Sunday, December 25, 2011

There Were Shepherds Abiding in the Field

On the cover of the Christian Century magazine two years ago, there was a delightful and very different Nativity scene. Joseph and Mary, dressed as Latin American peasants, are off to one side, while dominating the scene are a throng of shepherds and black-faced sheep, all crowding in around the glowing manger. Shepherds? Well, if you listened carefully to Luke’s story of the birth of Jesus, you noticed that the shepherds are the first humans with speaking parts. But shepherds? Why would shepherds camping out with their sheep be important players in this story?1 Theirs was a rough and dirty life, especially when they were out with the sheep. No way to get clean or do laundry or get rid of the smell of the sheep: no showers or bathtubs, no concentrated detergent, no hot water, unless they built a fire to heat it themselves, no running water unless they camped by a river. So when these shepherds reached Mary and Joseph they probably smelled strongly of sheep, wood smoke, and garlic from that day’s meal. Their clothes were probably torn and musty from the caves and tents that they usually slept in. Most of them were probably boys ranging in age from eight to fourteen, with a few grown men to generally keep guard. The older boys would be learning how to shear, butcher, and perhaps sell sheep, so the hardest, dirtiest part of the job of raising sheep was left to the younger boys. And yet here they came, these dirty, scruffy, street-smart kids. By some miracle, they had a vision of angels, and they left the sheep with a couple of bigger boys and ran pell-mell into the village. Pushing, shoving, maybe making wisecracks, they crowded in to see a teenage girl cradling a baby. What a scene! Did God really send God’s Son and God’s own messengers to these folks?

What an unlikely story. It’s true that King David, the ancestor of God’s anointed one, was a shepherd, and that Israel’s kings were often called shepherds. But really. Angels announcing the birth of the anointed one to those scruffy kids? And it’s true that one of the prophecies had said that the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem. But really. That tiny, poor village whose main source of income was the bread it sent up to Herod’s towering palace? And it’s true that we heard only last week how an angel had told another poor no-account teenager that she was to give birth to the savior of the world. But really. It would be as if the savior of the world were born in a homeless shelter or a truck stop. Wouldn’t the world’s savior have been delivered by a trained midwife in a rich well-appointed place? Wouldn’t the first people to hear that he was born be wealthy, well educated folks? Yes, God seems to have a preference, especially in Luke’s way of telling the story, for poor, down at the heels people, even for women. But really. Luke’s story is all so unlikely.

Actually, maybe the whole story is unlikely. The Word made flesh, God coming to us in a human body, the all-powerful God becoming totally powerless, totally dependent on poor, working class people. As Madeleine L’Engle said, “Cribbed, cabined, and confined within the contours of a human infant. The infinite defined by the finite? The Creator of all life thirsty and abandoned? Why would [God] do such a thing? Aren’t there easier ways for God to redeem … fallen creatures?” Can we really believe that God comes down to us, into the midst of “civil wars, demonstrations, conspiracies, and petty fights,” into a body as frail and intricate as ours?"2 And the child growing up to be a refugee, a working man with dusty feet, a man who would radically challenge and transform the world around him. The adult Jesus fulfilling his promise to feed us with his own body and blood, so that we might be his Body in the world. The holy one breaking into our world again and again and again. It is an unlikely story, even a ridiculous story, a mystery that we celebrate this day. Indeed, the whole Incarnation, the coming of God in history in human flesh is still as much a mystery today as the incomprehensible nature of God.

Do we just stop right there? Do we sit awestruck, open-mouthed, rooted to our pews in the face of such mystery? Of course, in one sense, awestruck silence is the right response. But maybe God hopes for something more of us. Maybe we need to look again at those angels and shepherds. Maybe we need to hear again the heavenly choir belting out, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace for people whom he favors.” Are those angels really saying that through the birth of this holy child, who is the Messiah, that all people will enjoy God’s gracious favor, and that the world will know peace?

If so, then we need to respond to that proclamation of grace! And this story suggests there are three ways we can do that. First, we can imitate the angels. We can join the heavenly choir in their singing out of God’s glory. We too can offer praise and thanks to God for God’s great gift of God’s son, indeed for all of God’s gifts to us. We can do that in our own individual prayers, as we travel through our days. What’s more important, we can offer our praise and thanks to God through regularly joining in worship with others, through hearing God’s Word in Scripture and joining ourselves more firmly to Christ’s Body in the Eucharist. Second, we can imitate the shepherds. We too can obey the angelic summons and go to seek Jesus wherever he may be found. We too can glorify and praise God for all that we have heard and seen. We can heed the angels by seeking and serving Christ in all people and by sharing with others not only our material goods but, what is more important, the good news of what Christ has done for us and for the world. And we can heed the angels by actively seeking to spread God’s peace in our world, a world as brutal and warring as that of the shepherds. And third we can imitate Mary. We hear no words from Mary in this story, but Luke tells us that, “Mary kept all these things to herself, holding them dear, deep within herself.” When the presents are all opened, the Christmas dinner is finished, the last guests have left, and the house is quiet again, perhaps we too can reflect on the glorious announcement, perhaps we too can savor its wonder in our own hearts. Praise, share, reflect. That’s what our life as Jesus’ disciples is all about.

“Angels we have heard on high.” Together with those scruffy boys, we too have heard the angels. Lord, grant us the grace to join them in saying to ourselves and others, “Come to Bethlehem and see him whose birth the angels sing.”
_____________________________

1. The description of the shepherds is based on Sandra Herrmann, “Shepherds Camping in the Neighborhood,” Lectionary Tales for the Pulpit, (Lima, OH: CSS, 2011), 26-7.

2. Julie Polter, “’Say, Say the Light,’” Sojourners, December 2011, 9.

Monday, December 19, 2011

What Would She Say?

What would you have said? What would you have said if a holy presence had suddenly made itself known to you, and then asked you to do something totally incredible? What would you have said? [Query a few people in the congregation.]

If you had been Mary, the entire cosmos would have been waiting, breathless, to hear your answer to Gabriel. In St. Paul’s Church in Antwerp, Belgium, on the north side aisle, hang fifteen paintings, depicting what are called the “mysteries” of Jesus’ life.1 The very first painting is by the 16th century artist Hendrik van Balen. The painting depicts the first of the “joyful mysteries,” i.e., the Annunciation. Christians believe that the coming of the Word into our neighborhood was part of God’s plan from the beginning of creation. In the van Balen painting God is on the point of fulfilling God’s promise to send a savior, a promise which we have heard over and over in the Hebrew Scriptures, and which we just heard John the Baptizer proclaim again for first century Jews and Gentiles. God is always dependent on human cooperation for the fulfillment of God’s plans. Now God is dependent on a young woman’s willingness to take the risk of letting God the Son come into her body. And so in this painting God the Father, God the Holy Spirit, and countless throngs of angels hold their breaths, suspended in time, as they wait for the response of this young woman. What would she say?

Understandably, she was cautious, perhaps even amazed. She no doubt asked herself first whether she was truly in the presence of a heavenly messenger, or whether she was just imagining it all. And why on earth would God’s messenger address her as “favored one?” She was poor, perhaps all of fourteen, and a woman, in a culture that had a decided preference for wealthy, older males. She lived in a no-account town, in an obscure corner of a country dominated for centuries by other countries. She was even more perplexed when the messenger suggested that she was called to give birth to a holy child. She retorted, “You’re kidding me, right? My fiancĂ© and I haven’t even slept together yet.” When he shook his head to show he wasn’t kidding at all, she knew that if she agreed to his proposal, her life, from that day forward, would change radically. So the cosmos waited: what would she say?

And, of course, they all let out a collective sigh of relief when she said, “Yes, I see it all now: I'm the Lord's maid, ready to serve. Let it be with me just as you say.” Yes, she agreed, but let’s be clear: Mary was not a passive player in God’s plan, she was not speaking lines already written for her, and she was not coerced into answering as she did. She had a choice. Though she knew that she was not one of the great ones of this world, perhaps Mary sensed, perhaps even dimly at first, that she was indeed called by God to take up her unique role in God’s plan of salvation. Surely she could not foresee all that was to unfold – Luke tells us that she “kept all these things in her heart.” Nevertheless she believed that the presence she felt was indeed holy, she trusted in God to work God’s will, and she said, “Yes.”

Mary’s “yes” was not the end of the story. Nor was the willingness of God the Son to take up residence among us the end of the story. The holy presence continues to break into our world. When and how do we sense the holy presence? Often, when we allow ourselves the time and space, when we take the ipods out of our ears or turn the TV off for a few minutes, when we open our prayer books or journals, or just sit expectantly, the holy presence makes itself known. Sometimes God’s presence is even more fragmentary: a verse from Scripture, a line of a hymn, a chance conversation may make us aware of God’s presence. If we are attentive, the holy presence also comes to us as we gather together in Christian community, as we hear Scripture read, as we are immersed in the waters of baptism, and as we are nourished with Christ’s Body and Blood. If we realize that we are all God’s children, we can then perhaps see how the holy presence also seeks out a welcome among Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and even those who deny its reality. Those who welcome that holy presence, become holy people, and through them God’s plan for creation continues towards its ultimate fulfillment.

When we sense the holy presence breaking into our world, our reaction may not be so different from that of Mary. “Is God really here?” we may think, “or am I just imagining it? And why would God take the trouble to come to me? I’m not anybody. I’m just a schoolteacher, or a retiree, or a homemaker. I’m just trying to do my best to provide for my family and community.” We might even ask the same question of our parish. “Why would the holy presence come to St. Peter’s? We’re just a small struggling parish in a struggling town down on the Ohio River, far from anywhere. Who are we to be part of God’s plan?” Surprise! We too, as individuals and as a parish, may find ourselves not only visited by the holy presence, but asked or called to participate in God’s plan in some unexpected way. “God with us” barges into our lives, sometimes into our very bodies, and lays out God’s plan for us. “You’re kidding, right?” we may say, “I’m too young, I’m too old, we can’t afford it, no one has the time, right?” And just as the angels and archangels, as the whole company of heaven stood holding their breaths until Mary answered Gabriel, the cosmos waits on our answers too. What will he say? What will she say? Will they do it?

