Sermon Audio

Hello all faithful readers!  Some of my sermons are now recorded at The Church of the Good Shepherd and I am delighted to invite you to our audio repository at http://goodshepsermons.wordpress.com/.  Unfortunately, the last two of mine that were recorded are from February and April of 2009.  But, feel free to listen to them there or read my text here.  Just don’t do both at the same time; I wander off the page every once in a while.  Sometimes I wander quite far! Blessings, Matthew +

November 7, 2009

Note:  This sermon, as part of our special focus this Sunday on our Outreach Ministries, involved a brief activity with one of our Outreach Commission members.  She led the congregation in reflecting upon how each and every member of the parish is a part of Outreach.

There is a difference between a challenge encourages us to give our best efforts, and a challenge that is meant to coerce us into a certain way of acting.  The danger of scripture is that it is very easy to use the sacred text to do either, to coerce or encourage.  Our Holy Scripture, the source of all things necessary for salvation, has a great level of gravity in our discourse.  There is nothing like the power of quoting from the scriptures when trying to win a moral or ethical argument.

And so when we hear the Bible challenging us, we must be very careful how we hear the Bible’s intent.  We hear today the familiar story (and I do not mean to overtly challenge you if you did not think it familiar!) of the widow’s mite.  We hear of an old widow giving all that she had, way beyond a tithe, way beyond a generous offering, to the temple treasury.  The lasting image of the passage is Jesus commenting on how great her sacrifice is, that in giving all that she had she has done better than those who have given great amounts out of their abundance.

The story has been used often to propel a stewardship campaign. We lift up the widow who lived out the duty to support the temple with her incredible gift.  Thus shouldn’t we?  You can already feel the coercion in that line of rhetoric.  The recipe has all the right ingredients:  a paragon of virtue for an example, a little dash of guilt, and that most important Bible quote.  I can sense the wallets being reluctantly opened already.

But wait, we should consider how the Bible is being used to challenge.  Perhaps the Bible should not be used to coerce ourselves through guilt. It may be a surprise to consider that Jesus might not have been trying to coerce folks to give money through his recognition and praise of the widow.  Some clues open this alternate understanding of the story.  It is odd that Jesus does not point to a reward for this woman, either heavenly or otherwise.  His listeners would be familiar with the story from 1 Kings of Elijah and the poor mother, who is reassured that after giving her last bit of food to the prophet Elijah that God would take care of her until the next rains came.  Yet here, this poor widow is given no such promise. Certainly if the point is to coerce folks into faithful giving for the upkeep of the temple this poor widow would be promised a reward like the old woman was promised by Elijah!  And yet Jesus does not offer some reward or remark on this poor widow’s future.

What is clear is that even in her need (the Greek that lies under the translators choice of ‘poverty’) this poor woman is being taught to give it to the temple treasury, the receptacle of all free-will offerings to the temple.  Jesus praises the woman for her willingness to act on the commandments of her faith, and her sacrifice mirrors Jesus’ own offering of all of himself, an offering very soon to come in Mark’s gospel. Jesus’ praise does not, however, suggest an acceptance of a social system that would leave a widow so destitute that two small copper coins would be her entire living.  Instead we have Jesus’ castigation of the scribes who would eat up this widow’s house.  Beware the scribes who eat up widow’s houses, Jesus warns just before this passage. Here Jesus, while praising the woman herself, condemns the culture that would not first help to support the poor out of their wealth before teaching of sacrifice and giving.

It would be easy to quote only Jesus’ praise of the old widow and then gently or not so gently coerce the faithful to do likewise.  But underneath this text, as in all the Bible, is God, God who first loves the world into being, who desires not sacrifice but love. Love God with all our hearts and souls and minds and beings, and love our neighbors as ourselves.  When we forget that lens then the temptation to see the Bible as a set of rules to follow and a set of lessons to be used for coercion becomes our corruption.  Without the foundation of love we can fall into the trap of pulling single lines from the Bible and turn them into guilt inducing weapons. But with the firm foundation of God’s all abiding love, the Bible instead becomes an invitation to relationship, where a poor woman is not a symbol of sacrifice but a symbol of injustice. For in the Bible it is not the woman’s action that is as important so much as the call to action that it stirs up in us as God presents us with those who are in such need.  Here is a poor woman, God says.  And our first response, out of a love, should be “Why is she poor?”

Jesus wants us to adopt his sense of love for all of creation, and here he presents his disciples and us with an opportunity for relationship.  Who is more worthy to be in relationship with, the soulless scribes who would bankrupt the widows of the world, or the poor widow herself, who in her faith is willing to sacrifice all for God?

And once we enter into relationship with this poor widow, we cannot leave her alone.  As our connection to her grows, her poverty pulls at us.  We see ourselves and our gracious, gifted lives, and then see her and her need.  This where relationship leads, for through relationship, we discover ourselves more deeply.  We discover our gifts, we find what God has given us so graciously.  With that discovery, God’s love is poured out through us as we extend our loving hearts.  You felt it when you stopped to consider why the poor widow was poor.  And if this poor widow draws that reaction from us, what of the poor in the world today?  Relationship is the driving force of God’s message to us.  Relationship leads us to our mission and our aim.  Through relationship we discover more deeply our own identity and God’s calling to us, calling us into the fields to work for his mission.

But we must be willing to be in relationship.  Those we meet, those God chooses to bring into our lives, those that we discern God calling us into relationship with us, each of these relationships draws from us the same discovery: not a lesson in how we should live, not a guilt laden coercive act of atonement, but a striving to be even more deeply entwined in relationship.  Once there, entwined in relationship, the love that God inspires in us does all the work of mission.

Today you are given the opportunity to witness and celebrate the many ways that Good Shepherd is in relationship to those around us, both in our local community and in the greater world, as we explore the Outreach ministries of our parish.  The first part of our journey is to discover that you are in relationship already.

You are already in relationship with the needs of the world.  God has brought us into these relationships not as a task and burden to overwhelm us, but as our path to discovering ourselves and the mission he has given us.  For in our discovery of the world’s needs we then pick up the banner of God and act.  We live more deeply into our calling as Christ’s Body and that body breaks open in love.  This is God’s response to the world.  No matter what the tragedy we encounter, God’s response is the invitation to relationship that leads to mission.  We are not being guilted into action! We are being offered a yet more perfect way of living as God creatures, a way discovered and fulfilled by relationship.  A relationship whose guidelines and purpose are ultimately demonstrated for us by Jesus Christ himself.  A life offered as a relationship with God, a life poured out in love.

October 11, 2009

The readings of the day were :  Job 23:1-9, 16-17, Psalm 22:1-15, Hebrews 4:12-16, Mark 10:17-31

Lamenting is not one of our strong suits.  We find it easy to rejoice in the telling of a Gospel that lifts our spirits with joy.  We sing songs that lift our hearts, bringing joy to us individually and communally.  We even hold celebrations in our community as often as we can.  Like they say, we do not need much of an excuse to hold a party!  But we find it hard to testify to our faith in the midst of suffering.  We find it hard to share our pain and grief with God, feeling somehow like we are damaged and broken because of our grief and pain and thus somehow unworthy of sharing all of ourselves with God.  We find our pain is somehow not worthy of sharing with God.  But a lament is precisely the communication with God that a faithful person gives when confronted with pain and loss.

Job is our archetype for such a person.  Job’s words are full of the conflicted and troubled emotions and reasoning of one who is forced to confront the apparent injustice and suffering of their situation.  Job’s experience, and the his faithful exploration of lament itself, teaches us profound things about our faith.  We place our faith in the one who has created us, redeemed us, and even sanctifies our lives, yet we often find ourselves aflicted with anger, sadness, frustration, grief, and loss.  Here, in the place of such confusion, a lament is our proper offering to God.

