Sermon: The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
October 16, 2011
Trinity Church
Proper 24
Exodus 33:12-23
Psalm 96:1-9, (10-13)
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
Matthew 22:15-22
The Pharisees are not such bad guys. They are just being true to what they really believe. They believe you've got to be very careful in what you do when God is watching. You need to keep your hands clean and not associate with the wrong kind of people and not eat things that good people shouldn't have put before them. They are not so different from each of us some of the time. It's very hard for us not to the think that our religion is primarily a code of behavior, a list of do's and don't's. It is very hard for us not to think that our religion is somehow about being proper as "proper" was understood by our parents and our grandparents. Some people are still offended by flip-flops or short pants in church. There are millions of people starving to death, whose children are starving before their eyes, and there are millions of people who go to bed – or should I say “go to sleep” because they have no bed – go to sleep not knowing whether or not they will be kidnapped or murdered in their sleep, and they need our help – and yet we find time to worry about whose shoes are polished and whose are not. That's what the Pharisees are like.
And the Herodians. They must be doing something right, because they and their friends are in charge. They only want things to keep going along as they are. The Church – the Temple that is – is beautiful and strong. It has plenty of money. It has plenty of programs and plenty of members who show up regularly to do what good religious people are supposed to do. The Herodians don’t want anything to shake the foundations; they don’t want any new ideas that challenge – not so much what they are doing – but the basis on which they are doing it. They keep order, that is for sure, but they do it by supporting a society in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Not to make too fine a point of it, it is conservatively estimated that in our own country 10% of the people control 90% of the wealth. You and I are the beneficiaries of that system. In that sense, we are the Herodians. Not bad people, just people acting according to what they have come to believe.
But Jesus presents a challenge to all of that. And they want to embarrass him. They want to see if they can get him to say something publicly that will get him in so much trouble that he will either be silenced or – if they play their cards right – get in so much trouble that he can be arrested and removed as a public figure.
So they ask him a loaded question – one they think that he cannot answer without falling into their trap: one answer will get him in trouble with the authorities, the other answer will discredit him among his friends and followers.
They ask him about taxes. You only have to turn on the TV or radio to know that even today this is a hot topic – and opposing factions are still using the topic of taxes to stir up the public – and try to win votes.
“What do you think about paying taxes,” they ask him. But Jesus knows taxes are not the real issue. They are not the real issue in our day and time either.
The issue there and then, just as it is here and now, is what should human beings be doing with what they have and who they are? What should governments and businesses be doing with the money and power and influence they have?
The Herodians and the Pharisees ask Jesus about money, and he asks them about themselves. The question isn’t really about money, it’s about what it means to be a human being.
“Show me a coin,” he says. And here our translation fails us. What we heard was “Whose head is on the coin,” but that isn’t what it says. What it says is “Whose IMAGE is on the coin.” Not “head” but “image.” The word is important.
“It is the emperor’s image”, they say. Then let the emperor have it – as long as you also let God have everything that has his image on it.
And that is where the bottom falls out of the Herodian's and the Pharisees' clever trap. The moment they hear the word “image,” they know their clever argument is in trouble. The are good Bible-reading people, and they would know what it says at the very beginning of that sacred book. They would know that right there at the very beginning of the human story are these words:
God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good. 26 Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air . . . 27 So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Gen 1:25-27 (NRSV)
If the money part is about Caesar, then the human being part is about God.
Jesus is saying that before you can worry about taxes and power and government and business you need to know who you are. He said it then; he says it now.
Before you write a check, before you cast a vote, before you make a business decision, before you exercise the freedom you have been given, you need to be sure you understand who you are and whose you are.
You are made in the image of God, he says.
You are made – you did not make yourself. That you exist at all is a gift to you, and everything you have is a gift to you, he says.
Our prayer book has been telling us this Biblical message for a long, long time. There is a moment in the Great Thanksgiving in one of our Eucharistic prayers that says this:
And we earnestly desire thy fatherly goodness to accept this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, whereby we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies. [BCP, 336 & 342]
Hear that again, “we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies.” Not part of who we are, not part of what we have, not some of what we do – but our entire selves.
In his response to the Herodians and the Pharisees Jesus raises the stakes. And, of course, it makes them angry. From this point forward they will look for a more permanent way to shut him up.
It is that time of year when the leaders of our congregation will speak to us about financial stewardship. And I am going to say something bold that I hope you will take to heart.
I am very, very well aware that a common criticism of clergy and of churches in general is that they talk about money too much. I’ve even – and too often – heard of people leaving congregations because there was too much talk of money. Let me say point blank that I have never known anyone make such a complaint who felt good about their own generosity and willingness to give. Those whose conscience is clear about this issue rarely, if ever, complain, because they are at peace with themselves and with God.
As Jesus points out, money is not an issue separate from our spiritual life. Quite the contrary, it is an integral part of who we are. It is why we place our offering of money on the altar – because in a real sense it represents our lives – and the amount of ourselves we are willing to share with others.
Only you know if what you share with God and with the world God has committed to your care “yourself, your soul and body,” or just some token amount, some part of who you are.
God calls us to give to God what is God’s. And what is God's is everything in all creation, including "ourselves, our souls and bodies."
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Thursday, June 9, 2011
EfM Graduation Sermon -- Christ Church Cathedral, Hartford, June 5, 2011
Zechariah 1:7–11
Psalm 31:19-24
Revelation 14:13–16
Matthew 8:5–13
Alan Jones is a priest and was for a long time Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. Phyllis Tickle lives on a farm in Millington, Tennessee. She is an editor and writer. She is a lector in her parish church and a Eucharistic Minister – and she is the mother of seven children. Ini Kopuria, whom our Church remembers this evening, was, for a large part of his life, a cop.
Twenty-seven years ago Alan wrote a splendid and prophetic book called Soulmaking in which he talks about the inner life of the human spirit and about the psychology of the spiritual journey we are on as followers of Jesus. He also says a bit about the shape our church is in in our time. He was an early voice, now joined by a whole chorus others, insisting that the church we all know and love is in for changes of a magnitude only rarely seen before. He says our times in particular will require of us a faith that is “passionate, intelligent and honest.” He means to imply, I am sure, that there is much about faith that can be not passionate, but lukewarm; not intelligent but over-simplified and intellectually shallow; not honest but fearful, willfully duplicitous and ignorant: A fortress of denial not an outpost of the Gospel.
Alan compares our situation to that of the English residents of Victorian India in the days of the Raj – when Brittan’ia ruled the waves. There is a story that when those English colonials had to flee quickly because of uprisings of the indigenous Indian population, the road out of town was “strewn with such things as stuffed owls and Victorian bric-a-brac,” – those decorative but otherwise useless things the ruling class had gathered about them. Jones says he has no idea what our church’s equivalent of “stuffed owls” will be in the coming era, but that he is sure, because of the changes God is making in God’s church, that our paths will be just as littered. He says that having faith that is “passionate, intelligent and honest” means that, “we Christians will need to travel light,” wisely choosing what we take forward with us.
For Phyllis Tickle, it isn’t that there will be road littered with once valued and now useless things. She says In her book The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why that from time to time the Church has “a great collective rummage sale”: a time when things once useful, but now no longer so, are discarded. What I like about what Phyllis says is that, though our times are extraordinary, and can be extraordinarily difficult, they are not unprecedented. She demonstrates most convincingly – and somewhat consolingly – that every five-hundred years or so this Great Collective Rummage sale takes place – and you and I happen to be living during just such a cleaning-out of the attic.
So, what are the stuffed owls we must leave behind? What is being shuffled off to the great rummage sale?
We are so much in the middle of it all, it’s not always easy to say, but there are some things that we can be pretty sure of.
One thing that will be left behind is the notion that only those who are ordained deacon, priest or bishop are ministers of the Gospel. There was a celebrated Bishop of New York who, fresh from his ordination as bishop in the great Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, was sharing with his wife how wonderful and moving and glorious the day had been. “I suppose so,” was her laconic reply, “but I hope you don’t think anything that happened today was more important that your baptism.”
And so it is: the church is leaving behind the ideas that the ordained are there only to minister to the un-ordained, that clergy are providers and laity are consumers. The truth being rediscovered is that we all minister to each other with equal authority and equal integrity – and that our ministries are not confined to “churchy” things and emergency situations. Oh yes, being an acolyte and a lector and an usher are important and valuable, but they are not, in the emerging model, “ministries” in the most profound and beautiful sense of the word. Those churchy things are the things we do around the family table so that we can go out into the world where our real ministries are – and, once out there, serve the world in God’s name. It may well be, and probably is, that the old hierarchical structure of the institutional church is a stuffed owl just waiting to be left on the roadside of the spiritual journey.
