight central aspects of Christian faith and tradition. All Saints’ Day celebrates the “communion of saints” that is a central part of our Creed. Without the saints, there would be no church, and though the saints of the church were not Christ himself, their lives bore and continue to bear witness to Christ in the centuries after his earthly existence.
So who are these “saints” that we commemorate today? In popular understanding, a “saint” is someone who is much more “holy” than us regular folk, someone who never makes mistakes, who never or doubts or questions, who is perfect in matters of faith. “Let’s face it, I’m no saint,” people will say as they describe their shortcomings, the implication being that if they were a saint, they would not have these flaws.
This high standard for what it means to be a saint likely is influenced by the Roman Catholic tradition, in which there is a lengthy process for officially canonizing someone as a saint. In this process, the individual’s life is evaluated by church authorities for evidence of his or her holiness of life and correctness of belief, and he or she must be the cause of at least two miracles after his or her death. These criteria certainly lend themselves to an understanding of “saints” as a super-human ideal of perfection. In a sermon on the occasion of the canonization of Elisabeth Ann Seton in 1975, Pope Paul VI said as much: “Being a Saint means being perfect,” he said, “with a perfection that attains the highest level that a human being can reach. A Saint is a human creature fully conformed to the will of God.”
But this understanding of a saint is not the only understanding in Christian history and theology. The creation of a feast day for “all saints” came out of a desire to honor and commemorate all the martyrs in the first few centuries of the church’s existence. A willingness to die for one’s faith instantly earned one the designation of “saint,” regardless of how “perfect” or not he or she was and whether or not he or she had been the vehicle of any miracles. In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul often opens his letters to the various churches across the Mediterranean region with the words, “to all the saints” at Corinth, or at Philippi, or at Rome, and in this context he is presumably speaking to all faithful Christians in those places, not just the really holy ones. Despite its focus on those exceptional saints that are canonized by the church, the Roman Catholic tradition also acknowledges this broader definition of a saint as well.
In the Episcopal Church, our understanding of what a “saint” is tends toward this broader use of the term. The Episcopal Dictionary of the Church defines the word “saint” first as simply “a holy person, a faithful Christian, one who shares life in Christ.” It goes on to add that “the term may also indicate one who has formally been canonized or recognized as a saint by church authority.” Although we in the Episcopal Church do honor certain Christians in our liturgical calendar who stand out as particularly praiseworthy examples of Christ-like living, we acknowledge that all of us who share life in Christ through our baptism are part of the “communion of saints” that we refer to each week in the Nicene Creed. And thus, All Saints’ Day becomes a day to remember not just those grand heroes of the faith like the Virgin Mary and Saint Peter and the Apostle Paul, but also the everyday faith heroes of our lives, those who have made Christ known to us by their dedicated lives of faith, prayer, and service.
Most likely, we can all name one or two of these saints. Unless we came to Christian faith solely through an intellectual pursuit, by reading about the faith and deciding to accept it for ourselves, we were likely influenced by other Christians, by friends and family members who already knew the love of God in Christ and shared it with us before we knew or accepted it for ourselves. Maybe it was our parent or uncle or grandmother who took us to church, or the Sunday School teachers who taught us that “Yes, Jesus loves us.” Maybe it was an inspiring mentor who showed us how to live out the faith we felt in our hearts but did not know how to put into action in our lives. Or maybe it was a friend who introduced us to Christianity as an adult, or a stranger who said just the right words to us at just the right moment in our lives to open our hearts to faith in Christ. Whether we came to faith at an early age or later in life, in a gradual process of being raised in the church or through a lighting-from-the-sky conversion experience – or somewhere in between – our paths to faith most likely were influenced by those saints who may never have a “saint’s day” in the Christian liturgical calendar, but who are no less saints than those who do.
On All Saints’ Sunday, we remember God’s promise that death is not the final word, that those saints who have already departed this life continue on in their love and service of God. The beautiful passages we heard from the Wisdom of Solomon and the Revelation to John remind us that “the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God,” and that God will bring about a new creation in which “death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” In the midst of our grief over the departure of those beloved saints who showed us the way of faith, we remember that God’s grace and love are stronger than death. Our Gospel passage from John tells the story of Jesus mourning the death of his friend Lazarus, and then raising him to life again, foreshadowing Jesus’s own eventual Resurrection, through which death was defeated not just for one man, but for all creation. Death, for the Christian, is not the end of the story. In fact, in some ways, for us it is the beginning.
We begin our lives as Christians through the sacrament of baptism, in which we are united with Christ in his death on the cross. Though we usually think of baptism only in the positive terms of new life and rebirth, in baptism we are also initiated into the sufferings of Christ, and into the suffering that may come through following Christ. In baptism, we are indeed “born again,” but the new life into which we are born is the life of Christ, a life in which Good Friday is inseparable from Easter, and in which Easter comes through Good Friday. It is through union with Christ in his death that we attain to union with him in his life. As the Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5). This is the promise of baptism, and the hope of the Christian life. This is the promise to which the lives of the saints bear witness, the promise that, again in the words of the Apostle Paul, “nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39).
And on this day that we are particularly aware of that “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) to the faith who have gone before us, we celebrate the addition of new members of the communion of saints. All Saints’ Sunday is one of four days in the church’s calendar when we initiate new members into the church through the sacrament of baptism. Today, we will renew our own baptismal covenant, and at the 11:00 service, we will welcome Alexandra Sidney Farmer and Andrew Christopher McClure into the church of God through baptism. They will be united with Christ in his death and in the hope of his Resurrection. Their parents and godparents will promise to raise them in the life of the church, that one day they might come to choose the God in Christ who has already chosen them. And we will promise to do all in our power to support them in their life in Christ. Because, as they say, “it takes a village.” Or perhaps – it takes a communion of saints.
Today we see the full circle of that communion of saints. As we give thanks for the witness of mature, fruitful Christian lives, we look expectantly and joyfully to these new disciples who are just beginning to grow in the knowledge and love of Christ. And we pray that we who pledge to support them in their life in Christ would one day be the “saints” that Alexandra and Andrew will remember whose lives bore witness to the power of the Resurrection and who led them to a mature faith in Christ.
All Saints’ Sunday, Year B (Wis. 3:1-9, Ps. 24, Rev. 21:1-6a, Jn. 11:32-44)
Today is All Saints’ Sunday, the day we commemorate the lives of all the saints who have gone before us, whose lives have been a testament to the power of the Gospel and an example of godly life and faith. All Saints’ Day is one of the seven principle feast days of the church, along with Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension Day, the Day of Pentecost, and Trinity Sunday. These seven days are the most important days in the church year, highlighting what is central to Christian faith and the life of the church.
All Saints’ Day and Trinity Sunday are the only two on the list that do not commemorate a specific event in the life of Jesus, but they also highlight central aspects of Christian faith and tradition. All Saints’ Day celebrates the “communion of saints” that is a central part of our Creed. Without the saints, there would be no church, and though the saints of the church were not Christ himself, their lives bore and continue to bear witness to Christ in the centuries after his earthly existence.
So who are these “saints” that we commemorate today? In popular understanding, a “saint” is someone who is much more “holy” than us regular folk, someone who never makes mistakes, who never or doubts or questions, who is perfect in matters of faith. “Let’s face it, I’m no saint,” people will say as they describe their shortcomings, the implication being that if they were a saint, they would not have these flaws.
This high standard for what it means to be a saint likely is influenced by the Roman Catholic tradition, in which there is a lengthy process for officially canonizing someone as a saint. In this process, the individual’s life is evaluated by church authorities for evidence of his or her holiness of life and correctness of belief, and he or she must be the cause of at least two miracles after his or her death. These criteria certainly lend themselves to an understanding of “saints” as a super-human ideal of perfection. In a sermon on the occasion of the canonization of Elisabeth Ann Seton in 1975, Pope Paul VI said as much: “Being a Saint means being perfect,” he said, “with a perfection that attains the highest level that a human being can reach. A Saint is a human creature fully conformed to the will of God.”
