Sermon delivered Sunday, August 21, 2016 (The Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 16, Year C (Track 2)), at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
Sermon Text(s): Isaiah 58:9b-14, Luke 13:10-17
“Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” (Exodus 20:8)
So God commanded the people of Israel when he gave them the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. And pretty much since that moment, people have been arguing over what exactly it means to “remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” Does it mean not doing any work? If so, does that mean just not doing whatever it is we do for a living, or do other things count as “work” as well? Does it mean spending the day worshipping God? If so, does that mean doing only religious activities, and preferably those that are serious and dour, leaving no room for fun? When we attempt to figure out what is acceptable and what is unacceptable on the Sabbath, what things we can “get away with” doing and what things are forbidden, we’re pretty much missing the point of why God gave us the Sabbath in the first place, why God commanded us to honor the Sabbath.
The most basic purpose of observing the Sabbath is to give us a day of rest. The passage from Exodus where God gives the Ten Commandments to Moses says:
“Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. For six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.” (Exodus 20:8-11)
In this passage, keeping sabbath is linked to God’s own pattern of action and rest: we are to work for a certain number of days and then rest, just as God did at creation. The book of Genesis tells us that on that day that God rested, he stepped back and looked at his creation and observed that it was good. So although there is no explicit reason given in the commandment as to why the people should keep the Sabbath or what the purpose of it is, by linking it to the creation story, the message is that we are not only given a break to rest, but to take delight in our work and in the work of God around us. To step back from our busy life just long enough to appreciate what we have and what is all around us.
In the book of Deuteronomy, a different reason is given for keeping the Sabbath:
“Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you.”– Then it goes on to repeat what is in Exodus about how nobody, not even the slaves or the livestock, is to do any work on the sabbath. But rather than a reference to the creation story, in Deuteronomy the commandment about Sabbath concludes with this line: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.”
Here the day of rest is linked with the liberation of the people from slavery – a condition in which they likely had had very little rest. Every time they observed the Sabbath, it would be a reminder to them to be grateful for their liberation. So the Sabbath is to be not just a day of rest, but a time to be grateful for the freedom to take that rest, a time to celebrate liberation.
When Jesus heals on the Sabbath – as he does in today’s Gospel reading and in many other places throughout the Gospels – he gets flack from Jewish leaders who saw this as a violation of the rule to do no work on the Sabbath. But Jesus rebukes them with this comeback:
"You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?"
Without directly saying it, Jesus is alluding to that other reason for keeping Sabbath – to celebrate liberation. Notice the language Jesus uses: “Ought not this woman… be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” He’s reminding them of the connection between the Sabbath and the exodus from Egypt: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.” Remember that part, guys? Being set free from bondage? Remember that that’s one of the reasons God established the Sabbath? So why should it be considered inappropriate to bring someone freedom from an ailment on the Sabbath day?
The ancient prophets had a lot to say about people who dishonored the Sabbath, and we have a glimpse of their critique in our Hebrew scripture passage today, from Isaiah:
“If you refrain from trampling the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call the sabbath a delight and the holy day of the LORD honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs; then you shall take delight in the LORD, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth.”
The prophets chastise people who “pursue their own interests” on the Sabbath day, who dishonor the Sabbath for selfish reasons, like wanting to make more money by keeping their store open one more day. In an ironic twist, the adamancy of the religious leaders that Jesus clashes with who insist that he should not heal because no work should be done on the Sabbath becomes a perfect example of those who “pursue their own interests” on the Sabbath day, as these religious leaders seek to maintain the order of the social institution that benefits them.
Jesus’s healing on the Sabbath, although it breaks the technical letter of the law, is not an example of “pursuing your own interests” on the Sabbath day. Jesus’s actions are not done out of a selfish desire to do whatever he wants on the Sabbath, disregarding God’s commandments. His act of healing is an unselfish act, an act in which he gives of himself to someone else, an act that honors the Sabbath by bringing someone freedom from bondage, echoing the action of God in bringing the people out of slavery in Egypt that prompted the establishment of the Sabbath day in the first place.
This exchange between Jesus and the religious leaders is a perfect illustration of what the apostle Paul observed in his second letter to the Corinthians: “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). Jesus is observing the spirit behind the law of keeping Sabbath, even if he is not strictly obeying the letter of the law. But the religious leaders who are so focused on the letter of the law – “no work should be done on the Sabbath, ever, not for any reason!” – lose sight of the spirit of the law. They become focused on obeying the law for the law’s sake rather than for the reason the law was given in the first place – to bring freedom and new life. Jesus calls out the religious leaders who are so upset that he has healed this woman, and yet despite their insistence that no work be done on the Sabbath ever, they still untie their animals and take them to drink on the Sabbath day, which, if we’re using that strict interpretation of the law, would be considered work. So, he challenges them, you’re willing to make an exception to keep your own animals alive, but not to serve and care for a woman who is suffering?
Living on the West Coast in 21st century America, we’re perhaps in an opposite situation from Jesus’s audience in today’s Gospel reading. Sabbath laws prohibiting work on a certain day are so far from our consciousness here that this passage likely has little relevance to us in that regard. We get that “the letter kills,” and so as a society, we’ve largely thrown out the letter, seeing religious observance as burdensome and restrictive. But what we’ve forgotten as we’ve done so is that excessive work also kills. A constant stream of information input coming at from our phones, our tablets, our televisions, the internet – 24 hours a day – that also kills.
Our problem is not so much being overly restricted about what we can’t do on the Sabbath, but having absolutely no restrictions about what we can do on the Sabbath! Running from one event to another, from one meeting to another, being too busy to do anything – our hectic lives never slow down anymore, not even over the weekends. There is no social pressure – from the society or from the church, anymore – at least, not the Episcopal Church! – to refrain from any action on any particular day of the week, and so it is left to each one of us, individually, to impose healthy restrictions on ourselves, and oftentimes it is easier to obey external laws than it is to set up internal ones for our own good. As a result, many of us today have no concept of what it means to “remember the Sabbath day,” to follow the wisdom of the ancients in listening to God’s commandment to just STOP, already. To remember that there is value in doing nothing, in resting, in just being.
Donna Schaper, a Baptist minister in New York City who has written extensively on the Sabbath, says, “When we do not keep sabbath, our life is a list.”
“When we do not keep sabbath, our life is a list.”
Lists are good. They keep us going and help us get things done by keeping us accountable. But if we don’t ever take a break, if we don’t ever just stop and rest, our entire life becomes one long to-do list.
This is the flip side of keeping Sabbath too strictly – not keeping it at all. And in both scenarios, actually, life becomes a list – either a list of “dos” and “don’ts,” a list of rules and regulations, or a list of “to-dos,” a list of things for which there will never be enough time, shutting out any time for ourselves or for God.
What might it look like to take charge of our own Sabbaths and stay true to the spirit of God’s command to “honor the Sabbath and keep it holy”? What kinds of things might you do to reclaim that Sabbath time, that rest time, on whatever day of the week works best for you?
If you have any preconceived notions about what it means to keep Sabbath, throw them out and ask yourself this question: “What brings me life? What rejuvenates me? What reminds me to be grateful for God’s grace and mercy in my life and motivates me to work for the liberation of others?”
Whatever your answers to those questions, make intentional time during your week to do those things, without worrying about whether you are “working” on the Sabbath or not, or whether you are being “productive” or not. Worrying too much about either the religious commandment to not do any work on the Sabbath or about the unspoken secular commandment that we must be productive and “get things done” 24 hours a day leads to the same result: a life in which true spiritual joy and connection is squelched. The letter kills, but the spirit gives life. Honor God by making time in your schedule for what brings you life and what motivates you to bring life to others. In doing so, you are “remembering the Sabbath day and keeping it holy.”
Sunday, August 21, 2016
Sunday, August 14, 2016
What kind of "peace" does Jesus come to bring?
Sermon delivered Sunday, August 14, 2016 (The Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 15, Year C (Track 2)) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” (Luke 12:51)
Jesus’s words in today’s Gospel passage stand in stark contrast to the understanding many of us in the mainline churches have of the teachings of Jesus. Jesus is the “Prince of Peace,” Jesus “loves the little children,” Jesus’s message was to “love God and love neighbor,” and that’s about it, right? We often talk about our faith as if we think “be nice to each other” pretty much sums up the Gospel.
But that’s not quite all of it. Jesus didn’t just say “be nice to each other.” He also said to free the oppressed and heal the sick and release the prisoners. He called us to fight against injustice, to stand in solidarity with the marginalized, to question any institutional structures whose rules about right and wrong ignore and even perpetuate human suffering. And as most of you know from experience, when you start standing up against injustice and raising up the voices of the marginalized, the reactions from others are often less than peaceful.
“I have not come to bring peace, but division,” Jesus says. Yes, he does call us to love God and love neighbor, but he wants us to understand that “loving God and loving neighbor” doesn’t mean always being nice, or never getting into conflict with anyone, or “keeping the peace” at all costs. Loving God and loving neighbor can be a revolutionary act – an act that compels us to see one other’s wounds rather than hide them.
Jesus’s words here echo other scripture passages from the Hebrew Bible that admonish false prophets for assuring the people that everything was ok when it wasn’t. He would have known these words of the prophet Jeremiah well:
“They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14)
Or, as Taylor Swift puts it in her song “Bad Blood,” “Band-aids don’t fix bullet holes.”
Unfortunately that’s too often how we, in society at large and in the church, attempt to solve problems. We offer solutions that do not take into account the seriousness of the problem. We attempt to “dress the wound as though it were not serious.” We become like the false prophets Ezekiel spoke about, who cover a flimsy wall with whitewash to make look good what is really weak and rotting (Ezekiel 13:11). That’s the kind of “peace” Jesus is talking about when he says “I come not to bring peace” – he doesn’t come to bring the kind of peace that shoves conflict under the rug rather than resolving it, or worse, that denies there’s even a problem at all.
“I’m sure there’s a legitimate reason the cop pulled you over.”
“Just cheer up and snap out of it; you’re not REALLY sick.”
“I’m sure your boss didn’t REALLY mean that as a threat.”
You’re blowing things out of proportion, you’re being too sensitive.
Just put a band-aid on it.
Everything will be all right.
But everything is NOT all right, and as followers of Jesus Christ, we are called to say so, even if doing so causes conflict or division with those closest to us.
How many social issues in our society would cause arguments if you were to bring them up with your family members? When Jesus says, “I have come not to bring peace but division. From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three,” he didn’t mean that his GOAL was to divide people, to create familial discord, but that whenever the word of God breaks through into human society, it almost always causes conflict because of humanity’s tendency to avoid pain. We’d rather bury our heads in the sand and say “everything will be all right” than to acknowledge that there is something seriously wrong with us or with our society. So the voices that don’t deny the wounds, that shine spotlights on things others would rather stay hidden – they often wind up causing division within their communities, and especially within their own families.
This is playing out right now in American society with Black Lives Matter. One could certainly say that the Black Lives Matter movement has caused division in this country. But the folks affiliated with Black Lives Matter would probably say they haven’t caused division, they are simply pointing out divisions that have existed for a long time. Despite the achievements of the Civil Rights movement, we still have much further to go. When Barack Obama was elected President, it was easy for some people to assume we had “arrived,” that we had reached a point where racism was no longer an issue in this country. And it is easy for those of us who have never lived in this society with brown or black skin to say “peace, peace” on this issue, when in reality there is no peace. For those of us in that position of privilege, our role is to listen. To listen to the voices we have not heard, to bear witness to experiences that we have not had, and acknowledge that they are real even if we haven’t personally experienced them ourselves. We must not turn away from pain, but face it head on, as Jesus and the prophets did.
The apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans that “all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death” (Romans 6:3). Our baptism connects us not just to the washing with water that Jesus got from John in the Jordan River, but to the “terrible baptism of suffering” that he experienced on the cross, the “baptism” he refers to in today’s Gospel that causes him great distress. We should have issued little Benjamin a hard hat along with his baptismal candle a few weeks ago, because while baptism is empowering, it is also dangerous. It means that we are forever connected to God and our sins are forgiven, but it also means we are also forever connected to Christ’s suffering and death.
Many people have criticized Christian theology that emphasizes our call to suffering, that insists that suffering can be redemptive, that we can be saved through suffering, that Jesus saves us through suffering. They don’t want to acknowledge that anything could be positive about suffering because of the ways that idea can be abused by people in power to justify injustice, to keep the oppressed oppressed. “Oh, you guys are called to suffer, it’s ok, just wait and stick it out; your reward will be great in heaven,” the church has said to black people in slavery, to women in abusive relationships, to workers exploited by corporations.
But that’s not the message of the Gospel! That’s the message of the false prophets who say “peace” when there is no peace! The call to suffering is not a call to inflict suffering on others, it’s a call to experience the suffering of others – to “weep with those who weep and to mourn with those who mourn.”
Charles Péguy, a French poet and philosopher, imagines that when we die, the recording angel at the entrance to heaven will say to us, “Show me your wounds.”
A life in Christ calls us to a life of suffering. If we have no wounds to show at the end of our days, we haven’t truly lived the Christian life. We’ve followed the false prophets who say “peace, peace” when there is no peace. We’ve turned a blind eye to the world’s injustices and benefitted from our complicity in them.
In the midst of the national anxiety around the police shootings last month, there was a meme circulating on Facebook that said,
“Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other close and continue to pull back the veil.”
Testifying to the truth might create division, but it is what we are called to do. Pulling back that veil so we can truly see the wounds that divide our society might make things seem like they are getting worse, but in another one of Jesus’s less popular sayings, he refers to this kind of conflict as the “beginning of the birth pangs,” of the necessary pain we must go through to come out on the other side with new life and a true peace, a peace that has its roots in reconciliation rather than denial, a peace that comes from healing the bullet hole rather than putting a band-aid over it.
That’s what “loving God and loving neighbor” looks like. Jesus calls us to a revolutionary love, a love that involves suffering. The suffering inherent in the Christian way leads us to a peace greater than any that would deny the existence of the wounds. And that’s the kind of peace Jesus is the prince of.
“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” (Luke 12:51)
Jesus’s words in today’s Gospel passage stand in stark contrast to the understanding many of us in the mainline churches have of the teachings of Jesus. Jesus is the “Prince of Peace,” Jesus “loves the little children,” Jesus’s message was to “love God and love neighbor,” and that’s about it, right? We often talk about our faith as if we think “be nice to each other” pretty much sums up the Gospel.
But that’s not quite all of it. Jesus didn’t just say “be nice to each other.” He also said to free the oppressed and heal the sick and release the prisoners. He called us to fight against injustice, to stand in solidarity with the marginalized, to question any institutional structures whose rules about right and wrong ignore and even perpetuate human suffering. And as most of you know from experience, when you start standing up against injustice and raising up the voices of the marginalized, the reactions from others are often less than peaceful.
“I have not come to bring peace, but division,” Jesus says. Yes, he does call us to love God and love neighbor, but he wants us to understand that “loving God and loving neighbor” doesn’t mean always being nice, or never getting into conflict with anyone, or “keeping the peace” at all costs. Loving God and loving neighbor can be a revolutionary act – an act that compels us to see one other’s wounds rather than hide them.
Jesus’s words here echo other scripture passages from the Hebrew Bible that admonish false prophets for assuring the people that everything was ok when it wasn’t. He would have known these words of the prophet Jeremiah well:
“They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14)
Or, as Taylor Swift puts it in her song “Bad Blood,” “Band-aids don’t fix bullet holes.”
Unfortunately that’s too often how we, in society at large and in the church, attempt to solve problems. We offer solutions that do not take into account the seriousness of the problem. We attempt to “dress the wound as though it were not serious.” We become like the false prophets Ezekiel spoke about, who cover a flimsy wall with whitewash to make look good what is really weak and rotting (Ezekiel 13:11). That’s the kind of “peace” Jesus is talking about when he says “I come not to bring peace” – he doesn’t come to bring the kind of peace that shoves conflict under the rug rather than resolving it, or worse, that denies there’s even a problem at all.
“I’m sure there’s a legitimate reason the cop pulled you over.”
“Just cheer up and snap out of it; you’re not REALLY sick.”
“I’m sure your boss didn’t REALLY mean that as a threat.”
You’re blowing things out of proportion, you’re being too sensitive.
Just put a band-aid on it.
Everything will be all right.
But everything is NOT all right, and as followers of Jesus Christ, we are called to say so, even if doing so causes conflict or division with those closest to us.
How many social issues in our society would cause arguments if you were to bring them up with your family members? When Jesus says, “I have come not to bring peace but division. From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three,” he didn’t mean that his GOAL was to divide people, to create familial discord, but that whenever the word of God breaks through into human society, it almost always causes conflict because of humanity’s tendency to avoid pain. We’d rather bury our heads in the sand and say “everything will be all right” than to acknowledge that there is something seriously wrong with us or with our society. So the voices that don’t deny the wounds, that shine spotlights on things others would rather stay hidden – they often wind up causing division within their communities, and especially within their own families.