You certainly know that while EfM – Education for MINISTRY – may indeed make you a better lector and eucharistic minister, usher or member of the altar guild, that is side-effect and not the main purpose of all the reading and learning and praying and worshiping-together you have done over the past four years.
The goal of EfM has been to prepare us for ministry in the world.
“You may be the only Gospel your neighbor ever reads,” says St. Francis. As I look around at what passes for Christianity in contemporary culture – exclusivity; political polarization, national arrogance and denominational elitism, a retreat to fearful and fearsome fundamentalism – I am convinced that the Gospel of which St. Francis speaks, is more critically important than ever. The world needs the living Gospel, visible in us followers of Jesus, as we go about our lives following his example – his kindness, his compassion, his honesty, his faith and his hope. EfM seeks to empower us to be that Gospel – in the check-out line, at the stop-light, in schools and hospitals and shops and offices and restaurants and on busses and trains and everywhere else we live our lives.
EfM calls us to be theologians of the ordinary.
As conscious followers of Jesus Christ, ministry is what we do and who we are all the time. Any other, rarified, specialized, esoteric understanding of ministry is a rummage-sale item we can hope and pray that nobody buys.
Which brings me to Ini Kopuria – remember him? Ini Kopuria was a cop. Well actually he was that and some other things too; but what he was not is ordained. True, he eventually founded an organization called The Melanesian Brotherhood, a kind of semi-monastic fellowship of men; but even then, the members of the Brotherhood were laymen, not ordained, and their vows were temporary, with the expectation that each brother would eventually return to customary community life, most likely marry and be followers of Jesus in their daily lives.
Early on as a student, Ini Kopuria showed a profound interest in things religious; and his friends and associates fairly assumed his life would be about churchy things as a profession. But Ini Koipuria chose to become a cop. That, I am sure, is why we had that interesting reading from Zechariah about those who “patrolled the earth, and lo, the whole earth remains at peace.”
Though he would eventually dedicate his life to the Brotherhood, the truth is he spent more of his life outside the Brotherhood than in it. And, again I say, he was never ordained – other that most important ordination we all share, the ordination of baptism.
One of his biographers choose five particular characteristic to describe him:
First . . his spirituality: prayer was a very real thing with Ini: God was in all his thoughts. Second, his joyousness, he was almost always in high spirits, full of fun, full of the joy of being alive, it was good to live with him. Third, his deep understanding of the thoughts of Melanesians. Fourth, his common sense, he always knew what was practicable and kept discussions to that which was reverent, joyful, sympathetic [and] wise. (Charles E. Fox. From Southern Cross Log (New Zealand Edition), June 1, 1946, pages 21-24.
Prayerful, joyful, perceptive-of and sensitive-to those around him, and a man of common sense. Four virtues anyone of us could claim if we will. In the case of Ini Kopuria these ordinary virtues were the path to the exemplary life that we celebrate today – ordinary human virtues were his path, entering into the hierarchy of the church was not.
Those are four virtues, but I mentioned a fifth. Ini was said not be “popular with the White staff who thought him conceited.” His very English biographer goes on to say that there was indeed some “truth in this, for he felt his own gifts.” “For he felt his own gifts” – and so the British colonials found him conceited. It seems that in Ini’s time-and-place the stuffed owl of racism had not yet been set out on the curb for pick-up. Would that all God’s children would feel – and claim – their own gifts.
I pray that your experiences in EfM have set you on the path to feeling and claiming your gifts as ministers of the Gospel, as Christ’s ambassadors to the world. I pray that it has helped you to a faith that is “passionate, intelligent and honest,” a faith that will help you help us all find the wisdom and the courage to leave the stuffed owls behind.
There is an apocryphal story that tells of some angels talking with Jesus. They ask what are his post-Ascension plans for the earth. “Now that they’ve heard and seen and experienced how much I love them and love the world,” he says, “I’m just going to leave the world in their care. It will be their job to trust that I am always with them, and to carry that message to the world, and to keep that love alive.” The angels sort of chuckled at God’s optimistic regard for the human race. “And if that doesn’t work,” they said, “what other plan do you have?”
“NO other plan,” said Jesus. “No other plan at all.”
As I look around this room today, I have to say there is every reason to think Jesus’s plan was and is a good one.
Psalm 31:19-24
Revelation 14:13–16
Matthew 8:5–13
Alan Jones is a priest and was for a long time Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. Phyllis Tickle lives on a farm in Millington, Tennessee. She is an editor and writer. She is a lector in her parish church and a Eucharistic Minister – and she is the mother of seven children. Ini Kopuria, whom our Church remembers this evening, was, for a large part of his life, a cop.
Twenty-seven years ago Alan wrote a splendid and prophetic book called Soulmaking in which he talks about the inner life of the human spirit and about the psychology of the spiritual journey we are on as followers of Jesus. He also says a bit about the shape our church is in in our time. He was an early voice, now joined by a whole chorus others, insisting that the church we all know and love is in for changes of a magnitude only rarely seen before. He says our times in particular will require of us a faith that is “passionate, intelligent and honest.” He means to imply, I am sure, that there is much about faith that can be not passionate, but lukewarm; not intelligent but over-simplified and intellectually shallow; not honest but fearful, willfully duplicitous and ignorant: A fortress of denial not an outpost of the Gospel.
Alan compares our situation to that of the English residents of Victorian India in the days of the Raj – when Brittan’ia ruled the waves. There is a story that when those English colonials had to flee quickly because of uprisings of the indigenous Indian population, the road out of town was “strewn with such things as stuffed owls and Victorian bric-a-brac,” – those decorative but otherwise useless things the ruling class had gathered about them. Jones says he has no idea what our church’s equivalent of “stuffed owls” will be in the coming era, but that he is sure, because of the changes God is making in God’s church, that our paths will be just as littered. He says that having faith that is “passionate, intelligent and honest” means that, “we Christians will need to travel light,” wisely choosing what we take forward with us.
For Phyllis Tickle, it isn’t that there will be road littered with once valued and now useless things. She says In her book The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why that from time to time the Church has “a great collective rummage sale”: a time when things once useful, but now no longer so, are discarded. What I like about what Phyllis says is that, though our times are extraordinary, and can be extraordinarily difficult, they are not unprecedented. She demonstrates most convincingly – and somewhat consolingly – that every five-hundred years or so this Great Collective Rummage sale takes place – and you and I happen to be living during just such a cleaning-out of the attic.
So, what are the stuffed owls we must leave behind? What is being shuffled off to the great rummage sale?
We are so much in the middle of it all, it’s not always easy to say, but there are some things that we can be pretty sure of.
One thing that will be left behind is the notion that only those who are ordained deacon, priest or bishop are ministers of the Gospel. There was a celebrated Bishop of New York who, fresh from his ordination as bishop in the great Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, was sharing with his wife how wonderful and moving and glorious the day had been. “I suppose so,” was her laconic reply, “but I hope you don’t think anything that happened today was more important that your baptism.”
And so it is: the church is leaving behind the ideas that the ordained are there only to minister to the un-ordained, that clergy are providers and laity are consumers. The truth being rediscovered is that we all minister to each other with equal authority and equal integrity – and that our ministries are not confined to “churchy” things and emergency situations. Oh yes, being an acolyte and a lector and an usher are important and valuable, but they are not, in the emerging model, “ministries” in the most profound and beautiful sense of the word. Those churchy things are the things we do around the family table so that we can go out into the world where our real ministries are – and, once out there, serve the world in God’s name. It may well be, and probably is, that the old hierarchical structure of the institutional church is a stuffed owl just waiting to be left on the roadside of the spiritual journey.
You certainly know that while EfM – Education for MINISTRY – may indeed make you a better lector and eucharistic minister, usher or member of the altar guild, that is side-effect and not the main purpose of all the reading and learning and praying and worshiping-together you have done over the past four years.
The goal of EfM has been to prepare us for ministry in the world.