Job’s words have been turned to by those in the midst of such pain and suffering.  Funerals are good examples.  One of the readings we can choose are from Job: “I know that my redeemer lives”. Beyond that instance we often site Job as an example of one who demonstrates patient suffering, the cliche phrase ‘the patience of Job’. And yet Job’s story does not solve our problem with suffering, a problem of a God who creates out of love and our circumstance so often full of pain a grief.  Job instead is a companion and an example for us of where a faith journey can take us.  Job’s journey is ours whenever we find our lives descending into places where we would rather not go.

Poor Job!  Today we hear Job lament his need for God, his need to find God and complain to him. Job’s story is a good one, maybe a bit long due to the length and artistry of some of the conversations captured in it’s verses, but the arc of the story, with Job starting out prosperous, then descending through suffering, and then rising again through God’s beneficent action is both pleasing and satisfying for us.

Job’s story begins with him, prosperous and respected, with 7 children, flocks and bountiful fields, wealthy and respected in his community.  And the Satan approaches God and says, “Job is only faithful because he is wealthy! Take that away and his will turn from his faith.  Like all humans their faith is weak.”.  God allows Satan to take away Job’s wealth and family to prove to Satan that Job is faithful, and sure enough, Job’s words ring out, lamenting his situation but placing his faith in God, the one who created him and blessed him with that fleeting wealth.  Satan is not done, though.  He challenges God and says that Job is only faithful because he is healthy.  Let me take that away from Job and he will turn from you.  God says, just do not kill him, and Job will remain faithful.  And so Satan inflicts Job with painful boils, so horrible that Job sits in ashes and scrapes his skin with a piece of broken pottery, the scraping actually feeling better than the festering sores.  And yet Job remains faithful.  Oh I suffer God.  I do not know why, but I hope you will deliver me from this someday.  Job laments, his faith never wavering, even as he confronts his awful situation.  Job does not know why God has let this happen to him, but that does not change the fact that God has created Job, and that God loves him even in his pitiful state.

It is at this point that three friends arrive and argue with Job.  How nice that they would come and argue with their suffering friend!  Their argument is this: Job, you must have done something wrong to earn this misfortune.  Before, you were righteous and God rewarded you, but now you are suffering.  You must have erred; search your life and confess what you have done wrong and then God will restore you.

How often do we fall for this way of thinking.  An economy built on our actions.  In other faith traditions they call this Karma, where ones actions earn one a result.  Good acts earn good results, bad actions earn punishments and suffering.  We fall into this trap as well, and here we have three of Job’s friends insisting that Job has done something wrong.

Job, though, will have none of this.  The words we heard today are Job’s lament after his friends have made their arguments.  Job accepts God’s placement of him in his predicament not because it is the result of some earthly judgment. Job knows he has done nothing wrong.  If only he could make his argument, submit his appeal to the great Judge.  But so deep is Job’s suffering that he is having trouble finding God.  He turns left and right, forward and backward, yet the God he so longingly wants to make his complaint to is just beyond his sight.

Job’s health and wealth are restored to him at the end of the story.  God redeems his servant.  Yet more importantly is that Job does not believe he has earned this as a reward for his faithfulness.  After getting to speak with God, Job admits that he has no right to ask for his wealth and happiness.  If anything, Job is humbled again before his Creator, the one who loved him into being itself.

The end of Job’s story is one of redemption in his earthly time, and this is why it is such a satisfying story for us.  But Job’s lesson is not fully heard.   Instead, some of the language of God’s coming redemption, of God, in his time, making he world right, gets picked up by other writers and is found in other stories. One part of the story of Job has another friend come, and speak to just this point, that God in his time, in the fullness of time, will restore the world.  These words get echoed in the words of the prophets, and a strong contingent in the Jewish faith begin to look with hope for a Messiah, the Lord’s Anointed, who will lead the Israelites to their greater future. A Messiah who will lead an human army, to human victory in human time for human power and success.

But the Messiah that comes fails these hopeful people, much as he fails Job’s friends who are looking for a transaction to satisfy their needs. Job does not win back his wealth from God.  Job’s faith leads him deeper into his loss and suffering, not out of it, and in the end Job accepts God’s love for him not as a return on Job’s investment in argument or persistence, but instead Job accepts God’s restoring his life and wealth as further proof that his redemption is out of Job’s hands and completely in God’s hands.  Whether or not Job is restored is not important; that Job is loved by God no matter his station or situation is paramount.  And like Job those who accept the Messiah into their lives learn the same lesson.  It is not our hands, our thoughts and actions, that earn us salvation, either from earthly disaster or from everlasting damnation.  The power to set the world right is solely in God’s hands, and what’s more God chooses to act, sending his son to set the world right.  Accepting the Messiah means accepting the truth that God has already done the work of making the world right, and we are in the midst of seeing it happen.  The Christ did not come to set the world right 2000 years ago.  He came to set the world right not at that one time, but for all time, in the fullness of time, in God’s time. Whether we experience a more just world and existence in our time is a not the point; we have little control over that.  But the promise of righteousness has been made and sealed by the only one who can provide it.  The one who restores Job, the one who hears us even when we cannot find him, the one who sends his Son to redeem the world.

Would that none of us should experience suffering!  If only we should never encounter loss!  For us, even when lost in the midst of our pain, Job’s example, echoed through the other laments of our biblical text, carries us through the darkness.  Job’s words are a candle we can carry, a companion on the journey into the depths.  When the hand of God is heavy upon you, Job’s lament is there with you. And we carry our faith in Job’s very words: “I know that my redeemer lives”.  With that as our foundation, our lament is valid, our place in God’s hands secure.

Teaching Sunday : September 6, 2009

The readings today are Exodus 3:1-13 and John 14:8-17, 25-27.  No audio or video was made during the service.

Teaching is holy work, worthy of reverence and respect.  Moses is taught by God, and his first instruction is to revere the place where he is standing by taking off our shoes.  Likewise Philip asks his question of Jesus and then reverently awaits the answer, knowing that his life is about to be radically changed by the teacher.  We may think that the knowledge they are being given is somehow more worthy of such a display of reverence, but all teaching, whether it be the formal teaching of the classroom or the far more informal learning that happens between each of us as we live together is made up of the same multiple dimensions of how God teaches us.

To teach is not simply to engage in delivering information to students and then assessing whether they learned the information, contrary to current political trends in education.  Anyone who has taught or has been taught knows that the real lesson going on in the classroom reaches far deeper than a bland fact or concept.  Something happens in that incredible nexus between teacher and student that is so much greater than such a simple thing as an exchange of knowledge from expert to novice.

It is this simple exchange, though, that Philip asks for from Jesus.  Show us the Father, Philip says.  And Jesus looks at him with deep, piercing eyes and says, if you have seen me, you have seen the Father.  Philip wants bland proof, a picture, some factoid that he can point to and say, See, there’s the Father! I’ve seen the Father! But Jesus knows that more than such a simple thing is necessary for Philip’s education.  Just this knowledge would not create a life of faith, a life lived out based on the principle of God’s redeeming love.  Sure, Philip could point to that one moment in life and say, This is when I met God.  But would he learn how to live a life in God’s love that way?  No, he wouldn’t.

Jesus knows that fulfilling a teacher’s role by inviting the students his disciples into a life of learning about God requires more than facts and experiences. Jesus knows that his role is to invite the disciples into relationship.  And in that relationship, not just with him but with all of God, the student’s lives will be changed.  Real learning, life changing learning, will come of this.  The facts and lectures mean nothing without the relationship that gives the knowledge context and meaning.