But this understanding of a saint is not the only understanding in Christian history and theology. The creation of a feast day for “all saints” came out of a desire to honor and commemorate all the martyrs in the first few centuries of the church’s existence. A willingness to die for one’s faith instantly earned one the designation of “saint,” regardless of how “perfect” or not he or she was and whether or not he or she had been the vehicle of any miracles. In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul often opens his letters to the various churches across the Mediterranean region with the words, “to all the saints” at Corinth, or at Philippi, or at Rome, and in this context he is presumably speaking to all faithful Christians in those places, not just the really holy ones. Despite its focus on those exceptional saints that are canonized by the church, the Roman Catholic tradition also acknowledges this broader definition of a saint as well.
In the Episcopal Church, our understanding of what a “saint” is tends toward this broader use of the term. The Episcopal Dictionary of the Church defines the word “saint” first as simply “a holy person, a faithful Christian, one who shares life in Christ.” It goes on to add that “the term may also indicate one who has formally been canonized or recognized as a saint by church authority.” Although we in the Episcopal Church do honor certain Christians in our liturgical calendar who stand out as particularly praiseworthy examples of Christ-like living, we acknowledge that all of us who share life in Christ through our baptism are part of the “communion of saints” that we refer to each week in the Nicene Creed. And thus, All Saints’ Day becomes a day to remember not just those grand heroes of the faith like the Virgin Mary and Saint Peter and the Apostle Paul, but also the everyday faith heroes of our lives, those who have made Christ known to us by their dedicated lives of faith, prayer, and service.
Most likely, we can all name one or two of these saints. Unless we came to Christian faith solely through an intellectual pursuit, by reading about the faith and deciding to accept it for ourselves, we were likely influenced by other Christians, by friends and family members who already knew the love of God in Christ and shared it with us before we knew or accepted it for ourselves. Maybe it was our parent or uncle or grandmother who took us to church, or the Sunday School teachers who taught us that “Yes, Jesus loves us.” Maybe it was an inspiring mentor who showed us how to live out the faith we felt in our hearts but did not know how to put into action in our lives. Or maybe it was a friend who introduced us to Christianity as an adult, or a stranger who said just the right words to us at just the right moment in our lives to open our hearts to faith in Christ. Whether we came to faith at an early age or later in life, in a gradual process of being raised in the church or through a lighting-from-the-sky conversion experience – or somewhere in between – our paths to faith most likely were influenced by those saints who may never have a “saint’s day” in the Christian liturgical calendar, but who are no less saints than those who do.
On All Saints’ Sunday, we remember God’s promise that death is not the final word, that those saints who have already departed this life continue on in their love and service of God. The beautiful passages we heard from the Wisdom of Solomon and the Revelation to John remind us that “the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God,” and that God will bring about a new creation in which “death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” In the midst of our grief over the departure of those beloved saints who showed us the way of faith, we remember that God’s grace and love are stronger than death. Our Gospel passage from John tells the story of Jesus mourning the death of his friend Lazarus, and then raising him to life again, foreshadowing Jesus’s own eventual Resurrection, through which death was defeated not just for one man, but for all creation. Death, for the Christian, is not the end of the story. In fact, in some ways, for us it is the beginning.
We begin our lives as Christians through the sacrament of baptism, in which we are united with Christ in his death on the cross. Though we usually think of baptism only in the positive terms of new life and rebirth, in baptism we are also initiated into the sufferings of Christ, and into the suffering that may come through following Christ. In baptism, we are indeed “born again,” but the new life into which we are born is the life of Christ, a life in which Good Friday is inseparable from Easter, and in which Easter comes through Good Friday. It is through union with Christ in his death that we attain to union with him in his life. As the Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5). This is the promise of baptism, and the hope of the Christian life. This is the promise to which the lives of the saints bear witness, the promise that, again in the words of the Apostle Paul, “nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39).
And on this day that we are particularly aware of that “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) to the faith who have gone before us, we celebrate the addition of new members of the communion of saints. All Saints’ Sunday is one of four days in the church’s calendar when we initiate new members into the church through the sacrament of baptism. Today, we will renew our own baptismal covenant, and at the 11:00 service, we will welcome Alexandra Sidney Farmer and Andrew Christopher McClure into the church of God through baptism. They will be united with Christ in his death and in the hope of his Resurrection. Their parents and godparents will promise to raise them in the life of the church, that one day they might come to choose the God in Christ who has already chosen them. And we will promise to do all in our power to support them in their life in Christ. Because, as they say, “it takes a village.” Or perhaps – it takes a communion of saints.
Today we see the full circle of that communion of saints. As we give thanks for the witness of mature, fruitful Christian lives, we look expectantly and joyfully to these new disciples who are just beginning to grow in the knowledge and love of Christ. And we pray that we who pledge to support them in their life in Christ would one day be the “saints” that Alexandra and Andrew will remember whose lives bore witness to the power of the Resurrection and who led them to a mature faith in Christ.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Shifting from a human-centered to a God-centered view of the universe
Sermon delivered Sunday, Oct. 21, 2012, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, Tenn.
21 Pentecost, Proper 24, Year B (Job 38:1-7, 34-41; Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b)
As we continue in our reading from Job this Sunday, we get to the part where God finally responds to Job’s cries of despair. And, interestingly enough, God does not directly address any of Job’s complaints or questions about the injustice of Job’s suffering or the senseless suffering in the wider world. Instead, God’s answer to Job is a creation story.
“Why has all this pain come upon me for no reason?” Job cries, “And what about all those orphans and widows starving out there, and all the wars, and the people who exploit and abuse others and get away with it? I demand an answer!”
And God replies, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Can you create lightning and make it rain? Can you provide food for all the creatures of the earth?”
He draws Job’s attention to the intricate workings of the wider world outside of Job’s small realm of existence and reminds Job that Job is not God, nor does the entire world revolve around Job. The story of Job seems to be suggesting that one possible solution to the “problem of evil,” the question of why suffering exists if the world is created by a benevolent God, is to shift our perspective from a human-centered point of view to a God-centered point of view. To “zoom out,” if you will, to see the bigger picture of how all the elements of the natural world fit together in an amazingly intricate and awe-inspiring configuration, of which humans are just one part. It can be humbling but comforting to realize that we are not the center of the universe.
Sewanee biologist David Haskell recently published a book called The Forest Unseen, in which he records his observations of one square meter of forest on the Cumberland Plateau over the course of a year. Although chock-full of scientific facts and figures, his approach is contemplative: his goal is to “search for the universal within the infinitesimally small” in the same way as Tibetan monks see the entire universe within the circular meditation aids called mandalas that they create out of colored sand, or in the same way as the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich saw the divine love and design of God in meditating on a hazelnut.
Whether describing the atomic physics behind the consistent hexagonal shape of snowflakes or the ways in which plants warn other plants about approaching insect predators by sending out chemical signals, Haskell’s meditations make fascinating scientific insights about the interconnectedness of all life accessible to a general audience. Although Haskell speaks of the inner workings of cells and organisms evolving through natural selection, not of God “tilting the waterskins of the heavens” to make it rain, his meditations on the greater workings of the universe put things in perspective for me in a similar way to what I think the story of Job intends to communicate in imagining God’s response to Job as an account of creation. Meditating on the wonders of creation reminds us that we are part of something much bigger than any of our individual lives.
Other authors of biblical texts turn to creation narratives in times of suffering as well. The “Song of the Three Young Men,” one of the canticles optional for use at Morning Prayer, is a passage from the Old Testament Book of Daniel that appears in the Greek version of the text but not the Hebrew. It details the song sung by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abendego after they are thrown in the fiery furnace for refusing to worship the golden image created by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Significantly, their song in a moment of persecution and near-death is an extensive meditation on creation and a call for all creation to praise and worship the Lord:
“Glorify the Lord, every shower of rain and fall of dew, all winds and fire and heat,” they sing. “Storm clouds and thunderbolts, glorify the Lord, praise him and highly exalt him forever… Glorify the Lord, O mountains and hills and all that grows upon the earth… O springs of water, seas and streams, O whales and all that move in the waters. All birds of the air, glorify the Lord, praise him and highly exalt him forever.”(BCP 88-89)
In the face of possible death, they sing about the glories of creation. They recognize that the vastness of creation over which God is sovereign is much bigger than their individual lives and that the created order will continue to give glory to God, whether or not they personally survive to continue to give witness to him.