“You may be the only Gospel your neighbor ever reads,” says St. Francis. As I look around at what passes for Christianity in contemporary culture – exclusivity; political polarization, national arrogance and denominational elitism, a retreat to fearful and fearsome fundamentalism – I am convinced that the Gospel of which St. Francis speaks, is more critically important than ever. The world needs the living Gospel, visible in us followers of Jesus, as we go about our lives following his example – his kindness, his compassion, his honesty, his faith and his hope. EfM seeks to empower us to be that Gospel – in the check-out line, at the stop-light, in schools and hospitals and shops and offices and restaurants and on busses and trains and everywhere else we live our lives.
EfM calls us to be theologians of the ordinary.
As conscious followers of Jesus Christ, ministry is what we do and who we are all the time. Any other, rarified, specialized, esoteric understanding of ministry is a rummage-sale item we can hope and pray that nobody buys.
Which brings me to Ini Kopuria – remember him? Ini Kopuria was a cop. Well actually he was that and some other things too; but what he was not is ordained. True, he eventually founded an organization called The Melanesian Brotherhood, a kind of semi-monastic fellowship of men; but even then, the members of the Brotherhood were laymen, not ordained, and their vows were temporary, with the expectation that each brother would eventually return to customary community life, most likely marry and be followers of Jesus in their daily lives.
Early on as a student, Ini Kopuria showed a profound interest in things religious; and his friends and associates fairly assumed his life would be about churchy things as a profession. But Ini Koipuria chose to become a cop. That, I am sure, is why we had that interesting reading from Zechariah about those who “patrolled the earth, and lo, the whole earth remains at peace.”
Though he would eventually dedicate his life to the Brotherhood, the truth is he spent more of his life outside the Brotherhood than in it. And, again I say, he was never ordained – other that most important ordination we all share, the ordination of baptism.
One of his biographers choose five particular characteristic to describe him:
First . . his spirituality: prayer was a very real thing with Ini: God was in all his thoughts. Second, his joyousness, he was almost always in high spirits, full of fun, full of the joy of being alive, it was good to live with him. Third, his deep understanding of the thoughts of Melanesians. Fourth, his common sense, he always knew what was practicable and kept discussions to that which was reverent, joyful, sympathetic [and] wise. (Charles E. Fox. From Southern Cross Log (New Zealand Edition), June 1, 1946, pages 21-24.
Prayerful, joyful, perceptive-of and sensitive-to those around him, and a man of common sense. Four virtues anyone of us could claim if we will. In the case of Ini Kopuria these ordinary virtues were the path to the exemplary life that we celebrate today – ordinary human virtues were his path, entering into the hierarchy of the church was not.
Those are four virtues, but I mentioned a fifth. Ini was said not be “popular with the White staff who thought him conceited.” His very English biographer goes on to say that there was indeed some “truth in this, for he felt his own gifts.” “For he felt his own gifts” – and so the British colonials found him conceited. It seems that in Ini’s time-and-place the stuffed owl of racism had not yet been set out on the curb for pick-up. Would that all God’s children would feel – and claim – their own gifts.
I pray that your experiences in EfM have set you on the path to feeling and claiming your gifts as ministers of the Gospel, as Christ’s ambassadors to the world. I pray that it has helped you to a faith that is “passionate, intelligent and honest,” a faith that will help you help us all find the wisdom and the courage to leave the stuffed owls behind.
There is an apocryphal story that tells of some angels talking with Jesus. They ask what are his post-Ascension plans for the earth. “Now that they’ve heard and seen and experienced how much I love them and love the world,” he says, “I’m just going to leave the world in their care. It will be their job to trust that I am always with them, and to carry that message to the world, and to keep that love alive.” The angels sort of chuckled at God’s optimistic regard for the human race. “And if that doesn’t work,” they said, “what other plan do you have?”
“NO other plan,” said Jesus. “No other plan at all.”
As I look around this room today, I have to say there is every reason to think Jesus’s plan was and is a good one.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 22, 2011
Acts 7:55-60
Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16
1 Peter 2:2-10
John 14:1-14
Jesus is saying goodbye to his friends. And goodbyes are hard. Their faces reveal the trouble in their hearts. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he says, looking around at them gathered there in the dim light of the oil lamps in that upper room. But they are afraid. Why is he going? Where is he going? Can’t they come too?
This Gospel lesson is, I believe, the one most used at Episcopal funerals. It is about goodbye’s and about the pain of goodbyes. And it is also about hope and reassurance in the face of loss, separation, and death.
I once had a conversation with a fellow clergyman who recounted to me his experience of helping the surviving member of a couple plan a funeral.. Reviewing the options, the priest suggested that the Gospel lesson be this one -- the one where Jesus says, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” “Dwelling places?”the partner said. “Dwelling places?” “You knew John. How gracious and tasteful he was. John would not want just a ‘dwelling place! John would want a mansion. Can’t we give him a mansion – like it said in the older Bible?” And so they did.
When it came time to read the Gospel at the funeral, my friend read from the translation we heard this morning, but, looking warmly at John’s partner as he read, he proudly proclaimed, “In my Fathers’ house are many ‘mansions’. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself.”
Jesus is taking the part of the servant of a nomadic tribe who strikes out ahead of his companions, who rushes ahead to the oasis to set up the tents, to draw the cool water, light the lamps, lay the carpets, and fluff up the pillows. That work done, he will return to the caravan to accompany them, to usher them toward the familiar comfort of their now awaiting home.
And this is his promise to us, too. To go ahead and prepare a place, a dwelling place, a mansion, for each of us.
What do you imagine that home, that dwelling place, that mansion will be like for you and those you love? For desert nomads, it would have been just what I described. A tent set firmly in the sand, providing refuge from the cold desert winds and shade from parching desert sun. Ornate rugs unrolled on the ground, great pillows all plumped up and shaken free of sand, oil lamps lighting the way to the life-giving water of the oasis.
That’s probably not your picture of your mansion in the sky. For you and me, maybe there are rich oriental rugs on the floor, and maybe there are chandeliers hanging from high ceilings. For me, those chandeliers would be full of real candles blazing in hospitable welcome. And they would never burn low or need replacing – or drip wax on the floor! There would be books and books and books. And a great big leather chair with the biggest ottoman in the heavenly furniture store. And a reading light that knows just how to focus itself so that even without my glasses, every word would leap off the page.
And there are pictures on the wall, pictures of beloved memories, pictures of Hawaii – and Rome pictures which, when you looked at them, would be full of the sound of crashing waves, and the smell of frangiapanne or the smell of pizza and the “honk, honk” of Vespas. What pictures will hang on the wall of your mansion in heaven?
But there will be no need of pictures of the people you love. Because all of them, ALL of them, will be coming for dinner. The dining room in that house will be big enough to hold them all, and they will all be there, and there will always be enough time to tell them all the things you ever wanted to. And to hear them tell you in return all the wonderful adventures of their lives. And you will never forget to tell them how much you love them. And they will never forget to tell you the same thing. And you will hear it. And know that it is true. And the food will be fabulous. And the desert tray will never be empty. Now that’s a mansion I could move into. A mansion worth dying to inherit.
But will it really be that way? Well, yes and no.
Jesus has indeed gone before us to that other land to prepare a place for us, and it will not be just a dwelling place. It will be the mansion of your dreams. Will it have comfortable furniture and leather-bound books? I do not know. But Jesus promises it will have all the good things we ever really longed for or needed.
It will be place with the doors flung wide open in welcome. A place in which you are truly known and truly loved. It will be the place you belong. There will be no shame there. No nagging sense that you are not what you ought to be. There will be no condemnation there, no accusing voice finding fault. Only acceptance, understanding, and love. There will be no regret there, because all sins are forgiven and wiped away. No sense that you’ve got to do more than you can, only sincere gratitude and thanksgiving that you have done what you could. And there will certainly be a banquet, where you can wear whatever you want, and stay as long as you need, and share in meal that fills your deepest hunger.
But wait. It seems we’ve stopped talking about furniture and photographs. And started talking about the fruits of God’s love for us. Acceptance, forgiveness, understanding, encouragement, compassion, and love so delicious you can taste it, love so comfortable you can feel it wrap around you and hold you up. This is the furniture of the Kingdom of God. This is the nature of the place Jesus has gone ahead to prepare for us.
And, dear friends, there is no reasons that place should be just there and then. It is the place we are called to live in right here and right now. If we are not busy furnishing this place, this world with those things, then we’ve got it all wrong. A church, a parish church, must be that place where acceptance, and forgiveness, understanding, compassion, and love so delicious you can taste it, may be found. Insofar as it is, then we really are that community Jesus calls us to be. Insofar as it is not, then we’ve got work to do.