Surely the angels and archangels waited expectantly last month as the congregation of St. John the Baptist Church in Corona, California got a glimpse of the holy presence in the form of Erin Tharp.2 Now twenty-eight, Tharp was paralyzed by viral encephalitis at the age of fourteen. Ever since she has been unable to speak and has been confined to a wheelchair. In a sermon that she laboriously typed out with one finger and that was read from an ipad by Deacon Karen Chavez, Tharp acknowledged her need for constant care. Yet she expressed her gratitude for her wheelchair. “It has allowed me to take family vacations, ‘walk’ with my [Centennial High School] class at graduation and pick out my canine daughter, Maggie,” she said. “I can also do the little things with the family. I never thought just eating dinner, as a family, would be so special.” Which led to “thinking about people less fortunate than me. They deserve the same feeling of freedom I enjoy. Where they were born or their economic situation shouldn’t hinder that.” Despite her limitations, Tharp became an enthusiastic supporter of the Free Wheelchair Mission, a nonprofit, nonsectarian ministry that has already supplied more than 600,000 wheelchairs worldwide. Along with Bishop J. Jon Bruno, Tharp has helped the Diocese of Los Angeles meet a challenge to underwrite the cost of sending out 2,750 wheelchairs. When Tharp addressed the congregation of St. John the Baptist, she had already donated $630 of her own, enough to buy 10 wheelchairs. She challenged the congregation to raise enough money for 100 chairs. People wondered if it were really possible to raise that much. Tharp, along with the angels and archangels, held her breath. What would the congregation say? All breathed a sigh of relief as the congregation accepted the challenge. At last count they’d raised enough to purchase 122 wheelchairs. As for Tharp, she is more concerned about continuing her outreach than about her own health challenges. “Advent is the perfect time to shed light on the extreme giving Free Wheelchair Mission does for God’s forgotten children, liberating them from the yoke of bondage,” she told the John the Baptist congregation. “In many places around the world, the disabled truly are the least of his brothers .… Let’s take time out of the busy-ness of this Christmas season to remember those who are often forgotten, if not ignored. At the risk of sounding corny, I think that’s the perfect birthday gift for Jesus.”

Who are our holy visitors? What do you hear in prayer, in Scripture, in conversation with each other? What is the holy presence that we discern asking us to do? Do we have a perfect birthday gift for Jesus? Are we called to new ministry “out there?” Or perhaps we are called to strengthen the bonds among the members of this parish. This week take a few minutes to let God’s holy presence visit you. Take careful note of what you hear. Remember that Gabriel’s message to Mary began with “The Lord is with you,” and concluded with “Nothing is impossible with God.” Good words to remember when God’s holy presence calls us into unexpected partnership with God.

1. As noted by Paul Wesley Chilcote in “Monday in Advent III,” Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2007), 36-7.

2. Pat McCaughan, “Corona Episcopalian inspires support for wheelchair ministry,” Episcopal News Service, December 15, 2011, accessed at http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/ens/2011/12/15/corona-episcopalian-inspires-support-for-wheelchair-ministry/

Sunday, December 11, 2011

He Came to Testify to the Light

”He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.” What light? With the frenetic holiday celebrations taking place on the other side of the red doors, we often don’t see much of the Light of the World at this time of year – or any time of year. And in a world where gunmen kill police officers on college campuses and suicide bombers still threaten innocent worshippers, it may be hard even to believe in the Light of the World.

A middle manager in a small factory – let’s call him Tom – stood looking at his desk on Christmas Eve.1 His report to his boss was overdue. Everyone else had left, and the building was eerily quiet. “I hate Christmas,” he sighed. This month had been one of the worst in his career. His department had lost several key positions to budget cuts, and everyone was expected to “work smarter,” i.e., get everything done with fewer people. “Don’t worry about me,” he’d told his staff members as he sent them home to their Christmas Eve celebrations, “I’ll be done very soon.” But Tom knew that the report would take him a long time to finish. He might be in the office for several hours yet. “I hate Christmas,” he sighed again.

About 8:00, he decided to go out to the corner deli and get something to eat. Making his way out the back door into the icy air of the alley, he nearly fell over a pile of rags, cardboard, and what seemed to be a tarpaulin. As he lifted his foot to kick the pile out of the way, a woman’s voice said weakly, “Sorry, mister. No one usually comes through that door at this time of night. It’s a good place to sleep, you see, because of the warm air coming out from under the door.” Tom had enough on his mind, so he just turned away, headed towards the deli, and muttered again, “I hate Christmas.” As he waited in the long line at the deli, Tom had time to read “A Pastor’s Christmas Note” in the local free newspaper. The pastor told the story of a homeless man whom he had watched sharing a stale hunk of bread with a flock of birds gathered round him. The man would take a bit of bread, break it in two, eat one part, and give the other part to the birds. No one bothered the homeless man, who seemed perfectly content sharing his meager meal with the birds. When he got to the counter, Tom ordered his usual corned beef on rye. Then he burst out, “No, make it two. And throw in a couple of pot pies and some veggies. I’ll have some orange juice too. How about a couple of Hershey bars? And do you have any warm hats?” Tom left the deli with two full sacks. Now he was eagerly looking forward to his Christmas Eve dinner with the homeless woman by the back door. He didn’t care if the report got done in time. Who would read it on Christmas anyway? As he walked through the cold night to his office, an old hymn floated back to him, “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emanuel shall come to thee, O Israel ….”

“He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.” What was John the Voice in the Wilderness up to? As he gathered followers around him and began baptizing people, the religious authorities confronted him. They questioned him, just as they would later challenge Jesus. “Who the devil are you, and why are you baptizing people?” “I know you’re waiting for the Messiah, God’s anointed one, but I am not he,” John told them plainly. “I’m not Elijah either, nor am I the prophet like Moses whom Moses said would be the Messiah’s forerunner.” Not, not, not. Then who was he?

The Fourth Gospel introduces us to John immediately after its opening hymn to the incarnate Word, immediately after its celebration of the light of life, the light that enlightens everyone, the light that darkness cannot quench. Who was John? John was a witness to that light. John was not a witness to a cute little baby, lying in a stable surrounded by adoring animals. John was a witness to an adult, an adult who would, through his own death and return to life, give life to the world. “This is the Messiah for whom you are waiting,” John told the religious authorities. “In all the old prophecies, in Isaiah, in Jeremiah, in Micah, in Malachi, God promised you a savior. Now God has made good on God’s promises. As I point to him, I am preparing people to receive him. And I rejoice to see this day, for God is faithful.”

“He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.” In a story in the Huffington Post last year, Lynne Hybels wrote, “When Jesus comes, everything changes.”2 About a hundred years ago, Egyptians from rural villages migrated to Cairo. Most of them were unskilled and illiterate, and so they wound up becoming itinerant trash collectors. In the 1970s, the zabaleen, as the trash collectors were called, were forced into a kind of tin-shack ghetto near Cairo’s Mt. Muqattam. Poor, filthy, and dangerous, Garbage Village had no churches, schools, electricity, running water, health care, or even stores. Disease, addiction to drugs and alcohol, and violence were widespread. One day, in 1974 a young trash collector asked a Christian businessman whose trash he collected, to tell him about Jesus. Then the young man persuaded the businessman to teach a Bible study in one of the shacks in Garbage Village. The zabaleen rejoiced to hear the message that God loved them. Within a few years, there were so many believers that the Coptic Orthodox built a church in the village. The villagers were free to select their priest, so they chose the businessman who had shared God’s love with them. After the businessman was ordained by the Coptic Church he became known as Father Samaan. “When Jesus comes to a place, it changes the whole society,” said Father Samaan.

“He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.” What about us? Do we recognize the light to whom John pointed? Do we recognize that we too are loved by God? Do we share with John the sense that God has given us a purpose in the story of salvation? Dare we believe that we are less important than John the Voice or Father Samaan? Advent is a special time. Advent is a time to stop, pause, and reflect. Instead of getting caught up in the activities that beckon us at every turn this month, take the gift of Advent quiet to prayerfully reflect on your own life. Reflect on the miracle of your own birth, your life choices, and your vocation. What do close friends and family members see in you? What are your gifts and from whom have they come? Who needs what you have to offer? Could it be that you too are a beloved child of God, with a unique and essential purpose? Could it be that you too are called to enable people to see the light?

Could it be that you are called to be an evangelist? Episcopalians shy away from that word. We say, “The Episcopal Church is the best kept secret,” and I sometimes think we prefer it that way. Faith is a private affair, some of us would say. Is that what the prophets say? Is that what Paul says? Is that what John the Voice in the Wilderness says? If our faith is a source of joy to us, how can we not want to share it? I’m not talking about damning non-believers to hell. I’m not talking about coercing or manipulating people into believing. I am talking about pointing to Jesus, enabling people to see the light, either through our words, or, better yet, through the quality of our lives and ministries. If we are truly his disciples, then as individuals and as parishes, we cannot be ashamed or afraid to say, “There he is.” During Epiphany tide we will hear the passage that comes a little later in this same chapter of John’s Gospel, in which Philip tells Nathanael that he has found the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Nathanael scornfully asks. Philip’s answer: “Come and see.” We too are called to say, “Come and see.” We too are called to point to the light, to share the good news of Jesus, using words, if necessary, as Francis of Assisi said. We too are called to stand at the foot of the Cross and point to him.

“He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.” Such is our call too.

1. The following story is based on Tom Gordon, “A Deeper Meaning,” in Within an Open Eye (Iona: Wild Good Publications, 2011), 24-29.

2. The following is based on material in Synthesis, December 2011, 3. The story by Lynne Hybels originally appeared in the Huffington Post on December 21, 2010.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

The Beginning of the Good News

Ya’acov ben Shimon was perplexed. He frowned as he looked around his village in Galilee.1 He’d heard that the Romans had started besieging Jerusalem after some radical Jewish sect started a revolt. Some people were overjoyed and said that God was at last driving the Romans out of Israel. But others said that the only way to have peace and security was to tolerate the Romans. Ya’acov had also heard that the emperor Nero had died last year. Four candidates had been acclaimed as the next emperor and then assassinated in short order. Now Vespasian, who’d ordered the siege of Jerusalem, had been crowned. How would this effect the war? And would prices finally come down?