Human teaching is the same.  The classroom teacher does more than just blandly display the knowledge, teach the facts, figures, experiences, and demonstrate skills to the students.  The teacher invites the students into relationship with knowledge, demonstrating what a life with that knowledge, so well learned, is like. At its core the relationship between teacher and student is the foundation of all learning.  Think back to your favorite teachers, both the formal ones of your schooling and the informal ones, whose relationships with you have taught you so much.  And there is the truth; the relationship itself taught you.  You learned if only because your entered into relationship with someone who out of their heart and soul offered something of themselves.  Perhaps their passion for their subject opened the door for you to be passionate about something yourself.  Perhaps their willingness to share their humanity through successes and failures taught you more about what it means to be fully human. Perhaps simply by being given the gift of walking near them in their lives, if only for a few moments, taught you about life and living.  Teachers, both formal and informal, classroom and street corner, educated and uneducated, invite us through relationships into the heart of learning itself.  The relational dimension of the teacher-student bond is the bedrock of learning.  The parallels between Jesus the teacher and all of our teachers runs deep.

The teacher’s role involves even more than the dimension of relationship like that of Jesus; the teacher takes part in creation itself, helping to mold and shape this blessed piece of creation that is their students into the being that God the Father, the Creator intends for them to become.  The teacher takes their part as the hands of God in the molding of creation. The teacher’s handiwork is the work of God in creation.  How wonderful.  And how humbling!

As humbling as taking part in forming God’s creation that learning can be, the choice to learn is made not be the teacher but by the student.  No greater disappointment is there for the teacher than the uninspired student who sits at the back of the class having decided not to learn at all.  For all the tools available to the teacher’s art, none is more valuable than the ability to inspire, to breath excitement into the student.  Observing it happen has similar descriptions: the metaphorical light-bulb moment, the student who stayed up all night working on something and who just had to come show you before the first class, the friend who went out and read the whole book after you described it to them.  When inspiration strikes, when the thirst to know enters into the student, the excitement echoes back into the teacher and the best way to describe it is a feeling of sublime joy.

Is there any better comparison of this facet of teaching than the Holy Spirit? The breath of life itself, unpredictable and virtually impossible to control enters in, and its arrival is unmistakable.  Excitement, fire, desire, passion, joy, boundless energy, at least pointed interest becomes obvious in the student.  And the lack of this lighting bolt, this drive, this thirst to learn, is just as poignant and perilous as a lack of the Holy Spirit’s attendance.  It seems like death itself.  A teacher’s most powerful tool is to invite that power, the power of inspiration, into the student’s lives.

The teacher does so much more than just display facts for students to learn.  The dimensions of teaching are creational, relational, and inspirational.  The task seems daunting, and it should be. See how their work is much the same as God’s work.  The teacher takes up the role of each member of the Trinity, and like the trinity the three separate roles blend together to make one, a unity, a teacher, who brings all three dimensions of their art to bear in their work.

The trinity is often described as three who in their intimate holy dance offer their gifts freely one to another and accept each other’s gifts in grace and humility.  So much is their sharing in the sacred heart of God that the three blend together into one, a perfect relationship of love in which truly any individuality disappears. It is we who need to break the Trinity apart in order to try to understand God.  In God, there is no need for division. So too is the teacher a union of creator, relator, and inspirer.  A teaching trinity, if you will.  And so many of us fall for the humor of how easy it is to teach.  Perhaps we should try being the entire Trinity for a student someday!

More trinitarian comparisons are here in the midst of teaching and learning. As teachers and students share in knowledge,  our relationships ideally can strive for this disappearance of division as well.  For as we bring the gifts of a willingness to offer learning as teachers and a willingness, even pure desire to learn as students, knowledge itself can freely flow between us all.  The dance of the Trinity around the heart of love forms again, this time between teacher, student, and knowledge itself, each growing closer together, with only our fragile humanity holding us apart.

It may be a bit overly romantic an image, perhaps even threatening at some level to consider our relationships as teachers and students as so holy a thing as the Holy Trinity in its dance of love and union.  Having been a classroom teacher myself for five years I can remember many days and experiences that did not seem so holy in the hallways and classrooms I taught in.  It is these painful parts of our broken, human lives that keep the ideal vision of holy relationship from becoming a complete reality here in the classroom and anywhere else.  Nonetheless every teacher and student can see how they take up their part in this sharing of the gifts and exchange knowledge.

Would it not be wonderful if we treated our schools, these places of holy relationship, with the reverence that Moses treats the holy ground where he learned so much.  The place where he, Moses, was invited into relationship with God, and was molded into who he was meant to be, and who was inspired and sent forth on his mission?  What joy for us to take off our shoes in the sacred places where we learn, where we grow through our relationships, whether the relationship is with the Great Teacher of all, or our more humble human teachers!  This is not an invitation for our children to wear sandals to school so that they can take them off easily!  This is an invitation to consider all the places where we learn, be them formal classrooms and lecture halls, or the myriad informal ones, like our break rooms and living rooms and parish halls, as sacred places, holy places where the gifts of open hearts in holy relationships are exchanged, and where knowledge, be it book learning or life experience, is given and received.

Take off your shoes, for every moment you live in relationship with another, becoming teacher and student both, you are on holy ground, dancing together around the heart of love.

Pastoral Care Sunday: July 12, 2009

Today’s sermon, part of our topical series of summer services, draws on the readings for Pentecost 9 from the BCP.  The primary reading for the sermon is Ephesians 1.  No audio recording was made.

Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts-Schori, in her opening comments to General Convention 2009, the triennial meeting of the Episcopal Church now in its fourth day out in sunny Anaheim, California, offered the church a challenging reclamation of community and its importance.  In comments that unfortunately received more news for their lack of some earth shattering statement on human sexuality, the Presiding Bishop openly ridiculed the theology of individual salvation, the idea that salvation has only to do with the individual and their relationship to God.  Common themes of such a theology are ideas like “once saved, always saved”, “salvation is gained when one accepts Jesus Christ into your heart”, and “I do not need a community of faith, I only need my God”.

These statements point to many ancient heresies that have never fully left the body of Christianity.  As well Bishop Schori’s comments highlighted the dangerous issue of individuality that guides much of western civilization.  This individuality is no more evident than in some of our very American ideals, things like personal responsibility, libertarian rules about personal property and actions, “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” mentalities, and other common and even revered elements of American popular philosophy.  She pointed to how this has lead to startling abuses of creation, and to narrow minded issues that have dogged the national organization she is helping to run.  No one walked away from Bishop Schori’s comments without feeling a bit shocked, even if at some level one could sense agreement with her probing analysis of individuality’s ugly side.

For us as we consider the ministry of Pastoral Care this Sunday, the meeting places of this danger of individuality and a community’s response to the needs of others provides a profound place for us to grow.  We give thanks for those who exercise an overt ministry of pastoral care, but we also need to consider what all of our roles in the community are as we provide pastoral care.  We all participate in providing care to each other, our neighbors, local community, and even the world.  Thinking of pastoral care as something only individuals do denies how all of us together support that ministry, and even take active roles in the ministry of caring for one another.  What shape that care takes, what intention forms the foundation of that care, and where we all should stretch together as we offer care are all important places for us to consider.

The foundation for the pastoral care we all provide is described in the passage of the letter to the Ephesians we read today.  Sure, Amos’s blunt pronouncement of his mission from God and Jesus’ scary instruction in going forth laying all our faith on God’s providing are both powerful messages for us as we venture forth to offer of ourselves.  But our caring for each other and our neighbors starts with the foundation of what has already been done for us.  And it is here that Ephesians speaks clearly to the community.