Churches do not exist to build real mansions on earth, but to build on earth our very best attempt at that heavenly place where God would have us live. A place where all God’s children learn and know that they are forgiven, are accepted, and are loved. A place where we do not fear condemnation and judgment because we learn and know that in God’s eyes all is forgiven, every debt has all been paid. A place where each one’s gifts are celebrated and shared to the good of everyone else. A place where we can truly, deeply, passionately be at home. That is what we need to be building here. The furniture of love, acceptance, and forgiveness, and mutual support are the stuff we need to be setting about us in this place. Anything else is a waste of our time.
And what about that banquet, what about that great dinner party at which all those we love, those whom we see no longer, are gathered together? The tears wiped from their eyes and ours? Just what about that circle that will “be unbroken? “
Dear friends, that too is here. Right here and right now. Gathered around us at this table are all those we love and who love us. This table only appears to be limited to time and space. In reality, only one end of this table is here. The other end stretches to the skies; and gathered around it is the whole company of Saints basking in the light of a million candles -- a million candles which all together do not burn nearly as brightly as God’s love lighting every face in that fabulous company. The bread there never runs out, and the wine is always flowing. That bread, that wine, that table are right here. Right now. There is indeed a mansion prepared for us, a dwelling place in God’s Kingdom. Open your eyes and see it. In our Father’s house are many, many mansions, and this place is called to be one of them. That doorway flung wide open in welcome to all God’s children must be right here.
And the party has indeed already begun, right now. And all goodbyes were only temporary. Everyone is here already. Even those we see no longer. They are here, and we are with them and they are with us.
Come, let us keep the feast.
Acts 7:55-60
Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16
1 Peter 2:2-10
John 14:1-14
Jesus is saying goodbye to his friends. And goodbyes are hard. Their faces reveal the trouble in their hearts. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he says, looking around at them gathered there in the dim light of the oil lamps in that upper room. But they are afraid. Why is he going? Where is he going? Can’t they come too?
This Gospel lesson is, I believe, the one most used at Episcopal funerals. It is about goodbye’s and about the pain of goodbyes. And it is also about hope and reassurance in the face of loss, separation, and death.
I once had a conversation with a fellow clergyman who recounted to me his experience of helping the surviving member of a couple plan a funeral.. Reviewing the options, the priest suggested that the Gospel lesson be this one -- the one where Jesus says, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” “Dwelling places?”the partner said. “Dwelling places?” “You knew John. How gracious and tasteful he was. John would not want just a ‘dwelling place! John would want a mansion. Can’t we give him a mansion – like it said in the older Bible?” And so they did.
When it came time to read the Gospel at the funeral, my friend read from the translation we heard this morning, but, looking warmly at John’s partner as he read, he proudly proclaimed, “In my Fathers’ house are many ‘mansions’. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself.”
Jesus is taking the part of the servant of a nomadic tribe who strikes out ahead of his companions, who rushes ahead to the oasis to set up the tents, to draw the cool water, light the lamps, lay the carpets, and fluff up the pillows. That work done, he will return to the caravan to accompany them, to usher them toward the familiar comfort of their now awaiting home.
And this is his promise to us, too. To go ahead and prepare a place, a dwelling place, a mansion, for each of us.
What do you imagine that home, that dwelling place, that mansion will be like for you and those you love? For desert nomads, it would have been just what I described. A tent set firmly in the sand, providing refuge from the cold desert winds and shade from parching desert sun. Ornate rugs unrolled on the ground, great pillows all plumped up and shaken free of sand, oil lamps lighting the way to the life-giving water of the oasis.
That’s probably not your picture of your mansion in the sky. For you and me, maybe there are rich oriental rugs on the floor, and maybe there are chandeliers hanging from high ceilings. For me, those chandeliers would be full of real candles blazing in hospitable welcome. And they would never burn low or need replacing – or drip wax on the floor! There would be books and books and books. And a great big leather chair with the biggest ottoman in the heavenly furniture store. And a reading light that knows just how to focus itself so that even without my glasses, every word would leap off the page.
And there are pictures on the wall, pictures of beloved memories, pictures of Hawaii – and Rome pictures which, when you looked at them, would be full of the sound of crashing waves, and the smell of frangiapanne or the smell of pizza and the “honk, honk” of Vespas. What pictures will hang on the wall of your mansion in heaven?
But there will be no need of pictures of the people you love. Because all of them, ALL of them, will be coming for dinner. The dining room in that house will be big enough to hold them all, and they will all be there, and there will always be enough time to tell them all the things you ever wanted to. And to hear them tell you in return all the wonderful adventures of their lives. And you will never forget to tell them how much you love them. And they will never forget to tell you the same thing. And you will hear it. And know that it is true. And the food will be fabulous. And the desert tray will never be empty. Now that’s a mansion I could move into. A mansion worth dying to inherit.
But will it really be that way? Well, yes and no.
Jesus has indeed gone before us to that other land to prepare a place for us, and it will not be just a dwelling place. It will be the mansion of your dreams. Will it have comfortable furniture and leather-bound books? I do not know. But Jesus promises it will have all the good things we ever really longed for or needed.
It will be place with the doors flung wide open in welcome. A place in which you are truly known and truly loved. It will be the place you belong. There will be no shame there. No nagging sense that you are not what you ought to be. There will be no condemnation there, no accusing voice finding fault. Only acceptance, understanding, and love. There will be no regret there, because all sins are forgiven and wiped away. No sense that you’ve got to do more than you can, only sincere gratitude and thanksgiving that you have done what you could. And there will certainly be a banquet, where you can wear whatever you want, and stay as long as you need, and share in meal that fills your deepest hunger.
But wait. It seems we’ve stopped talking about furniture and photographs. And started talking about the fruits of God’s love for us. Acceptance, forgiveness, understanding, encouragement, compassion, and love so delicious you can taste it, love so comfortable you can feel it wrap around you and hold you up. This is the furniture of the Kingdom of God. This is the nature of the place Jesus has gone ahead to prepare for us.
And, dear friends, there is no reasons that place should be just there and then. It is the place we are called to live in right here and right now. If we are not busy furnishing this place, this world with those things, then we’ve got it all wrong. A church, a parish church, must be that place where acceptance, and forgiveness, understanding, compassion, and love so delicious you can taste it, may be found. Insofar as it is, then we really are that community Jesus calls us to be. Insofar as it is not, then we’ve got work to do.
Churches do not exist to build real mansions on earth, but to build on earth our very best attempt at that heavenly place where God would have us live. A place where all God’s children learn and know that they are forgiven, are accepted, and are loved. A place where we do not fear condemnation and judgment because we learn and know that in God’s eyes all is forgiven, every debt has all been paid. A place where each one’s gifts are celebrated and shared to the good of everyone else. A place where we can truly, deeply, passionately be at home. That is what we need to be building here. The furniture of love, acceptance, and forgiveness, and mutual support are the stuff we need to be setting about us in this place. Anything else is a waste of our time.
And what about that banquet, what about that great dinner party at which all those we love, those whom we see no longer, are gathered together? The tears wiped from their eyes and ours? Just what about that circle that will “be unbroken? “
Dear friends, that too is here. Right here and right now. Gathered around us at this table are all those we love and who love us. This table only appears to be limited to time and space. In reality, only one end of this table is here. The other end stretches to the skies; and gathered around it is the whole company of Saints basking in the light of a million candles -- a million candles which all together do not burn nearly as brightly as God’s love lighting every face in that fabulous company. The bread there never runs out, and the wine is always flowing. That bread, that wine, that table are right here. Right now. There is indeed a mansion prepared for us, a dwelling place in God’s Kingdom. Open your eyes and see it. In our Father’s house are many, many mansions, and this place is called to be one of them. That doorway flung wide open in welcome to all God’s children must be right here.
And the party has indeed already begun, right now. And all goodbyes were only temporary. Everyone is here already. Even those we see no longer. They are here, and we are with them and they are with us.
Come, let us keep the feast.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter
Trinity Church
May 8, 2011
Acts 2:14a,36-41May 8, 2011
Psalm 116:1-3, 10-17
1 Peter 1:17-23
Luke 24:13-35
Cleopas and his companion were walking home, back to what was familiar. So much of what had happened to them in the last three days was not familiar, was not the world they wanted to live in. They were taking a walk in which it was painful and hard to put one foot in front of the other. They were coming from Jerusalem on a Sunday afternoon heavy with the memory of all that had happened there. They had seen the crowd go wild as Jesus rode in on donkey. They had heard him hailed as king and messiah. They had felt their hope and the hope of their people well up in their hearts as this gentle teacher moved into the holy city as a hero.