There was conflict right here in Ya’acov’s village too. The Jews and the Gentiles were fighting about the war. Formerly close neighbors and even family members were on different sides. However, there was a small group of people who refused to fight on either side. They were followers of a Galilean rabbi named Yehoshua, whom the Romans had crucified as a rebel about forty years ago. Everyone was disgusted with these folks. The rabbis thought they were dead wrong about this Yehoshua, and those who hated the Romans were sure that Yehoshua had done nothing to help drive the Romans out. But again Ya’acov wondered. How could it be that Yehoshua’s execution was a sign of God’s favor towards both Jews and Gentiles? One day one of Yehoshua’s followers handed him a scroll in Greek with a strange opening: “The beginning of the good news about Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God.” Beginning? What was beginning, and when? Messiah? Isn’t that what all the Jews were waiting for? Son of God? Isn’t that what they called the Roman emperor?

As he read the first part of the scroll, about John the Baptizer, Ya’acov wondered where the story of the Good News really began. The scroll writer – let’s call him Mark – started with a quotation from two Hebrew prophets, Isaiah and Malachi. Is that where the story really began, all those centuries ago, when God spoke through the prophets? Or did it begin when God brought the Jews back from exile in Babylon? Or did the story begin with John? Did the story begin with the hints in John’s proclamation? Clearly Mark and his community understood that John was a herald, and that, like the prophets, he was announcing God’s plan. But Mark also wanted his hearers to understand the meaning of John’s proclamation. So he looked back to the past and used the prophet Isaiah as an analogy for John. Isaiah had proclaimed that God would rescue the Jews from exile. Similarly, Mark and his community, in their current troubled world, understood that John had proclaimed the same kind of comfort and rescue that Isaiah had.

And then Ya’acov had another question. Where did the story end? Hadn’t the prophet Malachi, who had seen the newly completed second temple, said, “See I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple”? So Mark also must have used Malachi as an analogy for John. Malachi had looked forward, although with dread, to the new thing that God was doing, to the deliverance and judgment that God’s coming would bring. Similarly, for Mark, John proclaimed a new and powerful savior, someone who would judge everyone in the world and whose coming would radically change the world, someone who would initiate a new covenant with them through the Holy Spirit. So perhaps the witness of John the Baptizer, John the herald, was the beginning of the good news, but its fullness, the end of the story, was yet to be revealed.

Now we are reading the scroll that Ya’acov read. We call it the Gospel According to Mark. As we read and reread the entire story, perhaps we too wonder just where the Good News really begins – and ends. Perhaps the whole first half of Mark’s scroll, which recounts Jesus’ ministry in Galilee and all his teachings about God’s reign, is the true “beginning of the good news.” Or maybe the beginning of the Good News is Mark’s whole scroll and the story it tells. Perhaps the story begins when it comes alive for its hearers, when it encourages its hearers both to look back to God’s saving works in the past and to look forward in hope to the new thing that God is doing. Perhaps the story truly begins when people ponder how it could or should unfold in their own lives.

The truth is that the “beginning of the good news” always begins with God and God’s works, and that story has yet to end. At the same time, the story of the good news begins for us when we see ourselves in it, when we make it our own, and we only know the true end of it when our life on earth is over. As we live in our own middle time, we can follow Mark’s example and look both back to the past and forward to God’s future. We can understand ourselves both in terms of who and where we have come from and in terms of what God has yet to do with us.

In this Advent time, we can begin by looking back to our own predecessors in faith, to those who were God’s heralds for us. Take a few minutes to ponder who first introduced you to faith, who modeled devotion to God for you. Though faith is ultimately a gift of God, few of us come to faith all by ourselves. Even if we were baptized as adults, the chances are that someone was a guidepost for us on the way to the font. Was your herald a family member or close friend? What did that person do to introduce you to God? Did he read the Bible to you? Did she teach you the wonderful old hymns? Did their lives inspire you? Did they see Jesus in the “least of these” and generously offer themselves to others? Is there any way to honor those heralds of faith? Or perhaps your model of faith a saint from the past. In addition to John the Baptizer himself, many people still find Francis of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, Evelyn Underhill, Thomas Merton, or Mother Teresa compelling examples of faith. You might ponder this too: for whom are you a herald of Jesus, a model of faith and devotion? Who would be inspired by your life? Are there areas of your life that you need to change in order to be a more compelling example of faith? Do we hesitate to even admit that we need to repent?

In this Advent time, we also continue to look ahead. Like John the Herald, like Mark, and Ya’acov, like all those who preceded us in faith, we’re also still in the middle of the story. We believe that “the Lord whom you seek” will suddenly return to his temple, to complete and restore the world. We too long for that day, even though along with Malachi we may wonder, “Who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?” As we continue to look forward in hope, and as we do our best to prepare for the Lord’s appearing, this Advent time is also a good time to reflect on another question. We might wonder what our place is in God’s plan. How does God expect us, both as individuals and as a parish, to partner in bringing in the reign God heralded in John and initiated in Jesus? What ministries has God prepared “for us to walk in?”

Thursday December 1st was World Aids Day. In addition to those affected by HIV/AIDS themselves, many have been widowed and orphaned by AIDS. Today, for example, there are more than 16 million children orphaned by the AIDS scourge, many of them in east Africa. While we were celebrating Thanksgiving Day, Christian and Muslim leaders in Kenya met in Nairobi to discuss how to improve their responses to a disease that is a social, economic, political, and medical issue. Katherine Jefferts Schorri, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, and Mark Hanson, ELCA Presiding Bishop, issued a joint statement committing both their churches on World AIDS Day to a renewed partnership in ministry to AIDS victims and their families. Meanwhile, Tennis star Roger Federer, entertainer Madonna, and Episcopal priest Bill Rankin, who recently retired as CEO of the Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance (GAIA), all committed themselves to continue the fight against AIDS in Malawi. Is AIDS a problem in Gallia County? Are there AIDS victims or AIDS orphans among us? How would we know? Are there prophetic voices among us who could point us to answers to these questions? Where else might the Holy Spirit lead us?

Come, thou long expected Jesus. Your story began in ages past and continues into God’s future. Come and find us ready to proclaim our thanksgiving for your past gifts, our hope for the future, and our willingness always to seek and serve you in all whom we meet.

1. The following is based on the account in Christopher R. Hutson, “Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), 44ff.

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Stir Up Your Strength and Come

I like Advent calendars. I always have. I like having that pretty Nativity scene to look at while, each day, I open another window. Sometimes I even have to hunt for them – that pesky #13 or #17 can get hidden in a shepherd’s cloak or an angel’s wing! I even like the black and white Advent calendar that looks like a winding path, with each day’s suggestion of a helpful spiritual practice. But – and on this first Sunday in Advent I will risk sounding like the Grinch that stole Christmas – Advent is not a time of preparation for Christmas. In our stores, our print and broadcast media, and many of our homes we have begun the “Christmas season.” Actually the big Christmas season, with its insistence that we honor Jesus by maxing out our credit cards, is virtually unique to this country. Even so, unlike the rest of the mad world around us, in the church at least, we have begun the season of Advent. Advent: that slow, reflective time, when the church asks us to pause, be quiet, and turn towards God. And it took me a long time to realize this: Advent is not a preparation for Christmas. Advent is a season with blessings and graces of its own. Advent marks the beginning of a new church year – in our cycle of Eucharistic lections we are now in Year B. As in the other years in the Revised Common Lectionary cycle, in Advent we begin by retelling the old story, a retelling that will occupy us from now through next Pentecost. And on this very first day, as we begin the retelling, by God’s grace we also see glimpses of the end of our story and the hope that we bear as disciples of Jesus.

At its deepest, Advent is a season of reflection, reflection on at least three levels. On the first level, Advent allows us to give voice to our deepest longings for God’s presence in our world. As we hear the laments of the Psalmist and of Isaiah, we can resonate with the pain and longing in their voices. Decrying the invasion of Israel by the Assyrians, the psalmist cries, “Stir up your strength and come to help us. Restore us, O God with great armies, let us see your face….” Similarly, the prophet of Third Isaiah gives voice to his people’s sense of having been abandoned by God, as they return from exile to a ruined Jerusalem. Here too we hear a cry for God’s presence: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,” come down so powerfully that even the mountains would feel your presence.

As we look around at our own world, don’t we feel that same sense of longing for God’s presence? “Occupy Wall Street” has bitterly reminded us of the great economic disparities in this country. The failure of the so-called “Super Committee” to reach compromise on the federal budget reflects our deeply partisan political divide. Even worse, Greece, Italy, Ireland, and other western European countries stagger under unmanageable debt loads and struggle to take the unpalatable measures necessary to deal with their debts. In the Middle East, the “Arab Spring” rid the world of dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. What forces will rush in to fill these political vacuums remains to be seen. And when we turn to Africa, we just want to weep over the devastation in Somalia, Darfur, Liberia, and Zimbabwe. As you look around our tattered world, what most disturbs you? For me, as I contemplate our crazy quilt of employer-dependent health insurance, with its vast inequities in access to adequate healthcare, I want to weep. And what pulls at your hearts? What in the world, or even in this community, cries out for attention? Advent is a good time to reflect on what most urges us to shout at God, “Stir up your strength and come among us – and fix things!”

But Advent allows us to do more than bewail the injustices, poverty, and conflict of our world. On a second level, Advent also bids us reflect on our hopes for the future, our expectation of God’s future. The psalmist and Isaiah do more than just cry out. Even before crying out, the psalmist reminds God that God is Israel’s shepherd, “leading Joseph like a flock.” Although Israel’s sins perhaps led to the sense of abandonment by God that Isaiah’s people feel, even so the prophet reminds his hearers of the special relationship between God and God’s people, and of God’s love for God’s people: “We are the clay, and you are our potter, we are all the work of your hand…. We are all your people.” As disciples of Jesus, we too are grounded in that assurance of God’s love for God’s people. But we also believe that, just as God broke into our world once, God will break in again to complete the establishment of God’s reign. How and when this will occur we do not know, nor should we waste time speculating on what Jesus himself suggests we cannot know. What we do need to do is reflect on what our own future hopes are. Rather than surrendering to the frenzy of the “Christmas season,” pause and take a few minutes to reflect on your own hopes for the future. What would you like to see happen during your lifetime? What is your vision of God’s reign? When you hear those words, do you think of the peaceable kingdom in which lions and lambs lie down together? Do you think of a “new heaven and a new earth?” of a “new Jerusalem,” of a time and place where there is no more war and death, sickness and poverty? Do you think of the “river of life,” with its trees whose leaves are for the healing of the nations? How do you picture God’s reign? What do you hope for most deeply? Take the gift of Advent and reflect on that hope and offer it to God.