This is playing out right now in American society with Black Lives Matter. One could certainly say that the Black Lives Matter movement has caused division in this country. But the folks affiliated with Black Lives Matter would probably say they haven’t caused division, they are simply pointing out divisions that have existed for a long time. Despite the achievements of the Civil Rights movement, we still have much further to go. When Barack Obama was elected President, it was easy for some people to assume we had “arrived,” that we had reached a point where racism was no longer an issue in this country. And it is easy for those of us who have never lived in this society with brown or black skin to say “peace, peace” on this issue, when in reality there is no peace. For those of us in that position of privilege, our role is to listen. To listen to the voices we have not heard, to bear witness to experiences that we have not had, and acknowledge that they are real even if we haven’t personally experienced them ourselves. We must not turn away from pain, but face it head on, as Jesus and the prophets did.
The apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans that “all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death” (Romans 6:3). Our baptism connects us not just to the washing with water that Jesus got from John in the Jordan River, but to the “terrible baptism of suffering” that he experienced on the cross, the “baptism” he refers to in today’s Gospel that causes him great distress. We should have issued little Benjamin a hard hat along with his baptismal candle a few weeks ago, because while baptism is empowering, it is also dangerous. It means that we are forever connected to God and our sins are forgiven, but it also means we are also forever connected to Christ’s suffering and death.
Many people have criticized Christian theology that emphasizes our call to suffering, that insists that suffering can be redemptive, that we can be saved through suffering, that Jesus saves us through suffering. They don’t want to acknowledge that anything could be positive about suffering because of the ways that idea can be abused by people in power to justify injustice, to keep the oppressed oppressed. “Oh, you guys are called to suffer, it’s ok, just wait and stick it out; your reward will be great in heaven,” the church has said to black people in slavery, to women in abusive relationships, to workers exploited by corporations.
But that’s not the message of the Gospel! That’s the message of the false prophets who say “peace” when there is no peace! The call to suffering is not a call to inflict suffering on others, it’s a call to experience the suffering of others – to “weep with those who weep and to mourn with those who mourn.”
Charles Péguy, a French poet and philosopher, imagines that when we die, the recording angel at the entrance to heaven will say to us, “Show me your wounds.”
A life in Christ calls us to a life of suffering. If we have no wounds to show at the end of our days, we haven’t truly lived the Christian life. We’ve followed the false prophets who say “peace, peace” when there is no peace. We’ve turned a blind eye to the world’s injustices and benefitted from our complicity in them.
In the midst of the national anxiety around the police shootings last month, there was a meme circulating on Facebook that said,
“Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other close and continue to pull back the veil.”
Testifying to the truth might create division, but it is what we are called to do. Pulling back that veil so we can truly see the wounds that divide our society might make things seem like they are getting worse, but in another one of Jesus’s less popular sayings, he refers to this kind of conflict as the “beginning of the birth pangs,” of the necessary pain we must go through to come out on the other side with new life and a true peace, a peace that has its roots in reconciliation rather than denial, a peace that comes from healing the bullet hole rather than putting a band-aid over it.
That’s what “loving God and loving neighbor” looks like. Jesus calls us to a revolutionary love, a love that involves suffering. The suffering inherent in the Christian way leads us to a peace greater than any that would deny the existence of the wounds. And that’s the kind of peace Jesus is the prince of.
Sunday, July 24, 2016
Teach us to pray
Sermon delivered Sunday, July 24, 2016 (The Eighth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 12, Year C (Track 2)), at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
Sermon Text: Luke 11:1-13
“Lord, teach us to pray,” the disciples ask. “Teach us to pray.”
Jesus responds by giving them an outline of the kinds of things they should pray for and then tells them a parable about the efficacy of prayer. The fact that he tells this parable in response to their question about how to pray leads me to believe that maybe the disciples were asking out of a sense that they weren’t doing things right, that Jesus might know a different way to pray that would get them better results. “How can we get our prayers answered” seems to be the underlying question, not just “teach us to pray.”
Jesus’s answer to them is: just keep asking. He says to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.”
Although the friend initially turns down the request, he ultimately gives in because the person knocking at his door just won’t give up. Jesus’s message seems to be: if you know that persistence and constant asking can be effective in finally getting what you want from other broken and sinful human beings, who do not always have your best interests at heart, how much more should you be certain that God, who loves you and does have your best interests at heart, will give you what you want if you are persistent in asking?
This parable is unique to Luke, but Luke links it with a saying of Jesus that appears in some form or another in all four Gospels: “ask, and it will be given to you.” The same exact words appear in Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:7-8). Mark and John do not have this exact passage, but the same theme appears in those Gospels as well. “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours,” Jesus says in chapter 11 of the Gospel of Mark (Mark 11:24). And in John 14, Jesus promises the disciples, “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” (John 14:14)
These passages seem to suggest that all we have to do is ask, and God will give us whatever we want. They can easily lend themselves to a “vending machine” view of God, where all we need to do is insert prayer, press D4, and whatever we have prayed for will promptly be deposited into the receptacle at the bottom of the machine. But I expect that most of us have found that prayer does not always work that way. It does not seem to be as easy as “ask, and you shall receive,” as “select your desired outcome and it will be delivered to you, no questions asked.” Although sometimes our prayers do seem to be answered exactly as we have asked, most of us have plenty of examples of times when we asked for something from God and did not receive it.
This is not a new problem for the “modern believer;” the earliest Christian communities already recognized that they did not always get everything they asked for from God. The author of the letter of James deals with this issue by arguing that the people are not receiving what they ask for because they are asking wrongly, because their desires are not in line with the will of God. James 4, verses 2-3, says this: “You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.” James’s answer for why some prayers go unanswered is that people are asking for the wrong things for the wrong reasons. That can be a helpful interpretation when we know deep down that our motives in asking for the things we are asking for are probably not the most godly, that they may be motivated by selfish desires. In those cases, we can accept that our prayers are not answered because we were not asking for the right things. But what about the cases in which we ask for something that we believe to be in line with the will of God, when we ask for the very things God has promised us, like life and health and justice and mercy and resurrection and peace, and we do not receive them?
One need only turn on the news in the past few weeks to find plenty of examples of unanswered prayer. “Oh, please, Jesus, don’t tell me he’s dead,” Philando Castile’s girlfriend prayed on the video she took after he was shot by a police officer at a routine traffic stop. And that prayer cut right to the heart of so many of us because we too have prayed that prayer. “Please, Jesus, no.” We know the pain of crying out to God, “NO,” of praying earnestly that whatever horrific thing that is happening in front of us would somehow be undone, and yet the situation remains unchanged. God seems to be silent.
Jesus tells the disciples that they will be able to heal in his name, and in the Gospels and the Book of Acts we have stories of the disciples healing the sick and raising the dead, but I have never known a Christian who was able to literally raise the dead. The prophets constantly tell us that God has promised to “restore the fortunes of Zion,” and yet the conflict in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas continues unabated. The prophets tell us that God wants “justice to roll down like waters,” but we see oppression and injustice continuing in our own society and around the world. So how are we to reconcile these unanswered prayers with Jesus’s words that “if in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it”? That “everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened”?
Again, this is not a new question. The biblical authors also struggled with unanswered prayers. The psalmists asked, “How long, O Lord?” How long will you hide your face from us, how long will you not respond to our prayers, to our cries for help? As we survey the violence that has wracked our country and the world in recent weeks and months, the biblical prophets give voice to our collective weariness and grief. The prophet Habakkuk asks, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” (Habakkuk 1:2) Job cries out to God, “Even when I cry out, ‘Violence!’ I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice” (Job 19:7). In Psalm 22, the psalm Jesus quotes while dying on the cross, the psalmist says, “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer. By night as well, but I find no rest” (Psalm 22:2).
In figuring out how to deal with the agony of unanswered prayer, the biblical prophets are a good place to turn, because they know that pain themselves, deeply, intimately, as evidenced in these and many other passages. And what do they do? They express their anguish about unanswered prayer to God, not only to other people. Significantly, they never take the step that so many people do today, to assume that the fact of unanswered prayer must mean that God does not exist. The biblical writers “keep the faith” even in the midst of unanswered prayer, even when God does not turn out to be their own personal divine vending machine. They stay in relationship to God and express their anguish to God, even if no answers are forthcoming.
They also remember the times God has answered prayer and how many blessings they have received from God. In the same chapter as Job cries out that there is no justice and his prayers are not answered, he goes on to say that “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth” (Job 19:25). Immediately after the verse in Psalm 22 about crying to God but receiving no answer, the psalmist goes on to say, “Yet you are the Holy One… our forefathers put their trust in you; they trusted, and you delivered them… you are he who took me out of the womb, and kept me safe upon my mother’s breast” (Psalm 22:3-4, 9). In the midst of laments about unanswered prayer in the Bible, there is almost always a recall of times that prayer has been answered, when we asked and it was given to us, when we sought and did find, when we knocked and the door was opened to us.
A priest mentor of mine once told me that when people come to her and say, “I’ve lost my faith,” she asks them, “When did you last see it?” – the same kind of question you’d ask someone if they were looking for a lost wallet. You had it with you at some point, so where did you last see it? When did you last know, without a shadow of a doubt, that God was with you? That God loves you? That God has your best interests at heart? Because just like that lost wallet, if you retrace your steps, you can find it again.
Jesus never promised us a life free from pain and suffering. But he did promise “to be with us always, even until the end of the age.” We may never have a satisfactory answer for why God leaves some prayers unanswered, even those prayers that are for the very things we believe God himself wants for us and for the world. But that need not stop us from affirming those times that God has answered prayer, that we have felt God’s presence, that we have seen God’s hand at work guiding our lives. We can hold the two in tension with one another and, with the biblical prophets, continue to cry out in our grief, confident that God is still there.
Sermon Text: Luke 11:1-13
“Lord, teach us to pray,” the disciples ask. “Teach us to pray.”
Jesus responds by giving them an outline of the kinds of things they should pray for and then tells them a parable about the efficacy of prayer. The fact that he tells this parable in response to their question about how to pray leads me to believe that maybe the disciples were asking out of a sense that they weren’t doing things right, that Jesus might know a different way to pray that would get them better results. “How can we get our prayers answered” seems to be the underlying question, not just “teach us to pray.”
Jesus’s answer to them is: just keep asking. He says to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.”
Although the friend initially turns down the request, he ultimately gives in because the person knocking at his door just won’t give up. Jesus’s message seems to be: if you know that persistence and constant asking can be effective in finally getting what you want from other broken and sinful human beings, who do not always have your best interests at heart, how much more should you be certain that God, who loves you and does have your best interests at heart, will give you what you want if you are persistent in asking?
This parable is unique to Luke, but Luke links it with a saying of Jesus that appears in some form or another in all four Gospels: “ask, and it will be given to you.” The same exact words appear in Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:7-8). Mark and John do not have this exact passage, but the same theme appears in those Gospels as well. “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours,” Jesus says in chapter 11 of the Gospel of Mark (Mark 11:24). And in John 14, Jesus promises the disciples, “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” (John 14:14)
These passages seem to suggest that all we have to do is ask, and God will give us whatever we want. They can easily lend themselves to a “vending machine” view of God, where all we need to do is insert prayer, press D4, and whatever we have prayed for will promptly be deposited into the receptacle at the bottom of the machine. But I expect that most of us have found that prayer does not always work that way. It does not seem to be as easy as “ask, and you shall receive,” as “select your desired outcome and it will be delivered to you, no questions asked.” Although sometimes our prayers do seem to be answered exactly as we have asked, most of us have plenty of examples of times when we asked for something from God and did not receive it.
This is not a new problem for the “modern believer;” the earliest Christian communities already recognized that they did not always get everything they asked for from God. The author of the letter of James deals with this issue by arguing that the people are not receiving what they ask for because they are asking wrongly, because their desires are not in line with the will of God. James 4, verses 2-3, says this: “You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.” James’s answer for why some prayers go unanswered is that people are asking for the wrong things for the wrong reasons. That can be a helpful interpretation when we know deep down that our motives in asking for the things we are asking for are probably not the most godly, that they may be motivated by selfish desires. In those cases, we can accept that our prayers are not answered because we were not asking for the right things. But what about the cases in which we ask for something that we believe to be in line with the will of God, when we ask for the very things God has promised us, like life and health and justice and mercy and resurrection and peace, and we do not receive them?
One need only turn on the news in the past few weeks to find plenty of examples of unanswered prayer. “Oh, please, Jesus, don’t tell me he’s dead,” Philando Castile’s girlfriend prayed on the video she took after he was shot by a police officer at a routine traffic stop. And that prayer cut right to the heart of so many of us because we too have prayed that prayer. “Please, Jesus, no.” We know the pain of crying out to God, “NO,” of praying earnestly that whatever horrific thing that is happening in front of us would somehow be undone, and yet the situation remains unchanged. God seems to be silent.
Jesus tells the disciples that they will be able to heal in his name, and in the Gospels and the Book of Acts we have stories of the disciples healing the sick and raising the dead, but I have never known a Christian who was able to literally raise the dead. The prophets constantly tell us that God has promised to “restore the fortunes of Zion,” and yet the conflict in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas continues unabated. The prophets tell us that God wants “justice to roll down like waters,” but we see oppression and injustice continuing in our own society and around the world. So how are we to reconcile these unanswered prayers with Jesus’s words that “if in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it”? That “everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened”?
Again, this is not a new question. The biblical authors also struggled with unanswered prayers. The psalmists asked, “How long, O Lord?” How long will you hide your face from us, how long will you not respond to our prayers, to our cries for help? As we survey the violence that has wracked our country and the world in recent weeks and months, the biblical prophets give voice to our collective weariness and grief. The prophet Habakkuk asks, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” (Habakkuk 1:2) Job cries out to God, “Even when I cry out, ‘Violence!’ I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice” (Job 19:7). In Psalm 22, the psalm Jesus quotes while dying on the cross, the psalmist says, “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer. By night as well, but I find no rest” (Psalm 22:2).
In figuring out how to deal with the agony of unanswered prayer, the biblical prophets are a good place to turn, because they know that pain themselves, deeply, intimately, as evidenced in these and many other passages. And what do they do? They express their anguish about unanswered prayer to God, not only to other people. Significantly, they never take the step that so many people do today, to assume that the fact of unanswered prayer must mean that God does not exist. The biblical writers “keep the faith” even in the midst of unanswered prayer, even when God does not turn out to be their own personal divine vending machine. They stay in relationship to God and express their anguish to God, even if no answers are forthcoming.
They also remember the times God has answered prayer and how many blessings they have received from God. In the same chapter as Job cries out that there is no justice and his prayers are not answered, he goes on to say that “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth” (Job 19:25). Immediately after the verse in Psalm 22 about crying to God but receiving no answer, the psalmist goes on to say, “Yet you are the Holy One… our forefathers put their trust in you; they trusted, and you delivered them… you are he who took me out of the womb, and kept me safe upon my mother’s breast” (Psalm 22:3-4, 9). In the midst of laments about unanswered prayer in the Bible, there is almost always a recall of times that prayer has been answered, when we asked and it was given to us, when we sought and did find, when we knocked and the door was opened to us.
A priest mentor of mine once told me that when people come to her and say, “I’ve lost my faith,” she asks them, “When did you last see it?” – the same kind of question you’d ask someone if they were looking for a lost wallet. You had it with you at some point, so where did you last see it? When did you last know, without a shadow of a doubt, that God was with you? That God loves you? That God has your best interests at heart? Because just like that lost wallet, if you retrace your steps, you can find it again.
Jesus never promised us a life free from pain and suffering. But he did promise “to be with us always, even until the end of the age.” We may never have a satisfactory answer for why God leaves some prayers unanswered, even those prayers that are for the very things we believe God himself wants for us and for the world. But that need not stop us from affirming those times that God has answered prayer, that we have felt God’s presence, that we have seen God’s hand at work guiding our lives. We can hold the two in tension with one another and, with the biblical prophets, continue to cry out in our grief, confident that God is still there.
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Who is the Samaritan? A call to see beyond the divides
Sermon delivered Sunday, July 10, 2016 (The Sixth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 10, Year C (Track 2)) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
“Who is my neighbor?”
“Who is my neighbor?”
I know that I’m supposed to love God and love my neighbor, says the lawyer, but who is my neighbor? Who is it, exactly, who I’m supposed to love?
Have you ever noticed that Jesus doesn’t actually answer that question? In his clever way, Jesus is always doing that, somehow sidestepping the question people are asking to answer another question they’re not asking but should be. Giving them the answer they need rather than the answer they seek.
So when the lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor,” Jesus sees that what is behind the lawyer’s question is, as the scripture tells us, a need to “justify himself.” The lawyer is actually more concerned about himself and his own personal salvation – what he needs to do to “inherit eternal life” – than he is with anyone else’s wellbeing. The very fact that he even asks, “who is my neighbor” shows that he has not quite gotten the point of the commandment.