The letter to the Ephesians opens in typical Greek letter fashion:  A opening address to the recipients followed by a salutation to the health of the recipient.  The opening of a letter is meant to be an entreaty for the reader to pay attention, and what better way to do that than to express your thanks that the reader is healthy and what’s more, that you want your reader to stay healthy.  Whereas in our letters these days we often end with such a “to your health” or “sincerely”, the ancient Greek form put this part up front and center.  The main body of the letter, something we put right up front or even better sum up in a Regarding line at the top, comes later for the typical Greek letter, and the main themes of the letter to the Ephesians is not even a part of today’s selected passage.

It is interesting to note that instead of speaking of the recipients physical health the author of Ephesians launches immediately into a spirited, bold, and complex exposition on how our lives are completely changed by God in Jesus Christ.  No longer a brief thanksgiving for health, it is now a longer injunction proclaiming the deep thanks of the faithful, who have been brought into an entirely new type of health.

A very important thrust of this thanksgiving sentiment comes out of verses 11 and 12.  The Greek and subsequent English translation are full of subordinate clauses and phrases, so let me do some careful editing to lift out the important active meaning. In Christ we have obtained an inheritance,…. so that we… might live for the praise of his glory.  We have been given an inheritance for the one reason of being able to raise our voices in praise of God.  The inheritance is being adopted by God, which the letter makes clear just a few lines before.   The gift of God of tying us into his life through Jesus’s death and resurrection, leads us to our most important stance in life, praising God.  Our lives are meant to be full of praise, a praise of God’s glory in his creation and now redemption of the world.

The author of Ephesians chooses to speak of our heavenly redemption in a place that usually would refer to our good health and fortune, and to be clear that would be a very physical health and fortune.  The assumption is quite bold: more important than our physical health is our spiritual status that has been restored in Jesus Christ.  And this new health, this new spiritual wholeness, given to us and in all actuality to all of Creation is meant to bring us to our true calling, giving praise to God.

Now no one would deny that part of our work in caring for one another is to address the physical health needs of our family, neighbors, even our enemies. 20^th century science has done well to peer into the needs of individuals and even whole groups and see that the lofty need to see and sense God’s presence is terribly muted when the more basic needs of food, shelter, and security are not met.  Bringing our heavenly given resources to bear for those who are in need is part of our work.  But this sharing in God’s gifts that is emblematic of our charity is not an end in itself, a mark of our work to gain God’s love.  No.  Our sharing is only our way of clearing away the clouds of human suffering that keep our brothers and sisters from seeing and praising God alongside us.

Our charity’s goal is to bring the person back to a place where they can take up their part in the heavenly and earthly chorus that we all take part in as a community of faith.  The shepherding task of the pastor is to help guide not the lowly sheep but our fellow sheep on this path, bumping into each other as we remind each other of the direction our eyes are meant to point, God in Jesus Christ.  Eyes filled with praise and humble acknowledgement of God’s beneficence, a beneficence so great that we go beyond calling it God’s love and refer to God as love itself.  We share in the ministry of the love of God in the sharing of our compassion, wisdom, and humility.  In essence, by letting our lives be the guiding tools of the shepherd (the crook, the voice, the presence), we extend the love of God.

Here is theological grounding for Bishop Schori’s well intuited attack on individual salvation.  Pastoral care is not about meeting needs of individuals so much as it is similar to evangelization.  Our work of evangelization is not about convincing others to turn to God and accept him, seeing each conversion as a triumph of the individual over sin and our triumph in helping God spread some plague of individual salvation.  Our work of evangelization is the work of bringing other voices into the praise of God, who has already done the work of salvation. Thus our communities rise up together, arm in arm, in the praise of God, whether it be by helping others through their doubts to recognize the joy of God in their lives (evangelization), or by bearing with others in their pain through pastoral care.  In these ways we act out of the foundation of our faith, a God who has done what is impossible for us as individuals to do, providing for our salvation, adopting us as his children through his Grace.   Whether through pastoral care work or evangelism, part of our response is to aid others in lifting up the community’s chorus of praise.

June 28, 2009: Stewardship of Creation

The following sermon was given as part of the Church of the Good Shepherd’s annual Creation Sunday.  The readings were:  Deuteronomy 11:10-15, 1 Corinthians 3:10-14, John 12:23-26.  My apologies, but the sermon was not recorded.

Being a steward is not easy work.  On the surface, stewardship is about deciding what to do with what you have.  Make a list of possible uses, and pick.  In the complex markets of our world we create currencies of exchange and complex structures to modify values so that the commodities we have to make choices about get used in their best ways. Making the decisions over our resources then demands that we look with the eyes of stewards not just at our personal choices, but at the global system of choice.  It is not easy work.

Let’s take one resource as an example. In recent years the spike in food prices around the world has caused great turmoil and upheaval, and many smart folks are looking for reasons as to why this is happening.  Some point to changes in climate, some to war, but others point to the change in our use of corn. Agronomists and agricultural economists are actively debating the full impact of our country’s use of ethanol as a fuel.  No longer a cheap food source for cattle and cheap sweeteners for soft drinks, corn has become a source for fueling our cars and other vehicles.  Our converting corn into an alcohol that can and does now fuel our cars could be pressuring the complex international agricultural economy, and that could be the source of rising food prices the world over.

The debate rages on, and in truth it is probable that no one cause is at the root of the current international food tensions.  Corn may not even be part of the problem.  But as we raise the issue, we can use this opportunity to look closer at how we are being a steward of our resources, of how we approach the bounty of God’s creation.  Our basic philosophy, our foundations, can be looked at, the debate exposing our premises and assumptions.  And it is our foundations that have the greatest impact on our lives as Christians.

Paul mentions foundations in his letter to the Corinthians passage that we read today.  Paul speaks of building on a foundation, and that the only foundation for us as Christians to build upon is Jesus Christ.  We can hear the echoes here of Christ’s teaching about foundations,  with the sand that washes away in the storm as a strong warning to us about where to build our homes.  Paul may not have had that gospel passage to draw on to write his letter with, but the choice of building on sand that washes away or on the strong rock of faith in Christ is a reoccurring theme that must have echoed in the nascent church that carried on Jesus’ teaching in those first decades.

Foundations of sand can also describe how we often go about making decisions about resources in our world.  Our debating over how to use our resources has for so long been focused on scarcity.  It is the scarcity of a commodity that creates a market for it and through that market things like corn take on a value that can be debated, observed, and analyzed.  But the only reason corn has a value is because it is scarce.  Scarcity and market value change and shift like sand, as value can be affected by any storm that comes along.  If we build our foundation upon such sand, then we suffer the fate that Jesus pointed to: our spiritual lives get washed away along with our flimsy houses of our arguments.  Our debates are not meant to be founded on such things.

Building our house on the rock of Jesus Christ leads us to see each and every gift of creation as just that, a gift.  Suddenly that corn is not something for us to fight over, the corn becomes something to revere. Continuing on in Paul’s instruction from the Corinthians passage is a list of materials, a list of potential resources for our work: gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw.  This list might make you think there are better and worse materials to work with, and that thinking would lead us further down the terrible road of an economy of scarcity.  If this list were taken to mean some things are good and some things not so good to build with we would fret over what materials we have been given since those with the better materials would have a better chance to survive the test of fire.  But this is not what Paul intends at all.  Notice what is tested by the fire.  Paul is careful to point out that it is not the materials that our tested, it is our work that is tested (the fire will test what sort of work each has done).  No matter what materials we are given, it is what we do with them that matters.  We may be debating about corn ethanol as a fuel today, but even in that debate new materials are becoming available.  Science now has marketable ways of using just about any biological product to create fuel.  The materials are not the issue.  It is how we build with them, what work we do with them, what our foundation is for deciding, that matters.