Finally, on a third level, Advent bids us reflect on how to live in this “middle time,” this time between Christ’s first coming and Christ’s glorious return. In our Gospel reading, Jesus says it all: “Beware, keep alert…. Keep awake.” Rather than letting ourselves be dazzled by holiday lights and decorations or deafened by the endless Muzak Christmas carols that assault us in every store, rather than letting us rush straight to the manger, Advent bids us remain alert and awake to the ways in which Christ may be at work in our lives now. The two are not mutually exclusive: the “hope of glory” does not exempt us from present action. Cardinal Cushing often told about the little girl who loved to sit and listen to her grandmother read the story of creation in Genesis. Noticing that the girl seemed unusually attentive, the grandmother asked her what she thought of the Genesis story. “Oh, I love it,” she said, “You never know what God is going to do next.” In Advent, as we acknowledge that God did not finish or exhaust creation in the past, as we long for the perfection of creation and the coming of God’s reign in the future, we too might agree that we “never know what God is going to do next.” As we seek to hear Christ’s voice in the noisy world around us, we sense that God has not abandoned us, and we believe Jesus’ promise that, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

In this season of Advent, we reflect on our longing for God, our hopes for the future, and our confidence in God’s help in the present. As a way of deepening our appreciation for the church’s gift to us of Advent, I’d like to urge you to take seriously the suggestions of the Advent Conspiracy.1 Started in 2006 by five pastors, the Advent Conspiracy asks us to revolutionize our observance of Advent through four actions. The first action is to worship fully. We are asked to put down our burdens and regularly lift up a heartfelt song. The second action is to spend less. Certainly our kids love their gifts. But consider this: Americans spend over $450 billion a year every Christmas. Could you buy one fewer gift this year? Could you give instead a gift of service or a photograph or a heartfelt letter of appreciation? Could you give what you save to someone in need? The third action is to give more. During this Advent season, rather than rushing to the stores, perhaps we could give our friends and family a precious gift of time or attention. Do you need to write an old friend a letter? Do you need to sit and hear someone’s story? Finally, the reflection in which we engage in Advent should help us to love all. Can we follow Jesus by loving as he loved? By spending less at Christmas we can join Him in giving resources to those who need help the most. When the Advent Conspiracy first began four churches offered this simple challenge to their congregations. The result raised more than half a million dollars to aid those in need. One fewer gift. One unbelievable gift in the name of Christ.

“Stir up your strength and come to help us.” O God, when you come, may you find us alert, awake, and ready to follow where you lead.

1. For example, see http://ac.wcrossing.org/default.aspx?page=3684

Sunday, November 20, 2011

When Did We See You Hungry?

Have you ever been to one of the great Gothic cathedrals? Notre Dame or Chartres or Westminster Abbey? If you have, or even if you’ve seen pictures of them, you know that they are literally sermons in glass and stone. In the great cathedrals, every architectural detail, every window, and every sculpture are designed to point us to God and to remind us of God’s mighty works on our behalf. Though not medieval, the great Washington National Cathedral, the cathedral church of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, is also such a sermon in stone. Episcopal priest Frank Logue tells us that the entire building is designed to point us towards God and to remind us of God’s mighty works.1 As with the medieval cathedrals, the focal point of the national cathedral is the high altar. Behind the high altar the huge reredos depicts Christ in glory surrounded by over one hundred figures. But look closely: closest to the glorified Christ stand who? The great angels? The most exemplary saints? The apostles? The martyrs? None of these. Closest to the glorified Christ, at the very heart of this great cathedral stand six allegorical figures, figures of people who are hungry, thirsty, homeless, naked, sick, and imprisoned. You can’t miss the theme of the sermon: it is they, the poor, the needy, the weak, the victims, whom Christ first embraces in paradise.

Are you surprised? Were you surprised that Jesus depicted the final judgment as a test of how we treated others, especially of how we treated “the least of these?” Jesus warned us, didn’t he? He told us that when he returned to begin his reign over all creation we would face a test. Not on whether we understood and professed every iota of the Nicene Creed. Not on whether we had read and understood the sermons of John Chrysostom or John Donne. Not on whether we had the most beautiful sanctuaries and vestments. He would test us, Jesus told us, on how real our faith was, on how we had treated those who were poor, sick, hungry, oppressed or in prison, on whether we had actively attended to their needs or ignored them. He would remind us that faith isn’t faith until it’s actualized, until it’s made concrete in the ways that we live our lives. Even if we don’t always know exactly who the beneficiary of our good works is, even if we’re not always sure that those whom we help are part of the “deserving poor,” Jesus would say that when we use our faith to benefit others, we show our love for Jesus himself. Didn’t we already know that? Didn’t the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures tell us that? And hadn’t the writer of the Letter of James repeated the same message to his hearers when he asked, “What good is it to profess faith without practicing it?” What good is it if you ignore the needs of the naked or the hungry? Hadn’t he also warned us that “without good deeds faith is useless?”

So Jesus’ parable – and the sermon in stone – remind us that whether we like it or not, we will ultimately be accountable to God for how we have lived our lives and how we have used God’s gifts to us. This Sunday, when we recognize and give thanks to God that it is Christ to whom we are accountable rather than to any secular authority, perhaps this is a good time to pause and look at our own lives. How would we do on Jesus’ test? What does your datebook and your checkbook say about you? Are you regular in worship, and does the nourishment you receive in the Eucharist change the rest of your life in any way? Do you pay attention to the needs of only your closest family and friends and ignore the needs of those on the margins of your social circle? Whom do you consider “the least” in your world, and are you concerned about them? Do you look to see Jesus in others, even in “difficult” people, or people you don’t like? Do you look beyond the charitable handout and try to make a difference in the systems of injustice and inequity that trap people in poverty, disease, and disaster? Are you mindful of the needs of our brothers and sisters in other countries?

Jesus’ test isn’t only or even primarily addressed to us as individuals. All the pronouns in the parable are in the second person plural. So Jesus’ questions are also addressed to us corporately, to us here at St. Peter’s as a parish. And the questions are similar. This is a parish with many gifts: physical plant, talented people, resources. How are we using those gifts for the benefit of the community? If we were to lock the doors and all go our separate ways, would anyone miss us? Take a minute and think about it: where are you anxious, restless, to bring the Gospel to the wider community? Where would Jesus want us to go? If money were no object, and we had all the people we needed, what would we as a congregation want to do in the wider community? What tugs at your heart? Do we think we need more money or more people to truly live out our faith? If we have the will to try to befriend the “least of these,” Jesus’ sisters and brothers whom we see around us, might not God provide the resources that we need to do so?

Are you beginning to feel judged and put on the spot? Do you fear the separation of the sheep and the goats depicted in Jesus’ parable? Where’s the good news? My brothers and sisters, here’s the good news. That Jesus holds us accountable for what we do means that our lives have consequences, and it matters to God and to those around us how we live them out. Our lives may be short, our scope of action may be limited, but our lives still have value and meaning. That Jesus also holds us accountable as a parish for how we use God’s gifts means that our life together as a community of faith also has value and meaning. It does – or it should – mean that our being here makes a difference!

Ultimately, we come back to the question we have been wrestling with for the last several weeks, ever since, in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus began his last sermon in Jerusalem. And that question is, how do we live in this middle time between Jesus’ death and resurrection and the full inauguration of his reign on earth? The answer is both simple and complicated. We heard Jesus himself give the answer to the question: “You must love the Most High God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. That is the greatest and first commandment. The second is like it: You must love your neighbor as yourself.” Love God, love your neighbor: that is how we live in the middle time.

St. Teresa of Avila told us, “We cannot be sure if we are loving God … but we can know quite well if we are loving our neighbor.” I’d like to tell you about a community – not an individual, not even a parish, but an entire community – who looked to the margins and discovered the neighbors they were called to love. Not In Our Town: Light in the Darkness is a one-hour documentary, that was shown on public television, about a town coming together to take action after anti-immigrant violence devastated the community.2 In 2008, a series of attacks on Latino residents of Patchogue, New York culminated in the murder of Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadoran immigrant who had lived in the Long Island village for thirteen years. For the next two years, Mayor Paul Pontieri, Joselo Lucero, the murdered man’s brother, and Patchogue residents wrestled with the underlying causes of the violence. Four months after Marcelo Lucero’s murder, the mayor led the Patchogue Board of Trustees in passing a resolution stating that "thoughtful discourse can only occur in an environment free of hatred and vilification," and that anti-immigrant rhetoric not only harms targeted groups but "our entire social fabric." Joselo urged people to come together so that a tragedy like his brother's death would never happen again. The Suffolk County Police Department assigned two Spanish-speaking officers to Patchogue, one of whom serves as a community relations liaison with the immigrant community. The local library became both a safe place for Latino immigrants, who often felt uneasy in other public places, and a gathering place for those who wanted to continue working for reconciliation. Gradually the “Not in our Town” movement began to spread. Now more than fifty such groups exist all over North America, from Alaska to Florida, from California to Prince Edward Island.

The righteous will ask, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” Pray that it may be said of us that when we served his brothers and sisters in need we recognized him in them.
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1. Frank Logue pointed out the connection between the National Cathedral figures and this Gospel lection in his article, “The Power of Disturbing Faith,” accessed on November 17, 2011 at http://www.kingofpeace.org/religioncolumn/052110.htm.