But Jesus doesn’t answer him in a straightforward way. He doesn’t say, “Everyone is your neighbor. All lives matter. You must love everyone.”
Instead, he tells a story that gets right to the heart of the lawyer’s biases, of his need to divide the world into “us” and “them,” to figure out who’s in and who’s out, to determine who is “worthy” of our love and who is not.
He tells a story about someone who is in need, someone who has been hurt and has been left vulnerable, someone who has been a victim of violence. Interestingly, Jesus does not tell us anything about the person who was hurt, besides the fact that he was “a man.” He doesn’t tell us anything about the man’s ethnicity, religion, profession, political affiliation, or any other marker of identity. But he does tell us about some identity markers of the people who come across him on the road. The two who pass by the hurt man, who even cross over to the other side of the road to avoid coming into contact with him, were of the highly respected classes of Jewish society, the priests and Levites, the “good people,” the “righteous people,” the people who knew the answer to the lawyer’s question “what must I do to inherit eternal life” backwards and forwards, the ones who talked all day long about loving God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind, and loving your neighbor as yourself – but they walked right past this man in need, this person who had been hurt, attacked, this victim of violence – and they did nothing. They said nothing. They avoided the pain.
The person who stops to help him is a Samaritan, and this word has become so synonymous with “good” in our society because of the ways this parable has influenced popular culture that we miss the fact that “Good Samaritan” most likely sounded like an oxymoron to the audience to whom Jesus was speaking.
The Samaritans were rivals, enemies, of Jesus’s community. But contrary to how they often are portrayed, they were not an entirely different ethnic or religious group, another nation like the Egyptians or the Assyrians. They were actually another sect of Judaism, who had different ideas about where and how the God of Israel should be worshipped, and who claimed to be the true, most authentic representation of the religion of Israel from before the Israelites were exiled into Babylon. The Samaritans were the folks who managed to avoid the exile and stayed in the land and continued the practices as they had been going on before the exile, and when the other folks returned from exile, a lot of things had changed about how they practiced the faith, and a conflict began.
It was an internal fight, and we all know how those can be all the more difficult and painful. A modern equivalent for us in the Episcopal Church might be the conflict between us and the “Anglicans,” the American Episcopalians who left the Episcopal Church to affiliate with other parts of the Anglican Communion.
Think about the vitriol and bitterness that comes out of some people in our denomination when they talk about “the Anglicans.” That’s probably something similar to how the people in Jesus’s community talked about “the Samaritans.” They were the people who didn’t “get it” religiously, who were doing things all wrong, who were clearly not as “enlightened” as “we” are in all things religious.
And yet, in Jesus’s story, it is a Samaritan who stopped to help someone in need. Jesus holds up the Samaritan as the example of what it means to live out the essential elements of the faith. Jesus uses a person from the group most unlikely to be seen as sacred, holy, or righteous, from the group that is hated and vilified, from the group who is “the other” and says, “Look at this. This person gets it. You, with your focus on ‘who is my neighbor,’ you don’t get it. But precisely the person you assume is the problem, they get it.”
So the question for us, then, is not “who is my neighbor,” but “who is the Samaritan”? Who is our “other,” the one in whom it is most difficult for us to see the face of God?
Think about that for a moment. Who do you consider the enemy, the other, the problem? We all have those people in our minds, no matter how much we like to profess that we “love everyone.” There is always someone that, despite what we say outwardly, inwardly we find ourselves seething with anger toward that person or that group. Now, consider Jesus’s story with that person in the role of the Samaritan.
Close your eyes for a moment and picture this. A man is beaten, robbed, left for dead, shot and bloodied, perhaps just down the road on MacArthur Boulevard. And several people from your group, people who look like you, talk like you, think like you, believe like you, maybe other Episcopalians, maybe people from this church, they walk right past him and do nothing. But then this person, this person who is part of that group that you consider the problem, the other, the enemy, this person who stirs up anger and negative emotions in your heart whenever you think of them, that person walks up, sees the hurt person, and stops to help. They don’t avoid the pain. They get up close and personal. They use their jacket to try to stop the flow of blood. They pick him up in their car and drive him to a hospital. They pay his medical bills, spending up to about a quarter of their salary for that week on this person they’ve never met before in their life.
What does it feel like to imagine that person, part of that group that you have such difficulty feeling compassion for, doing something compassionate? What emotions ran through your body as you saw that scene? And how does the lawyer’s question, “who is my neighbor?” sound different to you now?
History is full of these stories. In spite of the divisions that pit one group against another, there are always people who are able to see beyond the divides and recognize our common humanity. Whether it’s Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved thousands of Jews from death during the Holocaust, or Keisha Thomas, the black woman who threw herself over a white man at a KKK rally to protect him from counter-protestors who had turned violent, shouting, “Kill the Nazi!,” or Nick Kelton, one of the inmates who broke out of a holding cell in a Parker County, Texas courthouse last month to save a guard who had collapsed from a heart attack, these people would have never thought to ask the question, “Who is my neighbor?” They saw human need, and they acted. No matter who the person was who was in need.
When interviewed by the press, Nick Kelton acknowledged that the inmates realized that they could have potentially lost their own lives in trying to help the guard.
“We were worried they were going to come with guns drawn on us,” he said, and indeed, the deputies who heard the commotion the inmates were making assumed a fight had broken out, and when they arrived and saw inmates broken out of their cell surrounding an unconscious guard, the first thing that went through their minds was probably not that these inmates were trying to help that guard. But the deputies exercised restraint, and they herded the inmates back into the cell, and assessed the situation before responding with more violence, and all parties involved came out alive.
When asked why they did this, Kelton gave a surprising response.
“Cause that’s a good man,” he said, pointing out toward the hallway where the guard had been sitting. “He saves lives.”
He elaborated further, “I mean, it never crossed my mind… whether he’s got a gun or a badge, if he falls down, I’m gonna help him.”
Another inmate added, “It just seems natural to me.”
Keisha Thomas expressed a similar sentiment when asked why she acted to protect a man who represented an ideology that saw her as inferior.
“Violence is violence,” she said. “Nobody deserves to be hurt, especially not for an idea.”
She also indicated that her own experience of being the victim of violence motivated her to help.
“I knew what it was like to be hurt,” she said. “The many times that happened, I wish someone would have stood up for me.”
She also acknowledged how violence can be a vicious cycle, and how necessary it is to intervene to prevent the cycle from spiraling out of hand.
“Let’s say they had killed him or hurt him really bad,” she says. “How does the son feel? Does he carry on the violence?”
As it happened, a man in a coffee shop one day came up to her and said thank you. “What for?” she said. “That was my dad,” he said.
In the midst of the divide and turmoil that has shaken our country this week, there will be no way forward without solidarity across the historic divides.
Forty eight years ago, Martin Luther King gave a sermon the night before his death, a sermon in which he commented on this parable of the Good Samaritan. He said that in fighting for justice, we must be willing to develop “a dangerous kind of unselfishness.” The people who didn’t stop to help the man on the road might have been worried that the robbers were still nearby, that their own lives could have been in danger if they stopped. Dr. King said that when they saw man on the side of the road, they asked the question, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?”, and it was their fear that kept them from acting. But the Samaritan asked a different question. He asked, “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
In his context in Memphis in 1968, Dr. King was fighting for the rights of the sanitation workers who were on strike, and he asked the congregation gathered to consider that situation in light of this parable:
“[T]he question before you tonight… [is] [n]ot, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?” Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" The question is, "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.”
And for us, today, this week, the question is not, “If we stop to stand up for black men who are murdered at a disproportionate rate by police, what will happen to us? To our jobs? To our friendships?” The question is, “If we do NOT stand up and say that Black Lives Matter just as much as any other life, if we do NOT stand up for our black brothers and sisters – and in an increasingly multiracial world, that “brother” and “sister” rhetoric is becoming increasingly less metaphorical and more literal – what will happen to them?” What would have happened if those inmates in Texas looked less like the white guard and deputies who had authority over them and more like my cousin Kaliq, son of a white mother and a black father, whose dark skin and afro would have made him “other” to those in authority? Would that situation have ended with everyone still alive and unharmed?
On Thursday, Ric Hudgens, a poet and pastor in Evanston, Illinois, just outside Chicago, posted this poem to his blog:
What It Will Take (Poem)
My eighty-year old neighbor,
a man of deep, abiding faith,
now frail and bent with age,
who marched
when marching made a difference,
once upon a time
late at night
heard a yell
from our alley.
A black man
screamed for mercy
as policeman raised their clubs.
My neighbor left his bed,
entered the alley,
threw his body over his neighbor
making himself a shield.
The police stopped.
This is what it will take.
White men
throwing our bodies
in between.
Making them break us
before
they break our brothers.
If there’s anyone in the world who should understand this, it is we who call ourselves Christians. For we follow a savior who also “threw his body in between,” who allowed himself to be murdered rather than respond to violence with violence, who sacrificed himself for a world that rejected him. Who died to save not just his friends, but those who considered themselves his enemies. Who called us to not be afraid, to see beyond the divides, to love God and to love neighbor, and to show mercy. He has called us to “go and do likewise.”
“Who is my neighbor?”
“Who is my neighbor?”
I know that I’m supposed to love God and love my neighbor, says the lawyer, but who is my neighbor? Who is it, exactly, who I’m supposed to love?
Have you ever noticed that Jesus doesn’t actually answer that question? In his clever way, Jesus is always doing that, somehow sidestepping the question people are asking to answer another question they’re not asking but should be. Giving them the answer they need rather than the answer they seek.
So when the lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor,” Jesus sees that what is behind the lawyer’s question is, as the scripture tells us, a need to “justify himself.” The lawyer is actually more concerned about himself and his own personal salvation – what he needs to do to “inherit eternal life” – than he is with anyone else’s wellbeing. The very fact that he even asks, “who is my neighbor” shows that he has not quite gotten the point of the commandment.
But Jesus doesn’t answer him in a straightforward way. He doesn’t say, “Everyone is your neighbor. All lives matter. You must love everyone.”
Instead, he tells a story that gets right to the heart of the lawyer’s biases, of his need to divide the world into “us” and “them,” to figure out who’s in and who’s out, to determine who is “worthy” of our love and who is not.
He tells a story about someone who is in need, someone who has been hurt and has been left vulnerable, someone who has been a victim of violence. Interestingly, Jesus does not tell us anything about the person who was hurt, besides the fact that he was “a man.” He doesn’t tell us anything about the man’s ethnicity, religion, profession, political affiliation, or any other marker of identity. But he does tell us about some identity markers of the people who come across him on the road. The two who pass by the hurt man, who even cross over to the other side of the road to avoid coming into contact with him, were of the highly respected classes of Jewish society, the priests and Levites, the “good people,” the “righteous people,” the people who knew the answer to the lawyer’s question “what must I do to inherit eternal life” backwards and forwards, the ones who talked all day long about loving God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind, and loving your neighbor as yourself – but they walked right past this man in need, this person who had been hurt, attacked, this victim of violence – and they did nothing. They said nothing. They avoided the pain.
The person who stops to help him is a Samaritan, and this word has become so synonymous with “good” in our society because of the ways this parable has influenced popular culture that we miss the fact that “Good Samaritan” most likely sounded like an oxymoron to the audience to whom Jesus was speaking.
The Samaritans were rivals, enemies, of Jesus’s community. But contrary to how they often are portrayed, they were not an entirely different ethnic or religious group, another nation like the Egyptians or the Assyrians. They were actually another sect of Judaism, who had different ideas about where and how the God of Israel should be worshipped, and who claimed to be the true, most authentic representation of the religion of Israel from before the Israelites were exiled into Babylon. The Samaritans were the folks who managed to avoid the exile and stayed in the land and continued the practices as they had been going on before the exile, and when the other folks returned from exile, a lot of things had changed about how they practiced the faith, and a conflict began.
It was an internal fight, and we all know how those can be all the more difficult and painful. A modern equivalent for us in the Episcopal Church might be the conflict between us and the “Anglicans,” the American Episcopalians who left the Episcopal Church to affiliate with other parts of the Anglican Communion.
Think about the vitriol and bitterness that comes out of some people in our denomination when they talk about “the Anglicans.” That’s probably something similar to how the people in Jesus’s community talked about “the Samaritans.” They were the people who didn’t “get it” religiously, who were doing things all wrong, who were clearly not as “enlightened” as “we” are in all things religious.
And yet, in Jesus’s story, it is a Samaritan who stopped to help someone in need. Jesus holds up the Samaritan as the example of what it means to live out the essential elements of the faith. Jesus uses a person from the group most unlikely to be seen as sacred, holy, or righteous, from the group that is hated and vilified, from the group who is “the other” and says, “Look at this. This person gets it. You, with your focus on ‘who is my neighbor,’ you don’t get it. But precisely the person you assume is the problem, they get it.”
So the question for us, then, is not “who is my neighbor,” but “who is the Samaritan”? Who is our “other,” the one in whom it is most difficult for us to see the face of God?
Think about that for a moment. Who do you consider the enemy, the other, the problem? We all have those people in our minds, no matter how much we like to profess that we “love everyone.” There is always someone that, despite what we say outwardly, inwardly we find ourselves seething with anger toward that person or that group. Now, consider Jesus’s story with that person in the role of the Samaritan.
Close your eyes for a moment and picture this. A man is beaten, robbed, left for dead, shot and bloodied, perhaps just down the road on MacArthur Boulevard. And several people from your group, people who look like you, talk like you, think like you, believe like you, maybe other Episcopalians, maybe people from this church, they walk right past him and do nothing. But then this person, this person who is part of that group that you consider the problem, the other, the enemy, this person who stirs up anger and negative emotions in your heart whenever you think of them, that person walks up, sees the hurt person, and stops to help. They don’t avoid the pain. They get up close and personal. They use their jacket to try to stop the flow of blood. They pick him up in their car and drive him to a hospital. They pay his medical bills, spending up to about a quarter of their salary for that week on this person they’ve never met before in their life.
What does it feel like to imagine that person, part of that group that you have such difficulty feeling compassion for, doing something compassionate? What emotions ran through your body as you saw that scene? And how does the lawyer’s question, “who is my neighbor?” sound different to you now?
History is full of these stories. In spite of the divisions that pit one group against another, there are always people who are able to see beyond the divides and recognize our common humanity. Whether it’s Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved thousands of Jews from death during the Holocaust, or Keisha Thomas, the black woman who threw herself over a white man at a KKK rally to protect him from counter-protestors who had turned violent, shouting, “Kill the Nazi!,” or Nick Kelton, one of the inmates who broke out of a holding cell in a Parker County, Texas courthouse last month to save a guard who had collapsed from a heart attack, these people would have never thought to ask the question, “Who is my neighbor?” They saw human need, and they acted. No matter who the person was who was in need.
When interviewed by the press, Nick Kelton acknowledged that the inmates realized that they could have potentially lost their own lives in trying to help the guard.
“We were worried they were going to come with guns drawn on us,” he said, and indeed, the deputies who heard the commotion the inmates were making assumed a fight had broken out, and when they arrived and saw inmates broken out of their cell surrounding an unconscious guard, the first thing that went through their minds was probably not that these inmates were trying to help that guard. But the deputies exercised restraint, and they herded the inmates back into the cell, and assessed the situation before responding with more violence, and all parties involved came out alive.
When asked why they did this, Kelton gave a surprising response.
“Cause that’s a good man,” he said, pointing out toward the hallway where the guard had been sitting. “He saves lives.”
He elaborated further, “I mean, it never crossed my mind… whether he’s got a gun or a badge, if he falls down, I’m gonna help him.”
Another inmate added, “It just seems natural to me.”
Keisha Thomas expressed a similar sentiment when asked why she acted to protect a man who represented an ideology that saw her as inferior.
“Violence is violence,” she said. “Nobody deserves to be hurt, especially not for an idea.”
She also indicated that her own experience of being the victim of violence motivated her to help.
“I knew what it was like to be hurt,” she said. “The many times that happened, I wish someone would have stood up for me.”
She also acknowledged how violence can be a vicious cycle, and how necessary it is to intervene to prevent the cycle from spiraling out of hand.
“Let’s say they had killed him or hurt him really bad,” she says. “How does the son feel? Does he carry on the violence?”
As it happened, a man in a coffee shop one day came up to her and said thank you. “What for?” she said. “That was my dad,” he said.
In the midst of the divide and turmoil that has shaken our country this week, there will be no way forward without solidarity across the historic divides.
Forty eight years ago, Martin Luther King gave a sermon the night before his death, a sermon in which he commented on this parable of the Good Samaritan. He said that in fighting for justice, we must be willing to develop “a dangerous kind of unselfishness.” The people who didn’t stop to help the man on the road might have been worried that the robbers were still nearby, that their own lives could have been in danger if they stopped. Dr. King said that when they saw man on the side of the road, they asked the question, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?”, and it was their fear that kept them from acting. But the Samaritan asked a different question. He asked, “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
In his context in Memphis in 1968, Dr. King was fighting for the rights of the sanitation workers who were on strike, and he asked the congregation gathered to consider that situation in light of this parable:
“[T]he question before you tonight… [is] [n]ot, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?” Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" The question is, "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.”