And then it had all fallen apart. He had been tried and brutally killed. And hope had died in their hearts. And so now they turn toward home, walking together, remembering and regretting, wondering how it had all gone so disastrously bad so terrifyingly fast.
Their world is falling apart, and it always does when worlds fall apart, it appears that it can never be put back together again.
But that is not God’s way – merely for worlds to crumble and nothing more.
For Cleopas and his companion, the new world that is about to emerge for them is more wonderful than anything their old world had to offer. In their old world, dead is dead. In their new world, the awareness is beginning to dawn that love conquers all things – even death.
The stories we hear in our Scriptures are paradigms – that is they reveal the great, overarching patterns at work in the universe. That is to say, the stories in our scriptures reveal what kind of God God is. And if that is true, then the story about Cleopas and his companion reveals God to us.
How is that so, and how does it matter?
What I have in mind, of course, is all the times our lives seem to be coming apart at the seams. Times of illness, times of death, times when careers or relationships go bad.
If we take the story Cleopas and his companion as our paradigm, what do we learn?
First we learn that they grieve and that they do it together. They were “talking with each other about all these things that had happened;” and when the encounter a stranger “They stood still looking sad.” [LK 14 ff] They are not pretending. They are not sugar-coating it. Though they can make no sense of what has happened, of what is happening, they do not deny it or say it isn’t so or that their pain isn’t real. I am never as deeply concerned for the psychological health of someone who cries as I am for someone who is never, ever known to do so. Grief is real, and like all feelings it must be expressed not suppressed. Cleopas and his companion grieve. And they share their grief. We, none of us, is ever meant to bear our grief alone.
But they do not shut down and give up. Though it may look like the end, they are still willing to engage a stranger whom it would have been just as easy to ignore or to shut out because their grief was too private, too personal. Nothing is too private or personal to share with those who genuinely are your companions. Nothing.
And now take a careful look at what the stranger says to them, “Oh how foolish you are.” [LK 24.25] Not exactly the gentlest thing he could have said to them. But it is the truth. Even though it is a harsh truth, they are willing to hear it.
This is a story I’ve never told from the pulpit before. Some weeks after my mother died, my friend and mentor Sam Lloyd, asked me how I was doing. I told him the past weeks had been very rough. That the grief and the memories sometimes overwhelmed me. And then I began to recount in vivid detail how difficult her last hours had been for her and for me. I was telling the story with all the immediacy of feeling it had had when it was occuring. Sam gently placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “Scott, that is over. It is not happening now.” I was shocked back into the reality of the present – the only place we can really live. Some might think his words were harsh, but I can tell you they were exactly the dose of reality I needed to take stock of myself and my faith and begin to put parts of my life back together and get on with my life.
Cleopas and his companion receive a similar jolt from the stranger – and they do not rebuke him or claim some kind of wounded pride or hurt feelings. They recognize the truth – and the truth can only bring healing. Not only do they embrace the hard truth – that they are being foolish, that there is so much they have misunderstood – they embrace the one who brings it to them. It is so much easier to shoot the messenger. It is so much easier to blame others for our situation.
And then the good news breaks forth – Jesus, the world they thought has vanished, is right there before them. He is not dead, but alive. Their world is not over, it is just sustaining a new beginning. Love, grief, truth have brought them to this moment.
Let’s apply this to our own situation. You have heard for over four years now that the church as we have know it – that means the WHOLE church and this parish church are changing. They will never be the way they were.
Our first response needs to be to accept the reality of that and to grieve – honestly, deeply, truly grieve; but then be willing to hear hard truths – hard truths rooted in our Scriptures. Truths like, “the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’” Rev 21:5 (NRSV) Truths like, “And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’” Rev 21:5 (NRSV) And truths like “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, 3 for you have [already] died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. Col 3:2-3 (NRSV) And truths not so hard to hear, like, “Jesus said, ‘. . . I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.’” Matt 16:18 (NRSV)
If we would come together and read and listen deeply to our Scriptures like Cleopas and his companion did, I am sure our way forward would become clearer and clearer. And we too would know Jesus in the breaking of the bread.
Notice that phrase, “in the breaking of the bread.” Not in the bread, but in its breaking. The great paradigm of the universe is that all things, ALL things break and are transcended, but that the God we know in Jesus Christ is present and active throughout it all and can be counted on to be present forever.
Think of that when you see that whole, unbroken piece of bread lifted up. Whole, unstained, undamaged and pure. That is not the world I live in. I don’t think it is the world you live in either. Watch as that bread is broken, broken into many pieces and then given to each of us who share in the broken-ness of this world.
Look and hope with all your heart, soul and with all your mind – and I promise you, you will see Jesus. He will be known to you in the breaking of the bread. He will be known to you as the world around us breaks, as it must and always has.
Sermon for Easter Day
Trinity Church
April 24, 2011
Acts 10:34-43April 24, 2011
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
Colossians 3:1-4
Matthew 28:1-10
Life and death. Life and death.
These two have been the church’s theme throughout last week, Holy Week. We have walked the way of the cross. Followed Jesus as he rode into Jerusalem, filling the city with hope as a lively, adoring crowd ran along beside him, a crowd overflowing with joy and life. But then we watched with horror as the crowds that had praised him so, the crowd in whom he had inspired such jubilant life, turned on him and demanded his death. Life and Death.
On Thursday we gathered with Jesus and his friends as, once more, he shared a meal with them. He gave them bread and wine as a way to keep his life ever present to them, not just as a memory, but as sound and taste and touch and sight and smell. We shared a meal together here that night and we heard the words “Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe. You bring forth bread from the earth; and on this night you have given us the bread of life.” You have given us the Bread of Life and a way to have you always with us even after your death. Life and Death.
And on Friday, Good Friday, we stood at the foot of the cross as he said, "It is finished. My work is done. "Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit . . . They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths . . . and in the garden there was a new tomb . . . they laid Jesus there.” [JN 19.30 ff.] A life too good for governments and religions and ordinary people to bear, dead on a cross. Laid in a tomb. Life and death. And life and death. And life and death.
And then comes today. Easter Day. Today Mary Magdalene and another Mary, two women Jesus had made feel so alive, have come to a place of death, a tomb, to do appropriate honor to one whom they loved who has died. To honor one who had brought such life to them and now was dead.
And they hear news too incredible and confusing to believe. “He has been raised from the dead.”[Mt. 28.7]
So maybe it isn’t just life and death. Maybe it is life and death and life again.
Life and death and life again. That is the message of Easter Day. That is God’s message to each of us, to each of you, this day.
Somewhere along the way Christianity got sidetracked. It got to be about a transaction between us and God. A “we-do-something-and-God-does-something-back” kind of arrangement: We are good and God rewards us. We are bad and God punishes us. And if we’re really, really bad, God punishes us forever. A message about the gift of life became a message about rules and fears and threats and obligations.
But that is not what Christianity is about. Christianity is about learning what life is all about, about how all creation is put together and who’s in charge of it and how we fit into all of that. And, while it is very important that Jesus’s friends saw and believed that though he was dead yet he lived, that is only part of it. That Jesus was dead and yet he lives is a message, it is a revelation – it is the revealing to you and me of the nature of creation. Easter Day reveals to us the truth about our existence – that the ultimate rule and pattern of the universe is not Life and Death, but Life and Death and Life again.
Those two Marys saw Jesus right before their eyes. “ Then Jesus said to them, "Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me."
“Now You have seen me alive,” he says, “now go tell the others that too shall see me.”
They saw Jesus. If only you and I could have that experience too. Maybe then we could have more faith that the message of Easter is true. That the pattern and meaning of it all is “Life and death and life again.”
But where should we look? And would we know him if we saw him? That is the challenge life offers us: Where and how to see the living Jesus.
It is a cliché, of course, to invite you to look at spring time bursting out all around us – but in my experience, clichés got to be clichés because the keep being true over and over and over. Winter gives way to spring, again and again and again. It is a glimpse of the way God has created the universe to work. Life and death and life again.
Yes, spring and summer do go down to winter again, and life can be looked at that way if we choose. But “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” [JN 12.24-25] Grain does not live so that it may die, it dies so that it may have even greater life. But you know that instinctively, don’t you? That the emerging life and beauty of spring are truer to God’s ultimate purpose than the death that is winter. You know it because that is the way God made you – to value life and to know that it is meant to be yours. Life and death and life again.