2. See http://www.niot.org/lightinthedarkness

Sunday, November 6, 2011

A Great Multitude Which No Man Could Number

The deep blue sea sparkled and the bright sunlight dazzled his eyes as day after endless day John of Ephesus stared out of his makeshift home on the island of Patmos. The government of the Roman emperor Domitian had exiled him here, because, as a forceful leader of a fledgling Christian community, the government considered him a dangerous agitator. Patmos wasn’t exactly a barren rock – there were a Roman garrison and imperial temple here – and a few members of his community had been able to come with John. Like so many of the Hebrew prophets, whose writings he knew so well, John had always been something of a visionary. He had had dreams and visions of God, Jesus, heaven, and even of the end times, when God’s victory would be complete. Now, about sixty years after Jesus’ triumph on the Cross, as John stared out into the sea and sun, he began to collect and organize his visions. As he began to write them down on long scrolls, he also had new visions, and he came to an even deeper understanding of God’s promises and purposes. Sometime after his release from Patmos, in the late ‘90s, he made his scrolls known not only to the Christian community in Ephesus, but also to all the other churches in Asia Minor. The scrolls containing John’s visions came to be known as the Apocalypse of John, or Revelation, from the first word of the very first scroll.

From the very beginning, Revelation was considered a strange book. It was only included in the New Testament canon in 397, and that was despite questions about its character, symbolism, and authorship. In the 16th century, Martin Luther initially considered it to be "neither apostolic nor prophetic," and he said that "Christ is neither taught nor known in it,” though he did retract this view in later life. In the same century, John Calvin considered the book canonical, yet he declined to write a commentary on it. To this day, Revelation is the only New Testament book not read in the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church, though it is included in Catholic and Protestant liturgies.

Why is Revelation such a strange and difficult book? The first reason may be that it is addressed to people experiencing a socio-political context unfamiliar to most Americans, that of severe oppression and martyrdom. It offers a strong critique of the source of that oppression, i.e., the Roman Empire, and warns people to follow God’s ways instead. “Salvation belongs to our God, who is seated on the throne and to the Lamb, not to Caesar,” shout the multitude. In addition, Revelation contains all sorts of violent, disruptive, and frightening images, and its narrative thread is difficult to follow. Even more than the Gospels, it offers contradictory statements on the nature of God, and on who is saved. What makes it even more suspect is that it depicts one person’s visionary experiences rather than the historical record preserved by those who first interacted with Jesus. No wonder most of us shy away from it!

Yet Revelation has much to offer us. Indeed, some seminarians have spent an entire semester chasing down its Old Testament allusions and fleshing out its many themes. We do have to be careful not to try to apply the book of Revelation to the contemporary church or to current events. With that caveat, this morning I want to pull out just one thread. Many passages and much of the imagery of Revelation seem black and white. Reflecting Christians’ unremitting struggle with the Roman government, which is symbolized by Babylon, the text seems to make it crystal clear, who is the oppressor and who is the victim, who is saved and who is damned. Even so, underneath all those seemingly black and white allusions, Revelation also strongly suggests that the Lamb has triumphed over evil and death, and that, consequently, all will ultimately be saved.

We hear that suggestion clearly in this morning’s passage. In the first eight verses of this chapter, which we did not hear, John has witnessed the salvation of the 144,000, i.e., the representatives of all the twelve tribes of Israel. Now he has turned around, and suddenly he beholds, “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb….” The vision echoes those of the prophet Isaiah and the message is clear: no longer is salvation available only to God’s initially chosen people, now all people have access to God’s love. As one scholar reminds us, though the imagery and mood of Revelation is often dark and somber, John continues to offer us “the God whose victory does not depend on ours, who loves us when we do not love him or ourselves, who believes in us when we do not believe in him or ourselves, who saves us when we do not believe that we need saving or are worth saving.”1 God’s judgment has been spoken from the Cross, and, ultimately, all people are both judged by the Cross and included in its saving power.

And here’s the even better news: you and I are included in the salvation wrought by God and the Lamb! All of us here, past, present, and yet to come, are included in God’s salvation. Is that an odd proclamation for All Saints Day? The observation of this day began in the ancient church, when martyrs like those whom Revelation mentions were remembered and praised. Gradually, Christians included in that number all whose lives in the faith were especially heroic or exemplary. Many of these heroic Christians are included among the official list of “saints” maintained by the Roman Catholic Church, and many more are included in our Holy Women, Holy Men. However, finally we have come to realize that the “saints” we commemorate today include all baptized Christians. Indeed, this is exactly the way most of our New Testament writings understand who the “saints” are. Paul, for example, regularly refers to the “saints” in the Christian communities to whom he writes.

From Paul’s time right through to ours, the saints, that multitude whom no one could count, include all baptized people. That uncountable multitude includes the members of the Body of Christ in all places, and in all times, past, present, and yet to come. It includes not only Teresa of Avila, the CurĂ© D’Ars, and Mother Ruth. That multitude also includes all the less exemplary Christians, Renaissance popes, Spanish inquisitors, Henry VIII, and all those who grieved God through their vanity, anger, pride, lust, greed or any other sin. When we are honest with ourselves, we know that we too are among the unworthy saints. Even so, worthy or unworthy, no one escapes God’s saving embrace. You can probably all say John 3:16 from memory (“For God so loved the world….”). But the next verse is equally important: “Indeed God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

Every time we liturgically remember one of the more exemplary saints, we pray a collect associated with that person. It’s instructive to look at those collects, for they almost all follow the same pattern. After thanking God for the life and witness of that person, the collects pray that we might follow their good examples and ourselves witness to God’s goodness and love. If today were not All Saints Day and Sunday, we would be privileged to remember William Temple, a former archbishop of Canterbury with a passion for social justice, who died on this day in 1944. Here is the collect for his day, November 6: “O God of light and love, you illumined your Church through the witness of your servant William Temple: Inspire us, we pray, by his teaching and example, that we may rejoice with courage, confidence and faith in the Word made flesh, and may be led to establish that city which has justice for its foundation and love for its law; through Jesus Christ, the light of the world, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.”

As we give thanks for the life of William Temple and all those whom we remember this day, here are our tasks for this day and this week. First, sometime today, take a moment to reflect on who has been an exemplary saint or person in your life in the past, or who is an exemplary saint for you now. Pray for that person and thank God for that person’s witness. Ask God to help you be more like that person. If that person is still alive, call him or her or write a note of thanksgiving. Second, pray that you might be an exemplary saint for someone else. To whom and in what way does your life witness to God’s great love in Christ? Who might be touched by your witness? And, finally, rejoice that, as we welcome four more people into the blessed company of all the saints, we know that we are not only surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, but that we ourselves are a part of that “great multitude which no man could number.” Thanks be to God!

1. M. Eugene Boring, Revelation, Interpretation (Louisville: John Knox, 1989), 228, quoted by Wilfrid J. Harrington, O.P. Revelation, (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1993), 231.

Monday, October 31, 2011

You are not to be called Rabbi

“But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one father on earth, for you have one father – the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah.” These words from today’s Gospel are hard words! Do you hear the rebuke in them? As someone who has been called “doctor,” “professor,” and “dean,” I hear the rebuke, and it stings me! And now here I am a priest – with another set of titles: “reverend,” “pastor,” “chaplain,” and, God help me, “Mother” – me, who, as a feminist refused for years to call priests “father.”

But what is Jesus really telling me here? Is Jesus really that exercised about titles? Would he frown on those who are called “Herr Doktor” and smile on us informal Americans who call everyone by their first name? Or is there a more important message here?

As you know, Matthew’s Gospel was written about 85 AD for a Jewish Christian community. This community was in conflict with the pharisaic Jewish communities that had survived the destruction of the temple in 70. You remember that the puritanical Pharisees sought particularly to guard their own personal purity by keeping apart from Gentiles. They also wanted to ensure the survival of the Jewish community by conscientiously adhering to every iota of the Law of Moses. At the same time, the audience of Matthew’s gospel was struggling themselves to follow Jesus’ more inclusive model and to welcome Gentiles into the new Christian communities. In all our Gospel passages for the last several weeks, we have been hearing Jesus’ disputes with the religious leaders following his triumphant entrance into Jerusalem. In parable after searing parable, he has compared them to sons who refuse to obey their fathers, wicked tenants of a vineyard who kill the rightful heir, and ungrateful wedding guests. They in turn have tried to trick him with questions about paying taxes and keeping commandments.

Now Jesus has added fuel to the fire that will eventually bring about his death by once again criticizing the Pharisees. Now, let’s remember that criticism of the religious leadership has a long tradition in the Hebrew Bible. In our first lesson, we heard Micah castigate the prophets of his day. Did you hear him rebuking them for prophesying for gain and distinguishing among their hearers, for encouraging those who could pay and discouraging those who could not? Standing squarely in that same tradition, Jesus echoes Micah in castigating the Pharisees for excessive concerns about purity, for laying burdens on the backs of others, for making a great show in their personal devotion, and for expecting respect and honor from others. “They do all their deeds to be seen by others, for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. They love to have the place of honor at banquets, and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi.”

In case you’re wondering, phylacteries, called “tefillin” in Hebrew, consist of two small leather cases with leather straps attached, containing verses from the Torah on small bits of parchment. Then and now, orthodox Jewish males wear them during prayer time. One box is bound around the forehead and the other around the upper left arm. Jewish males also wore – and continue to wear – a long prayer shawl with long fringes, called a “tallis.” Both the tefillin and the tallis help to remind the man of God’s constant presence. So in wearing large, visible tefillin and tallises with long fringes, the Pharisees make a big public show of their piety. And Jesus rightly rebukes them. He then turns to the crowd and his disciples, and he warns them against proclaiming their religious superiority: don’t let yourselves be called rabbi, father, or teacher.

OK, Lord, I get it! No one calls me “Dr. Flemming” anymore. No “Mother Leslie” either. Is that what Jesus asks of me? Or of you? Perhaps, but I think there is something more important here than just titles. Our reading from Paul’s letter to the Thessalonian Christians gives us clues as to what Jesus really expects of his followers, of you and me. Two clues, actually. First clue: unlike the Pharisees, Paul took care not to lay burdens on the Thessalonians. “You remember our labor and toil, brothers and sisters, we worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you while we proclaimed the gospel of God.” In other words, not only did Paul not make excessive spiritual demands on the Thessalonians, he also supported himself through his secular trade of tent making, so that he would not burden them financially. And here’s the second clue to what Jesus expects of us: Paul did not proclaim the good news to the Thessalonians to make a public show or to win praise. He taught them, because he deeply loved them. “As you know,” he wrote them, “we dealt with each one of you like a father with his children, urging and encouraging you and pleading that you lead a life worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.” In contrast to the false prophets of Micah’s time, or the Pharisees of Matthew’s Gospel, Paul speaks God’s word not in self-interest, not because there is any reward or gain for himself in doing so, but out of deep love for those who hear the word and turn to God.