And for us, today, this week, the question is not, “If we stop to stand up for black men who are murdered at a disproportionate rate by police, what will happen to us? To our jobs? To our friendships?” The question is, “If we do NOT stand up and say that Black Lives Matter just as much as any other life, if we do NOT stand up for our black brothers and sisters – and in an increasingly multiracial world, that “brother” and “sister” rhetoric is becoming increasingly less metaphorical and more literal – what will happen to them?” What would have happened if those inmates in Texas looked less like the white guard and deputies who had authority over them and more like my cousin Kaliq, son of a white mother and a black father, whose dark skin and afro would have made him “other” to those in authority? Would that situation have ended with everyone still alive and unharmed?
On Thursday, Ric Hudgens, a poet and pastor in Evanston, Illinois, just outside Chicago, posted this poem to his blog:
What It Will Take (Poem)
My eighty-year old neighbor,
a man of deep, abiding faith,
now frail and bent with age,
who marched
when marching made a difference,
once upon a time
late at night
heard a yell
from our alley.
A black man
screamed for mercy
as policeman raised their clubs.
My neighbor left his bed,
entered the alley,
threw his body over his neighbor
making himself a shield.
The police stopped.
This is what it will take.
White men
throwing our bodies
in between.
Making them break us
before
they break our brothers.
If there’s anyone in the world who should understand this, it is we who call ourselves Christians. For we follow a savior who also “threw his body in between,” who allowed himself to be murdered rather than respond to violence with violence, who sacrificed himself for a world that rejected him. Who died to save not just his friends, but those who considered themselves his enemies. Who called us to not be afraid, to see beyond the divides, to love God and to love neighbor, and to show mercy. He has called us to “go and do likewise.”
Sunday, June 26, 2016
Learning to see "the man behind the monster"
Sermon delivered Sunday, June 26, 2016 (The Fifth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 5, Year C) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Omar Mateen over the past few weeks.
I tend to do that every time there is a mass shooting: I think about the shooter. Of course I grieve for the lives lost, but I am always drawn to those figures who are instantly vilified after these events: Dylan Roof, Wade Michael Page, Adam Lanza – names that become household names, repeated endlessly by news media along with the words “disturbed,” “mentally ill,” “radical,” “extreme,” or in the case of our latest shooter, “terrorist,” since his religious background happened to be Muslim – but whatever labels are thrown at them, we always seem to leave “human being” off the list. Even as the media tracks down their relatives, friends and neighbors trying to paint a picture of who this person was, somehow they still use terms that separate “us” from “them,” that reduce a person to a monster.
But something in the picture of Omar Mateen that has emerged over the past several weeks has humanized him to me considerably: the speculation that he might have not been completely straight. Numerous people at Pulse, the gay nightclub where he shot and killed nearly 50 people and wounded more than 50 more, have come forward to say they had seen Mateen at the club on numerous occasions before, and some also said they had interacted with him on gay dating websites.
So far, FBI has said they have found no evidence that Mateen was having relationships with men in their investigation of his electronic communications, but the speculation continues. If Omar Mateen found himself attracted to men and if he found this impossible to reconcile with the teachings of his religious tradition, then perhaps it was out of a conflicted struggle with self that he opened fire on the patrons at Pulse that night. We already know about the high rates of suicide among gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth, but now we have a possible example of how the internalized self-hatred that so many LGBT people feel as a result of society’s condemnation of them can put others in danger as well.
We may never know whether or not Omar Mateen was gay, or bisexual, or questioning his sexual identity. In some ways, that’s none of our business – what was no doubt a very personal struggle for him has suddenly been laid open for the public to pick apart. But I find it extremely relevant in our context as a religious community, because whether or not these allegations are true, the story of someone struggling with same-sex attraction and feeling rejected or condemned by their religious scriptures, tradition, leaders, and community is true for countless people. Whether or not this is Omar Mateen’s story, it is someone’s story. And this event has put the dangers of religious condemnation of same-sex attraction in a national spotlight.
In the Episcopal Church, we have come further than many on acceptance of same-sex couples and the gifts their relationships bring to us in the church. And I know I am likely preaching to the choir here at St. Cuthbert’s, but we all know that there are many churches and many other religious communities out there who continue to condemn same-sex attraction as unnatural and sinful. The same day of the shootings, a pastor here in California preached to his congregation that “as Christians, we should not mourn the death of 50 sodomites.” Pastor Roger Jimenez of the Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento told his congregation that the biblical response to Orlando would be to affirm that those killed “got what they deserved,” because according to the Bible, “the sin they performed was worthy of death.”
Despite the ways in which religion and scripture have been discounted by many people in our society, they remain powerful influences over the lives of millions of people. Far from being outdated and irrelevant, the interpretation of scripture can be a matter of life and death! The book of Hebrews says “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword,” (Hebrews 4:12), and unfortunately that sword can be dangerous! It can be used both for good and for evil, as a tool to defend against injustice or as a weapon to break down and destroy.
Our passage from Galatians today contains elements that have been used as weapons in our history. The dichotomy that Paul sets up between “the flesh” and “the Spirit” in this passage and in many of his other writings has influenced Christianity negatively with regards to our understanding of sexuality for centuries. Paul holds up celibacy as a model, saying one should marry only if one can’t “control oneself” in terms of satisfying one’s sexual urges, and talks about everything that is “of the flesh” as being against God’s will. “Do not gratify the desires of the flesh,” Paul says in Galatians 5:16, and interpreters have often read the phrase “desires of the flesh” as a code word for “sexual desires.”
But here’s where interpretation is so very important, and where we can see how important close study of the texts can be. The Greek word for flesh, sarx, is most literally translated, “flesh” or “body,” but it can also be used to mean “human nature,” and a nuanced understanding of this usage completely changes the meaning of this passage. The online concordance I often use to look up Hebrew or Greek words for a more complete understanding of their meaning said that when sarx is used negatively in the Bible, as in “don’t gratify the desires of the flesh,” it’s talking about that human nature that leads us to think we don’t need God, that we can make all our decision and do everything on our own, apart from God (which, if you recall, was the original human sin in the Garden of Eden).
This usage of sarx, according to that concordance, refers to
At Bible study on Wednesday night, Fr. John Rawlinson noted that in his translation of Galatians 5 from the Jerusalem Bible, the word translated as “the flesh” in the New Revised Standard Version, which we use in our lectionary readings and which is printed in your bulletins and you just heard read a few minutes ago is translated as “self-indulgence.” This passage sounds very different in that translation. Instead of:
“Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want.” (Galatians 5:16-17, NRSV)
We have this:
“Let me put it like this: if you are guided by the Spirit you will be in no danger of yielding to self-indulgence, since self-indulgence is the opposite of the Spirit, the Spirit is totally against such a thing, and it is precisely because the two are so opposed that you do not always carry out your good intentions.” (Galatians 5:16-17, Jerusalem Bible)
To me, this makes so much more sense with everything else I know about the message of scripture. Self-indulgence is the issue, not “fleshly desires.” I like how the concordance made the point that even things that seem “respectable” can be considered “of the flesh” if we understand the meaning in this way. So, the “desires of the flesh” that we are commanded not to gratify could be something as acceptable as accumulating wealth – something that is certainly “respectable” and praised in our society, yet if done solely for self-gain, is condemned by the scriptures. The key is not so much the action as the intention behind the action. Just as the scriptures can be used for good or ill, so can any action. Yes, sexual desires can lead to sin, but they are not inherently sinful any more so than the instinct for self-preservation, which keeps us alive but also leads us to do things that benefit ourselves at the expense of others.
But unfortunately, many people who read the scriptures – of the Christian faith and of other religions – never delve this deeply into the meaning of the text. They read something in translation from another language and take it as God’s word from on high, without even knowing whether that translation even fully conveys the meaning of the original text, or without fully understanding the historical context in which it was written. Thus “do not gratify the desires of the flesh,” a relevant warning about the dangers of self-indulgence, can become one of many passages used as a weapon to condemn and ostracize people who express themselves sexually in a way that makes some people uncomfortable.
Pastor Jimenez in Sacramento based his remarks about the shooting in Orlando on his understanding of the scriptures. He talked about what “the Bible says” about homosexuality and used that to undergird some incredibly harsh words. In his sermon, he said to his congregation:
"Are you sad that 50 pedophiles were killed today?" Um no. I think that’s great. I think that helps society. I think Orlando, Florida, is a little safer tonight. The tragedy is that more of them didn’t die. The tragedy is I’m kind of upset he didn’t finish the job — because these people are predators. They are abusers. I wish the government would round them all up, put them up against a firing wall, put the firing squad in front of them and blow their brains out."
After a social media firestorm of backlash against his remarks after they were posted on YouTube, Pastor Jimenez continued to defend his position when interviewed by news media. He said to reporters,
"As far as the Bible is concerned, they crossed a line. The sin they performed is worthy of death. I realize our society doesn't take that, but that's what the Bible says. If someone does something that's worthy of death and they end up dying, I'm not gonna mourn them."
Although I’m not familiar enough with the Qur’an, the scriptures of Islam, to quote equivalent passages in that tradition, I imagine Omar Mateen might have read similar passages that were used as weapons in his tradition that led him to think that somehow shooting and killing as many gay people as possible was more acceptable to God than embracing his own attraction to men. But ironically, his actions in killing people were more "of the flesh" than it would have been for him to have a faithful, committed relationship with another man, had he been single and available to do so.
As I’ve reflected on what might have been Omar Mateen’s internal dilemma with great sadness and compassion, an interesting parallel from the early 20th century French novel, The Phantom of the Opera, later made in to a stage musical, came to mind. Born with a horribly disfigured face, “the Phantom,” as he is called since he lives a reclusive life where no one sees him, is ostracized by society and winds up living in a lair underneath the Paris Opera House, where he terrorizes people through constant violence, including murders, in an attempt to exert control over the workings of the opera house. One could use all of the words we use to describe mass shooters to describe him: disturbed, tortured, radical, extreme, mentally ill, terrorist. He falls in love with a young soprano named Christine, who he mentors from behind the walls of her dressing room, never revealing his face. She knows him as her strange “Angel of Music.” When his true form is finally revealed to Christine, he is convinced that it is his physical deformity that prevents her from loving him. At the very end of the play, after wreaking havoc on the opera, killing the star behind the scenes so he can walk on and play Christine’s love interest, and then whisking her off to his lair, Christine has had enough. She yells at him:
"Have you gorged yourself at last in your lust for blood?
Am I now to be prey to your lust for flesh?"
(Notice the use of “flesh” to connote sexual desire here – that biblical expression continues to influence art!)
He responds,
"That fate which condems me to wallow in blood
Has also denied me the joys of the flesh
This face, the infection which poisons our love….
This face, which earned a mother’s fear and loathing
A mask, my first unfeeling scrap of clothing…
Pity comes too late! Turn around and face your fate!
An eternity of THIS before your eyes…"
He rips of his mask and thrusts his deformed face in front of hers.
But she responds,
"This haunted face holds no horror for me now
It’s in your soul that the true distortion lies."
The tragedy in the Phantom’s story is that he was so obsessed with something he thought was wrong with him, so fixated on something that society told him was wrong with him, that he turned into the monster he thought he was. And maybe, just maybe, this is what happened to Omar Mateen as well.
In a moment of tenderness earlier in the play, after Christine first removes his mask against his will and gets a glimpse of his face, after throwing a tantrum and cursing her, the Phantom crumbles to the stage and quietly begins singing a much softer, gentler tune…
“Fear can turn to love
You’ll learn to see to find the man behind the monster
This repulsive carcass who seems a beast but secretly
Dreams of beauty
Secretly, secretly…”
At the very end of the play, when the Phantom holds Christine’s fiancé hostage, demanding that she choose to marry the Phantom instead or else he will kill her finance, she does something that changes the entire course of action. As the Phantom yells menacingly at her and her fiancé struggles in the noose the Phantom has placed around his neck, she suddenly goes into a pensive moment that recalls the tenderness of that earlier moment when she first removed his mask. She says, half to the Phantom and half to herself,
“Pitiful creature of darkness,
What kind of life have you known?
God give me courage to show you
You are not alone!”
And then she kisses him. She chooses to respond to terrorism and violence and threats with love. She sees the man behind the monster, as he’d said she could. She acknowledges him as a human being and touches him with the caress of a lover.
And this gesture of love transforms the Phantom. He lets Christine and her fiancé go free, and then disappears, never to be heard from again, never to terrorize the opera house again.
I believe it is the role of religion to help us see “the man behind the monster,” but too often religion has been in the business of telling people they are monsters rather than reminding them they are beloved children of God.
A song by the contemporary Christian artist Brandon Heath muses on all ways we miss seeing that the people we pass by in society every day who are hurting or wounded in some way. In the song, Heath prays for God to allow him to see the world as God sees it. He sings,
"Give me your eyes for just one second
Give me your eyes so I can see,
Everything that I keep missing,
Give your love for humanity.
Give me your arms for the broken-hearted
The ones that are far beyond my reach.
Give me Your heart for the ones forgotten.
Give me Your eyes so I can see."
I call this seeing with “kingdom eyes.” Seeing as God sees, not as the world sees. Seeing the man behind the monster. Seeing a human being where the world sees “a terrorist.” To those who would agree with Pastor Jimenez’s views, I say, THIS is the truly Christian response to Orlando, and to any other mass shooting. To truly see the broken-hearted, to see the ones forgotten, to see everything that we miss in our superficial view of the world. To mourn with the victims and to show love to the ones society tells us are monsters, to pray that “God would give us courage to show them they are not alone.”
Who knows? Had Omar Mateen been part of a community where he felt safe to question his sexuality, if he’d had any hope that his questioning would have been met with compassion and love rather than condemnation, maybe he never would have walked into that nightclub with that gun that fateful night. While we can’t change the past, I can only pray that Omar Mateen finally found some peace when he met his maker. And I imagine that he most likely discovered that those 49 souls he assumed were abhorrent and sinful were there to welcome him with open arms into the fellowship of the saints when he arrived later that same evening.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Omar Mateen over the past few weeks.
I tend to do that every time there is a mass shooting: I think about the shooter. Of course I grieve for the lives lost, but I am always drawn to those figures who are instantly vilified after these events: Dylan Roof, Wade Michael Page, Adam Lanza – names that become household names, repeated endlessly by news media along with the words “disturbed,” “mentally ill,” “radical,” “extreme,” or in the case of our latest shooter, “terrorist,” since his religious background happened to be Muslim – but whatever labels are thrown at them, we always seem to leave “human being” off the list. Even as the media tracks down their relatives, friends and neighbors trying to paint a picture of who this person was, somehow they still use terms that separate “us” from “them,” that reduce a person to a monster.
But something in the picture of Omar Mateen that has emerged over the past several weeks has humanized him to me considerably: the speculation that he might have not been completely straight. Numerous people at Pulse, the gay nightclub where he shot and killed nearly 50 people and wounded more than 50 more, have come forward to say they had seen Mateen at the club on numerous occasions before, and some also said they had interacted with him on gay dating websites.
So far, FBI has said they have found no evidence that Mateen was having relationships with men in their investigation of his electronic communications, but the speculation continues. If Omar Mateen found himself attracted to men and if he found this impossible to reconcile with the teachings of his religious tradition, then perhaps it was out of a conflicted struggle with self that he opened fire on the patrons at Pulse that night. We already know about the high rates of suicide among gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth, but now we have a possible example of how the internalized self-hatred that so many LGBT people feel as a result of society’s condemnation of them can put others in danger as well.
We may never know whether or not Omar Mateen was gay, or bisexual, or questioning his sexual identity. In some ways, that’s none of our business – what was no doubt a very personal struggle for him has suddenly been laid open for the public to pick apart. But I find it extremely relevant in our context as a religious community, because whether or not these allegations are true, the story of someone struggling with same-sex attraction and feeling rejected or condemned by their religious scriptures, tradition, leaders, and community is true for countless people. Whether or not this is Omar Mateen’s story, it is someone’s story. And this event has put the dangers of religious condemnation of same-sex attraction in a national spotlight.
In the Episcopal Church, we have come further than many on acceptance of same-sex couples and the gifts their relationships bring to us in the church. And I know I am likely preaching to the choir here at St. Cuthbert’s, but we all know that there are many churches and many other religious communities out there who continue to condemn same-sex attraction as unnatural and sinful. The same day of the shootings, a pastor here in California preached to his congregation that “as Christians, we should not mourn the death of 50 sodomites.” Pastor Roger Jimenez of the Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento told his congregation that the biblical response to Orlando would be to affirm that those killed “got what they deserved,” because according to the Bible, “the sin they performed was worthy of death.”