But that, of course, is not our only clue. Far from it – If we have eyes to see.
Have you ever experienced forgiveness? Have you ever been a part of a relationship that was caught up in the deadly cords of hurt and resentment and anger? Of course you have – and I truly, deeply hope that at some point in your life you have also known the mending of the broken relationship –the healing of the hurt, the letting go of the resentment, the subsiding of the anger. If you have, and I pray you have, you know that the anger and the resentment are deadly. They weigh you down to the earth. And the reconciliation, the forgiveness, the healing brings joy and hope and strength and peace. Once-deadly relationships can be restored to life. Life and death and life again. To know that experience is to know Jesus, to glimpse the power of his reconciling love. Love that brings life to dead relationships can only be expected to bring life to us. That is where we must look to see Jesus – in the healing of division, in the forgiving and being forgiven that free us from the cords of deadly resentment and fear.
Anger and resentment and fear have no life to offer us. Forgiveness and reconciliation – person to person, race to race, nation to nation – there is where Jesus is to be found. It is where he has gone ahead of us and waits to see us there.
Life and death and life again.
Today we have the privilege and the joy of baptizing two young children. In a few moments they shall be baptized as all Christians have been.
A their baptisms, as at our own, they will approach waters of chaos and death. “In [the waters of Baptism] we are buried with Christ in his death.”[BCP] Those threatening, deadly waters will wash over them. And then they shall, as we once did, emerge on the other side of that water, full of new life. Born again into a Life that can never be taken away. We will receive them unconditionally into God’s family, God’s household, the Church, just as God receives us unconditionally into everlasting life with him. In Baptism, we all have died, and now our life is hidden with Christ in God. [COL 3.3]
Life and death and life again. It is the deep, enduring, unchangeable truth at the heart of creation. A truth that you already know because nature and your own experience tell you so. A truth that we reenact and recreate here today. You have only to look at these children and at that font to see Jesus. He has gone there ahead of us, and there we can see him, if we will.
That is the message of Easter Day. The message of every moment of our lives. In Christ we have already died. That is behind us now. And we have been raised to the new, unending life God has always intended for us.
Christ is risen, and so, in the power of his love shall we all also be.
Alleuia, Christ is risen. The lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.
Friday, April 1, 2011
Do you hear what I hear?
Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent -- The Samaritan Woman at the Well
Last week Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, and in his conversation with Jesus he generally misunderstood what Jesus was saying. Jesus said that those who would enter the Kingdom of God must be born again, by which he meant that they must take on a new way of thinking and imagining the world and their relationship with God and other people. “You must be born from above,” said Jesus; and Nicodemus, taking him literally, asked “"How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?” Jesus was speaking symbolically and metaphorically and mystically, and Nicodemus could only think literally and in ways much too small for the Kingdom of God Jesus came to show us.
Today Jesus encounters a woman at a well, and he both embodies and speaks to her about the life-giving water of compassion, of acceptance of all people, including even her, a Samaritan woman. This compassion and acceptance, if we will drink deeply of them, will well up in us and come gushing out like a geyser. If humanity would drink of that kind of water, then, as the prophet Isaiah says, “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea..” That is the kind of water Jesus is talking about, but the woman, at least at first, can only think of wells and buckets and the kind of water you wash your hands and clothes in.
Two conversations two weeks in a row in which the deeper meaning of Jesus’s words is misunderstood.
Here in the thick of Lent it is worth asking what these two stories of misunderstanding might mean for us who are invited to live in the Kingdom of God.
Surely the first thing to consider is the importance of listening. I can recall more than once when I began to respond to someone before hearing all they had to say. In fact I’ve developed a little saying I use from time to time as an apology. Finding that I’ve begun to talk when I should have been listening, I have been known to say by way of apology, “Oops, if I’d just shut up, I might be able to hear your question.” Listening is important. Indeed it is sacrificial – we have to get our own self-centeredness out of the way, making a hospitable place for the other to be heard. It’s not as easy as it sounds. If it were easy, there would not be so much misunderstanding between people and so much of what has been said over and over would not come as news.
And not just listening to other people. But listening for the voice of God. Listening for the voice of Jesus. I know I aggravate people by taking advantage of the ways our Prayer Book allows for shifting and rearranging the way we worship. I do that in the hope that we will hear things with freshness and at ever greater depth. I think it is good every once and a while to hear the Lord’s Prayer say, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” I think the word sin packs a wallop that the word trespasses lost long, long ago. Can you hear the difference? Trespasses? Sins? I had a parishioner once who said, “Trespasses sounds like just a little ‘whoops’, but sin is serious business.” What would it mean for us to hear, deeply, truly hear that Jesus expects us to forgive the sins of other? Whatever it means, I know it begins with listening to him say it.
What I am talking about is listening not just with the ears, but with the whole person – heart, soul and imagination. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul and all your mind,” we are told; and what can “mind” mean unless it means thinking, examining, reinterpreting, asking what more and deeper meaning we may have missed at first?
A second thing we can learn about from these misunderstood conversations with Jesus is “What assumptions do we make that we need to reexamine?” Nicodemus was told he had a lot more yet to know and understand. The woman at the well was told she was missing the point, both of her conversation with Jesus and with her understanding of God. Nicodemus thought he had God figured out. The woman at the well thought that the differences between her and other people were more important than they really are. Of both Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman it can be said, “Your God is too small.”
And that is the title of an important book from the previous century by J.B. Phillips. Let me give you an extended quotation:
No one is ever really at ease in facing what we call "life" and "death" without a religious faith. The trouble with many people today is that they have not found a God big enough for modern needs. While their experience of life has grown in a score of directions, and their mental horizons have been expanded to the point of bewilderment by world events and by scientific discoveries, their ideas of God have remained largely static. It is obviously impossible for an adult to worship the conception of God that exists in the mind of a child of Sunday-school age, unless he is prepared to deny his own experience of life.
He goes on to say:
It often appears to those outside the Churches that this is precisely the attitude of Christian people. If they are not strenuously defending an outgrown conception of God, then they are cherishing a hothouse God who could only exist between the pages of the Bible or inside the four walls of a Church. Therefore to join in with the worship of a Church would be to become a party to a piece of mass-hypocrisy and to buy a sense of security at the price of the sense of truth, and many men and women of goodwill will not consent to such a transaction.
Surely remaining committed to this kind of “too small God” is one of the primary reasons churches in our time are failing to grow.
Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman, who are really only stand-ins for you and me, have the chance to learn from Jesus that we must be willing to reexamine our understanding of God.
If your God really cares whether or not you wear a hat to church – as the Episcopal God certainly used to do; or if your God is really watching you carefully and recording precisely every mistake you make and every shortcoming you have; if your God really wants to torment you or anyone else for all eternity; if your God is there only to comfort and console you and not also to challenge and to change you, then almost certainly, in Phillips’s words, “Your God is too small.”
It is Lent. The church invites you, as we heard on Ash Wednesday, to use this time before Easter as a time for “self-examination and repentance” for “prayer, fasting, and self-denial,” and for reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.” Self-examination and repentance – that can mean, if we will let it, being willing, to do what Jesus asks Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman to do; that is to look deep within ourselves with honesty and openness and then being willing to change our thinking based on what we find there.
Prayer – not just giving God our "to-do list" or reminding God of what we need and want, but listening, deeply listening for how God is calling us to change and grow.
Fasting – that doesn’t mean just going without food, but can mean giving up anything that distracts us from God – like our defensiveness: giving up for a little while the constant whine of frightened folks, “But I don’t like change.” Fast from that fear and try instead imagining how your life could be better if you would change and grow in the ways you already sense God is calling you to. Fast from a diet of fear, try nourishing yourself on trust instead.
Reading and meditating on God’s holy Word. How comfortable are you with picking up the Bible? Does it mystify you? Does it seem impenetrable and forbidding. You can change that if you want to, you know. A bunch of us have recently made a beginning at that by examining the letters of Paul in our Adult Forum; and today we are doing the same thing with the ever mysterious and confounding Book of Revelation. There’s a place to start that is open to you, if you would only choose to take advantage of it. Do you know that your Prayer Book lays out a plan for reading the important parts of the bible in little pieces, day by day, week by week? It does. Ask me. I’ll show you. [P]
So much goes on around us that we choose not to know or hear. We see it in Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman. In fact this chronic propensity of ours – not to listen, not to hear, not to understand – happens all throughout John’s Gospel. That is why – at least in part – why we read it during Lent – so that we can hear Jesus’s invitation to listen, to grow, to think in new and more wonderful ways.