Now, I really get it! Jesus calls us to be servant ministers, people who minister to others like Paul, like Jesus himself, out of a deep love for others. Not arrogantly, not expecting honors. Not by tailoring our service to the social or economic status of those who depend on us. But with love and with sensitivity to the true needs of those around us, always trying to create with those in need true relationship and loving community.

Does the call to be servant ministers mean that we’re all alike, or that we’re all called to the same kinds of service? Does it mean that we should deny our education, experience, or unique gifts? Should we deny the titles that go along with our respective roles? I don’t think so. In fact, I think it’s just the reverse: the gifts of all of us – and we all have gifts, janitors, secretaries, homemakers, retirees, neurosurgeons, bus drivers, teachers, nurses – all have unique gifts, and all are needed to build up the Body of Christ. The late Dutch theologian Henri Nouwen reminds us that, “We all should have the mind of Jesus Christ, but we do not all have to have the mind of a school teacher, a carpenter, a bank director, a member of congress, or whatever socioeconomic or political group. There is a great wisdom hidden in the old bell tower calling people with very different backgrounds from their homes to form one body in Jesus Christ.” With our varied experiences we are all needed in the Body of Christ. But – and there’s always a but – Jesus also reminds us that whatever our contributions, whatever our accomplishments, no matter who we are, none of us is more important than another, none of us has intrinsic status, none of us can rightfully lord it over others. Rather, “the greatest among you will be your servant.”

“The greatest among you will be your servant.” When Oscar Romero was appointed the archbishop of San Salvador in February 1977, the prominent, wealthy families who controlled most of the land and money in El Salvador, offered to build him a palace where he could live in the splendor and security befitting an archbishop. But Romero would have none of it. Until the day he was murdered in March 1980, he chose to live simply, in the sacristy adjoining the hospital chapel in which he served.

Can we live up to Oscar Romero’s model? Can we live up to Paul’s model? Can we live up to the model of servant minister that Jesus offered us? Can we love our neighbors as ourselves, as Jesus commanded us in last week’s Gospel? Can we fulfill the promises that we made at our Baptisms, to seek and serve Christ in all persons and to respect the dignity of all people? Can we too be servant ministers? Can we make our lives and gifts available to all, regardless of who they are? Can we be faithful disciples of Jesus without expecting special recognition or honors in return? We can, with God’s grace, if we believe, as surely as Paul believed of the Thessalonian Christians, that God’s Word is also and always at work in us. Thanks be to God!

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Do We Put Him to the Test?

“Are you official or one of us,” Mrs. Smith asked pointedly.1 They were upright and honest people in Colville County, and they didn’t think people ought to “get above themselves.” They also had a tradition of holding their elected officials to strict account, especially where money was concerned. Rumor had gotten around that last year one of their county commissioners had claimed commission expenses for attending the county Fourth of July parade. It felt to the plain people of Colville that not only had the commissioner gotten “above himself,” but that he had wrongly taken county funds. Now the organizer of the parade wasn’t particularly politically astute. He was about to shake the commissioner’s hand at this year’s Fourth of July parade, when a group began to gather around the commissioner. Mrs. Smith, a well-known leader of the local senior citizens, asked, “Are you here on official business?” “I’m here for the parade,” the commissioner answered. “Oh right, we’re all here for the parade. But are you official or one of us?” “I represent the Board of Commissioners,” the bewildered commissioner answered. “Of course you do. But are you getting paid to be here, like you were last year?” The commissioner began to perspire. “Well, yes,” he said, “but it’s the system.” As the people around Mrs. Smith began to murmur, the commissioner imagined the headlines in the next day’s newspapers: “Riot at Fourth Parade,” “Senior Citizen Arrested for Assaulting Commissioner.” But the commissioner was a wily politician. How else would he have gotten elected? So he played his trump card. ‘But, you see, this year I’m giving my expenses for today to the VFW – and last year’s expenses as well. It’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?” So far, so good. “To the VFW,” Mrs. Smith asked. “Yes, to the VFW, if that’s best, if they can use the funds,” the commissioner replied. The people around him nodded to each other and began to disperse. The relieved commissioner was led to the parade viewing stand. A few weeks later, the local VFW leader got a check in the mail from the commissioner. Whether it was the full amount of the commissioner’s expenses for the two years he didn’t know, but he did make sure that Mrs. Smith was the first to hear about it.

A wily politician nimbly eluding a trap. Perhaps the Colville County commissioner had read his Bible. He certainly could have taken a lesson from Jesus. In both today’s Gospel reading and the reading for next week, the Pharisees plainly wanted to trap Jesus into incriminating himself. They posed the question about paying an especially onerous tax that went straight to the emperor. Clearly, neither obvious answer to their question was acceptable. It wasn’t that the people didn’t already pay many taxes – in the currency of their Roman occupiers. But this one was particularly hated. If Jesus had answered directly that it was O.K. to pay the tax he would have alienated his own followers. And if he had answered that it was not lawful for observant Jews to pay the tax, he would have risked reprisal from the Roman authorities. So like our wily county commissioner, he first flung a question back at his questioners: “Why are you putting me to the test?” Then making them produce the Roman coin and observe its face, he gave the most enigmatic answer possible to their question: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”

His answer has haunted us ever since. What is Caesar’s? What is God’s? If we give to Caesar what has Caesar’s image on it, and we give to God what has God’s image on it, then what belongs to God? Everything! We are made in God’s image, and, ultimately everything we are, and everything we have belongs to God: all our resources, all our time, all our personal talents and gifts. “All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.” How, when, and what to give back to God is a question that every serious Christian must answer.

Yet this reading poses to us an even more difficult and ultimately more important question: how are we like the religious leaders who have been questioning Jesus’ identity and authority. Their questioning of Jesus, their disbelief, and their attempts to entrap Jesus have been running motifs throughout the entire latter part of Matthew’s Gospel, so that at the end the Cross seems inevitable. Ironically, the challenges to Jesus’ identity and authority did not stop with the Cross or the Resurrection. In its earliest centuries, the church was beset by heresies in which various thinkers tried to deny in different ways that Jesus was the Word made flesh. Indeed, the Nicene Creed is a distillation of the responses to those heresies and was composed with the hope that the question of Jesus’ identity would be settled for good. The medieval church, with its idolization of the Latin language, controlled people’s access to Scripture, almost usurping the authority of Jesus himself. In our own era, many modern thinkers have dismissed Scripture, God, and Jesus as irrelevant and unnecessary, hypotheses of which we have no need.

Are we anything like the religious leaders in the Gospel reading who challenge Jesus’ identity and authority? Perhaps we identify Jesus with a particular social position. “What would Jesus do?” was a popular question a few years back. Perhaps you are certain of what Jesus’ views would be on abortion, sexuality, divorce, market capitalism, the United Nations, Medicaid, or a host of other social issues. Conversely, perhaps you believe that Jesus has no authority over your social and political choices. We believe in the separation of religious institutions and government: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." But does that separation mean that our faith has no impact on how we carry out our lives in society? Does it mean that Jesus has no authority over us?

Ultimately, the question we are dealing with here is how do we obey God? What does God expect from us? And the answer is simple: God expects of us nothing less than obedience to God’s Word. Eight centuries before Jesus the prophet Micah suggested an answer to that question: “Listen here, mortal: God has already made abundantly clear … what God needs from you: simply do justice, love kindness, and humbly walk with your God.” Jesus knew the prophetic writings well, and in his own life he fulfilled their message. In his self-giving and his self-sacrifice, in his death on the Cross, Jesus models for us the complete obedience, the giving of all we are, that God expects of us as well. And more to the point, just as Jesus challenged the religious leaders who questioned his identity and authority, so he challenges us: to examine our lives and to frame them according to God’s expectations. Can we look at our spiritual lives? Is there more to our relationship with Jesus than Sunday worship, nourishing as that might be? How about our use of our resources? Are we returning to God anything of what God has given us? Is our giving of our resources of treasure, time, and talent intentional and proportional to what we have? How about our action on social issues? Do we pray about our choices both in and out of the voting booth? Do we ignore the needs of those around us or elsewhere in the world, or do we ask the Holy Spirit to guide us into the causes where our prayerful participation might help to further God’s kingdom? And is our obedience to God grudging or grateful? Do we lovingly present to God “ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice” to God?

Obeying God, measuring up to God’s expectations, modeling ourselves on Jesus, giving ourselves to God, all of this is difficult, so difficult that we all fail. Limited human beings, sinners, that we all are, all of us challenge Jesus’ authority over us, and none of us can give to God all that is God’s. All of us are disobedient, idolatrous, and weak. Yet, my sisters and brothers, the good news is that even when we are disobedient, even when we give God less than God’s due, even when we are unsure of who Jesus is and how our faith in him should make a difference in our lives, God still loves us. All of today’s texts remind us that God remains good, and gracious to us, and ever present. God is the one who never forgets our names, our addresses, or our needs. God is the one who is always ready to answer our call. When we ask that those who seek God or a deeper knowledge of God will find and be found by God, we can be sure that that prayer will be answered. Thanks be to God, always!

1. The following story is adapted from “Reds Under the Beds,” by Tom Gordon, in Welcoming Each Wonder (Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications, 2010), 270-73.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

A Rich Feast

I don’t like today’s Gospel. I don’t like the parable in today’s Gospel. Actually, I don’t like any of the parables of judgment that we’ve been hearing these past few weeks: not the one about the two sons, nor the one about the wicked tenants, nor this one with its frightening ending. Where’s the grace? Where’s the good news? Why are we hearing these lessons? What does the Church want us to hear in them?