Despite the ways in which religion and scripture have been discounted by many people in our society, they remain powerful influences over the lives of millions of people. Far from being outdated and irrelevant, the interpretation of scripture can be a matter of life and death! The book of Hebrews says “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword,” (Hebrews 4:12), and unfortunately that sword can be dangerous! It can be used both for good and for evil, as a tool to defend against injustice or as a weapon to break down and destroy.
Our passage from Galatians today contains elements that have been used as weapons in our history. The dichotomy that Paul sets up between “the flesh” and “the Spirit” in this passage and in many of his other writings has influenced Christianity negatively with regards to our understanding of sexuality for centuries. Paul holds up celibacy as a model, saying one should marry only if one can’t “control oneself” in terms of satisfying one’s sexual urges, and talks about everything that is “of the flesh” as being against God’s will. “Do not gratify the desires of the flesh,” Paul says in Galatians 5:16, and interpreters have often read the phrase “desires of the flesh” as a code word for “sexual desires.”
But here’s where interpretation is so very important, and where we can see how important close study of the texts can be. The Greek word for flesh, sarx, is most literally translated, “flesh” or “body,” but it can also be used to mean “human nature,” and a nuanced understanding of this usage completely changes the meaning of this passage. The online concordance I often use to look up Hebrew or Greek words for a more complete understanding of their meaning said that when sarx is used negatively in the Bible, as in “don’t gratify the desires of the flesh,” it’s talking about that human nature that leads us to think we don’t need God, that we can make all our decision and do everything on our own, apart from God (which, if you recall, was the original human sin in the Garden of Eden).
This usage of sarx, according to that concordance, refers to
“making decisions (actions) according to self – i.e. done apart from faith (independent from God's inworking). Thus, what is "of the flesh (carnal)" is by definition displeasing to the Lord – even things that seem "respectable!" In short, flesh generally relates to unaided human effort, i.e. decisions (actions) that originate from self or are empowered by self. This is carnal ("of the flesh") and proceeds out of the untouched (unchanged) part of us – i.e. what is not transformed by God.”
At Bible study on Wednesday night, Fr. John Rawlinson noted that in his translation of Galatians 5 from the Jerusalem Bible, the word translated as “the flesh” in the New Revised Standard Version, which we use in our lectionary readings and which is printed in your bulletins and you just heard read a few minutes ago is translated as “self-indulgence.” This passage sounds very different in that translation. Instead of:
“Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want.” (Galatians 5:16-17, NRSV)
We have this:
“Let me put it like this: if you are guided by the Spirit you will be in no danger of yielding to self-indulgence, since self-indulgence is the opposite of the Spirit, the Spirit is totally against such a thing, and it is precisely because the two are so opposed that you do not always carry out your good intentions.” (Galatians 5:16-17, Jerusalem Bible)
To me, this makes so much more sense with everything else I know about the message of scripture. Self-indulgence is the issue, not “fleshly desires.” I like how the concordance made the point that even things that seem “respectable” can be considered “of the flesh” if we understand the meaning in this way. So, the “desires of the flesh” that we are commanded not to gratify could be something as acceptable as accumulating wealth – something that is certainly “respectable” and praised in our society, yet if done solely for self-gain, is condemned by the scriptures. The key is not so much the action as the intention behind the action. Just as the scriptures can be used for good or ill, so can any action. Yes, sexual desires can lead to sin, but they are not inherently sinful any more so than the instinct for self-preservation, which keeps us alive but also leads us to do things that benefit ourselves at the expense of others.
But unfortunately, many people who read the scriptures – of the Christian faith and of other religions – never delve this deeply into the meaning of the text. They read something in translation from another language and take it as God’s word from on high, without even knowing whether that translation even fully conveys the meaning of the original text, or without fully understanding the historical context in which it was written. Thus “do not gratify the desires of the flesh,” a relevant warning about the dangers of self-indulgence, can become one of many passages used as a weapon to condemn and ostracize people who express themselves sexually in a way that makes some people uncomfortable.
Pastor Jimenez in Sacramento based his remarks about the shooting in Orlando on his understanding of the scriptures. He talked about what “the Bible says” about homosexuality and used that to undergird some incredibly harsh words. In his sermon, he said to his congregation:
"Are you sad that 50 pedophiles were killed today?" Um no. I think that’s great. I think that helps society. I think Orlando, Florida, is a little safer tonight. The tragedy is that more of them didn’t die. The tragedy is I’m kind of upset he didn’t finish the job — because these people are predators. They are abusers. I wish the government would round them all up, put them up against a firing wall, put the firing squad in front of them and blow their brains out."
After a social media firestorm of backlash against his remarks after they were posted on YouTube, Pastor Jimenez continued to defend his position when interviewed by news media. He said to reporters,
"As far as the Bible is concerned, they crossed a line. The sin they performed is worthy of death. I realize our society doesn't take that, but that's what the Bible says. If someone does something that's worthy of death and they end up dying, I'm not gonna mourn them."
Although I’m not familiar enough with the Qur’an, the scriptures of Islam, to quote equivalent passages in that tradition, I imagine Omar Mateen might have read similar passages that were used as weapons in his tradition that led him to think that somehow shooting and killing as many gay people as possible was more acceptable to God than embracing his own attraction to men. But ironically, his actions in killing people were more "of the flesh" than it would have been for him to have a faithful, committed relationship with another man, had he been single and available to do so.
As I’ve reflected on what might have been Omar Mateen’s internal dilemma with great sadness and compassion, an interesting parallel from the early 20th century French novel, The Phantom of the Opera, later made in to a stage musical, came to mind. Born with a horribly disfigured face, “the Phantom,” as he is called since he lives a reclusive life where no one sees him, is ostracized by society and winds up living in a lair underneath the Paris Opera House, where he terrorizes people through constant violence, including murders, in an attempt to exert control over the workings of the opera house. One could use all of the words we use to describe mass shooters to describe him: disturbed, tortured, radical, extreme, mentally ill, terrorist. He falls in love with a young soprano named Christine, who he mentors from behind the walls of her dressing room, never revealing his face. She knows him as her strange “Angel of Music.” When his true form is finally revealed to Christine, he is convinced that it is his physical deformity that prevents her from loving him. At the very end of the play, after wreaking havoc on the opera, killing the star behind the scenes so he can walk on and play Christine’s love interest, and then whisking her off to his lair, Christine has had enough. She yells at him:
"Have you gorged yourself at last in your lust for blood?
Am I now to be prey to your lust for flesh?"
(Notice the use of “flesh” to connote sexual desire here – that biblical expression continues to influence art!)
He responds,
"That fate which condems me to wallow in blood
Has also denied me the joys of the flesh
This face, the infection which poisons our love….
This face, which earned a mother’s fear and loathing
A mask, my first unfeeling scrap of clothing…
Pity comes too late! Turn around and face your fate!
An eternity of THIS before your eyes…"
He rips of his mask and thrusts his deformed face in front of hers.
But she responds,
"This haunted face holds no horror for me now
It’s in your soul that the true distortion lies."
The tragedy in the Phantom’s story is that he was so obsessed with something he thought was wrong with him, so fixated on something that society told him was wrong with him, that he turned into the monster he thought he was. And maybe, just maybe, this is what happened to Omar Mateen as well.
In a moment of tenderness earlier in the play, after Christine first removes his mask against his will and gets a glimpse of his face, after throwing a tantrum and cursing her, the Phantom crumbles to the stage and quietly begins singing a much softer, gentler tune…
“Fear can turn to love
You’ll learn to see to find the man behind the monster
This repulsive carcass who seems a beast but secretly
Dreams of beauty
Secretly, secretly…”
At the very end of the play, when the Phantom holds Christine’s fiancé hostage, demanding that she choose to marry the Phantom instead or else he will kill her finance, she does something that changes the entire course of action. As the Phantom yells menacingly at her and her fiancé struggles in the noose the Phantom has placed around his neck, she suddenly goes into a pensive moment that recalls the tenderness of that earlier moment when she first removed his mask. She says, half to the Phantom and half to herself,
“Pitiful creature of darkness,
What kind of life have you known?
God give me courage to show you
You are not alone!”
And then she kisses him. She chooses to respond to terrorism and violence and threats with love. She sees the man behind the monster, as he’d said she could. She acknowledges him as a human being and touches him with the caress of a lover.
And this gesture of love transforms the Phantom. He lets Christine and her fiancé go free, and then disappears, never to be heard from again, never to terrorize the opera house again.
I believe it is the role of religion to help us see “the man behind the monster,” but too often religion has been in the business of telling people they are monsters rather than reminding them they are beloved children of God.
A song by the contemporary Christian artist Brandon Heath muses on all ways we miss seeing that the people we pass by in society every day who are hurting or wounded in some way. In the song, Heath prays for God to allow him to see the world as God sees it. He sings,
"Give me your eyes for just one second
Give me your eyes so I can see,
Everything that I keep missing,
Give your love for humanity.
Give me your arms for the broken-hearted
The ones that are far beyond my reach.
Give me Your heart for the ones forgotten.
Give me Your eyes so I can see."
I call this seeing with “kingdom eyes.” Seeing as God sees, not as the world sees. Seeing the man behind the monster. Seeing a human being where the world sees “a terrorist.” To those who would agree with Pastor Jimenez’s views, I say, THIS is the truly Christian response to Orlando, and to any other mass shooting. To truly see the broken-hearted, to see the ones forgotten, to see everything that we miss in our superficial view of the world. To mourn with the victims and to show love to the ones society tells us are monsters, to pray that “God would give us courage to show them they are not alone.”
Who knows? Had Omar Mateen been part of a community where he felt safe to question his sexuality, if he’d had any hope that his questioning would have been met with compassion and love rather than condemnation, maybe he never would have walked into that nightclub with that gun that fateful night. While we can’t change the past, I can only pray that Omar Mateen finally found some peace when he met his maker. And I imagine that he most likely discovered that those 49 souls he assumed were abhorrent and sinful were there to welcome him with open arms into the fellowship of the saints when he arrived later that same evening.
Sunday, June 5, 2016
Gun Violence Awareness Sunday: Our faith calls us to more than just words
Sermon delivered Sunday, June 5, 2016 (The Third Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 5, Year C), at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
The women in the first reading and in the Gospel today are both grieving over lost sons. This is not an uncommon theme in the Bible; we could turn to any number of books in the Bible and find stories of grief over lost loved ones. In both passages today, the cause of death was illness or natural causes, but in many other parts of the Bible we have graphic stories of violent death and the mourning that follows when life is cut too short -- not because of natural causes, but because of the sinfulness of people.
This past Thursday, June 2, was National Gun Violence Awareness Day. This is a relatively new observance; only the second annual. And it came into existence not because of some government decree or some organization pronouncing it would be so, but through the grassroots organizing of a group of high school students in Chicago.
After losing their friend Hadiya Pendleton to a random shooting in January of 2013, Hadiya’s friends started a movement to raise awareness about gun violence. They encouraged their classmates to wear orange – the color hunters wear to protect themselves in the woods, the color of gun safety, the color that indicates that someone is not a target or something is not a weapon – they encouraged their classmates to wear orange on June 2, which was Hadiya’s birthday. The movement has gained momentum, and now people all over the country are wearing orange on June 2 to raise awareness about the toll gun violence is taking on our nation and to advocate for gun safety. And today, clergy all over the Episcopal Church are wearing orange stoles to stand in solidarity with this movement.
So as I looked at our lessons today, I noticed these grieving mothers. In these stories, both mothers get their sons back – God restores them to life, through the prayer of Elijah and the command of Jesus. These resurrection narratives remind us that death does not have the last word. We are given a promise that life will overcome death, that death cannot defeat us.
But what about Hadiya's parents? What about those mothers and fathers in Newtown, who will never see their children master reading, or get braces, or take the SATs? What about the mothers and fathers in Columbine, whose children never got to graduate from high school, who would have been my age now, had they lived, with careers and families and who knows what else? What about those children at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, whose parents were gunned down while they worshipped, whose parents will not be there to see them graduate, get married, have children? God hasn’t brought back their sons, their daughters, their mothers, their fathers, from the dead. What does resurrection mean for them? What does resurrection look like for them?
As a priest, I have a duty to remind the church of the power of the resurrection, to remind us that death does not have the last word. But sometimes that is difficult to do when all evidence around us seems to point to the contrary. Sometimes mere words don’t feel like enough. It’s not enough to say that death triumphs over life, it’s not enough to read the stories of Jesus raising someone’s son from the dead and hope against hope that this can happen for our loved ones, too. The purpose of our faith is not only to give comfort in times of despair, but to stir us to action, to work to prevent the preventable tragedies of this life. To demand that action be taken, to say “not one more!” Not one more life lost to preventable, unnecessary violence, to gun-related accidents, or to suicide.
Some tragedies in this life are beyond our control, like natural disasters – hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes – or many kinds of illnesses. For those things there will always be a theological question around why God allows these things to happen. But some things we can control. Some tragedies are due to human behavior, human sin, things that could be different if we were to be intentional about the choices we make and the actions we take. Gun violence is one of those tragedies. We CAN change it. It is within our power. We can’t blame God for it. We have to take responsibility for the ways we, as a species, have endlessly invented ways to harm each other and ourselves. We created the gun, and we are responsible for its misuse. We must, as our confession in the liturgy says, “repent of the evil that enslaves us – the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” And to repent means to CHANGE. To change direction. To turn around completely. To do something different. Not to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, which as we all know, is the definition of insanity. We must raise our voices and say, “enough is enough.”
In 2013, I led a Lenten series called “Christian Responses to Gun Violence.” It was right after 2012, a particularly bloody year in terms of mass shootings: the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in July, the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in August, and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December. We took the traditional Anglican “three-legged stool” approach and looked at what scripture, tradition, and reason had to say about the use of weapons and violent force. We realized that faithful Christians can and do disagree on the best way to protect innocent life, and that Christian ethics has historically had two different “positions” on the use of weapons and violent force: the pacifist perspective, which says that violence is never justified, and the just war theory, which says that violent force is justified in some circumstances, if the scenario meets a certain set of criteria, including that the violence is used as a last resort, that violence is done in service of the common good, and that only the minimal amount of violence necessary to bring about the desired result is used.
After considering all this, we got to the “so what” question – the question I want to hold up for you today. What does our faith call us to do in response to the tragic loss of life in our cities and towns due to gun violence? Surely our location on the edge of East Oakland, one of the most notorious neighborhoods in the country for gun violence -- makes this issue relevant and important to us as we seek to bring God’s justice and mercy to the communities around us.
In my research on how Christians of all sorts have responded to gun violence, I noticed three basic ways they have done so:
• political advocacy
• prayer and witness
• community development and empowerment.
The Episcopal Church has a public policy network that focuses exclusively on activism through political advocacy. They lobby Congress and advocate for certain courses of action that they believe are most congruous with the values of our faith. A group of bishops that formed after Newtown, led by the bishops of Connecticut, called Bishops United Against Gun Violence, and another group of lay people called Episcopalians Against Gun Violence, fall into this category. There are many ways to get involved in their work if political advocacy is where you are feeling called.
In the prayer and witness category, a church in New Orleans stands out. St. Anna’s Episcopal Church on the outskirts of the French Quarter has become known for their “murder board,” (click the word "murder board" for a link to a video about this ministry) a wall on the outside of the church where they record the name, age, and method of death for all local murder victims each week. In a city that has one of the highest murder rates in the country, this church is bearing public witness to the very human toll of urban violence, reminding the community that each one of the statistics is a human being with a name and a face and a family. They pray for each week’s victims by name in the Prayers of the People on Sundays as part of their liturgy.
Another example in this category would be this new icon (pictured at right). This is “Our Lady Mother of Ferguson and All Killed By Guns.” It was commissioned by Mark Bozzuti-Jones, a priest at Trinity Wall Street, and was written by Mark Dukes, the iconographer who wrote the dancing saints icons at St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco. This image powerfully speaks to how sacred and valuable every life lost to gun violence is, and gives voice, through visual representation, to the grief of those who remain to mourn their loss.
Finally, community development and empowerment. When I led the Lenten series in Nashville in 2013, I highlighted the work of a trauma surgeon who had started a violence prevention program in the public schools after seeing too many young people come through the ER as gunshot victims. He wanted to address the root causes of violence – poverty, lack of education, lack of positive mentors and role models, and so on – to try to help prevent these kids from winding up on his operating table in the ER.
One organization I’ve discovered here in Oakland that’s doing a similar kind of work is a program called Oakland Unite, part of the Department of Human Services for the City of Oakland, that leads violence prevention and intervention programs in the most at-risk parts of Oakland – but I turn to you all, the experts on this area, to let each other know about other initiatives you are familiar with that are doing good work to address the root causes of violence.
So, whether it’s political advocacy, prayer and witness, community development and empowerment, or all three, there is bound to be some way in which your gifts can be used to address this issue. And who knows? Some of you may be called to go even deeper and take a leadership role in this area. Or maybe St. Cuthbert’s as a community might be called to be God’s hands and feet in addressing violence in the neighborhoods that surround our church. That could be a critical part of our way forward. Again, we must listen for God’s call to us – taking the time for discernment is key. Where is the Holy Spirit calling you, calling us, on this issue, if anywhere? The psalmist reminds us today that “Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.” How can you, how can we, turn weeping into dancing for our brothers and sisters who live in constant fear of gun violence, especially our neighbors in East Oakland? Because our faith calls us to more than just words.