Many of the psalms also recount beautiful creation narratives, sometimes in the midst of a lament or struggle with God’s apparent absence or silence. Today’s psalm, 104, is a song entirely of thanksgiving and praise, with no verses of lament, but taken within the entire corpus of the psalms as a whole, they represent a body of poetic literature that both cries out to God in times of despair and finds hope through remembering and recounting the sacred stories of Israel’s history and recalling God’s creation of the world. During times of suffering, when, like Job, we wonder where God is and cannot feel his presence, we remember the places we’ve seen and experienced God in the past to find comfort – and creation or the natural world around us seems to be one of the primary places that many people, both ancients and moderns, find testament to God’s presence.
Meditating on creation can be comforting because it relieves us of any notion that it is our job to rule the world, to manage or control or “fix” things. Although we see many things that may seem wrong or broken with the world, we are reminded that that “God is God and we are not,” and that can be a very liberating thought for those of us who sometimes feel like Atlas, holding the weight of the world on our shoulders.
Meditating on creation can also help us to see that what may seem evil or horrific from one perspective might actually be quite magnificent and awe-inspiring when seen in the greater scheme of things. Watching a lion devour a gazelle might seem to be cruel, and certainly that moment is one of great suffering for the gazelle, but in the death of the gazelle comes nourishment for the lion. And the lion’s eventual death will provide nourishment for vultures or other birds of prey. Nothing is wasted. The energy bound up in each of these living creatures will not cease to exist, but be transformed, serving another purpose in the great cycle of life that many cultures and religions regard as sacred.
In leading a recent Quiet Day (9/28/12, at St. Mary's Sewanee) on the Song of the Three Young Men, that canticle of creation from Morning Prayer, Episcopal priest and author Barbara Cawthorne Crafton commented on the peace that comes from spending time meditating on creation. “The more time we spend with plants and animals, the more at peace we will be with our own end,” she said. Observing the cycle of life reminds us that, as we say on Ash Wednesday, we are dust and to dust we shall return.
God answers Job’s cries of despair with a song of creation because an awareness of our own mortality and our place in the great cycle of life has the potential to bring great comfort. And there is some indication in the text that Job does find comfort in reflecting on these things.
Although most translations of the final chapter of Job, which we will read in the lectionary next week, say that Job responds to God’s speech by repenting, by apologizing and “taking back” everything he’d said before, Hebrew Bible scholar Rebecca Abts Wright suggests a different translation. She is convinced that Job never repents, since he has done nothing wrong of which to repent – and even God acknowledges this in the final chapter when he says that Job has spoken truth about God while Job’s friends have not. Instead, she points out that the root of the Hebrew word translated as “repent,” while it can mean “to change the mind,” is never used in calls for people to repent elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. The root also means “to comfort,” and indeed, that same word is translated as “comfort” just a few verses later when Job’s relatives come to him and comfort him after the ordeal is over. Wright suggests that rather than translating the final verse of Job’s response to God’s speech as “therefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes,” it could more accurately be translated as “therefore, I melt away and am comforted concerning dust and ashes.”
There’s a very different message there if she is correct. In Wright’s interpretation, the message is not that Job gets put in his place for questioning God and submits after receiving a divine “smack down.” Instead, after being reminded of the vastness of God’s creation and his small place in the grand scheme of things, he finally “lets go,” so to speak – that’s what I hear in the “melt away” part – and is “comforted concerning dust and ashes” – he is comforted about the fact of his own mortality and the human condition. He is reminded that he is dust and to dust he shall return, and he is “at peace with his own end.” He is comforted knowing that God is in control of the universe, and that God has heard his cries of pain, even if he does not understand the reasons for his suffering.
So perhaps the next time you find yourself struggling with something difficult, you might remember God’s answer to Job from the whirlwind and take a step outside to contemplate the movement of an ant on the pavement or the intricacies of the veins of the leaves on the trees around you. Step out of your mind for a moment and contemplate the bigger picture of God’s wondrous creation. Cultivating a sense of awe and respect for creation over time may bring you deepening waves of peace and a holy sense of connectedness with all life.
21 Pentecost, Proper 24, Year B (Job 38:1-7, 34-41; Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b)
As we continue in our reading from Job this Sunday, we get to the part where God finally responds to Job’s cries of despair. And, interestingly enough, God does not directly address any of Job’s complaints or questions about the injustice of Job’s suffering or the senseless suffering in the wider world. Instead, God’s answer to Job is a creation story.
“Why has all this pain come upon me for no reason?” Job cries, “And what about all those orphans and widows starving out there, and all the wars, and the people who exploit and abuse others and get away with it? I demand an answer!”
And God replies, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Can you create lightning and make it rain? Can you provide food for all the creatures of the earth?”
He draws Job’s attention to the intricate workings of the wider world outside of Job’s small realm of existence and reminds Job that Job is not God, nor does the entire world revolve around Job. The story of Job seems to be suggesting that one possible solution to the “problem of evil,” the question of why suffering exists if the world is created by a benevolent God, is to shift our perspective from a human-centered point of view to a God-centered point of view. To “zoom out,” if you will, to see the bigger picture of how all the elements of the natural world fit together in an amazingly intricate and awe-inspiring configuration, of which humans are just one part. It can be humbling but comforting to realize that we are not the center of the universe.
Sewanee biologist David Haskell recently published a book called The Forest Unseen, in which he records his observations of one square meter of forest on the Cumberland Plateau over the course of a year. Although chock-full of scientific facts and figures, his approach is contemplative: his goal is to “search for the universal within the infinitesimally small” in the same way as Tibetan monks see the entire universe within the circular meditation aids called mandalas that they create out of colored sand, or in the same way as the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich saw the divine love and design of God in meditating on a hazelnut.
Whether describing the atomic physics behind the consistent hexagonal shape of snowflakes or the ways in which plants warn other plants about approaching insect predators by sending out chemical signals, Haskell’s meditations make fascinating scientific insights about the interconnectedness of all life accessible to a general audience. Although Haskell speaks of the inner workings of cells and organisms evolving through natural selection, not of God “tilting the waterskins of the heavens” to make it rain, his meditations on the greater workings of the universe put things in perspective for me in a similar way to what I think the story of Job intends to communicate in imagining God’s response to Job as an account of creation. Meditating on the wonders of creation reminds us that we are part of something much bigger than any of our individual lives.
Other authors of biblical texts turn to creation narratives in times of suffering as well. The “Song of the Three Young Men,” one of the canticles optional for use at Morning Prayer, is a passage from the Old Testament Book of Daniel that appears in the Greek version of the text but not the Hebrew. It details the song sung by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abendego after they are thrown in the fiery furnace for refusing to worship the golden image created by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Significantly, their song in a moment of persecution and near-death is an extensive meditation on creation and a call for all creation to praise and worship the Lord:
“Glorify the Lord, every shower of rain and fall of dew, all winds and fire and heat,” they sing. “Storm clouds and thunderbolts, glorify the Lord, praise him and highly exalt him forever… Glorify the Lord, O mountains and hills and all that grows upon the earth… O springs of water, seas and streams, O whales and all that move in the waters. All birds of the air, glorify the Lord, praise him and highly exalt him forever.”(BCP 88-89)
In the face of possible death, they sing about the glories of creation. They recognize that the vastness of creation over which God is sovereign is much bigger than their individual lives and that the created order will continue to give glory to God, whether or not they personally survive to continue to give witness to him.