It’s not hard to guess Jesus’ intent in these parables. All of them clearly indict the religious leadership and suggest that those who are on the edges of society, who have been deemed poor, insignificant, or unclean by the fastidious Pharisees and other leaders, are closer to full enjoyment of God’s love than the religious leaders are. Perhaps Jesus was hoping that such an indictment would induce the religious leadership to change course and join his disciples. Perhaps he was upping the ante and pushing his conflict with them closer to its eventual outcome. Nor is it difficult to guess why the early Christian community preserved these parables of Jesus, and why writer of the Gospel of Matthew included them in his Gospel. Writing in the ‘80’s, when tensions between the fledgling Christian community and the synagogue leadership were increasing, the Gospel writer’s primary goal was to announce that God’s Kingdom had indeed finally arrived in the person of Jesus. At the same time, the writer also sought to explain to a mixed-ethnic community why the religious elite of Judaism had largely resisted the Christian message, and why the early Christian community should continue to attract an increasing number of Gentiles.

I still don’t hear much grace or good news, do you? And as we ourselves begin to shiver a little in fear of judgment, perhaps we’re tempted to ask ourselves where we fit in this parable. Take a minute and think about it: with whom do you most closely identify in this parable? Sitting here in a pew of this beautiful church, having committed yourselves to Jesus, having committed yourself to this parish, waiting to be nourished with Christ’s Body and Blood, perhaps you identify with those servants – we resist calling ourselves “slaves,” don’t we – those servants who faithfully do the king’s bidding and go out issuing invitations, first to the previously invited guests, then to any and all willing to come in. Do you see yourselves out there, for example, inviting friends to St. Peter’s, or perhaps welcoming our Loaves and Fishes guests? Or perhaps you identify with the previously invited guests who can’t come to the banquet for various reasons. Perhaps we are some of “the great intenders,” the ones not committing crimes or abusing anyone, just going about our business. Are we one of those ones who blithely pursue a life of perfect intending? “Yes,” we say, “someday, sometime, I’ll get around to accepting God’s invitation, just not now.” Or perhaps, like many of us, you identify with the rag-tag bunch rounded up by the next set of servants, thankful that you’ve been accepted by God. Does anyone here identify with the wrongly-clad guest? Perhaps we worry that we don’t follow all the rules, or don’t measure up to God’s expectations, or are still living an old life unacceptable to God. Or perhaps you’re even now saying to yourself, “I’m glad I’m not that person.” Perhaps you’re wondering if our parish has on a wedding garment. Are we doing what God expects of us? With whomever I identify myself in the parable, though, I’m still left wondering, where’s the grace in this parable? Where’s the good news?

My brothers and sisters, as long as we focus on ourselves in this parable, we can’t hear the good news. The truth is that this parable is not about us: it’s about God. Like most of Jesus’ parables, this one has something to tell us about God and about what God hopes for in us. The good news is that God’s realm is open to all: there is no A-list for God’s party. All are invited. Actually, we hear the same good news in our reading from Isaiah, don’t we? Writing about eight centuries before Jesus, Isaiah gave us a wonderful vision of the celebration that God has prepared for God’s people. Didn’t God promise us, in Isaiah’s words, a feast of rich food and well-aged wine for all peoples? Jesus uses that same image of a banquet, here a wedding banquet, one of the most joyous human occasions most of us can imagine, and Matthew reinforces it, to proclaim that God has invited all of us into God’s realm, not just the religious elite, not just those who have the time or resources to be especially punctilious in their practice of holiness, not just those who can take a week-long retreat every year, wonderful as that might be. God invites all of us: rich and poor, busy and idle, black, white, yellow, red, brown, all ethnicities, all genders, all, bad, lukewarm, good.

And God doesn’t stop inviting us to the feast: God continues to extend invitations to join God’s blessed community to all who would hear, at any and every time. God invites us into God’s community by encouraging us to allow ourselves to be open to God’s presence in our own personal prayer time, perhaps even to venture into the mysterious realm of contemplative prayer. God has a standing invitation for us to feast at the Eucharistic banquet, taking in God’s word and tasting Jesus’ Body and Blood. A pastor of a small rural parish would say at the end of the liturgy, “Go in peace, this has been the highlight of your day; it’s all downhill from here.” God also has other ways of inviting us into God’s realm. God invites us to share with others when we reach out to those in need, when we give of ourselves and our time, for example, to feed the hungry at Loaves and Fishes, or when we help the victims of natural disasters. God invites us to use our skills in organizing and advocacy by speaking up for those who have no voice and through responsibly exercising our voting rights. God invites us into God’s realm when we gaze on God’s creation with awe and appreciation, when we forgive one another, when we bravely bear the various struggles of our lives. In all our fears, frustrations, sadness, desires, accomplishments, and joys, God invites us into a realm of peace, where we center our attention on the One who loves us deeply enough to come among us in the flesh.

Are we alert to God’s invitation? We may refuse or misunderstand God’s invitation, but God continues to extend God’s invitation to us, hourly, daily, weekly, continuously. And if we hear God’s invitation, if we do accept it, and if we realize that God’s invitation is for all, then God can begin to transform us. Perhaps we fear to accept God’s invitation because we know that ultimately it must be actualized in our lives. God’s grace is unending, but it is not free of cost. Ultimately, we must do more than stand speechless on the threshold without the needed clothes. Ultimately, we must put on that wedding garment and let God change us. Ultimately, we must let God work through us, gradually changing us into the persons God created us to be.

Are we as a parish alert to God’s invitations? God’s invitation to the feast was not extended only to size A-size parishes, parishes like Redeemer or St. Thomas in Cincinnati. God’s invitation is extended to all of us, even to small parishes like St. Peter’s. God’s invitation is extended to all people, not just those who wear a clerical collar. I believe the Common Ministry program is one way that God is inviting us as a parish to bring God’s kingdom nearer. If we accept God’s invitation, if we enter joyfully into the wedding hall, God will transform us. Are there other ways God is extending invitations to us a parish? We are an outpost of God’s kingdom right here in Gallipolis, Ohio. If we can stay alert to God’s invitations, and if we can accept and actualize them, be assured that God will change us, grow us, and strengthen us to share God’s invitations with others. Can we do it? Here’s my answer, John van de Laar’s poem, “The Amazing Invitation.”

No special qualifications needed;
No particular connections or exclusive memberships required;
No secret passwords or unique attributes expected;
No campaigning or canvassing,
no examinations or reference checks;

Just an amazing invitation to a feast;
to find our place at Your table
Alongside these other unworthy ones,
these other beloved ones;
these others humble enough to accept the invitation
without asking who else will be there.

Well, Jesus, Lord of the Feast.
with thankful and open hearts,
we accept Your amazing invitation.1

1. Accessed at http://sacredise.com.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Let Me Sing for My Beloved

When the rain is blowing in your face
And the whole world is on your case
I could offer you a warm embrace
To make you feel my love.
When evening shadows and the stars appear
And there is no one to dry your tears
I could hold you for a million years
To make you feel my love.1

How do you understand God? Is God an abstraction for you, an intellectual puzzle, or an intriguing idea? Is God some impersonal force for you? “The Force be with you,” they said in the Star Wars films. Is that how you experience God? Perhaps you think of God as transcendent, totally beyond this world, above all human experience, except perhaps for the Word made flesh. Or maybe you think of the Deists’ “watchmaker.” God set the world in motion, and it has run by itself ever since? Perhaps you think of God as unchanging. After all, doesn’t one of the prayers in our Compline service ask that we may rest in God’s “eternal changelessness?” In some respects, all of these ways of talking about God have some truth in them, since at some point we humans acknowledge that God is unknowable and indescribable. “Neti, neti,” say Hindus, “not this, not this.” “Utter mystery,” say many practitioners of contemplative prayer. To say anything more about God surely risks anthropomorphizing God, reducing God to purely human terms. And yet today’s Scriptures beg us to ask a poignant and utterly necessary question. Does God feel? Does God have emotions, as we do? If we are created in God’s image, and emotions are intrinsic to our nature, must they not also be intrinsic to God’s nature? Doesn’t God also feel?

The Hebrew Scriptures – and remember that they were Jesus’ Scriptures, and they are our Scriptures too – contain many, many examples of God having feelings. Think of God in the Garden of Eden, lonely, wandering around looking for Adam and Eve. How about all the many times God gets angry at the Israelites, especially during the long trek in Sinai? How about the psalms? For the psalmist, God can be impatient, jealous, sympathetic, compassionate, merciful, and loving. The prophets show God providing both warnings and reassurance. Through the prophecy of Hosea God grieves for unfaithful Israel. And, of course, the Song of Songs portrays God as a young man in springtime, passionately in love with his fair beloved.

Does God have feelings? Judging by our reading this morning from the prophecy of Isaiah, God has very deep feelings. The prophet has just castigated Israel for the corruption of its priests. Seemingly changing tone, the prophet then begins a love song in God’s name. God has created a vineyard, which God has lovingly tended: planted it with the best vines, put up a guardhouse, built a wine press. But did the vineyard produce the sweet wine that God expected from such loving care? Contrary to God’s expectations and hopes, the vineyard produced wild grapes, i.e., inedible grapes that only scavenger birds would deign to eat. Then the prophet lets God give voice to God’s despair and disappointment: “What more could I have done for my vineyard that I didn’t do? Why did it yield wild grapes?” Despite God’s best efforts, despite all of God’s love and care, God’s project has failed: the vineyard is unproductive. Giving in, God will let the vineyard be, let it produce wild grapes, let its protective hedges fall down, and send no more rain on it.

Can we relate to this story? Surely all of us have had parallel experiences, experiences where we have poured our best efforts into a project, only to see it fail. I can think of numerous examples from my time as dean at Ohio University: grant proposals that we thoroughly researched, lovingly and carefully wrote up, and submitted well before the due date, only to be bypassed by the powers that were or given only a small fraction of what we’d requested. I think of a few young faculty members – fortunately only a few – to whom we gave reduced teaching assignments, summer support, travel to workshops, coaching and mentoring, and still they couldn’t sufficiently improve their teaching or write the needed articles to be eligible for tenure. Although we pray to be spared this feeling of disappointment and despair, many parents of adult children know it well: for all our care, attention, love, and support, our adult child just can’t seem to take hold, can’t make a go of life, can’t shake free from addiction, or, worst of all, commits a horrible crime. Did you ever wonder, for example, what the parents of Jared Loughner must have felt, when they heard the news of what he’d done? With God, we too can wring our hands and cry out, “What more could I have done that I haven’t done?”