The women in the first reading and in the Gospel today are both grieving over lost sons. This is not an uncommon theme in the Bible; we could turn to any number of books in the Bible and find stories of grief over lost loved ones. In both passages today, the cause of death was illness or natural causes, but in many other parts of the Bible we have graphic stories of violent death and the mourning that follows when life is cut too short -- not because of natural causes, but because of the sinfulness of people.
This past Thursday, June 2, was National Gun Violence Awareness Day. This is a relatively new observance; only the second annual. And it came into existence not because of some government decree or some organization pronouncing it would be so, but through the grassroots organizing of a group of high school students in Chicago.
After losing their friend Hadiya Pendleton to a random shooting in January of 2013, Hadiya’s friends started a movement to raise awareness about gun violence. They encouraged their classmates to wear orange – the color hunters wear to protect themselves in the woods, the color of gun safety, the color that indicates that someone is not a target or something is not a weapon – they encouraged their classmates to wear orange on June 2, which was Hadiya’s birthday. The movement has gained momentum, and now people all over the country are wearing orange on June 2 to raise awareness about the toll gun violence is taking on our nation and to advocate for gun safety. And today, clergy all over the Episcopal Church are wearing orange stoles to stand in solidarity with this movement.
So as I looked at our lessons today, I noticed these grieving mothers. In these stories, both mothers get their sons back – God restores them to life, through the prayer of Elijah and the command of Jesus. These resurrection narratives remind us that death does not have the last word. We are given a promise that life will overcome death, that death cannot defeat us.
But what about Hadiya's parents? What about those mothers and fathers in Newtown, who will never see their children master reading, or get braces, or take the SATs? What about the mothers and fathers in Columbine, whose children never got to graduate from high school, who would have been my age now, had they lived, with careers and families and who knows what else? What about those children at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, whose parents were gunned down while they worshipped, whose parents will not be there to see them graduate, get married, have children? God hasn’t brought back their sons, their daughters, their mothers, their fathers, from the dead. What does resurrection mean for them? What does resurrection look like for them?
As a priest, I have a duty to remind the church of the power of the resurrection, to remind us that death does not have the last word. But sometimes that is difficult to do when all evidence around us seems to point to the contrary. Sometimes mere words don’t feel like enough. It’s not enough to say that death triumphs over life, it’s not enough to read the stories of Jesus raising someone’s son from the dead and hope against hope that this can happen for our loved ones, too. The purpose of our faith is not only to give comfort in times of despair, but to stir us to action, to work to prevent the preventable tragedies of this life. To demand that action be taken, to say “not one more!” Not one more life lost to preventable, unnecessary violence, to gun-related accidents, or to suicide.
Some tragedies in this life are beyond our control, like natural disasters – hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes – or many kinds of illnesses. For those things there will always be a theological question around why God allows these things to happen. But some things we can control. Some tragedies are due to human behavior, human sin, things that could be different if we were to be intentional about the choices we make and the actions we take. Gun violence is one of those tragedies. We CAN change it. It is within our power. We can’t blame God for it. We have to take responsibility for the ways we, as a species, have endlessly invented ways to harm each other and ourselves. We created the gun, and we are responsible for its misuse. We must, as our confession in the liturgy says, “repent of the evil that enslaves us – the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” And to repent means to CHANGE. To change direction. To turn around completely. To do something different. Not to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, which as we all know, is the definition of insanity. We must raise our voices and say, “enough is enough.”
In 2013, I led a Lenten series called “Christian Responses to Gun Violence.” It was right after 2012, a particularly bloody year in terms of mass shootings: the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in July, the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in August, and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December. We took the traditional Anglican “three-legged stool” approach and looked at what scripture, tradition, and reason had to say about the use of weapons and violent force. We realized that faithful Christians can and do disagree on the best way to protect innocent life, and that Christian ethics has historically had two different “positions” on the use of weapons and violent force: the pacifist perspective, which says that violence is never justified, and the just war theory, which says that violent force is justified in some circumstances, if the scenario meets a certain set of criteria, including that the violence is used as a last resort, that violence is done in service of the common good, and that only the minimal amount of violence necessary to bring about the desired result is used.
After considering all this, we got to the “so what” question – the question I want to hold up for you today. What does our faith call us to do in response to the tragic loss of life in our cities and towns due to gun violence? Surely our location on the edge of East Oakland, one of the most notorious neighborhoods in the country for gun violence -- makes this issue relevant and important to us as we seek to bring God’s justice and mercy to the communities around us.
In my research on how Christians of all sorts have responded to gun violence, I noticed three basic ways they have done so:
• political advocacy
• prayer and witness
• community development and empowerment.
The Episcopal Church has a public policy network that focuses exclusively on activism through political advocacy. They lobby Congress and advocate for certain courses of action that they believe are most congruous with the values of our faith. A group of bishops that formed after Newtown, led by the bishops of Connecticut, called Bishops United Against Gun Violence, and another group of lay people called Episcopalians Against Gun Violence, fall into this category. There are many ways to get involved in their work if political advocacy is where you are feeling called.
In the prayer and witness category, a church in New Orleans stands out. St. Anna’s Episcopal Church on the outskirts of the French Quarter has become known for their “murder board,” (click the word "murder board" for a link to a video about this ministry) a wall on the outside of the church where they record the name, age, and method of death for all local murder victims each week. In a city that has one of the highest murder rates in the country, this church is bearing public witness to the very human toll of urban violence, reminding the community that each one of the statistics is a human being with a name and a face and a family. They pray for each week’s victims by name in the Prayers of the People on Sundays as part of their liturgy.
Finally, community development and empowerment. When I led the Lenten series in Nashville in 2013, I highlighted the work of a trauma surgeon who had started a violence prevention program in the public schools after seeing too many young people come through the ER as gunshot victims. He wanted to address the root causes of violence – poverty, lack of education, lack of positive mentors and role models, and so on – to try to help prevent these kids from winding up on his operating table in the ER.
One organization I’ve discovered here in Oakland that’s doing a similar kind of work is a program called Oakland Unite, part of the Department of Human Services for the City of Oakland, that leads violence prevention and intervention programs in the most at-risk parts of Oakland – but I turn to you all, the experts on this area, to let each other know about other initiatives you are familiar with that are doing good work to address the root causes of violence.
So, whether it’s political advocacy, prayer and witness, community development and empowerment, or all three, there is bound to be some way in which your gifts can be used to address this issue. And who knows? Some of you may be called to go even deeper and take a leadership role in this area. Or maybe St. Cuthbert’s as a community might be called to be God’s hands and feet in addressing violence in the neighborhoods that surround our church. That could be a critical part of our way forward. Again, we must listen for God’s call to us – taking the time for discernment is key. Where is the Holy Spirit calling you, calling us, on this issue, if anywhere? The psalmist reminds us today that “Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.” How can you, how can we, turn weeping into dancing for our brothers and sisters who live in constant fear of gun violence, especially our neighbors in East Oakland? Because our faith calls us to more than just words.
Sunday, May 29, 2016
In a world divided into 'us' and 'them,' who counts as 'one of us'?
Sermon delivered Sunday, May 29, 2016 (Second Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 4, Year C) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA. (1 Kings 8:22-23, 41-43; Psalm 96:1-9; Galatians 1:1-12; Luke 7:1-10)
Shortly after 9/11, I worked on a documentary film about the backlash that happened in the weeks and months following the attacks on New York and D.C. As you may know, the increase in anti-Muslim sentiment after 9/11 led to a wave of violence against people perceived to be Muslim. People were told to “go back to your country,” their homes and places of worship were vandalized or burned, and 19 people across the U.S. were killed in a misplaced attempt at revenge against our “enemy.”
Muslims experienced their share of this, but so did Sikhs, followers of a religion from northern India whose turbans and beards reminded people of Osama bin Laden. South Asians of all religions were attacked, whether Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Sikh, or Muslim, and so were Native Americans and Latinos – basically anyone with brown skin was seen as “the enemy” and thus became a target. We titled our documentary Divided We Fall, and its “tag line” was, “In a world divided into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ who counts as ‘one of us’?”
In that context, that question was a question about national identity, but that same question can be asked about religious identity. That question runs throughout our Scriptures and the history of the church. Who counts as “one of us”? Who are “we” and who are “they”? It’s not always explicitly stated like that, but defining religious identity always involves drawing boundaries between those who are part of the group and those who are not. Today’s scripture readings all have to do with Israel’s complicated relationship with the “other,” the foreigner, the outsider.
In our first lesson, from 1 Kings, chapter 8, we have an excerpt from the prayer King Solomon prayed when dedicating the Temple in Jerusalem. As part of a long prayer to God asking God to hear the people of Israel when they come to the Temple to pray for various things, he also says this:
“Likewise, when a foreigner, who is not of your people Israel… comes and prays toward this house, then hear in heaven… and do according to all that the foreigner calls to you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you.” (1 Kings 8:41-43)
The psalm speaks about telling God’s glory among “the nations” and among “all peoples,” repeatedly saying that the “whole earth” should sing and praise the God of Israel.
In the second reading, Paul is passionately scolding the Galatians for “turning to a different gospel” – and although the passage does not explicitly identify what that “different gospel” is, a complete reading of the letter to the Galatians reveals that it is the instructions some Christians have given Gentile converts – they told the Gentiles that if they wanted to be “one of us,” they had to first be circumcised and obey the Jewish law. Paul is adamantly against this idea, asserting that those who do not bear the physical marker of group identity and do not obey the same religious rituals are still “one of us,” since, as he says in one of the most famous passages from Galatians, “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).
And finally, in the Gospel, we have another question about the boundary between Gentile and Jew. A centurion, a soldier in the Roman army, asks Jesus to heal his slave. Although he is a Gentile, Jesus grants his request, and the scriptures tell us that Jesus was “amazed” by this man, saying, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith” (Luke 7:9).
All of these passages speak favorably toward “them” – the “other,” the “foreigner,” the Gentile – but we all know that there are plenty of biblical passages that do not. One commentator points out that Israel’s relationship to the “foreign” “is usually marked by an attitude ranging from cautious to defensive,” and probably for good reason: there was always the potential of violent conflict breaking out between the people of Israel and their neighboring countries.
A former parishioner of mine who is a biologist says that discrimination is a biological construct, one that is necessary for survival. Discrimination between “us” and “them” allows us to decide very quickly, based on appearance, what is safe and what is not. These decisions are based on memories and experience: sometimes individual memories, but sometimes collective memories passed down through the species. For example, if I’m a gazelle and my only experience with tigers is that they try to eat me, I will probably not approach the tiger and try to be friendly with it. And even if I’m a baby gazelle and I haven’t had any experience with tigers yet, I’m probably going to be instinctually afraid of them because I’ve inherited the instincts of my ancestors who have had experience with tigers. Being afraid of them is evolutionarily advantageous for me; taking a “cautious and defensive” attitude toward the tiger will likely help me stay alive.
Although human beings are more complex intellectually than our other mammal relatives, we still have a part of our brain that operates out of that base, instinctual fear toward anything that is different. If something is unknown to us, we have no way of knowing whether it is safe or dangerous -- and on the off chance that it might be dangerous, we have to be ready to protect ourselves. Distinguishing between different groups of people is not the problem. The problem is assuming that if something is different, it is threatening – that is what leads to the kind of racism and violence that we saw after 9/11, and that we continue to see any time there is a terrorist attack against Westerners that is attributed to Muslims, or when political rhetoric intensifies a sense that Muslims are our enemy (or whoever the "enemy" happens to be at the moment).
Given the evolutionary advantage of being “cautious and defensive” toward anyone who is not “one of us,” any embrace of the “foreigner” must be an intentional act, one that will involve controlling our “reptile brain,” that part of us that instinctively sees otherness as a threat and wants to fight or flight. My personal view is that the passages of scripture that play in to the “foreigner is the enemy” concept are evidence of the sinful nature of the scriptures’ very human authors. The scripture is inspired by God, yes, but I also believe it is tainted by the humans through whom the message was filtered. Sometimes they allowed the Spirit to flow through them without any interference, and sometimes their particular biases colored how they expressed the message God was sending. Our scriptures for today remind us that there is a divine mandate to welcome the foreigner, the stranger, the outsider, to break down the walls between “us” and “them” – and I happen to believe that that is the unadulterated divine message – one that is certainly not “of human origin,” because it goes against our very biology.
In our redeemed state, we are called to rise above the reptile brain, to acknowledge that “they” might actually have a lot in common with us, that “they” might not seek to do us harm, that we don’t need to defend ourselves against “them.” We are called to realize that our relationship with “them” can be one of collaboration rather than competition, and that “they” can even become “one of us” – as the Gentiles did when they joined the Jewish followers of Jesus to form what became the Christian church – a new “us” that was different than the “us” that had existed before.
But even when “we” stay distinct and separate from “them” – even when we don’t ultimately come to share the same religion – we can work to move our relationship with “them” from our natural state of fear and suspicion to one of trust and respect. Through my work in interfaith dialogue, I have learned to acknowledge the sacred and holy when I find it among “them” just as joyfully as when I find it among “us.” In dialogue with other religious communities, I often find myself remembering today’s Gospel reading and saying, “Not even in the church have I found such faith!”
Shortly after 9/11, I worked on a documentary film about the backlash that happened in the weeks and months following the attacks on New York and D.C. As you may know, the increase in anti-Muslim sentiment after 9/11 led to a wave of violence against people perceived to be Muslim. People were told to “go back to your country,” their homes and places of worship were vandalized or burned, and 19 people across the U.S. were killed in a misplaced attempt at revenge against our “enemy.”
Muslims experienced their share of this, but so did Sikhs, followers of a religion from northern India whose turbans and beards reminded people of Osama bin Laden. South Asians of all religions were attacked, whether Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Sikh, or Muslim, and so were Native Americans and Latinos – basically anyone with brown skin was seen as “the enemy” and thus became a target. We titled our documentary Divided We Fall, and its “tag line” was, “In a world divided into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ who counts as ‘one of us’?”
In that context, that question was a question about national identity, but that same question can be asked about religious identity. That question runs throughout our Scriptures and the history of the church. Who counts as “one of us”? Who are “we” and who are “they”? It’s not always explicitly stated like that, but defining religious identity always involves drawing boundaries between those who are part of the group and those who are not. Today’s scripture readings all have to do with Israel’s complicated relationship with the “other,” the foreigner, the outsider.
In our first lesson, from 1 Kings, chapter 8, we have an excerpt from the prayer King Solomon prayed when dedicating the Temple in Jerusalem. As part of a long prayer to God asking God to hear the people of Israel when they come to the Temple to pray for various things, he also says this:
“Likewise, when a foreigner, who is not of your people Israel… comes and prays toward this house, then hear in heaven… and do according to all that the foreigner calls to you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you.” (1 Kings 8:41-43)
The psalm speaks about telling God’s glory among “the nations” and among “all peoples,” repeatedly saying that the “whole earth” should sing and praise the God of Israel.
In the second reading, Paul is passionately scolding the Galatians for “turning to a different gospel” – and although the passage does not explicitly identify what that “different gospel” is, a complete reading of the letter to the Galatians reveals that it is the instructions some Christians have given Gentile converts – they told the Gentiles that if they wanted to be “one of us,” they had to first be circumcised and obey the Jewish law. Paul is adamantly against this idea, asserting that those who do not bear the physical marker of group identity and do not obey the same religious rituals are still “one of us,” since, as he says in one of the most famous passages from Galatians, “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).
And finally, in the Gospel, we have another question about the boundary between Gentile and Jew. A centurion, a soldier in the Roman army, asks Jesus to heal his slave. Although he is a Gentile, Jesus grants his request, and the scriptures tell us that Jesus was “amazed” by this man, saying, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith” (Luke 7:9).
All of these passages speak favorably toward “them” – the “other,” the “foreigner,” the Gentile – but we all know that there are plenty of biblical passages that do not. One commentator points out that Israel’s relationship to the “foreign” “is usually marked by an attitude ranging from cautious to defensive,” and probably for good reason: there was always the potential of violent conflict breaking out between the people of Israel and their neighboring countries.
A former parishioner of mine who is a biologist says that discrimination is a biological construct, one that is necessary for survival. Discrimination between “us” and “them” allows us to decide very quickly, based on appearance, what is safe and what is not. These decisions are based on memories and experience: sometimes individual memories, but sometimes collective memories passed down through the species. For example, if I’m a gazelle and my only experience with tigers is that they try to eat me, I will probably not approach the tiger and try to be friendly with it. And even if I’m a baby gazelle and I haven’t had any experience with tigers yet, I’m probably going to be instinctually afraid of them because I’ve inherited the instincts of my ancestors who have had experience with tigers. Being afraid of them is evolutionarily advantageous for me; taking a “cautious and defensive” attitude toward the tiger will likely help me stay alive.