Many of the psalms also recount beautiful creation narratives, sometimes in the midst of a lament or struggle with God’s apparent absence or silence. Today’s psalm, 104, is a song entirely of thanksgiving and praise, with no verses of lament, but taken within the entire corpus of the psalms as a whole, they represent a body of poetic literature that both cries out to God in times of despair and finds hope through remembering and recounting the sacred stories of Israel’s history and recalling God’s creation of the world. During times of suffering, when, like Job, we wonder where God is and cannot feel his presence, we remember the places we’ve seen and experienced God in the past to find comfort – and creation or the natural world around us seems to be one of the primary places that many people, both ancients and moderns, find testament to God’s presence.
Meditating on creation can be comforting because it relieves us of any notion that it is our job to rule the world, to manage or control or “fix” things. Although we see many things that may seem wrong or broken with the world, we are reminded that that “God is God and we are not,” and that can be a very liberating thought for those of us who sometimes feel like Atlas, holding the weight of the world on our shoulders.
Meditating on creation can also help us to see that what may seem evil or horrific from one perspective might actually be quite magnificent and awe-inspiring when seen in the greater scheme of things. Watching a lion devour a gazelle might seem to be cruel, and certainly that moment is one of great suffering for the gazelle, but in the death of the gazelle comes nourishment for the lion. And the lion’s eventual death will provide nourishment for vultures or other birds of prey. Nothing is wasted. The energy bound up in each of these living creatures will not cease to exist, but be transformed, serving another purpose in the great cycle of life that many cultures and religions regard as sacred.
In leading a recent Quiet Day (9/28/12, at St. Mary's Sewanee) on the Song of the Three Young Men, that canticle of creation from Morning Prayer, Episcopal priest and author Barbara Cawthorne Crafton commented on the peace that comes from spending time meditating on creation. “The more time we spend with plants and animals, the more at peace we will be with our own end,” she said. Observing the cycle of life reminds us that, as we say on Ash Wednesday, we are dust and to dust we shall return.
God answers Job’s cries of despair with a song of creation because an awareness of our own mortality and our place in the great cycle of life has the potential to bring great comfort. And there is some indication in the text that Job does find comfort in reflecting on these things.
Although most translations of the final chapter of Job, which we will read in the lectionary next week, say that Job responds to God’s speech by repenting, by apologizing and “taking back” everything he’d said before, Hebrew Bible scholar Rebecca Abts Wright suggests a different translation. She is convinced that Job never repents, since he has done nothing wrong of which to repent – and even God acknowledges this in the final chapter when he says that Job has spoken truth about God while Job’s friends have not. Instead, she points out that the root of the Hebrew word translated as “repent,” while it can mean “to change the mind,” is never used in calls for people to repent elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. The root also means “to comfort,” and indeed, that same word is translated as “comfort” just a few verses later when Job’s relatives come to him and comfort him after the ordeal is over. Wright suggests that rather than translating the final verse of Job’s response to God’s speech as “therefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes,” it could more accurately be translated as “therefore, I melt away and am comforted concerning dust and ashes.”
There’s a very different message there if she is correct. In Wright’s interpretation, the message is not that Job gets put in his place for questioning God and submits after receiving a divine “smack down.” Instead, after being reminded of the vastness of God’s creation and his small place in the grand scheme of things, he finally “lets go,” so to speak – that’s what I hear in the “melt away” part – and is “comforted concerning dust and ashes” – he is comforted about the fact of his own mortality and the human condition. He is reminded that he is dust and to dust he shall return, and he is “at peace with his own end.” He is comforted knowing that God is in control of the universe, and that God has heard his cries of pain, even if he does not understand the reasons for his suffering.
So perhaps the next time you find yourself struggling with something difficult, you might remember God’s answer to Job from the whirlwind and take a step outside to contemplate the movement of an ant on the pavement or the intricacies of the veins of the leaves on the trees around you. Step out of your mind for a moment and contemplate the bigger picture of God’s wondrous creation. Cultivating a sense of awe and respect for creation over time may bring you deepening waves of peace and a holy sense of connectedness with all life.
Sunday, October 7, 2012
Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?
Sermon delivered Sunday, Oct. 7, 2012 (19th Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 22B), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, Tenn. (Job 1:1, 2:1-10)
“Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10)
Job’s question is a poignant one, coming from a man who had experienced unspeakable loss. Our lectionary passage leaves out most of the first chapter of Job, which describes the loss of Job’s livestock and the death of his servants and all ten of his children. Then Job is stricken with a painful illness. Things are so bad that his wife comes to the conclusion it would be better to die than to continue to live with the suffering Job is experiencing, and encourages Job to curse God and die.
But Job refuses, continuing to accept God’s sovereignty over his life. “The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21), he says when he learns of the death of his children. “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” he asks (Job 2:10), in response to his wife’s words of anger and despair.
This question could be the “topic sentence” of the entire Book of Job: Are human beings willing to receive the good at the hand of God and not to receive the bad? It is the question that Satan, or “the Accuser,” asks in the heavenly court. “Of course Job is faithful and upright,” he says to God, “It’s easy for people to be faithful and give praise to God when things are going well for them. But what about when things are tough? How much will they love you then?”
The entire “game” that the Accuser plays with Job is an experiment to answer that very question: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” Will Job continue to be in faithful relationship with God even when his comfortable life is stripped away from him?
Now, before we go any further, let me say a word about the disturbing opening of this story. What kind of God, you might ask, would agree to let all these calamities befall an innocent person just to win a “bet,” if you will, with an unruly angel? Does God also send death and destruction upon us intentionally, just to see if we’ll cave under the pressure? Are the suffering of our lives a result of God making a similar bargain with the Accuser?
In my understanding of God, the answers to those questions are “no” and “no.” It is helpful to understand that the Book of Job was never intended to describe actual events that happened to a real person. Hebrew Bible scholar Rebecca Abts Wright describes the book of Job as the ancient equivalent of a “Dr. Seuss” story, a story meant to illustrate a particular question or topic through creative imagination. The story of Job describes a perfect man with a perfect family in a made up land (no one knows where “the land of Uz” is) with a made-up name (“Job” is not a Semitic or Hebrew name, or a name common to any of the surrounding cultures). This is the ancient Near Eastern equivalent of a story about the Whos down in Whoville. The description of Job is a kind of stereotype of perfection that does not exist completely in real life. But the author of the story posits the existence of this hypothetical “perfect” person to explore a significant theological question: Is it possible to remain faithful to God in the midst of unexplainable suffering, suffering which we have done nothing to deserve?
The story of Job is something like a parable, through which we are invited to consider our own lives of faith. Are we “fair-weather” friends of God, happy to praise him when things are going well, but quick to curse him when they are not? Are we like the seed in Jesus’s parable of the sower (Luke 8:4-15) that was sown on rock, who receive the Word with joy when we first hear it, but when troubles arise, we fall away?
Reading this passage from Job at this particular point in time, I cannot help but think of the response of the Sikh community in Wisconsin to the shootings at their place of worship two months ago. Despite enduring the horror of a violent attack during a worship service and losing six members of their community, the Sikh community has responded with love and compassion, continuing to be at prayer and to encourage one another to remain in chardi kala, a state of optimism and high spirits that is central to the Sikh faith. My friend Valarie Kaur, a third-generation Sikh American from California and a nationally-known interfaith activist, went to Milwaukee to be with the community in the days and weeks after the shootings. She gathered first-hand stories from the people there and began sharing them through op-ed pieces, blog entries, Facebook posts and tweets.
One of the most powerful stories she shared was that of Santokh Singh, a 50-year-old man from India who came to the U.S. to serve the community in Milwaukee as a granthi, a devotional singer who recites prayers from scripture in Sikh worship services. In the attack on the gurdwara in August, he survived two gunshot wounds to the stomach. In reflecting on the shooting, Santokh said, “I have no hate for the gunman. What happened was done by God. How can I wish ill upon the gunman if it is God’s will?”