Taking the first step, by treating each piece of God’s creation as gift, leads us to into God’s understanding of stewardship, of building our lives on the sure foundation of God’s beneficent giving.  In finding the sure footing of those who understand and respect the ground that they are given, we become the people who can most appreciate the blessedness of creation, no matter the current circumstance.  Gas prices may rise and fall, corn future speculation may create feasts and famines in our scarcity-driven markets, and yet all of these circumstances that so tax us mentally and socially melt away under the beautiful light that is the truth of God’s giving.  It is by serving God and not serving our selfishness driven by our fear of scarcity that Jesus demands of us in today’s gospel passage.  Serving him, and not this world with its shifting sands of change and chance, this is our directive.  If we discover that our choices over corn are causing famine in the world, it may be that we would change our policies.  But that decision would be based on scarcity, in this case the scarcity of others outweighing our own scarcity.  And we, driven by guilt, would choose to alleviate their pain.  That foundation, one built on guilt and fear, is not the foundation God wants us to choose from; it is a foundation of a meaningless life that would be washed away in the storm, burned away in a fire.  The same choice can be made from a foundation of reverence for the blessed piece of creation we are asked to be stewards of, and this is the meaningful life of a Christian.

Finding a place for reverence of each and every gift is the first step in the hard work of being a steward.  Reverence, though, is a dangerous word.   Holding creation with reverential hands means more than making good choices as stewards of creation.  It means honoring, respecting, and cherishing the very gifts placed into our hands.  No decision can be made without reflecting on the gifted nature of the very elements of creation we hold in our decision making fingers. Reverence takes our debates and turns them on their head, for as we confront a debate over something’s scarcity we are suddenly struck by how wonderful it is to have that commodity at all.  Beyond that holding creation with reverence leads us to let go of fear itself.  Those markets that drove us by guiding our fear fueled lives no longer control us, for we relish the opportunity, given to us by God, to have such wonderful things as fuel and food in the first place.  Our hands that before clutched and held onto the scarce resources now become the tender, loving, worshipful hands, blessed to take part in God’s creation.

Be it a gas pump, a coffee cup, a new t-shirt, a zucchini plant, a paint can, or smiling child’s face, our hands touch God’s gifts every moment of every day.  Our shortcoming is that we so often fail to revere the very glory of God that is at our finger tips.  Learning to bear greater reverence for each and every molecule and atom means humbling ourselves enough to open our hearts in reverence to God and his Creation.  Each moment can become worship.  No longer do we save our worship for one hour on Sunday; each moment we touch part of God’s creation we now can lift up our hearts, lifting them to the Lord.

This reverence is what converts our debates over corn, food, and fuel from one about scarcity into one about gift and blessing.  Reverence for God’s creation is the proper foundation for our debates and the choices we must make from them. Reverence is the first step of a steward, who embarks on her work not by examining scarcity, but by loving this grace filled life.  A steward walks with joy bursting out over each blessed piece of God’s creation.  Stewardship is not easy, and God raises the bar for us with the challenge to serve him in joy and not serve ourselves in fear.  In God’s eyes, we lack nothing.  Each and everything is a gift, and we honor God by holding everything in the reverential hands of stewards.

Pentecost 2009: Come Holy Spirit

We assume they wanted the Holy Spirit to come.  Christ tells the disciples that they will know more once the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, comes to them from the Father.  And on that first Pentecost morning they certainly learned  much:  several learned new languages in order to help testify to the truth.  Peter is moved to stand and declare with a new strong voice the truth that he was unable to admit during the trial and crucifixion.  New confidence, new skills, and plenty of courage are all given as the Holy Spirit first visits the church.  The disciples must have wanted the Holy Spirit to come in.
As much as we assume that the early church wanted the Holy Spirit to come we also assume that we want the Holy Spirit to be a part of our lives now.  We want to be inspired to do new things.  We want our lives to be sanctified by God, who in the Holy Spirit completes the work of creation and redemption by adding the blessing of sanctification on us.  It seems natural at some level to want the Holy Spirit to come into our lives.  We could assume it this week of all weeks, when we celebrate the first time that the Holy Spirit blessed the church.  It is what Pentecost is all about.
And yet we can also question this assumption.  When the Holy Spirit enters, people find themselves doing remarkably new things.  The inspiration to grow and learn new skills, to uncover new talents that previously had lain hidden, to find new time and energy to give in service to God, these things are all evidence of the Holy Spirit finding its way into our lives.  And as new things begin to enter we can already feel the threat of such an invasion.  We are comfortable and happy doing what we are doing right now.  Fear rises when we start to think about how our lives could be thrown wildly off balance by this new powerful influence.  The last thing we want to do is invite something into our lives that’s sole purpose is to change and upset our self created balance of life.  Or worse, our lives are already out of balance and causing us great pain.  We do not want God entering in and making our unbalanced lives a chaos.  But that is what we are assuming today.  We assume by celebrating Pentecost that we are willing to raise our voices in the ancient prayer, “Come, Holy Sprit”.  Come into our lives and make them startlingly new.  Come in and take these redeemed lives and sanctify them, drawing from us the work you want of us.  Draw out the your ministry from this body of Christ, formed out of the faithful redeemed creation of the Father.  Come Holy Spirit.
It is a big assumption to think that we want the Holy Spirit to come into our lives, for those tongues of fire to rest upon our heads.  We know intellectually that this is what God wants.  It is why Jesus prepares the disciples for it, telling them and us that we will be made more complete by the Advocate’s leading.  It is through the Holy Spirit that we will find our callings, our missions, our ministries.   The continued leadership of God’s faithful will come from the Spirit’s inspiration.  So for today, we will assume we want the Holy Spirit to come.  A big assumption, yes, but on today of all days we will practice that prayer, Come Holy Spirit.
The issue then for us as a people who pray for the Holy Spirit to enter into our lives is a practical one.  The story of that first Pentecost tells of no specific steps on how to go about getting the Holy Spirit to come in.  From Acts 1 verse 9  where Jesus ascends to the moment the Holy Spirit enters in there is no instruction or reflection on how the gathered faithful called forth the Holy Spirit.  The disciples went about their business praying and meeting together in the upper room.  That’s it.  No formula of actions that call forth the spirit. No dramatic act that becomes a liturgy, like the words we will say around this table as we bring forth again the bread and wine now flesh and blood.  No instructions on how to go about greeting new members like we will do today with water.  It seems as if the Spirit just appeared with the disciples doing nothing that first Pentecost morning.
There is a clue, however, that can help us to understand how we participate in the loving act of God blessing us with the Holy Spirit.  Luke, the author of Acts, leaves behind a detail for us to hear, if only we could hear the Greek of the original.  It’s a poetic use of a single word, meant to draw attention by its similar usage.  The word is what we translate first as “to sit” or “sitting”.  Acts 2 verse 2 says the Holy Spirit filled the entire house where they (the disciples) were sitting.  To sit, in Greek kathemai, refers at first glance to the physical act of sitting down.  We in our society rarely think about sitting as anything other than taking a rest in a chair.  Sitting is an act of relaxation, of inaction, of taking some time off.  We rarely ever tell our bosses that we are sitting in our office, even if we are sitting in our chairs.  We are working in our office, working at our desks.  Some of us even get up and pace quite a bit since it helps us feel like we are more active and productive.  Sitting is anything but productive.  Sitting is a lack of productivity to us.  At best sitting is what we do before we start our next task, and often we get to our feet to begin.  “We’re just sitting” is not the right answer.  Better to be working.  The disciples it seems were just sitting around, doing nothing.
So then our surprise is all that much greater when we hear the same root word in the next phrase.  Acts 2 verse 3: tongues of fire appeared among them, and rested on each of them.  The fire rested on them, ekathizo.  The Holy Spirit does not throw them out of their relaxing sitting position.  No, the Holy Spirit joins them in the act of resting, of sitting.  Kathemai is not about relaxing or taking a break like the word sitting means to us.  To sit or rest in a place has much more to do with being, dwelling, and inhabiting.  To invest oneself in one’s place, to embody that which God has given you.  Kathemai is not about relaxing from our labors, it is about being who we are.  The Holy Spirit is not taking a break and resting on the heads of the disciples but instead is dwelling in the disciples, making them more complete.  The disciples were not relaxing, they were living into their truest nature.  “Just sitting” is not a good translation of what the disciples were doing.  The disciples and we are not beings who work, we are beings who are created and redeemed.  Our work is subsequent to this truth.  The disciples are not doing nothing; they are living into their nature as Christ’s followers, called together in that upper room.
By dwelling together in that upper room the disciples acknowledged both their physical place and their blessed nature as redeemed creatures.  The disciples acknowledged their physical place as a people called to live together in a  united spiritual journey, choosing to dwell together in a spiritual space where they could invest themselves in their very nature,   a nature as a created and redeemed people.  Christ did not die to give us more work to do, Christ died to redeem our very nature.  This is what defines us. The Holy Spirit comes into our lives and sends us out because we have learned to rest, to inhabit, to dwell in the truth of who we are: redeemed creatures of God called together in community.  The Holy Spirit enters in when we rest in that knowledge.
If we wanted to recapture some of the poetry from the Greek we might come up with some other rendition of this passage from Acts.  As the disciples sat, the Holy Spirit came and sat on them!  Maybe not.  But what about: As they disciples rested in their being, the Holy Spirit came and rested in them.  Or even more: as the disciples dwelled together, the Holy Spirit came and dwelt amongst them.
Resting and dwelling brings up the image of a home, both a familial and a spiritual home.  Our homes, both the ones where our families receive mail and the ones where our community gathers, are not just places to relax. They are also places for us to find and define ourselves.  The making a home, the work of turning a living place into a home, needs to involve the acknowledgment of what God has done in creating us and redeeming us.  And when we take the time to make our dwelling places a spiritual space, then the Holy Spirit can come in and reside there with us, resting with us.  Our familial homes and our community homes, this spiritual home, are meant to be places where we can rest in the truth of what defines us.
So often we define ourselves by what we do.  Some of us are willing to go so far as to say that what we do comes from our faith in God, but for most, our life in God is a brief passing activity.  In either case we’ve got the formula wrong for a Holy Spirit inhabited life.  Our lives are not about what we do, it is about who we are: we are Christ’s own forever.  It is when we live into this truth, that we are defined by what God has done for us in creating us and redeeming us, that we make a home for the Spirit to enter in.  This is true for each of us as individuals and for all of us together as a parish in Christ’s church.  We are defined by who we are, not what we do.  When we rest in this truth, then the Holy Spirit will lead us to the ministry he has for us.
Assuming that we want the Holy Spirit to be in our lives means we need to accept who we are in God’s eyes.  His beloved creatures, whom he is willing to die for in order to keep us connected to him.  Dwell in who you are, blessed brothers and sisters united in the bonds of Christ Jesus, and there, where you reside, where you dwell, the Holy Spirit will come and dwell with you.