Although human beings are more complex intellectually than our other mammal relatives, we still have a part of our brain that operates out of that base, instinctual fear toward anything that is different. If something is unknown to us, we have no way of knowing whether it is safe or dangerous -- and on the off chance that it might be dangerous, we have to be ready to protect ourselves. Distinguishing between different groups of people is not the problem. The problem is assuming that if something is different, it is threatening – that is what leads to the kind of racism and violence that we saw after 9/11, and that we continue to see any time there is a terrorist attack against Westerners that is attributed to Muslims, or when political rhetoric intensifies a sense that Muslims are our enemy (or whoever the "enemy" happens to be at the moment).
Given the evolutionary advantage of being “cautious and defensive” toward anyone who is not “one of us,” any embrace of the “foreigner” must be an intentional act, one that will involve controlling our “reptile brain,” that part of us that instinctively sees otherness as a threat and wants to fight or flight. My personal view is that the passages of scripture that play in to the “foreigner is the enemy” concept are evidence of the sinful nature of the scriptures’ very human authors. The scripture is inspired by God, yes, but I also believe it is tainted by the humans through whom the message was filtered. Sometimes they allowed the Spirit to flow through them without any interference, and sometimes their particular biases colored how they expressed the message God was sending. Our scriptures for today remind us that there is a divine mandate to welcome the foreigner, the stranger, the outsider, to break down the walls between “us” and “them” – and I happen to believe that that is the unadulterated divine message – one that is certainly not “of human origin,” because it goes against our very biology.
In our redeemed state, we are called to rise above the reptile brain, to acknowledge that “they” might actually have a lot in common with us, that “they” might not seek to do us harm, that we don’t need to defend ourselves against “them.” We are called to realize that our relationship with “them” can be one of collaboration rather than competition, and that “they” can even become “one of us” – as the Gentiles did when they joined the Jewish followers of Jesus to form what became the Christian church – a new “us” that was different than the “us” that had existed before.
But even when “we” stay distinct and separate from “them” – even when we don’t ultimately come to share the same religion – we can work to move our relationship with “them” from our natural state of fear and suspicion to one of trust and respect. Through my work in interfaith dialogue, I have learned to acknowledge the sacred and holy when I find it among “them” just as joyfully as when I find it among “us.” In dialogue with other religious communities, I often find myself remembering today’s Gospel reading and saying, “Not even in the church have I found such faith!”
Sunday, May 1, 2016
Authentic evangelism is always Spirit-led
Sermon delivered Sunday, May 1, 2016 (6th Sunday of Easter, Year C) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
Acts 16:9-15, John 14:23-29
“Come over to Macedonia and help us.”
This line from today’s passage from Acts is a classic in the theology of evangelism and missions. Paul’s vision of the man from Macedonia pleading for help has been echoed in the call stories of evangelists throughout the centuries – many missionaries have framed their sense of call to travel abroad with a similar sense that a foreign people is asking them to “come over and help us.”
At its best, casting missionary work within this framework encourages people to be willing to go wherever God calls them and to respond to expressed human need wherever they find it. But at its worst, conceptualizing missionary work in this way has led to a patronizing kind of approach in which the missionaries go of their own initiative to “help” people who have not expressed a need for help, bringing with them an attitude that assumes they have all the answers and solutions to bring to the people they have set out to “help.” Let’s explore that shadow side a bit more before we turn our attention to what I believe is a corrective to that shadow side within this very passage.
Any time we talk about “helping” others, we have to step back and examine the power dynamics at play. It is often much easier to be the “helpers” than to be the “helped.” The “helpers” are the ones with power, money, with enough abundance in their lives that they have something to give. The “helped” are the ones “in need,” the ones who lack something, the ones who are vulnerable and dependent. It is much easier to see ourselves as the competent givers than the vulnerable receivers, and yet in our relationship with God we are ALL vulnerable and dependent. The roles of “helper” and “helped” are never completely separable when God’s Spirit is at work. That’s the tricky part and the key thing to remember anytime we begin to see ourselves primarily as the “helpers.” All encounter that is led by the Spirit is intended for the mutual transformation of both parties, and requires listening and obedience on both sides.
The blueprint for evangelism we have in the Acts of the Apostles, the stories of how the first disciples spread the faith in its earliest days, show story after story of mutual encounter. I’m struck by how often the people to whom the disciples are sent to bring the message receive their own vision from God ahead of time to let them know these people are coming. It’s not like the disciples are the only ones receiving visions telling them what other people need; the people they are sent to have also been spoken to by God and they are ready and waiting for them when they arrive.
We’ve heard several of these stories lately: in Paul’s conversion story we heard a few weeks ago from Acts chapter 9, Paul receives a vision from God telling him to go into the city and wait for someone to come and tell him what to do, and Ananias receives a vision telling him to go look for Paul, the infamous persecutor of the church. When they meet up, they confirm that they each have received visions that brought them together. In Acts 10, we hear the story of how Cornelius, the Roman soldier, receives a vision that he should send for Peter, and right about that same time Peter receives a vision telling him that all foods are clean and the Spirit tells him that some men have come looking for him and that the Spirit has sent them. This leads Peter to share the Gospel with Cornelius, breaking tradition in taking the message to and including Gentiles, not just his fellow Jews.
In today’s story, we don’t have as clear of an example of the Spirit moving on both sides – we’re not told whether the people of Macedonia also received a vision telling them to expect the disciples, but Lydia is receptive and open to their message when they arrive. And far from a patronizing encounter where the disciples do all the “giving” and “helping” to this “poor lost soul,” Lydia does her own share of giving right back – she shows them hospitality by providing lodging for the disciples while they are in her community. The encounter is one of mutual transformation, mutual benefit, mutual assistance, not just from one side to the other.
And perhaps the most important aspect of this evangelism story is that it is Spirit-led; it is God’s initiative that leads to Lydia’s conversion, not Paul’s or any other person’s. Paul and his crew weren’t even planning to go to Macedonia originally; they had planned to continue to travel in the region where they had been. If our first lesson had started just three verses earlier in this chapter, at verse 6 instead of verse 9, we would have heard this introduction to the journey to Macedonia:
“They went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia. When they had come opposite Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them; so, passing by Mysia, they went down to Troas.” (Acts 16:6-8)
It’s here that our reading for today picks up, with verse 9:
“During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them. We set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the following day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city for some days.”
It is in Philippi that they encounter Lydia. Now, if you look at the map I’ve included in your bulletins, you’ll see all these cities or regions that were mentioned in the reading have been circled. Look at where Phrygia and Galatia are, in the central part of what is now Turkey. That whole region is called “Asia” on the map, and even though the scripture says they had already been “forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the Word in Asia,” still they try to go to Bithynia – see where that is on the map? Even further north than Galatia, and still East! It’s like, um, hello, what part of “not in Asia right now, folks!” did you guys not get? But “the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them” to go there, and so they go down to Troas – see where that is? Basically as far West as you can go and still be in Asia. They’re trying desperately to hang on to what they already know, to stay in the area that’s familiar to them, to continue to try to do something in Asia despite being told that their ministry is not there right now. So here they are, hanging out in Troas, at the very edge of their familiar territory, and it’s here that Paul receives the message to go to Macedonia – even further West – a whole different land mass! They follow that call and they wind up finding Lydia in Philippi. She was the one God had prepared for them to encounter next, and if they hadn’t been willing to listen to the Spirit’s promptings and follow where God led, they would have never even met her.
In our Gospel passage for today, Jesus promises the disciples that after he is taken from them, they will continue to have a teacher and guide in the Holy Spirit: “I have said these things to you while I am still with you,” he says. “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” (John 14:25-26)
The Holy Spirit is the continuing presence of God among us, to continue to guide and direct the church in the ways that God wants us to go. The disciples had the benefit of an actual human person in the form of Jesus of Nazareth to teach and guide them, but now we are left with this illusive and not-so-easy-to-identify Holy Spirit as our guide. Our challenge is to remember that we still have a teacher and guide with us, because it is a lot easier to ignore that guide if it is not a physical person actually speaking to us and showing us the way. It’s a lot easier, in the absence of a physical person as leader, to be guided by our own ideas and desires rather than God’s ideas and desires.
I’ve said quite a bit about that distinction lately, and I want to make clear that I’m not saying that our ideas and desires are inherently opposed to God’s ideas and desires. They can, in fact, be the same thing. But the key is remembering to ask the question, to listen for where the Spirit is leading us and being open to the idea that that might not be the same place we’ve decided we want to go. Like the disciples in our passage from Acts today, we might think we’re going to Bithynia, but God wants us to go to Macedonia! Sometimes when we listen to the Spirit, we find a whole new direction that we hadn’t even thought of before. Other times, we confirm that the direction we’re already going is indeed of God – but again, remembering to listen is the key point.
So the corrective to the shadow side of Christianity’s missionary impulse is to ensure that evangelism is always Spirit-led. When left to our own devices, we know the horrible things we are capable of – coming in to a community and tearing away their time-honored traditions and the ways God has spoken to them throughout the centuries, insisting that they do things our way, right down to the clothes they wear and the language they speak, falsely equating one particular human culture with the Gospel. But when we look at the stories of evangelism in the book of Acts, the account of how the faith first spread, we are reminded that authentic evangelism is always Spirit-led. It is God-initiated rather than human-initiated. And it is never a one-way encounter. It is never one people telling another what to do. It is always a mutual encounter in which both sides have received messages or visions from God and together they attempt to discover the wonderful thing that God is trying to do in their midst and to be faithful to that call.
So as we consider the ways we might reach out to our neighborhood and the community around this church building, let us be in prayer and deep listening about where God is calling us – and how God might already be speaking to the people around us. Being still long enough to listen will help us ensure that our evangelism is Spirit-led rather than human-led.
Acts 16:9-15, John 14:23-29
“Come over to Macedonia and help us.”
This line from today’s passage from Acts is a classic in the theology of evangelism and missions. Paul’s vision of the man from Macedonia pleading for help has been echoed in the call stories of evangelists throughout the centuries – many missionaries have framed their sense of call to travel abroad with a similar sense that a foreign people is asking them to “come over and help us.”
At its best, casting missionary work within this framework encourages people to be willing to go wherever God calls them and to respond to expressed human need wherever they find it. But at its worst, conceptualizing missionary work in this way has led to a patronizing kind of approach in which the missionaries go of their own initiative to “help” people who have not expressed a need for help, bringing with them an attitude that assumes they have all the answers and solutions to bring to the people they have set out to “help.” Let’s explore that shadow side a bit more before we turn our attention to what I believe is a corrective to that shadow side within this very passage.
Any time we talk about “helping” others, we have to step back and examine the power dynamics at play. It is often much easier to be the “helpers” than to be the “helped.” The “helpers” are the ones with power, money, with enough abundance in their lives that they have something to give. The “helped” are the ones “in need,” the ones who lack something, the ones who are vulnerable and dependent. It is much easier to see ourselves as the competent givers than the vulnerable receivers, and yet in our relationship with God we are ALL vulnerable and dependent. The roles of “helper” and “helped” are never completely separable when God’s Spirit is at work. That’s the tricky part and the key thing to remember anytime we begin to see ourselves primarily as the “helpers.” All encounter that is led by the Spirit is intended for the mutual transformation of both parties, and requires listening and obedience on both sides.
The blueprint for evangelism we have in the Acts of the Apostles, the stories of how the first disciples spread the faith in its earliest days, show story after story of mutual encounter. I’m struck by how often the people to whom the disciples are sent to bring the message receive their own vision from God ahead of time to let them know these people are coming. It’s not like the disciples are the only ones receiving visions telling them what other people need; the people they are sent to have also been spoken to by God and they are ready and waiting for them when they arrive.
We’ve heard several of these stories lately: in Paul’s conversion story we heard a few weeks ago from Acts chapter 9, Paul receives a vision from God telling him to go into the city and wait for someone to come and tell him what to do, and Ananias receives a vision telling him to go look for Paul, the infamous persecutor of the church. When they meet up, they confirm that they each have received visions that brought them together. In Acts 10, we hear the story of how Cornelius, the Roman soldier, receives a vision that he should send for Peter, and right about that same time Peter receives a vision telling him that all foods are clean and the Spirit tells him that some men have come looking for him and that the Spirit has sent them. This leads Peter to share the Gospel with Cornelius, breaking tradition in taking the message to and including Gentiles, not just his fellow Jews.
In today’s story, we don’t have as clear of an example of the Spirit moving on both sides – we’re not told whether the people of Macedonia also received a vision telling them to expect the disciples, but Lydia is receptive and open to their message when they arrive. And far from a patronizing encounter where the disciples do all the “giving” and “helping” to this “poor lost soul,” Lydia does her own share of giving right back – she shows them hospitality by providing lodging for the disciples while they are in her community. The encounter is one of mutual transformation, mutual benefit, mutual assistance, not just from one side to the other.
And perhaps the most important aspect of this evangelism story is that it is Spirit-led; it is God’s initiative that leads to Lydia’s conversion, not Paul’s or any other person’s. Paul and his crew weren’t even planning to go to Macedonia originally; they had planned to continue to travel in the region where they had been. If our first lesson had started just three verses earlier in this chapter, at verse 6 instead of verse 9, we would have heard this introduction to the journey to Macedonia:
“They went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia. When they had come opposite Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them; so, passing by Mysia, they went down to Troas.” (Acts 16:6-8)
It’s here that our reading for today picks up, with verse 9:
“During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them. We set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the following day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city for some days.”
It is in Philippi that they encounter Lydia. Now, if you look at the map I’ve included in your bulletins, you’ll see all these cities or regions that were mentioned in the reading have been circled. Look at where Phrygia and Galatia are, in the central part of what is now Turkey. That whole region is called “Asia” on the map, and even though the scripture says they had already been “forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the Word in Asia,” still they try to go to Bithynia – see where that is on the map? Even further north than Galatia, and still East! It’s like, um, hello, what part of “not in Asia right now, folks!” did you guys not get? But “the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them” to go there, and so they go down to Troas – see where that is? Basically as far West as you can go and still be in Asia. They’re trying desperately to hang on to what they already know, to stay in the area that’s familiar to them, to continue to try to do something in Asia despite being told that their ministry is not there right now. So here they are, hanging out in Troas, at the very edge of their familiar territory, and it’s here that Paul receives the message to go to Macedonia – even further West – a whole different land mass! They follow that call and they wind up finding Lydia in Philippi. She was the one God had prepared for them to encounter next, and if they hadn’t been willing to listen to the Spirit’s promptings and follow where God led, they would have never even met her.
In our Gospel passage for today, Jesus promises the disciples that after he is taken from them, they will continue to have a teacher and guide in the Holy Spirit: “I have said these things to you while I am still with you,” he says. “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” (John 14:25-26)
The Holy Spirit is the continuing presence of God among us, to continue to guide and direct the church in the ways that God wants us to go. The disciples had the benefit of an actual human person in the form of Jesus of Nazareth to teach and guide them, but now we are left with this illusive and not-so-easy-to-identify Holy Spirit as our guide. Our challenge is to remember that we still have a teacher and guide with us, because it is a lot easier to ignore that guide if it is not a physical person actually speaking to us and showing us the way. It’s a lot easier, in the absence of a physical person as leader, to be guided by our own ideas and desires rather than God’s ideas and desires.
I’ve said quite a bit about that distinction lately, and I want to make clear that I’m not saying that our ideas and desires are inherently opposed to God’s ideas and desires. They can, in fact, be the same thing. But the key is remembering to ask the question, to listen for where the Spirit is leading us and being open to the idea that that might not be the same place we’ve decided we want to go. Like the disciples in our passage from Acts today, we might think we’re going to Bithynia, but God wants us to go to Macedonia! Sometimes when we listen to the Spirit, we find a whole new direction that we hadn’t even thought of before. Other times, we confirm that the direction we’re already going is indeed of God – but again, remembering to listen is the key point.
So the corrective to the shadow side of Christianity’s missionary impulse is to ensure that evangelism is always Spirit-led. When left to our own devices, we know the horrible things we are capable of – coming in to a community and tearing away their time-honored traditions and the ways God has spoken to them throughout the centuries, insisting that they do things our way, right down to the clothes they wear and the language they speak, falsely equating one particular human culture with the Gospel. But when we look at the stories of evangelism in the book of Acts, the account of how the faith first spread, we are reminded that authentic evangelism is always Spirit-led. It is God-initiated rather than human-initiated. And it is never a one-way encounter. It is never one people telling another what to do. It is always a mutual encounter in which both sides have received messages or visions from God and together they attempt to discover the wonderful thing that God is trying to do in their midst and to be faithful to that call.
So as we consider the ways we might reach out to our neighborhood and the community around this church building, let us be in prayer and deep listening about where God is calling us – and how God might already be speaking to the people around us. Being still long enough to listen will help us ensure that our evangelism is Spirit-led rather than human-led.