“The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21)
In the face of unspeakable loss, the Sikh community in Wisconsin, like Job, has affirmed an acceptance of God’s sovereignty in their lives. “Whatever God gives, we receive with grace,” says a Sikh prayer. Turning to prayer for solace in the days and weeks after the shooting, Sikhs received the gut-wrenching pain of their loss as a gift from God. “One does not turn away a gift, or bury it, or rage against it, but receive it with an open heart,” Valarie wrote in an article for The Washington Post, describing the community’s theological response to the tragedy.
“Shall we receive the good at the hand of God but not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10)
But Job’s acceptance of his fate and his poignant words of faith and trust are not the whole story. In this book of 42 chapters, Job’s strong statements of trust and acceptance of God’s will appear only in the first two chapters. From chapter three onwards, Job begins to lament his loss. He says it would be better if he had never been born, and question God’s justice at allowing such pain to come into his life.
“Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me,” he says. “I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes” (Job 3:25-26). This is a far cry from the calm acceptance of his fate and peaceful worship and blessing of God that he expressed when he first lost his children and livestock. After the loss has a chance to sink in more deeply, the raw pain seeps out, perhaps even against his will, since Job was a deeply pious man who most likely would have wanted to remain in chardi kala, as the Sikhs would put it, optimistic and faithful despite his sufferings. But the pain was too much.
And it is too much for some members of the Sikh community in Milwaukee as well. Not all members of the community are able to trust that the shootings were a part of God’s will with as much peace and grace as Santokh Singh. Valarie also shared stories of members of the community who continue to see images of their loved ones lying on the floor in pools of blood, who continue to hear the gunshots in their dreams, who cannot sleep at night. The trauma of the shootings strips away their sense of peace and violates their most sacred space.
“Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes” (Job 3:25-26).
So what are we to do when we are unable to stay in chardi kala? When the pain and grief are simply too much, when we cannot honestly thank God for this supposed “gift” that he gives?
Well, we can do what Job does. Job expresses his anger, his frustration, his despair, and his pain to God. He does not give in to the temptation to beat himself up, to agree with the unhelpful suggestions of his friends that surely God must be punishing him for some sin he has committed. No, Job maintains his sense of integrity by insisting on his own innocence, and in questioning God’s justice in allowing innocent people to suffer.
But in all this, Job never curses God, as his wife suggests. He still acknowledges that God is in control, even if he doesn’t like it! He makes his complaints about how God is running the world known, and at the end of it all God actually affirms Job’s response over the response of Job’s friends, who support traditional wisdom in saying that God rewards those who are righteous and brings suffering upon those who are wicked. In the last chapter of the book of Job, in a passage you won’t see in the lectionary when we get to this section at the end of October, God scolds Job’s friends, saying, “My wrath is kindled against you, …for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7).
Accepting God’s will and God’s sovereignty over our lives does not mean denying the feelings of frustration, grief, anger, and despair that well up within us when inexplicable suffering comes to us. With Job, we can say, “The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21), but still cry out in pain. With the Sikh community in Milwaukee, we can say, “Whatever God gives, we receive with grace,” but still acknowledge when the grief is too much to bear – and seek help from friends, family, and professional counselors to get us through. And we can be gentle with ourselves in that place of both/and, of faith and doubt, gratitude and despair, because the important part is that we stay in relationship with God – not that we say nice things about God or always like God and never question God – but that we are in authentic relationship with God – a God who knows something about the depths of inexplicable pain, whose desire to be in authentic relationship with us led him to death on a cross.
“Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10)
Job’s question is a poignant one, coming from a man who had experienced unspeakable loss. Our lectionary passage leaves out most of the first chapter of Job, which describes the loss of Job’s livestock and the death of his servants and all ten of his children. Then Job is stricken with a painful illness. Things are so bad that his wife comes to the conclusion it would be better to die than to continue to live with the suffering Job is experiencing, and encourages Job to curse God and die.
But Job refuses, continuing to accept God’s sovereignty over his life. “The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21), he says when he learns of the death of his children. “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” he asks (Job 2:10), in response to his wife’s words of anger and despair.
This question could be the “topic sentence” of the entire Book of Job: Are human beings willing to receive the good at the hand of God and not to receive the bad? It is the question that Satan, or “the Accuser,” asks in the heavenly court. “Of course Job is faithful and upright,” he says to God, “It’s easy for people to be faithful and give praise to God when things are going well for them. But what about when things are tough? How much will they love you then?”
The entire “game” that the Accuser plays with Job is an experiment to answer that very question: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” Will Job continue to be in faithful relationship with God even when his comfortable life is stripped away from him?
Now, before we go any further, let me say a word about the disturbing opening of this story. What kind of God, you might ask, would agree to let all these calamities befall an innocent person just to win a “bet,” if you will, with an unruly angel? Does God also send death and destruction upon us intentionally, just to see if we’ll cave under the pressure? Are the suffering of our lives a result of God making a similar bargain with the Accuser?
In my understanding of God, the answers to those questions are “no” and “no.” It is helpful to understand that the Book of Job was never intended to describe actual events that happened to a real person. Hebrew Bible scholar Rebecca Abts Wright describes the book of Job as the ancient equivalent of a “Dr. Seuss” story, a story meant to illustrate a particular question or topic through creative imagination. The story of Job describes a perfect man with a perfect family in a made up land (no one knows where “the land of Uz” is) with a made-up name (“Job” is not a Semitic or Hebrew name, or a name common to any of the surrounding cultures). This is the ancient Near Eastern equivalent of a story about the Whos down in Whoville. The description of Job is a kind of stereotype of perfection that does not exist completely in real life. But the author of the story posits the existence of this hypothetical “perfect” person to explore a significant theological question: Is it possible to remain faithful to God in the midst of unexplainable suffering, suffering which we have done nothing to deserve?
The story of Job is something like a parable, through which we are invited to consider our own lives of faith. Are we “fair-weather” friends of God, happy to praise him when things are going well, but quick to curse him when they are not? Are we like the seed in Jesus’s parable of the sower (Luke 8:4-15) that was sown on rock, who receive the Word with joy when we first hear it, but when troubles arise, we fall away?
Reading this passage from Job at this particular point in time, I cannot help but think of the response of the Sikh community in Wisconsin to the shootings at their place of worship two months ago. Despite enduring the horror of a violent attack during a worship service and losing six members of their community, the Sikh community has responded with love and compassion, continuing to be at prayer and to encourage one another to remain in chardi kala, a state of optimism and high spirits that is central to the Sikh faith. My friend Valarie Kaur, a third-generation Sikh American from California and a nationally-known interfaith activist, went to Milwaukee to be with the community in the days and weeks after the shootings. She gathered first-hand stories from the people there and began sharing them through op-ed pieces, blog entries, Facebook posts and tweets.
One of the most powerful stories she shared was that of Santokh Singh, a 50-year-old man from India who came to the U.S. to serve the community in Milwaukee as a granthi, a devotional singer who recites prayers from scripture in Sikh worship services. In the attack on the gurdwara in August, he survived two gunshot wounds to the stomach. In reflecting on the shooting, Santokh said, “I have no hate for the gunman. What happened was done by God. How can I wish ill upon the gunman if it is God’s will?”
“The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21)
In the face of unspeakable loss, the Sikh community in Wisconsin, like Job, has affirmed an acceptance of God’s sovereignty in their lives. “Whatever God gives, we receive with grace,” says a Sikh prayer. Turning to prayer for solace in the days and weeks after the shooting, Sikhs received the gut-wrenching pain of their loss as a gift from God. “One does not turn away a gift, or bury it, or rage against it, but receive it with an open heart,” Valarie wrote in an article for The Washington Post, describing the community’s theological response to the tragedy.
“Shall we receive the good at the hand of God but not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10)
But Job’s acceptance of his fate and his poignant words of faith and trust are not the whole story. In this book of 42 chapters, Job’s strong statements of trust and acceptance of God’s will appear only in the first two chapters. From chapter three onwards, Job begins to lament his loss. He says it would be better if he had never been born, and question God’s justice at allowing such pain to come into his life.
“Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me,” he says. “I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes” (Job 3:25-26). This is a far cry from the calm acceptance of his fate and peaceful worship and blessing of God that he expressed when he first lost his children and livestock. After the loss has a chance to sink in more deeply, the raw pain seeps out, perhaps even against his will, since Job was a deeply pious man who most likely would have wanted to remain in chardi kala, as the Sikhs would put it, optimistic and faithful despite his sufferings. But the pain was too much.
And it is too much for some members of the Sikh community in Milwaukee as well. Not all members of the community are able to trust that the shootings were a part of God’s will with as much peace and grace as Santokh Singh. Valarie also shared stories of members of the community who continue to see images of their loved ones lying on the floor in pools of blood, who continue to hear the gunshots in their dreams, who cannot sleep at night. The trauma of the shootings strips away their sense of peace and violates their most sacred space.
“Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes” (Job 3:25-26).
So what are we to do when we are unable to stay in chardi kala? When the pain and grief are simply too much, when we cannot honestly thank God for this supposed “gift” that he gives?
Well, we can do what Job does. Job expresses his anger, his frustration, his despair, and his pain to God. He does not give in to the temptation to beat himself up, to agree with the unhelpful suggestions of his friends that surely God must be punishing him for some sin he has committed. No, Job maintains his sense of integrity by insisting on his own innocence, and in questioning God’s justice in allowing innocent people to suffer.
But in all this, Job never curses God, as his wife suggests. He still acknowledges that God is in control, even if he doesn’t like it! He makes his complaints about how God is running the world known, and at the end of it all God actually affirms Job’s response over the response of Job’s friends, who support traditional wisdom in saying that God rewards those who are righteous and brings suffering upon those who are wicked. In the last chapter of the book of Job, in a passage you won’t see in the lectionary when we get to this section at the end of October, God scolds Job’s friends, saying, “My wrath is kindled against you, …for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7).
Accepting God’s will and God’s sovereignty over our lives does not mean denying the feelings of frustration, grief, anger, and despair that well up within us when inexplicable suffering comes to us. With Job, we can say, “The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21), but still cry out in pain. With the Sikh community in Milwaukee, we can say, “Whatever God gives, we receive with grace,” but still acknowledge when the grief is too much to bear – and seek help from friends, family, and professional counselors to get us through. And we can be gentle with ourselves in that place of both/and, of faith and doubt, gratitude and despair, because the important part is that we stay in relationship with God – not that we say nice things about God or always like God and never question God – but that we are in authentic relationship with God – a God who knows something about the depths of inexplicable pain, whose desire to be in authentic relationship with us led him to death on a cross.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ
Homily delivered at the monthly healing service at St. Paul's Franklin.
“For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ” (2 Cor. 1:5).
As we gather today in this service of healing, we remember that we are not alone in our pain and our struggles. God himself in Christ has experienced the gut-wrenching pain of a violent death on the cross, and has experienced what it is like to wrestle with the dread of pain and suffering. The night before his crucifixion, Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, “My Father, if it possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want” (Matt. 26:39). Although the Gospel of John portrays Jesus as calmly accepting his fate, Matthew, Mark, and Luke all describe Jesus struggling in anguish the night before his death, wishing that things could be otherwise. His prayer gives voice to a universal human cry: “Dear God, please save me!” – from pain, from suffering, and from death.
But pain, suffering, and death are unavoidable in this world: even Jesus did not get to bypass them in this life. And Jesus never promises his followers that their lives will be easy and painless; in fact, he warns them that following him may bring more pain and suffering into their lives, from a human perspective. But the consolation that we have through Christ that the Apostle Paul writes about is the knowledge that pain, suffering, and death do not have the final word. Although Jesus’s prayer to have the cup of suffering removed from him was not answered, the suffering and death that he endured did not defeat and destroy him. “On the third day, he rose again,” (Nicene Creed) and “rising from the grave, destroyed death, and made the whole creation new” (Eucharistic Prayer D, BCP 374).
God has answered that universal human cry to “save us” from pain, from suffering, and from death. As believers in Christ, through our baptism we have been united with Christ in his death – and in his sufferings – but also in his resurrection. As Paul writes in Romans 6, “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5).
The ultimate healing of humanity has already occurred in the transformation and transfiguration of mortal flesh into the eternal life of the Resurrection in Jesus Christ – and through our baptism we already begin to participate in that transformed life, the full flourishing of which we await at Christ’s Second Coming and the Resurrection of all. This hope for full participation in the Resurrected life is why we can say in our burial service, “Even at the grave we make our song, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” The consolation we have in Christ is not one that denies the anguish of suffering, but looks for its transformation into the life-giving power of the Resurrection.
“For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ” (2 Cor. 1:5). “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5).
“For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ” (2 Cor. 1:5).
As we gather today in this service of healing, we remember that we are not alone in our pain and our struggles. God himself in Christ has experienced the gut-wrenching pain of a violent death on the cross, and has experienced what it is like to wrestle with the dread of pain and suffering. The night before his crucifixion, Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, “My Father, if it possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want” (Matt. 26:39). Although the Gospel of John portrays Jesus as calmly accepting his fate, Matthew, Mark, and Luke all describe Jesus struggling in anguish the night before his death, wishing that things could be otherwise. His prayer gives voice to a universal human cry: “Dear God, please save me!” – from pain, from suffering, and from death.
But pain, suffering, and death are unavoidable in this world: even Jesus did not get to bypass them in this life. And Jesus never promises his followers that their lives will be easy and painless; in fact, he warns them that following him may bring more pain and suffering into their lives, from a human perspective. But the consolation that we have through Christ that the Apostle Paul writes about is the knowledge that pain, suffering, and death do not have the final word. Although Jesus’s prayer to have the cup of suffering removed from him was not answered, the suffering and death that he endured did not defeat and destroy him. “On the third day, he rose again,” (Nicene Creed) and “rising from the grave, destroyed death, and made the whole creation new” (Eucharistic Prayer D, BCP 374).
God has answered that universal human cry to “save us” from pain, from suffering, and from death. As believers in Christ, through our baptism we have been united with Christ in his death – and in his sufferings – but also in his resurrection. As Paul writes in Romans 6, “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5).
The ultimate healing of humanity has already occurred in the transformation and transfiguration of mortal flesh into the eternal life of the Resurrection in Jesus Christ – and through our baptism we already begin to participate in that transformed life, the full flourishing of which we await at Christ’s Second Coming and the Resurrection of all. This hope for full participation in the Resurrected life is why we can say in our burial service, “Even at the grave we make our song, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” The consolation we have in Christ is not one that denies the anguish of suffering, but looks for its transformation into the life-giving power of the Resurrection.
“For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ” (2 Cor. 1:5). “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5).
Sunday, September 9, 2012
A call to be in community with "the poor"
Sermon delivered Sunday, Sept. 9, 2012, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Franklin, Tenn.
When I was about 16 years old, I started reading the Bible for the first time. Sure, I’d grown up in church – my parents took my sister and me to the local Lutheran church every Sunday – and I’d heard scripture passages read out loud in the service every week, but until I was 16, I don’t think I’d ever actually opened a Bible. When I “got saved” at a youth rally sponsored by a friend’s Southern Baptist church, I came home with a pamphlet of materials about how to nurture my new life in Christ that instructed me to read and study various scripture passages. So I asked my mother, “Um, do you have, like, a Bible I could borrow?” She gave me a small, pocket-sized paperback copy she’d been given in a Sunday School class years ago, and I began to explore, reading voraciously through the New Testament.
But as I read, I began to get a bit uneasy, because the picture I began to get of Jesus didn’t match up very closely with what I’d seen and experienced in church. I noticed that Jesus had spent his ministry being with people considered to be on the margins of his society, but I didn’t see many Christians around me doing similar things in our society. Sure, I had learned through church that being a Christian had something to do with “being a good person” and “helping the less fortunate,” but donating our used clothes to the area thrift store and taking some canned goods to the food pantry didn’t seem to be the same as what I saw Jesus doing in the stories in the Bible: actually being with people – ministering to their needs, yes, but more significantly, being with them, knowing them, loving them. I had never actually met a single person who had benefitted from any of the items my family or church had donated over the years. “The poor” were not part of our church; they were somewhere “out there,” and certainly not “one of us.”