Palm Sunday – April 5, 2009

We have two choices for Holy Week, and each one is valuable and worthwhile.  On the one hand we can keep a broad perspective, placing each event of holy week in the larger context of the life and death of Jesus and how that story prepares us for next Sunday’s revelation.  On the other hand we can try as best we can to re-live the actual moments of this path, immersing ourselves in each day’s events, discovering as best we can what the disciples, the crowd, and even Jesus himself felt as each step was taken.  Both paths provides us boundless spiritual and theological avenues for growth in our faith and love of the Christ who was and is and is to come.
Our liturgy today attempts, somewhat messily, to support both paths for our Holy Week observance.  By hearing the Passion Gospel today we are given the overview of the narrative.  We hear the end of the story so that we know where we are headed.  We do miss some of the intervening steps, but at least by hearing the entry into Jerusalem and the horror of the Cross we now have a firm fix on the beginning and the end of Holy Week.  With these guides we can now place the other puzzle pieces we encounter into the bigger picture and understand better how they fit.
But we do not call this Sunday “Overview Sunday”.  We call it Palm Sunday.  The name focuses on the entrance into Jerusalem, the waving and laying down of green branches, the shouting of Hosannas, the proud bowing of lieges who accept their lord, the one who will save his people from the myriad forms of oppression they live with each day.  This day is a time for celebrating, shouting, pleading for our savior.
And so we try, in a somewhat messy way, to do both today, asking those who wish to walk each day like it was their first time ever through Holy Week to listen to the horrible end of the story and then try to shift themselves back to consider what it must have been like during the joyous Sunday celebration.  And likewise for those who want to approach Holy Week from above, taking in the larger perspective, we make them try to celebrate today when the Passion narrative is already weighing on their minds.
In either case, we don not make the path easy to follow today, but no one said Christianity was easy! Again, either path is a fruitful one, and denying one way of approaching Holy Week for the sake of another would be bad, too.  We can thank the Church which over the centuries has left us in this uncomfortable, messy, yet fruitful place.
With this understanding of Palm Sunday’s two potential paths as a bridge, move back with me to the Sunday, the entrance of Jesus into the greater Jerusalem area.  The people of Israel accept their king today, waving palms and shouting Hosannas to the new found king.  This is the King  who will liberate them and lead them to the greater glory that the Hebrew people had been promised repeatedly down through the generations.  Now with their new David installed the Israelites will throw off the shackles of Roman oppression, a revolution that echoes the great liberations of their forbearers who survived Egypt and then Babylon.  More than that the Israelites would once again realize their favored status with their God, finding their fields and flocks more plentiful, their families and cities more healthy, their neighbors less threatening, and their worship once again made pure from corruption and neglect.
It is this desperate plea that fuels the wild, almost chaotic shouting of Hosanna.  Hosanna is not, as we are accustomed to using in our worship, the word for praise in either Hebrew of Greek.  The root in either language is “ to save” and in this tense, with its imperative command, it is best rendered as “Oh, Save Us” or “Please save us”.  Mark, who writes his Gospel telling down perhaps 30 years after the incident, confuses the meaning of Hosanna, possibly using a hymn that the nacent church commonly used.  Scholars have tried several times to suggest ‘corrections’ to Mark’s Greek, and you can imagine the reaction from more traditional minded folk to having a modern scholar edit the Gospel. In any case, consider what Hosanna says about the crowd:  Hosanna is not raised hands in praise so much as pleading hands, desiring to be filled.
If we step back from Mark’s awkward use of Hosanna and accept that the crowd was in some way expressing their deeply felt feelings through shouting Hosanna, Save us, then we grasp a little more clearly what the crowd thought of this Jesus.  Jesus is not the soul changing redeemer of all humanity whom we call the Christ in the Israelite minds. Jesus is the worldly leader who will lead the Israelites to new freedom and prosperity.  The crowd, fed by recent stories of this man and glimpses of him during his travels through the region, had come to accept that this Jesus, though lowly in background, must be the promised one, the new David who will rise up to challenge this generation’s Goliath.  Jesus to the massed crowd is the political and military leader who will bring real change to their world.  And so the crowd surges forward, waving the green palms, signs of growth and God’s blessing.  The crowd lays their cloaks on the ground, declaring their willingness to lay down their lives for this leader.  The crowd shouts out their deepest held hopes, even as the Roman oppressors and conspiring Jewish leaders listen on.  The realities of the complex human world momentarily vanish, and like so many crowds before and after, for a moment the crowd senses peace and joy through the release of suffering brought about by the miraculous leader.
The new hope of this crowd of poor and oppressed Israelites will come crashing down soon enough.  This Jesus whom they place their hope in will turn out to be an entirely different leader, who’s human power is far less than that of the Roman and Jewish leadership of Jerusalem, or even that of his closest disciples.  In short order the crowd will turn on Jesus, and their pent up rage will convert their shouts into startlingly different tones.  By the end of the week, instead of lifting him up as their earthly savior, they will lift him up as a religious traitor.
We do not need to look too far for examples of the great crowd’s fickle nature.  The rejoicing over the financial gains of only a few years ago has turned into publicly acknowledged witch hunts of those very CEOs who led the rise and now fall of our stocks and finances.  I fear the new crop of leaders who have been raised up by the crowds, those great crowds shouting for real change,  could face a similar fate if good news does not come soon. We, like the crowd at Jerusalem,  continue to look for earthly saviors, and we, like them, are left with painful human disappointment.  It is with similar error that we turn to Jesus for salvation our human world, and join with the Israelite crowd today, projecting our hopes and dreams on this miraculous one, who could somehow wipe out the suffering that is an essential element to human life.
And so into Holy Week we plunge, carrying with us our hopes and our fears.  Today we acknolwedge our failing in looking for earthly salvation.  Our knowledge that this story leads to an entirely new way of envisioning salvation can either be ignored by those walking this path moment by moment or it can be used to provide the perspective to explain why this is happening at all.  The choice is for each of us to choose a path through Holy Week, encountering the joy and the grief, so that our hearts and souls may be opened for what God is truly trying to do by sending Jesus into our world.