Sunday, April 24, 2016
Who are we to hinder God -- even when God breaks tradition?
Sermon delivered Sunday, April 24, 2016 (5th Sunday of Easter, Year C) at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
(Acts 11:1-18, Revelation 21:1-6, John 13:31-35)
“Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.”
We use that phrase to conclude the reading of the Scriptures in public worship at St. Cuthbert’s. This phrase comes from a liturgical resource called “Enriching Our Worship,” which was made available to the Episcopal Church in 1998 as a supplement to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. It offers alternative phrases and imagery to the more traditional wording in the prayer book.
The traditional phrase used after the reading of Scripture in the prayer book is, “The Word of the Lord.” But I much prefer “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people,” for several reasons.
Although I do believe our scriptures to be “The Word of the Lord,” I think using that phrase so casually and without clarification can lead to a misunderstanding of how we are to engage with them. To me, when I hear “THE WORD OF THE LORD,” I imagine some big booming voice of authority sending down a message from on high. To me, that phrase has a sense of absolutism that does not encourage inquiry and exploration. This is the truth, the whole truth, the undeniable, indisputable truth, so help us God!
But “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people” has an entirely different ring, at least to my ears. Rather than telling us to be passive recipients of something coming down from heaven, it invites us to discern what God is saying to us now in and through this text. It doesn’t imply that there is one meaning and all we have to do is accept it. When we are invited to “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people,” we must do something in response to the scripture. We have to use our own faculties, our own God-given gifts for discernment, to figure out what God is saying to our church, to our community, to our country, to our world, through this passage of scripture.
This semantic distinction is important, I think, because it reminds us that God’s revelation to us is ongoing, not static. While maintaining and preserving tradition and passing it on to the next generation is important, if we focus only on that part of religion, we can end up knowing more about what God said to the ancient people than what God is saying to us today.
The letter to the Hebrews says that “the Word of God is living and active” (Hebrews 4:12), and our brothers and sisters in the United Church of Christ remind us that “God is still speaking,” which has been their official slogan since 2004. Despite the fact that the scriptures include stories of God encouraging change in individuals and within communities, and of God saying outright, “I am doing a new thing!” – whether through the ancient prophet Isaiah or the futuristic book of Revelation – many people still tend to think of God – and therefore religion – as unchanging, unchangeable, set in stone, and church can be a place where “innovation” can be a dirty word.
But our scriptures on this Fifth Sunday of Easter, in this season of change and renewal, put innovation right up front and center. Beyond John’s vision of the heavenly king proclaiming “I am making all things new” in the passage from Revelation and Jesus giving a “new commandment” to the disciples in the passage from John, perhaps the most striking example of innovation is in our passage from Acts, when Peter receives a revelation from God that leads him to abandon the dietary laws that were central to Jewish tradition.
Now, it’s perhaps not possible to overstate how significant this change was for Peter and for the followers of Jesus. Although there is a common misperception that Jesus rejected Jewish tradition and ritual because of the many times he broke the Sabbath or challenged the authorities, Jesus actually was not really a religious innovator. He followed the traditional Jewish practices and he observed all the Jewish festivals. He told his followers, “I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill.” In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5, he has this to say about Jewish law:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:17-19)
Now, given that context, Peter’s vision telling him to “get up, kill and eat” animals that were forbidden by Jewish law to be eaten is extraordinarily radical! Peter immediately protests, saying, “By no means, Lord, for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.” He probably thought this vision was a test, to see if he’d do the right thing, to see if he’d be tempted to eat any of the “forbidden fruits” he was being shown on this sheet coming down from heaven. I imagine Peter might have been remembering Jesus’s words: “Whoever breaks one of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” “No way am I going to break the dietary laws,” Peter’s thinking, “I’ve already screwed up enough times; I’m not going to screw it up again! I know the right answer to this one – ‘By no means, Lord, I wouldn’t DREAM of disobeying the law!’”
But in the vision, God insists that he do so! “What God has made clean, you must not call profane,” says the voice from heaven.
I spent some time in evangelical non-denominational churches in college, and I remember a key part of their teaching was that no revelation could ever contradict scripture. So if you thought you had a vision from God, you had to go back and read the scriptures and see what they said, and if what you felt God was telling you to do was contrary to what the scripture said, it couldn’t be an authentic message from God. This line of reasoning was often used to explain to women who felt a call to ordained ministry why that couldn’t be an authentic message from God. Since women leading congregations would contradict scriptures that said, “Women should be silent in church,” or “I do not permit a woman to have authority over a man,” then obviously the woman must be confused or misunderstand what she’s really being called to do. God would never call a woman to ordained ministry, because that would contradict scripture!
But by that line of reasoning, Peter’s revelation in today’s passage from Acts would also be invalid! I’m sure some of the believers in Jerusalem rejected Peter’s message for the same reason: “What do you mean, God told you to eat unclean animals? That contradicts the scriptures! God would never tell you to do something that contradicts scripture!”
And yet, Christian tradition has held up this story as an example of how the Spirit moved among the believers in the early church, and the church would look very different today had Peter’s vision not been taken seriously – we would all still be keeping kosher and all the other commandments of the Jewish law as well. We would have essentially been required to convert to Judaism in order to become a follower of Jesus. But Peter’s contrary-to-scripture revelation acknowledged that God was bringing in the Gentiles even without their conversion to Judaism. Peter’s contrary-to-scripture revelation was central to the birth of the church and what it would become, and therefore central to our identity as Christians today. We now regard this example of breaking tradition as scripture!
The revelation Peter received wasn’t just a new interpretation of an old way of being; it was literally rejecting something that had been sacrosanct and endorsing something that had been forbidden! If this was possible, how could the church ever know for sure that they were following the right path? How could they be sure they were following God’s will, if God’s will could change with the next revelation to come along?
We still continue to struggle with these questions today. The debate over women’s ordination that raged in the 20th century in Protestant churches and of course continues today in the Roman Catholic Church, and the debate over same-sex marriage that has become the “hot button issue” of the 21st century, are just two obvious, high profile examples of the church wrestling with whether God can move us in a direction that “contradicts tradition” or “contradicts scripture,” but we can see this dynamic at play in any number of situations in the church, in issues large and small, any time we feel ourselves being called to move in a direction that somehow seems to be contrary to what is taught in the Bible or church tradition, and yet, we feel this call so strongly that we cannot deny that it is of God.
And although he valued the religious tradition of his birth and upheld it, Jesus himself also taught his followers that the action of God in this world is not always so easy to pin down. He compared the work of the Spirit to the wind. In John chapter 3, he answers Nicodemus’s inquiry about how to enter the kingdom of heaven by saying, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). The Spirit moves where it will, and our job is to be still long enough to listen for it and hear where it is moving, and to acknowledge it wherever we find it, even if it contradicts everything we’ve always known.
After the believers in Jerusalem hear about Peter’s vision showing that all foods had been made clean and then his story of the Gentiles receiving the Holy Spirit just as the Jewish followers of Jesus had, they acknowledge that it is possible that God is moving even in this unconventional way. “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” Peter asks, as he explains why he’s allowed Gentiles to join the community without keeping the Jewish law, and why he’s eaten with them despite their lack of adherence to the Jewish dietary laws. His listeners are silenced, for what satisfactory answer is there to that question? Who are we to hinder God? If God’s Spirit is behind something, good luck trying to stop it.
At another point in the book of Acts, the teacher Gamaliel, a wise elder on the Jewish council, defends the leaders of the church against calls for their execution by reasoning with his fellow councilmembers in this way:
“So in the present case,” Gamaliel says, “I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone; because if this plan or this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them—in that case you may even be found fighting against God!’” (Acts 5:38-39)
As we begin the work of discernment about the future this congregation over the next weeks and months to come, let me remind you again about the key role of LISTENING in discernment. We are being invited to “hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people” at St. Cuthbert’s and in this part of Oakland. Our job is to listen for where God is already at work in the world around us, and to join in, to become his partners in creation, in bringing forth that “new thing” in our midst. Our job is to be open to the Spirit’s promptings and to follow them wherever they lead – even if they lead us to break tradition! Even if they lead us to do things that might contradict what we always thought we knew, or what we always thought we wanted for this church and for this community. Because no matter how noble and compassionate our ideas are, no matter how exciting or fun or promising they might seem, and no matter how much effort we put in to fulfilling them, they will never come to fruition if they are not in line with where God’s Spirit is already moving in the world. We can’t FORCE something to happen of our own will if it is not already of God.
So as we discern together, we must continue to ask ourselves “is this plan or this undertaking of human origin, or is it of God?” And we must be willing to accept the answer we receive, for if it is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, we will not be able to stop it, because who are we to hinder God?
(Acts 11:1-18, Revelation 21:1-6, John 13:31-35)
“Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.”
We use that phrase to conclude the reading of the Scriptures in public worship at St. Cuthbert’s. This phrase comes from a liturgical resource called “Enriching Our Worship,” which was made available to the Episcopal Church in 1998 as a supplement to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. It offers alternative phrases and imagery to the more traditional wording in the prayer book.
The traditional phrase used after the reading of Scripture in the prayer book is, “The Word of the Lord.” But I much prefer “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people,” for several reasons.
Although I do believe our scriptures to be “The Word of the Lord,” I think using that phrase so casually and without clarification can lead to a misunderstanding of how we are to engage with them. To me, when I hear “THE WORD OF THE LORD,” I imagine some big booming voice of authority sending down a message from on high. To me, that phrase has a sense of absolutism that does not encourage inquiry and exploration. This is the truth, the whole truth, the undeniable, indisputable truth, so help us God!
But “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people” has an entirely different ring, at least to my ears. Rather than telling us to be passive recipients of something coming down from heaven, it invites us to discern what God is saying to us now in and through this text. It doesn’t imply that there is one meaning and all we have to do is accept it. When we are invited to “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people,” we must do something in response to the scripture. We have to use our own faculties, our own God-given gifts for discernment, to figure out what God is saying to our church, to our community, to our country, to our world, through this passage of scripture.
This semantic distinction is important, I think, because it reminds us that God’s revelation to us is ongoing, not static. While maintaining and preserving tradition and passing it on to the next generation is important, if we focus only on that part of religion, we can end up knowing more about what God said to the ancient people than what God is saying to us today.
The letter to the Hebrews says that “the Word of God is living and active” (Hebrews 4:12), and our brothers and sisters in the United Church of Christ remind us that “God is still speaking,” which has been their official slogan since 2004. Despite the fact that the scriptures include stories of God encouraging change in individuals and within communities, and of God saying outright, “I am doing a new thing!” – whether through the ancient prophet Isaiah or the futuristic book of Revelation – many people still tend to think of God – and therefore religion – as unchanging, unchangeable, set in stone, and church can be a place where “innovation” can be a dirty word.
But our scriptures on this Fifth Sunday of Easter, in this season of change and renewal, put innovation right up front and center. Beyond John’s vision of the heavenly king proclaiming “I am making all things new” in the passage from Revelation and Jesus giving a “new commandment” to the disciples in the passage from John, perhaps the most striking example of innovation is in our passage from Acts, when Peter receives a revelation from God that leads him to abandon the dietary laws that were central to Jewish tradition.
Now, it’s perhaps not possible to overstate how significant this change was for Peter and for the followers of Jesus. Although there is a common misperception that Jesus rejected Jewish tradition and ritual because of the many times he broke the Sabbath or challenged the authorities, Jesus actually was not really a religious innovator. He followed the traditional Jewish practices and he observed all the Jewish festivals. He told his followers, “I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill.” In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5, he has this to say about Jewish law:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:17-19)
Now, given that context, Peter’s vision telling him to “get up, kill and eat” animals that were forbidden by Jewish law to be eaten is extraordinarily radical! Peter immediately protests, saying, “By no means, Lord, for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.” He probably thought this vision was a test, to see if he’d do the right thing, to see if he’d be tempted to eat any of the “forbidden fruits” he was being shown on this sheet coming down from heaven. I imagine Peter might have been remembering Jesus’s words: “Whoever breaks one of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” “No way am I going to break the dietary laws,” Peter’s thinking, “I’ve already screwed up enough times; I’m not going to screw it up again! I know the right answer to this one – ‘By no means, Lord, I wouldn’t DREAM of disobeying the law!’”
But in the vision, God insists that he do so! “What God has made clean, you must not call profane,” says the voice from heaven.
I spent some time in evangelical non-denominational churches in college, and I remember a key part of their teaching was that no revelation could ever contradict scripture. So if you thought you had a vision from God, you had to go back and read the scriptures and see what they said, and if what you felt God was telling you to do was contrary to what the scripture said, it couldn’t be an authentic message from God. This line of reasoning was often used to explain to women who felt a call to ordained ministry why that couldn’t be an authentic message from God. Since women leading congregations would contradict scriptures that said, “Women should be silent in church,” or “I do not permit a woman to have authority over a man,” then obviously the woman must be confused or misunderstand what she’s really being called to do. God would never call a woman to ordained ministry, because that would contradict scripture!
But by that line of reasoning, Peter’s revelation in today’s passage from Acts would also be invalid! I’m sure some of the believers in Jerusalem rejected Peter’s message for the same reason: “What do you mean, God told you to eat unclean animals? That contradicts the scriptures! God would never tell you to do something that contradicts scripture!”
And yet, Christian tradition has held up this story as an example of how the Spirit moved among the believers in the early church, and the church would look very different today had Peter’s vision not been taken seriously – we would all still be keeping kosher and all the other commandments of the Jewish law as well. We would have essentially been required to convert to Judaism in order to become a follower of Jesus. But Peter’s contrary-to-scripture revelation acknowledged that God was bringing in the Gentiles even without their conversion to Judaism. Peter’s contrary-to-scripture revelation was central to the birth of the church and what it would become, and therefore central to our identity as Christians today. We now regard this example of breaking tradition as scripture!
The revelation Peter received wasn’t just a new interpretation of an old way of being; it was literally rejecting something that had been sacrosanct and endorsing something that had been forbidden! If this was possible, how could the church ever know for sure that they were following the right path? How could they be sure they were following God’s will, if God’s will could change with the next revelation to come along?
We still continue to struggle with these questions today. The debate over women’s ordination that raged in the 20th century in Protestant churches and of course continues today in the Roman Catholic Church, and the debate over same-sex marriage that has become the “hot button issue” of the 21st century, are just two obvious, high profile examples of the church wrestling with whether God can move us in a direction that “contradicts tradition” or “contradicts scripture,” but we can see this dynamic at play in any number of situations in the church, in issues large and small, any time we feel ourselves being called to move in a direction that somehow seems to be contrary to what is taught in the Bible or church tradition, and yet, we feel this call so strongly that we cannot deny that it is of God.
And although he valued the religious tradition of his birth and upheld it, Jesus himself also taught his followers that the action of God in this world is not always so easy to pin down. He compared the work of the Spirit to the wind. In John chapter 3, he answers Nicodemus’s inquiry about how to enter the kingdom of heaven by saying, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). The Spirit moves where it will, and our job is to be still long enough to listen for it and hear where it is moving, and to acknowledge it wherever we find it, even if it contradicts everything we’ve always known.
After the believers in Jerusalem hear about Peter’s vision showing that all foods had been made clean and then his story of the Gentiles receiving the Holy Spirit just as the Jewish followers of Jesus had, they acknowledge that it is possible that God is moving even in this unconventional way. “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” Peter asks, as he explains why he’s allowed Gentiles to join the community without keeping the Jewish law, and why he’s eaten with them despite their lack of adherence to the Jewish dietary laws. His listeners are silenced, for what satisfactory answer is there to that question? Who are we to hinder God? If God’s Spirit is behind something, good luck trying to stop it.
At another point in the book of Acts, the teacher Gamaliel, a wise elder on the Jewish council, defends the leaders of the church against calls for their execution by reasoning with his fellow councilmembers in this way:
“So in the present case,” Gamaliel says, “I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone; because if this plan or this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them—in that case you may even be found fighting against God!’” (Acts 5:38-39)
As we begin the work of discernment about the future this congregation over the next weeks and months to come, let me remind you again about the key role of LISTENING in discernment. We are being invited to “hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people” at St. Cuthbert’s and in this part of Oakland. Our job is to listen for where God is already at work in the world around us, and to join in, to become his partners in creation, in bringing forth that “new thing” in our midst. Our job is to be open to the Spirit’s promptings and to follow them wherever they lead – even if they lead us to break tradition! Even if they lead us to do things that might contradict what we always thought we knew, or what we always thought we wanted for this church and for this community. Because no matter how noble and compassionate our ideas are, no matter how exciting or fun or promising they might seem, and no matter how much effort we put in to fulfilling them, they will never come to fruition if they are not in line with where God’s Spirit is already moving in the world. We can’t FORCE something to happen of our own will if it is not already of God.
So as we discern together, we must continue to ask ourselves “is this plan or this undertaking of human origin, or is it of God?” And we must be willing to accept the answer we receive, for if it is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, we will not be able to stop it, because who are we to hinder God?
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