"If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying all this to you, you would have asked him, and he would have given the water of life." He would and he will.
Last week Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, and in his conversation with Jesus he generally misunderstood what Jesus was saying. Jesus said that those who would enter the Kingdom of God must be born again, by which he meant that they must take on a new way of thinking and imagining the world and their relationship with God and other people. “You must be born from above,” said Jesus; and Nicodemus, taking him literally, asked “"How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?” Jesus was speaking symbolically and metaphorically and mystically, and Nicodemus could only think literally and in ways much too small for the Kingdom of God Jesus came to show us.
Today Jesus encounters a woman at a well, and he both embodies and speaks to her about the life-giving water of compassion, of acceptance of all people, including even her, a Samaritan woman. This compassion and acceptance, if we will drink deeply of them, will well up in us and come gushing out like a geyser. If humanity would drink of that kind of water, then, as the prophet Isaiah says, “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea..” That is the kind of water Jesus is talking about, but the woman, at least at first, can only think of wells and buckets and the kind of water you wash your hands and clothes in.
Two conversations two weeks in a row in which the deeper meaning of Jesus’s words is misunderstood.
Here in the thick of Lent it is worth asking what these two stories of misunderstanding might mean for us who are invited to live in the Kingdom of God.
Surely the first thing to consider is the importance of listening. I can recall more than once when I began to respond to someone before hearing all they had to say. In fact I’ve developed a little saying I use from time to time as an apology. Finding that I’ve begun to talk when I should have been listening, I have been known to say by way of apology, “Oops, if I’d just shut up, I might be able to hear your question.” Listening is important. Indeed it is sacrificial – we have to get our own self-centeredness out of the way, making a hospitable place for the other to be heard. It’s not as easy as it sounds. If it were easy, there would not be so much misunderstanding between people and so much of what has been said over and over would not come as news.
And not just listening to other people. But listening for the voice of God. Listening for the voice of Jesus. I know I aggravate people by taking advantage of the ways our Prayer Book allows for shifting and rearranging the way we worship. I do that in the hope that we will hear things with freshness and at ever greater depth. I think it is good every once and a while to hear the Lord’s Prayer say, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” I think the word sin packs a wallop that the word trespasses lost long, long ago. Can you hear the difference? Trespasses? Sins? I had a parishioner once who said, “Trespasses sounds like just a little ‘whoops’, but sin is serious business.” What would it mean for us to hear, deeply, truly hear that Jesus expects us to forgive the sins of other? Whatever it means, I know it begins with listening to him say it.
What I am talking about is listening not just with the ears, but with the whole person – heart, soul and imagination. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul and all your mind,” we are told; and what can “mind” mean unless it means thinking, examining, reinterpreting, asking what more and deeper meaning we may have missed at first?
A second thing we can learn about from these misunderstood conversations with Jesus is “What assumptions do we make that we need to reexamine?” Nicodemus was told he had a lot more yet to know and understand. The woman at the well was told she was missing the point, both of her conversation with Jesus and with her understanding of God. Nicodemus thought he had God figured out. The woman at the well thought that the differences between her and other people were more important than they really are. Of both Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman it can be said, “Your God is too small.”
And that is the title of an important book from the previous century by J.B. Phillips. Let me give you an extended quotation:
No one is ever really at ease in facing what we call "life" and "death" without a religious faith. The trouble with many people today is that they have not found a God big enough for modern needs. While their experience of life has grown in a score of directions, and their mental horizons have been expanded to the point of bewilderment by world events and by scientific discoveries, their ideas of God have remained largely static. It is obviously impossible for an adult to worship the conception of God that exists in the mind of a child of Sunday-school age, unless he is prepared to deny his own experience of life.
He goes on to say:
It often appears to those outside the Churches that this is precisely the attitude of Christian people. If they are not strenuously defending an outgrown conception of God, then they are cherishing a hothouse God who could only exist between the pages of the Bible or inside the four walls of a Church. Therefore to join in with the worship of a Church would be to become a party to a piece of mass-hypocrisy and to buy a sense of security at the price of the sense of truth, and many men and women of goodwill will not consent to such a transaction.
Surely remaining committed to this kind of “too small God” is one of the primary reasons churches in our time are failing to grow.
Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman, who are really only stand-ins for you and me, have the chance to learn from Jesus that we must be willing to reexamine our understanding of God.
If your God really cares whether or not you wear a hat to church – as the Episcopal God certainly used to do; or if your God is really watching you carefully and recording precisely every mistake you make and every shortcoming you have; if your God really wants to torment you or anyone else for all eternity; if your God is there only to comfort and console you and not also to challenge and to change you, then almost certainly, in Phillips’s words, “Your God is too small.”
It is Lent. The church invites you, as we heard on Ash Wednesday, to use this time before Easter as a time for “self-examination and repentance” for “prayer, fasting, and self-denial,” and for reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.” Self-examination and repentance – that can mean, if we will let it, being willing, to do what Jesus asks Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman to do; that is to look deep within ourselves with honesty and openness and then being willing to change our thinking based on what we find there.
Prayer – not just giving God our "to-do list" or reminding God of what we need and want, but listening, deeply listening for how God is calling us to change and grow.
Fasting – that doesn’t mean just going without food, but can mean giving up anything that distracts us from God – like our defensiveness: giving up for a little while the constant whine of frightened folks, “But I don’t like change.” Fast from that fear and try instead imagining how your life could be better if you would change and grow in the ways you already sense God is calling you to. Fast from a diet of fear, try nourishing yourself on trust instead.
Reading and meditating on God’s holy Word. How comfortable are you with picking up the Bible? Does it mystify you? Does it seem impenetrable and forbidding. You can change that if you want to, you know. A bunch of us have recently made a beginning at that by examining the letters of Paul in our Adult Forum; and today we are doing the same thing with the ever mysterious and confounding Book of Revelation. There’s a place to start that is open to you, if you would only choose to take advantage of it. Do you know that your Prayer Book lays out a plan for reading the important parts of the bible in little pieces, day by day, week by week? It does. Ask me. I’ll show you. [P]
So much goes on around us that we choose not to know or hear. We see it in Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman. In fact this chronic propensity of ours – not to listen, not to hear, not to understand – happens all throughout John’s Gospel. That is why – at least in part – why we read it during Lent – so that we can hear Jesus’s invitation to listen, to grow, to think in new and more wonderful ways.
"If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying all this to you, you would have asked him, and he would have given the water of life." He would and he will.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
What's at stake?
Our Sunday Morning Adult Forum has just begun a two-week discussion of the "apostle" Paul. Suggested reading is Borg and Crossan's The First Paul. The title implies that there is more than one "Paul." In fact they posit at least three Pauls -- The Paul of Acts, the authentic Paul and a post-Pauline Paul some of whose writings they classify as anti-Pauline.
The Borg-Crossan duo has been read a lot around our parish. Our Advent study was a series of conversations about their book The First Christmas. Reaction was mixed and widely variant. Some were appalled at the suggestion that not every event in the narratives of Matthew and Luke happened exactly as described. It was too painful to consider that the sky might not literally have filled with angels or that "following a star" is a nonsensical navigational feat. Some found the book to be almost "mean" in analytically draining the life out of our cherished Christmas stories and images. But others found the book to be liberating, freeing, an invitation to a deeper, more mature faith. It was in hope of the latter that I led a conversation about the book.
The conversation about Paul will probably not produce negative reactions like the Christmas book did -- because I don't imagine the stories about Paul and the authenticity of his letters reside as deeply in the heart as a donkey, a manger, shepherds and angels do. But my goal will be the same: to provide for serious inquirers an intellectually honest and non-superstitious way to relate to our sacred texts.
I have been asked if I was for "throwing out the Bible," when nothing could be further from the truth. I am a devoted student of the Bible, finding in its pages a depth and breadth and height of inspiration, consolation, challenge and guidance found no where else in such magnificent concentration.
But why stir things up? What's at stake?