Our passage from the letter of James this morning (James 2:1-17) is about what happens when “the poor” actually show up in church, when they don’t stay safely “out there,” hidden behind the back doors of distribution centers or in alleys beside shelters. It’s about what happens when “the poor” cease to be an abstract statistic and become real people in our midst. It’s about what happens when a person who is exhausted from spending his days sleeping on park benches in the blazing sun because it is too dangerous to sleep at night shuffles in to church and sits down in the back pew. How do those who claim to believe in and follow “our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” respond? Do they clutch their purses a little closer? Wrap their arms protectively around their children? Edge uncomfortably away?
James’s words about the sin of partiality and favoritism in the church ring just as true today as they did in the first and second centuries. There seems to be something innate in human societies that leads them to favor the “haves” over the “have nots.” Despite the fact that Jesus spent his ministry caring for and being with those on the margins of society, and despite the centuries-old Jewish tradition of God’s favor and care for the poor that we heard echoed in our passage from Proverbs this morning, the earliest churches – just like churches today – became stratified and segregated according to socioeconomic status. And even in the churches that were or are socioeconomically diverse, those with the most money often wield the most power and command the most respect. Churches might give lip service to Jesus’s teachings about the impossibility of serving God and money (Matthew 6:24) and the teachings in 1 Timothy about the love of money being the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10), but in practice the person “with gold rings and in fine clothes” is often treated better than the “poor person in dirty clothes,” just as the letter of James describes.
Encountering these scriptures for the first time at age 16 and observing some of these dynamics in the churches around me began to open my heart to a deep sense of call to ministry with those on the margins of society, but it wasn’t until nearly 10 years later, while I was living in the Boston area for graduate school, that I began to act on that sense of call.
Through the Episcopal church I was attending at the time, I heard about an outdoor worship service for homeless people in Cambridge, called simply, “The Outdoor Church.” It was an offshoot of a larger gathering in downtown Boston called “common cathedral” that had been started by an Episcopal priest about 10 years before. The rector at my parish went down once a month to the Outdoor Church to help with the service and to share in fellowship with the community there. I remember being in a Christian formation class on a Monday after one of his Sundays at the Outdoor Church and being captivated by his descriptions of his experiences there the previous day. “It really felt like church,” he said.
Not too long after that, I began volunteering weekly with the Outdoor Church. My priest’s words resonated deeply with my own experience: it did indeed “feel like church,” like what I imagined the church was supposed to be. I felt I had finally found a community whose way of life seemed to mirror what Jesus did in the Gospels: being with those on the margins of society, offering them not just care for their physical needs (which we did in the form of sandwiches and socks and jackets), but a sense of belonging and community.
It was through my encounters with the people in that community that I learned how damaging the unspoken concern with appearances in churches can be. Many churches will never have to deal with the hypothetical issue the letter of James presents because no “poor person in dirty clothes” would feel comfortable even walking through the doors of their church. Many people on the streets think they are not “presentable” enough or “worthy” enough to attend church. They worry about how they look or how they smell, and fear of rejection keeps them far from the doors of any church. Simply saying “our church welcomes all people” is not enough to counteract unspoken cultural norms that dictate that people arrive for church clean and nicely dressed, nor does it outweigh the palpable uncomfortable vibe that homeless people can often sense from people in traditional churches if they show up for a regular Sunday service. Communities like the Outdoor Church – and our own Church in the Yard [C.I.T.Y.] here in Nashville – attempt to respond to this dynamic by taking the church to people where they are, on the streets, instead of waiting for “them” to come to “us.” The United Church of Christ minister I worked with at the Outdoor Church used to say that our mission was to “take the church to people who either cannot or will not reach it on their own.”
The Outdoor Church really “felt like church,” I think, because it was a gathering where people were accepted just as they were, where there were no acts of favoritism or preference shown to those who had money over those who did not. It was a community where there were no pressures or expectations to look or act a certain way, but where all people were seen and treated as beloved children of God.
And in that community of faith and belonging, people’s bodily needs were met as well. After Eucharist, we served a meal – just like they do at Church in the Yard. We did not simply say to our brothers and sisters who lack daily food, “Go in peace, keep warm and eat your fill,” but we shared a meal with them and helped them find snow boots or jackets when they needed them.
The faith in that community was not the “faith by itself” with no works that James criticizes, but a lively and robust faith manifested in the actions of the members of the community toward one another. The selfless giving and works of faith flowed not just from the people making the sandwiches and donating the jackets, but from our homeless parishioners as well. Our street friends would often make small monetary donations to the Outdoor Church, or give back to us in other ways. I remember a small Latino man in Harvard Square with whom we shared sandwiches every week as he sold his handiwork as a street vendor. Although he spoke almost no English, one of our volunteers was fluent in Spanish and was able to translate for us. His situation was dismal: he had somehow managed to come to the U.S. without the proper paperwork, traveling with friends or relatives and not understanding the legal situation he was getting himself into. He had expected to be able to return to his family in Latin America, but now realized he was unable to leave or to get a job due to his undocumented status, so for the time being he was hand-making beaded items and selling them on the street. Those items were the only source of income he had, but one week he presented to each of us ministers a small, hand-made dreamcatcher, decorated with feathers and beads. “Because you help me,” he said to us in English. I have kept it by my bedside ever since.
Churches whose focus is on the so-called “social gospel” – feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and other “acts of mercy” – often are criticized by so-called “evangelical” Christians for neglecting to “share the Gospel” with those whose physical needs they meet. “Social Gospel” Christians like this passage from James that argues that “faith without works is dead,” while evangelicals prefer Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith… it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”
This tension between faith and works and what role “sharing our faith” should play in our outreach work is a constant point of contention between Christians on different ends of this spectrum. A fellow student in one of my religion classes at Furman University once said during a class discussion of the life and work of Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa that “if you feed the poor but don’t tell them about Jesus, it’s like a slap in the face.” I remember thinking that I believed the exact opposite – that the “slap in the face” would be to tell people about Jesus but not provide for their basic needs. But reflecting on this tension now, I don’t think that either extreme is the authentic Christian way. Neither the street corner preacher handing out tracts or the food pantry handing out canned goods is fully living out the Christian call to be in community with the poor. Both approaches require little interaction between the “ministers” and the people they say they are trying to reach. The problem comes largely when we think of “the poor” as an abstract group that we need to do something to rather than fellow human beings and fellow people of faith we need to be in relationship with. We think we need to “give to the poor,” never considering that they have much to give to us. We think we need to “share the Gospel” with others, never considering that the people with whom we aim to share our faith might already know quite a bit about God and be able to teach us something about faith.
The kind of church the letter of James is calling us to be is one where we engage in the mutuality of community, not the inequality of donor and receiver. We are to come together across classes as one body in Christ, and to share with each other whatever we have to share – be it money or faith or skills or knowledge – because everyone has something to contribute to the body of Christ. It is out of that foundation – of recognizing our equality in the eyes of God and the unique contribution of each person to the church and the world – that we move toward providing for one another’s needs in the way that James describes. When we know one another, we won’t be able to not care about the plight of our neighbor, because we will be to each other not abstract statistics or problems to be solved, but brothers and sisters in Christ.
When I was about 16 years old, I started reading the Bible for the first time. Sure, I’d grown up in church – my parents took my sister and me to the local Lutheran church every Sunday – and I’d heard scripture passages read out loud in the service every week, but until I was 16, I don’t think I’d ever actually opened a Bible. When I “got saved” at a youth rally sponsored by a friend’s Southern Baptist church, I came home with a pamphlet of materials about how to nurture my new life in Christ that instructed me to read and study various scripture passages. So I asked my mother, “Um, do you have, like, a Bible I could borrow?” She gave me a small, pocket-sized paperback copy she’d been given in a Sunday School class years ago, and I began to explore, reading voraciously through the New Testament.