Lent 3: March 15, 2009

It must have seemed like incredible foolishness to those gathered around witnessing the spectacle taking place in the beloved temple.  A person from a small town has entered.  Rumors and stories are overheard concerning him, rumors that he has attracted a large following, rumors that his teaching is powerful, but  his power is not measurable in the conventional terms: he has no wealth, no army, no country of his own.  All this person has are stories told about him, stories of, frankly, some amazing events within which he is featured.  After he enters the temple, this person goes on a wild rampage turning over the tables of all the usual folk who sell stuff and trade in the temple.  Birds go flying, dirt and dust get stirred up, coins spray in every direction.  Outrage and disgust are expressed from the vendors and more than a few of the consumers who were spending away their meager fortunes.  And then, this person says something so out of the ordinary that everyone either laughs or throws up their hands in disgust at this plague of insanity that has visited their comfortable lives:  He says he can tear down the temple and build it in three days.
This temple has already been leveled and rebuilt through the history of the Hebrew people, and they celebrate that history in annual events of praise and sacrifice.  The temple is the centerpiece of what they have created, a celebration of what God has done through them.  Some may have agreed with this cleansing of the temple, hearing in Jesus’ words some bit of wisdom about what the temple is really meant to be.  But most, who frequent or ignore the tables of these vendors are nervous and angry that their stable and safe, if somewhat dirty, world is being turned upside down.  Most folks at least accept the money changers in their holy temple since fighting them would only make matters worse. And so the laughter and disgust created by Jesus’ wild rampage pile up, and the words of prophecy that Jesus launches into the crowd are unable to be heard and understood.  Only the disciples would later be able to put the puzzle pieces together.  It took a long time for Jesus’ lesson to sink in.  Once his message is let in, Jesus’ teaching is as powerful and challenging as the physical act of turning over the tables in the beloved temple.
It is not often that when clergy gather for a required meeting that great learning comes about.  More often clergy learn things from odd, out of the ordinary places, where observations about life provide us windows into the deeper meaning of God’s creation.  A diocesan meeting is not the usual place for such observations.  But once in a while, a bland meeting can open a window to see Jesus at work.  At a monthly gathering of clergy who have recently taken on new positions, I sat with 40 of my colleagues.  Our moderator stood and introduced the topic for our morning discussion; this morning discussion format is standard fare for our time together.  He began by saying that our originally planned session on communications had to be postponed and in its place our moderator wanted to open a discussion of racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of discrimination that exist in our parishes and in our own lives.
Our moderator went on to explain that he wanted to be fair to us though and give us some options in how to approach what for most is a sensitive and sometimes painfully self-revelatory experience.  Opening up our deepest shortcomings and discussing them with others is a dangerous undertaking, as talking about our experiences of discrimination exposes us to vulnerability, disturbing memories, and often to painful admissions of our own limited vision.  This was not something our moderator wanted to thrust upon us.  Instead he asked for us to discuss the two or three ideas he had for entering into the conversation.
What followed I am ashamed to admit was a classic example of a conversation that spiraled out of control.  It was a conversation fed by anxiety, anger, and fear.  We clergy are not somehow immune from experiences defined more by their defensiveness and avoidance than by courage and openness.  By the end of our ten minutes of terse and fearful discussion of our options, a new insight formed for me.  It was clear to me that the value of encountering our shortcomings around issues like these is not about once-and-for-all fixing of our mistakes and missteps, but instead about keeping ourselves aware of how these issues pervade our lives, how they our endemic to our existence.
The root of the –isms that infect our relationships, communities, and society are the prejudicial judgments each of us collectively and personally make.  The prejudicial judgments have their foundation in how our minds work hard to make generalities out of our observations.  When we observe one thing, we want to use that observation to make predictions of future events so that we can be better prepared.  The errors that result from our making such judgments on our limited information is most often what lies at the foundation of the classism, racism, sexism, ageism, and most every –ism we find.  Our poor and limiting reactions to the ‘others’ that we encounter in our lives are not caused by malice so much as by neglect.  Neglect in not trying to learn more about each person who enters out lives.  The walls that our social groups put up to others are caused not by mean spirited exclusivist sentiment so much as by our lazy pursuit of comfort and safety.  It’s easier to find comfort around people who look like us, who act like us, who come from places like the places we come from.  How much more blessed would our social circles be if they were ever expanding in their borders, always searching to expand and include a new face, a new opinion, a new and sometimes challenging perspective!  Yet more often than not our neglectful reliance on the stereotypes we learn that keep our lives simple and easy close the door to those new perspectives, those new, holy, and blessed lives that happen to orbit our circles of friends and relations.
Exposing this shortcoming in how we form and strengthen our communities seems like such an obviously good thing to do.  And yet the even the work of exposing those nooks and crannies, those dark corners, is painful.  Oh so painful.  Doing the hard work of exposing the detritus and debris that clutters the holy corridors of our temples is worse than mindless and annoying housekeeping;  it is heartwrenching.  Thankfully God lead us clergy through that tense yet thankfully brief discussion and into a fruitful exploration of where we are finding that ugly collection of shortsighted limitations in our own lives and in the lives of our communities.
Lent is a time for shining the bright light of truth into the dark and dirty corners of our lives, where detritus and decay has built up, crud that has built up more from our lack of attention than from our own malice.  Lent gives us an opportunity to blaze that cleansing light into the cracks and crevices where we have allowed the decay to penetrate our lives.  We can, through our Lenten exertions, be renewed and redeemed by examining where we have let darkness into our spiritual lives and spiritual homes.
The metaphor of the cleansing of the temple points directly to the need to cleanse all the temples of God’s creation.  From the holy body of the faithful that Jesus calls together here to the holy and beautiful body that God has given you, full of potential and redemption worthy talent.  All God’s temples need to be periodically swept clean. What we need is a crazy person to go through with a set of cords and beat the dust and dirt out of the crevices and dark corners of these temples.
Jesus freely volunteers for this job. Jesus is ready to boldly walk in and lead us through the dirty work of upending the tables.  We must open the door of our souls for Christ’s cleaning work to be done.  We open that door by knocking ourselves out of our comfort zone, taking on Lenten disciplines, new tasks that encourage and enrich us or withholding from ourselves some pleasure that has up to now helped us turn a blind eye to the crud that has built up.  If we are afraid or uncomfortable at the prospect of this, we take courage in knowing the Jesus is leading the way, he has the tied cords in hand, wanting so desperately to make God’s holy temples clean.  Jesus enters into our lives not just to encourage us to actions, but also to come in a clean house.  Jesus is willing to encounter the scorn and disgust that inevitably turns up as he works to sweep away the grime.  As we follow Christ into the dirty work, we too encounter all those feelings.  But with Jesus as our guide, we know where the story leads.  To temples that are redeemed, to lives that can better serve and worship God, to hearts that can be opened, to cultures and communities that can become remarkably new and glorious in God’s eyes.  May we find time this Lent to have the dirty tables in our lives upended, and the temples of our lives are made clean and new.  Amen.