My sisters and brothers, fortunately for Israel and for us, God’s despair and disappointment are not the end of the story. Yes, the vineyard becomes “a waste,” and falls into ruin. And yet, for all that, God still cares deeply for God’s people. The vineyard of Israel and Judah are God’s planting, God’s creation. The rest of Isaiah’s prophecy goes on to remind us of what the Gospels also tell us: that God is not a remote, uncaring God. Rather, God is deeply caring, deeply involved with God’s people. And not only with Israel and Judah, but, ultimately with all nations, all humanity, all of creation. Despite Israel’s faithlessness, despite the unsuccessful alliances with Assyria and the exile into Babylon, ultimately God cares so much for God’s people, that, Isaiah assures them, God will deliver all of them from war, oppression, and death. “O Lord, you are my God,” Isaiah will sing to God, “for you have done wonderful things, plans formed of old, faithful and sure.” And ultimately all people and all creation will be included in the saving work of God.

But – there’s always a “but,” isn’t there – God’s love for Israel and Judah carries expectations. God tended the vineyard of Israel and Judah expecting justice and righteousness, but the vineyard produced only bloodshed and cries of pain. God expected the vineyard to bear good fruit, not the wild fruits of injustice and suffering, nor the fruits of greed, gluttony, dishonesty, and arrogance, as the later verses of this chapter detail. No wonder God was disappointed! As Christians, we can certainly relate to the image of bearing good fruit. Jesus himself used this image. We remember especially what he told his friends in the Gospel of John: “I am the vine; you are the branches; those who live in me and I in them will bear abundant fruit…. It was not you who chose me; it was I who chose you to go forth and bear fruit,” to love one another as Jesus had loved them.

And so ultimately we are faced with a challenge. We who have been grafted on to Israel – as St. Paul reminds us in his letter to the Roman Christians – what good fruit have we produced in our lives? God loves us as deeply as God loved Israel and Judah, but God’s love for us is not for our own self-aggrandizement. We do not hear in this Scripture – nor anywhere in the Bible – a prosperity Gospel. What we do hear is the question that is at the heart of God’s love song. How have we returned God’s passionate love for all people and for the world that God created? Have we produced the inedible grapes of greed, over-consumption, dishonesty, and war? Have we turned away from those in need? Have we trashed this beautiful earth that God has given us? Or do our lives reflect God’s passionate love? Do we try to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind? Do we strive actively for justice and peace, equity and well-being? Do we aim to be good stewards of all the abundant resources that God has given us? Do we try with all our being to love others as God loves us?

As we grapple with these questions, as we engage in the self-examination to which the prophets of Israel call us, to say nothing of the part of Matthew’s Gospel that we have been hearing these last several weeks, we do so with the assurance of God’s deep, continuing, and abiding love. God does feel – deeply. And God’s deepest feeling is passionate love for God’s people. When we truly commit ourselves to God and strive in our lives to return God’s love, we can be assured that, as one writer put it, “we are characters in a divine love song.”2 And so, we are bold to pray,

Lord, you have called us to know you,
you have called us to love you,
you have called us to serve you.
Make us worthy of our calling.
May we proclaim your power and your peace.
May we rejoice in your light and your love;
through Christ the living Lord. Amen.3

1. Garth Brooks, “To Make You Feel My Love,” quoted in Celebration Preaching Resources, for October 2, 2011.

2. James Burns, Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 4 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 127.

3. David Adam, Clouds and Glory (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2001), 126.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Clearing Out the Junk Drawers of our Lives

Do you have a junk drawer in your house? A bursting closet, storeroom, basement, or attic? Don’t we all? Depending on how long you’ve lived in your present house, over the months and years, you’ve probably been tossing all kinds of things into your junk drawers, or closets, or storerooms, or basements, or attics. Maybe you’ve finally convinced yourself that you absolutely have to do some clearing out. These days magazines like Woman’s Day, the AARP magazine, and USA Weekend, to mention just a few, harp on our need to declutter – perhaps to make room for what we’ll acquire during the holiday shopping season! These articles also acknowledge that decluttering is difficult. Psychologists tell us that we should begin the clearing out process by asking ourselves what keeps us from getting started. Do we feel overwhelmed by all our stuff, is it difficult to find the time to begin, or do we fear the negative emotions we might dredge up? More pragmatic organization experts suggest a sorting approach, i.e., taking our kitchen implements, clothes, books, mementoes, pictures, whatever, and sorting them into at least three piles: 1) love it, use it, look at it, or wear it all the time; 2) use it, look at it, or wear it occasionally; and 3) haven’t used it, looked at it, or worn it for at least a year. The things in category 1 go back to their places to continue to be used or treasured. The still-usable items in category 3 go into a donate-to-charity box, and the useless items get tossed. The items in category 2 are carefully examined again, and finally are either kept or discarded. Such sorting is not easy, but for most of us it is a needed and ultimately freeing exercise.

How about the rest of your life? Do you have a spiritual junk drawer, or closet? Our Scripture lessons today, especially our Gospel lesson, bid us also to take an honest look at our spiritual lives and consider whether and where spiritual sorting may be called for. In our Gospel lesson, Jesus has triumphantly entered into Jerusalem – an event that we remember on Palm Sunday. Filled with zeal and anger, Jesus then charged into the temple and made all the money changers and animal sellers get out. No wonder the religious leaders wondered where Jesus had gotten the authority to do what he did. Wouldn’t you have, in their shoes? Jesus flung their question back at them with a question of his own about the role of John the Baptist. Of course, Jesus was alluding to John’s identification of him as the Messiah, thus implicitly answering their question. But Jesus also reminded the religious leaders that John had called for all people to repent, to change their way of thinking and the way they lived their lives.

Then Jesus told a little story about two sons. After initially refusing, the first son did what his father had asked. After initially agreeing, the second son did not do what his father had asked. Jesus forced his listeners to choose between the sons. Of course, they gave the right answer: ultimately what matters is what we do in response to God’s call, not the beliefs we profess or the long prayers we intone. Yet I wonder. Isn’t it a little too easy to think that people can be identified and grouped this way? Perhaps Matthew’s community saw the first members of the Kingdom of God as those, both Jews and Gentiles, who had followed Christ, and saw the Jewish religious leadership as lesser members. But again, I wonder. It’s so easy to be judgmental. It’s so easy to see one group as redeemed and another group as unworthy, so easy to think that we are among the redeemed – because we’re of the right gender or ethnicity, or because we have a beautiful liturgy, or we profess the right beliefs, or we give generously to the poor – and to think that others who don’t share our identity, practices, and views are cast out.

Brothers and sisters, the truth is that today’s readings, and especially the story of the two sons, invite us to take a both/and approach. Aren’t we all sometimes and in some ways like both sons? Aren’t there times when we promise what we can’t or won’t, or don’t have the will to deliver? Conversely, aren’t there aspects of our lives that we deeply regret, that we are striving to bring more closely into line with God’s expectations? Our Gospel story suggests that both sons actually need to repent, to change their lives. And the good news is that we can repent. In the words of the prophet Ezekiel, God assured the Israelite exiles that repentance was always open to them: “I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God. Turn, then, and live.” In Jesus’ little story we are reminded and reassured that we are not bound by the past. We are not saved by our past promises, but neither are we determined or condemned by our past deeds. We can all repent, we can all turn around, and we can all change, with God’s help.

And yet we know that repentance is difficult. Just like decluttering, repentance requires of us a deep, self-examination, a true clearing out of spiritual junk drawers and closets. What keeps us from engaging in this kind of honest appraisal of our lives? What keeps us from following through on our best intentions and responding to God’s call to a more honest life? Do we think that our drawers and closets are already spotless? Are we like those who are sure of their own righteousness, certain that they have nothing of which to repent? Or conversely, are our lives, like our overflowing closets, such a mess that we feel overwhelmed by the prospect of even beginning? Are we afraid of the time such self-examination might take? Or are we afraid of what we might find if we do begin the process of self-examination?

Perhaps we need to follow the organization gurus. Perhaps we need to begin by taking baby steps, or breaking the task down into small manageable parts. Perhaps we can look first at our beliefs and prejudices. Perhaps we can engage in a kind of sorting process. What do our social or political beliefs look like? Where did or do we get them? What should we keep, what discard? Do we have positions on issues of which we are still absolutely certain? Are there positions which we’ve inherited perhaps but don’t agree with anymore? Do our views on some issues, capital punishment, abortion, immigration, health insurance, global poverty, or peace need rethinking? What about our spiritual beliefs? When was the last time we truly examined what we believe about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, evil, salvation, prayer, the sacraments, other religions? Of which of our long-held convictions are we still absolutely certain? Are some of our convictions out of date? Do they need to be discarded? Which beliefs bear closer examination? Should we perhaps engage with others in examining what we think we believe?

Perhaps our practices also need the same kind of sorting approach, both for us as individuals and for us as a parish. Can you take a hard look at your traditions as a family? Are some to be cherished, and others to be changed, now that your life circumstances have changed? Don’t we often find that holiday traditions need to be examined closely as our circumstances change? What about our personal spiritual practices? Can you take a hard look at them? What should be kept, what discarded, what rethought? What about our worship life here? What should we keep, what might we stop doing, what do we need to examine more closely?

Taking a hard look at our spiritual lives is often difficult. We know that, which is why we are often so reluctant to engage seriously with spiritual issues. And yet, God through the prophet Ezekiel and through Jesus in today’s Gospel asks us to think, to ponder, and to reflect. Today’s readings offer us hope that honest self-examination, repentance, and change of life will bring us closer to one another and nearer to God’s kingdom. They also remind us that we must continue to look at our lives carefully, regularly, perhaps even daily. Even ten minutes a day, as we say our last prayers, will help us to begin the process of self-examination. As we let go of unneeded aspects of our lives, as we declutter our spiritual lives, God, who is “slow to guide and swift to bless,” will move in to graciously direct more and more of our lives. As our paths become clearer and freer of unneeded burdens, we become more and more the person that God created us to be, and our feet are ever more firmly fixed on the path that leads us into the Kingdom of God. May Jesus ever give you a clearer vision of the way into the Kingdom.