In that regard I always think of Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts in the following dialogue:
The Borg-Crossan duo has been read a lot around our parish. Our Advent study was a series of conversations about their book The First Christmas. Reaction was mixed and widely variant. Some were appalled at the suggestion that not every event in the narratives of Matthew and Luke happened exactly as described. It was too painful to consider that the sky might not literally have filled with angels or that "following a star" is a nonsensical navigational feat. Some found the book to be almost "mean" in analytically draining the life out of our cherished Christmas stories and images. But others found the book to be liberating, freeing, an invitation to a deeper, more mature faith. It was in hope of the latter that I led a conversation about the book.
The conversation about Paul will probably not produce negative reactions like the Christmas book did -- because I don't imagine the stories about Paul and the authenticity of his letters reside as deeply in the heart as a donkey, a manger, shepherds and angels do. But my goal will be the same: to provide for serious inquirers an intellectually honest and non-superstitious way to relate to our sacred texts.
I have been asked if I was for "throwing out the Bible," when nothing could be further from the truth. I am a devoted student of the Bible, finding in its pages a depth and breadth and height of inspiration, consolation, challenge and guidance found no where else in such magnificent concentration.
But why stir things up? What's at stake?
In that regard I always think of Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts in the following dialogue:
Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things.""I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Carroll was, after all, a clergyman and might just have know what it meant to encounter those who insisted on believing impossible things.
What's at stake, as I understand it, is my vocation to foster mature faith and to help Christ's ambassadors in the world to fulfill their calling.
The rigid insistence on biblical literalism is a stumbling block to those who might otherwise be engaged by the Christian faith. Guarding the door, as I imagine it, are stories that are incredible to contemporary women and men. And their incredibility is an obstacle. It is also an obstacle to the faith development of those already inside the door.
No one insists that in order to have the best experience of a production of Shakespeare's Tempest one has to believe the events it displays actually happened. Or, to make the point more clearly, no one need ask if Beethoven's Ninth Symphony of Mozart's 40th are "true." To ask such a question is a category mistake. Closer to the point, it is absolutely insignificant whether or not there was ever a landowner who paid all his workers the same wage no matter how long they had labored. The historicity of the tale is not the point and is, in fact, an utter distraction from it.
I want to move beyond any argument about historicity to what the stories (or musical compositions) mean, what they have to teach, what emotional, psychological and even aesthetic effect they have on their hearers.
What's at stake is passing on to generations to come a lively faith with the power to change lives and engender hope. What's at stake is our cultivating a relationship with the Word that is not impeded or obscured by "the words."
But how are we to tell the difference between story and "fact." I would advise using the same ability one uses in reading a newspaper to tell the news from the cartoons, the want ads and the movie reviews.
I don't ask anyone to believe impossible things. Just to believe in the power of love as it is found in experience and illumined on the printed page -- or musical score.
What's at stake, as I understand it, is my vocation to foster mature faith and to help Christ's ambassadors in the world to fulfill their calling.
The rigid insistence on biblical literalism is a stumbling block to those who might otherwise be engaged by the Christian faith. Guarding the door, as I imagine it, are stories that are incredible to contemporary women and men. And their incredibility is an obstacle. It is also an obstacle to the faith development of those already inside the door.
No one insists that in order to have the best experience of a production of Shakespeare's Tempest one has to believe the events it displays actually happened. Or, to make the point more clearly, no one need ask if Beethoven's Ninth Symphony of Mozart's 40th are "true." To ask such a question is a category mistake. Closer to the point, it is absolutely insignificant whether or not there was ever a landowner who paid all his workers the same wage no matter how long they had labored. The historicity of the tale is not the point and is, in fact, an utter distraction from it.
I want to move beyond any argument about historicity to what the stories (or musical compositions) mean, what they have to teach, what emotional, psychological and even aesthetic effect they have on their hearers.
What's at stake is passing on to generations to come a lively faith with the power to change lives and engender hope. What's at stake is our cultivating a relationship with the Word that is not impeded or obscured by "the words."
But how are we to tell the difference between story and "fact." I would advise using the same ability one uses in reading a newspaper to tell the news from the cartoons, the want ads and the movie reviews.
I don't ask anyone to believe impossible things. Just to believe in the power of love as it is found in experience and illumined on the printed page -- or musical score.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
A Dinosaur in the Museum
The talk in my circle of colleagues and friends is about "the emerging church." All agree THAT it is, but no one knows WHAT it is, at least what it is in much detail.
Right now it seems to me we are learning what this emerging church is not. It is not like the church of the 1950's that was a pillar of mainstream American culture. If there is any religious force that is mainstream in American culture today it is a strange hybrid of fundamentalism, nostalgia and superstition that is largely anti-intellectual, conservative in the narrow sense of "conserving" ideas and understandings that are actually quite recent. The religious rhetoric that commands most of the airwaves is a far cry from Jesus's message of grace and the dignity of every human being.
The emerging church is not that -- nor is it like the Church that emerged way back when the Roman emperor Constantine combined Christianity and the Roman Empire. Church and state were blended, but the two elements, American culture and Christianity, have begun to break apart like oil and vinegar in a cruet that has sat so long that the always uneasy emulsion has begun to separate. The emerging church will be something other than the marriage of religion and the prevailing culture. Once again, it appears, Christianity is consciously becoming a counter-cultural movement.
But I am deeply committed to "classical Anglicanism," from the creeds to the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer. Along with the Scriptures, the writing that most speaks to my soul is the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Eliot, Auden and others who give voice to the depth and beauty of the Spiritual Journey walked in the Anglican way. I do not want the leave these things behind.
But I wonder. Am I merely clinging to an older way of thinking and praying and living? Does it really matter that the liturgy begun on Maundy Thursday doesn't really end until the Easter Vigil? Is that just a quaint museum piece and am I dinosaur?
Maybe so. Either way, here is one of my favorite museum exhibits, a bit from John Donne's poem A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning:
Never has an image been more apt. Two lovers, though far apart, are not separated, but like pure gold that can be stretched almost infinitely with out breaking, are still connected to each other no matter the distance. Wow. (Notice the cadence of the last line, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM -- like the jeweler's hammer tapping a piece of gold into ever thinner leaf.) Such writing!
I can't imagine the soul's longing to be swept up, overwhelmed, ravished by God finding any greater expression.
Are they baby or bathwater? Am I a dinosaur in a museum? A creature from a different time, who is surrounding himself with relics only? Where is the balance?
"These fragments have I shored up against my ruin." -- T. S. Eliot
Right now it seems to me we are learning what this emerging church is not. It is not like the church of the 1950's that was a pillar of mainstream American culture. If there is any religious force that is mainstream in American culture today it is a strange hybrid of fundamentalism, nostalgia and superstition that is largely anti-intellectual, conservative in the narrow sense of "conserving" ideas and understandings that are actually quite recent. The religious rhetoric that commands most of the airwaves is a far cry from Jesus's message of grace and the dignity of every human being.
The emerging church is not that -- nor is it like the Church that emerged way back when the Roman emperor Constantine combined Christianity and the Roman Empire. Church and state were blended, but the two elements, American culture and Christianity, have begun to break apart like oil and vinegar in a cruet that has sat so long that the always uneasy emulsion has begun to separate. The emerging church will be something other than the marriage of religion and the prevailing culture. Once again, it appears, Christianity is consciously becoming a counter-cultural movement.
But I am deeply committed to "classical Anglicanism," from the creeds to the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer. Along with the Scriptures, the writing that most speaks to my soul is the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Eliot, Auden and others who give voice to the depth and beauty of the Spiritual Journey walked in the Anglican way. I do not want the leave these things behind.
But I wonder. Am I merely clinging to an older way of thinking and praying and living? Does it really matter that the liturgy begun on Maundy Thursday doesn't really end until the Easter Vigil? Is that just a quaint museum piece and am I dinosaur?
Maybe so. Either way, here is one of my favorite museum exhibits, a bit from John Donne's poem A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning:
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
Never has an image been more apt. Two lovers, though far apart, are not separated, but like pure gold that can be stretched almost infinitely with out breaking, are still connected to each other no matter the distance. Wow. (Notice the cadence of the last line, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM -- like the jeweler's hammer tapping a piece of gold into ever thinner leaf.) Such writing!
And another, from one of Donne's Holy Sonnets:
Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I can't imagine the soul's longing to be swept up, overwhelmed, ravished by God finding any greater expression.
Are they baby or bathwater? Am I a dinosaur in a museum? A creature from a different time, who is surrounding himself with relics only? Where is the balance?
"These fragments have I shored up against my ruin." -- T. S. Eliot
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)