Epiphany 4: February 1, 2009

The Epiphany season holds as one of its central metaphors this simple message:  The light enters in.  Christ’s light breaks into the world.  Because this light enters in, we then need to consider our response.   As the light enters into our lives, as it enters the entire world, we need to grapple with what the light entering in calls from us as individuals and as a community.  We cannot sit still and ignore the light;  this light changes everything.  To be more precise the light of Christ reveals what was there but what we did not know for sure.  But with the light we now know, and we can never be the same.  Now we will always seek the light, and even more we are called to help those around us to journey toward the light, too.
The gospel passage from Mark today does not readily present any light imagery, but the metaphor of light reveals great meaning in this episode of Christ’s early ministry.  “He entered the synagogue and taught”, the gospel passage proclaims.   Christ enters in.  The Light enters the room.  Notice who fully recognizes the Light that has entered the room.  It is not the gathered Jews, nor Simon and Andrew who have already joined Jesus in his travels.  The unclean spirit boldly announces the identity of Christ, the Holy One of God.  It is the contrast between the unclean spirit and the bright light of Christ that makes it so easy for the unclean spirit to identify this intruder, this intruder who eliminates the dark corner where the spirit can hide.  In the darkness where the unclean spirit remains the bright light is so stark that it is unmistakable what and who this Light is.  And like all light, this light has the power to eliminate the darkness, to cast out the demon from its safe brooding shadows, and send him to oblivion.  And so Christ does.  Christ’s light cleanses the room of the darkness.
If we were meant to live in utter darkness, then we would be destined for a similar fate as the Light pierces our existence. This is not our fate, however.  Look at all the people gathered in this Gospel scene.  Those gathered  listen to Jesus’ teaching and observe the power with which he acts.  They are all amazed, but not quite sure who this person is.  They and us often walk in the gray space between the dark corners and this new light,  the liminal space where our inability to follow God meets God’s love pouring into the world. Pure darkness cannot help but recognize the Light, but the shadowy, murky gray of our world confounds our vision and leaves us not sure who this light is or where the light is coming from often as we travel our journeys.
The Light entering our lives is a two sided blessing for us.  On the one hand it is clear sign that we are not condemned to hide in darkness.  The light enters in not to condemn us by to guide us, to remind us of God’s love.  But so too the presence of the light means we are not the light ourselves.  We exist in the middle, we weave amidst the shadows of darkness and these new shafts of light.  We have to discern our path through the pervading grays of a world in between darkness and light.  We work to follow the source and end of our lives, this Light that draws us on.  We are worth the love of God as he shines his light into the shadows that we travel through.  We are so worth his redemption that his light will never stop shining, Christ will never stop looking for us.  Our calling is to never stop looking for him, to never turn away, to always yearn to draw near to the light.
The methods for our search, for keeping our journeys pointed in Jesus’ direction, are many.  For almost all of us, though, our search will involve each other.  Our community is part of our journey, and learning to rely on our fellow travelers is one of the lessons we relearn often.  A metaphorical example.  Once I was on my way to a convention and one of my friends called me.  She was on the way to the same convention and she needed directions.  She asked me, “where’s the turn to get to the convention center”, to which I replied, “I’m not sure of the name of the street, but it’s the turn before you get to the toll road”.  Her next words?  “You mean the toll road I just passed?” A tribute to my friend is that she was willing to call and ask where to turn, she was willing to ask for guidance, not that I knew much more.  We both entered the gray area of finding our way, and she was willing to reach out a hand to a fellow traveler when she got lost in a shadows.  I should mention at this point that this friend of mine owns a GPS unit.  It seems she trusts human beings more than machines for guidance, but that is a different sermon.
It is a tired cliche to make fun of folks for their willingness or unwillingness to ask for directions when driving. Our desire to go it alone, to trust only ourselves, to act as if we have the lights under our control (the headlights are on, we can see where we are going….), these feelings keep us from relying on each other in our stumbling around in the gray world.  I could have, and probably should have, called someone else to get clearer directions.  That time I knew just barely enough to get myself and my friend to our destination, but the challenge for us to know when to reach out and ask others what they think.  We need to be reminded to listen to others and hear what they have to say about the path ahead.  God himself even adds his voice, and if we grow quiet enough, that still small voice can lead our spirits on.
By growing deeper in our willingness to listen, we can grow deeper in faith until we find ourselves like Peter, 7 chapters later in Mark’s Gospel, finally declaring with the strong voice of Holy Spirit inspired humanity, “You are the Messiah”.   The first of the followers of Christ to admit the truth; the first disciple to put the pieces of the puzzle together and be convinced.  And yet compared to the unclean sprit here in chapter 1, it takes so long for us like Peter to put it all together.  Peter’s journey is a long one of formation, of questions and not so direct answers, of following the light through many shadows.
And like Peter, emerging from the shadows is not a once in a lifetime experience. We are always somewhere in the cycle of looking for Jesus, for a clear view of the Light, of finding our moments when we call out the truth, moments when the bright Light shines on us and our faith is confirmed and our myriad doubts fall away.  Those cherished moments in our faith lives become strong memories, touchstones that we can draw on in the lean times, when the voice guiding us, the light leading us, the friends around us seems so far away.
These cycles of growth are why St. Paul is willing to give up eating the meat offered to idols.  He’s willing to be a vegetarian if it helps another in their work of following Christ through the shadows.  Our calling does not end with us being willing to listen; our calling grows into the work of offering ourselves to our fellow travelers, of giving of ourselves so that others can find their way.  Paul preaches this often.  Our faith tells us that this meat offered to idols is fine to eat, since earthly idols are nothing but dumb objects, but if it helps another grow in faith then the meat shall never touch Paul’s lips.  What would you be willing to give up to help another?  Could you give up meat if it somehow could help another grow in faith? Could you give up something you love?  What about watching football?  And what would you be willing to give up to help yourself?  Are you able to give up relying on yourself, and start relying on the community of the faithful, this gathered Body of Christ?  We first acknowledge that we exist in the gray area.  Then we admit that the only source of light is Jesus Christ.  We work to reflect that light on to others, as a community of disciples.
Our community today gathers to offer many things.  If you sense that you are sick, either in body or spirit, come forward for healing prayers and be reminded that God’s love sees past your ills and promises that in God’s eyes you are holy and blessed, that God’s holy light shines on you.  Come and receive the body and blood of Christ, that holy food poured out for you, so that you may be fed and encouraged to share this blessed light you have seen with the whole world.
Follow this light wherever it leads you.  Let go of self reliance and draw closer to the light, and give of yourself so that others may do draw towards the light, too.  Christ’s light has broken in and we will never be the same.