But as I read, I began to get a bit uneasy, because the picture I began to get of Jesus didn’t match up very closely with what I’d seen and experienced in church. I noticed that Jesus had spent his ministry being with people considered to be on the margins of his society, but I didn’t see many Christians around me doing similar things in our society. Sure, I had learned through church that being a Christian had something to do with “being a good person” and “helping the less fortunate,” but donating our used clothes to the area thrift store and taking some canned goods to the food pantry didn’t seem to be the same as what I saw Jesus doing in the stories in the Bible: actually being with people – ministering to their needs, yes, but more significantly, being with them, knowing them, loving them. I had never actually met a single person who had benefitted from any of the items my family or church had donated over the years. “The poor” were not part of our church; they were somewhere “out there,” and certainly not “one of us.”
Our passage from the letter of James this morning (James 2:1-17) is about what happens when “the poor” actually show up in church, when they don’t stay safely “out there,” hidden behind the back doors of distribution centers or in alleys beside shelters. It’s about what happens when “the poor” cease to be an abstract statistic and become real people in our midst. It’s about what happens when a person who is exhausted from spending his days sleeping on park benches in the blazing sun because it is too dangerous to sleep at night shuffles in to church and sits down in the back pew. How do those who claim to believe in and follow “our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” respond? Do they clutch their purses a little closer? Wrap their arms protectively around their children? Edge uncomfortably away?
James’s words about the sin of partiality and favoritism in the church ring just as true today as they did in the first and second centuries. There seems to be something innate in human societies that leads them to favor the “haves” over the “have nots.” Despite the fact that Jesus spent his ministry caring for and being with those on the margins of society, and despite the centuries-old Jewish tradition of God’s favor and care for the poor that we heard echoed in our passage from Proverbs this morning, the earliest churches – just like churches today – became stratified and segregated according to socioeconomic status. And even in the churches that were or are socioeconomically diverse, those with the most money often wield the most power and command the most respect. Churches might give lip service to Jesus’s teachings about the impossibility of serving God and money (Matthew 6:24) and the teachings in 1 Timothy about the love of money being the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10), but in practice the person “with gold rings and in fine clothes” is often treated better than the “poor person in dirty clothes,” just as the letter of James describes.
Encountering these scriptures for the first time at age 16 and observing some of these dynamics in the churches around me began to open my heart to a deep sense of call to ministry with those on the margins of society, but it wasn’t until nearly 10 years later, while I was living in the Boston area for graduate school, that I began to act on that sense of call.
Through the Episcopal church I was attending at the time, I heard about an outdoor worship service for homeless people in Cambridge, called simply, “The Outdoor Church.” It was an offshoot of a larger gathering in downtown Boston called “common cathedral” that had been started by an Episcopal priest about 10 years before. The rector at my parish went down once a month to the Outdoor Church to help with the service and to share in fellowship with the community there. I remember being in a Christian formation class on a Monday after one of his Sundays at the Outdoor Church and being captivated by his descriptions of his experiences there the previous day. “It really felt like church,” he said.
Not too long after that, I began volunteering weekly with the Outdoor Church. My priest’s words resonated deeply with my own experience: it did indeed “feel like church,” like what I imagined the church was supposed to be. I felt I had finally found a community whose way of life seemed to mirror what Jesus did in the Gospels: being with those on the margins of society, offering them not just care for their physical needs (which we did in the form of sandwiches and socks and jackets), but a sense of belonging and community.
It was through my encounters with the people in that community that I learned how damaging the unspoken concern with appearances in churches can be. Many churches will never have to deal with the hypothetical issue the letter of James presents because no “poor person in dirty clothes” would feel comfortable even walking through the doors of their church. Many people on the streets think they are not “presentable” enough or “worthy” enough to attend church. They worry about how they look or how they smell, and fear of rejection keeps them far from the doors of any church. Simply saying “our church welcomes all people” is not enough to counteract unspoken cultural norms that dictate that people arrive for church clean and nicely dressed, nor does it outweigh the palpable uncomfortable vibe that homeless people can often sense from people in traditional churches if they show up for a regular Sunday service. Communities like the Outdoor Church – and our own Church in the Yard [C.I.T.Y.] here in Nashville – attempt to respond to this dynamic by taking the church to people where they are, on the streets, instead of waiting for “them” to come to “us.” The United Church of Christ minister I worked with at the Outdoor Church used to say that our mission was to “take the church to people who either cannot or will not reach it on their own.”
The Outdoor Church really “felt like church,” I think, because it was a gathering where people were accepted just as they were, where there were no acts of favoritism or preference shown to those who had money over those who did not. It was a community where there were no pressures or expectations to look or act a certain way, but where all people were seen and treated as beloved children of God.
And in that community of faith and belonging, people’s bodily needs were met as well. After Eucharist, we served a meal – just like they do at Church in the Yard. We did not simply say to our brothers and sisters who lack daily food, “Go in peace, keep warm and eat your fill,” but we shared a meal with them and helped them find snow boots or jackets when they needed them.
The faith in that community was not the “faith by itself” with no works that James criticizes, but a lively and robust faith manifested in the actions of the members of the community toward one another. The selfless giving and works of faith flowed not just from the people making the sandwiches and donating the jackets, but from our homeless parishioners as well. Our street friends would often make small monetary donations to the Outdoor Church, or give back to us in other ways. I remember a small Latino man in Harvard Square with whom we shared sandwiches every week as he sold his handiwork as a street vendor. Although he spoke almost no English, one of our volunteers was fluent in Spanish and was able to translate for us. His situation was dismal: he had somehow managed to come to the U.S. without the proper paperwork, traveling with friends or relatives and not understanding the legal situation he was getting himself into. He had expected to be able to return to his family in Latin America, but now realized he was unable to leave or to get a job due to his undocumented status, so for the time being he was hand-making beaded items and selling them on the street. Those items were the only source of income he had, but one week he presented to each of us ministers a small, hand-made dreamcatcher, decorated with feathers and beads. “Because you help me,” he said to us in English. I have kept it by my bedside ever since.
Churches whose focus is on the so-called “social gospel” – feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and other “acts of mercy” – often are criticized by so-called “evangelical” Christians for neglecting to “share the Gospel” with those whose physical needs they meet. “Social Gospel” Christians like this passage from James that argues that “faith without works is dead,” while evangelicals prefer Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith… it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”
This tension between faith and works and what role “sharing our faith” should play in our outreach work is a constant point of contention between Christians on different ends of this spectrum. A fellow student in one of my religion classes at Furman University once said during a class discussion of the life and work of Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa that “if you feed the poor but don’t tell them about Jesus, it’s like a slap in the face.” I remember thinking that I believed the exact opposite – that the “slap in the face” would be to tell people about Jesus but not provide for their basic needs. But reflecting on this tension now, I don’t think that either extreme is the authentic Christian way. Neither the street corner preacher handing out tracts or the food pantry handing out canned goods is fully living out the Christian call to be in community with the poor. Both approaches require little interaction between the “ministers” and the people they say they are trying to reach. The problem comes largely when we think of “the poor” as an abstract group that we need to do something to rather than fellow human beings and fellow people of faith we need to be in relationship with. We think we need to “give to the poor,” never considering that they have much to give to us. We think we need to “share the Gospel” with others, never considering that the people with whom we aim to share our faith might already know quite a bit about God and be able to teach us something about faith.
The kind of church the letter of James is calling us to be is one where we engage in the mutuality of community, not the inequality of donor and receiver. We are to come together across classes as one body in Christ, and to share with each other whatever we have to share – be it money or faith or skills or knowledge – because everyone has something to contribute to the body of Christ. It is out of that foundation – of recognizing our equality in the eyes of God and the unique contribution of each person to the church and the world – that we move toward providing for one another’s needs in the way that James describes. When we know one another, we won’t be able to not care about the plight of our neighbor, because we will be to each other not abstract statistics or problems to be solved, but brothers and sisters in Christ.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)