On the day after Thanksgiving, columnist Leonard Pitts announced good news: “An average of 17.7 percent of Americans were at times unable to feed themselves in the 12 months prior to September of this year.”1 How on earth could this be good news, Pitts asked. The answer: the percentage of hungry Americans was down from 18.5 percent at the end of 2009. Pitts went on to remind us that we don’t have to go to Kenya or Haiti to find hunger. In this season of “gorging on turkeys and hams and yams and greens, potatoes by the mound, dressing by the mountain, and groaning tables of puddings, pies, cookies, and cakes,” hunger endures in this country. Even though the lieutenant governor of South Carolina likened children who receive free and reduced price lunches to “stray animals you feed at your back door,” hunger endures. Even though we work hard at providing free meals to people, even though we participate in the distribution of food, hunger endures. Is it because of the recession that we have so much hunger? Well, we had hungry people before the recession. Are hungry people lazy or dishonest? Maybe a few are, but many hungry people are disabled, mentally ill, or poorly educated. Some have lost their jobs, some will never find a job in their community, and some have a job that doesn’t pay enough to live on. (Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickle and Dimed for more on that last reason.) And truth be told, any of us could be poor and hungry. Even middle-class people can lose their jobs and find themselves suddenly poor. Many of us are one health-care crisis away from poverty. Did you know that the majority of people who file for bankruptcy do so because of medical bills not covered by insurance?
At this point, you’re probably thinking, “What does this have to do with me? And what on earth do hungry poor people have to do with today’s Scripture lessons?” The answer is: everything! In our Old Testament reading from the prophet Isaiah, and in our psalm, we have a vision of what God intends our world to look like, of what a future of shalom, the well-being of all, might look like. In God’s shalom, all creation lives in harmony and peace. In God’s shalom that peace is a peace founded on justice, and especially justice for the poor. Hear Isaiah describing the ruler of God’s future: “He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear,” i.e., he won’t be impressed by the trappings of high status or by elegant language, but “with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.” The psalmist also looks forward to a future of harmony and peace: “There shall be abundance of peace till the moon shall be no more.” And the psalmist reminds us that the ruler of God’s peaceful kingdom will “rule your people righteously and the poor with equity,” and that “he shall defend the needy among the people; he shall rescue the poor and crush the oppressor.” Clearly the God whose word Isaiah proclaims has a special heart, a special preference, for the poor. Could these be the same poor people about whom Pitts was writing?
Our Gospel lesson strikes a slightly different note. Standing squarely within the prophetic tradition of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Ezekiel, and all the rest, John the Baptist also proclaims God’s word. But John proclaims that a great change in people’s lives is about to occur, that the ideal king, the messiah, the just ruler proclaimed by earlier prophets, is indeed about to appear. In preparation for the coming of God’s anointed one, John calls out, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” As a token of their repentance he charges people to be baptized, i.e., to be immersed in water, in a symbolic cleansing. John also has harsh words for the religious leadership – and we’ll hear a lot of this in Matthew’s Gospel. John warns them not to take refuge in their standing as children of Abraham, i.e., as heirs to God’s promises, but themselves repent and bear good fruit.
John was speaking to the people of his own time, to first-century Jews who were awaiting the coming of God’s anointed. Is he also speaking to us? Our collect for today asks for God’s grace to heed the warnings of the prophetic messengers whom God has sent and to forsake our own sins. So, yes, the Hebrew prophets, the prophets of our own day, and John the Baptizer are also addressing us. As a pastor and teacher, I especially hear John’s harsh words to the religious leaders as addressed to me, and I do challenge myself to repentance, and I ask God’s grace to bring forth the good fruit that God would have me bear. But ultimately John’s harsh words are addressed to all of us. All of us baptized Christians are also heirs to God’s covenant, along with the original descendants of Abraham. And like the religious leaders who first heard John’s accusations, we too cannot think that we are immune from any further attention to the demands of God. We too are called to repentance, and especially in this season, when we too wait eagerly for the appearing of the Prince of Peace.
“Repentance.” Now what does this word really mean? One thing it does not mean is a trip down the aisle at a revival. It does not mean solely renouncing evil in our baptisms and thinking we are done with repentance forever. No, repentance is a lifelong process, something we need to do continually. Nor does repentance mean putting ourselves on a guilt trip. Certainly, confession and absolution are good and necessary processes. But repentance really means turning around, changing direction, changing our mind-set, aligning ourselves with what God is up to in the world. And repentance is not only for individuals. Parishes, communities, even nations can repent. All of us, individually and collectively, can change course, can turn away from our own selfish desires, and begin heading in God’s direction.
How does such change come about? Ultimately, all change of heart is the work of the Holy Spirit within us. However, the Holy Spirit has many different ways of working. Sometimes we change as a result of new experiences, sometimes through getting new information, sometimes in response to prayer that God will show us the road that God wants us to travel. Most of us don’t need to “invite Christ into our lives” – we’ve probably already done that, or we wouldn’t be here today. What we do need to do is change how we think and how we act.
Can we change our thinking and our action with respect to issues of hunger in the U.S.? Dear God, you may say, I do believe that all your people, even your poorest people, should have enough to eat. How are you asking me to change my mind? What are you asking me to do? Everything you are currently doing, the Lord may say, and more! Yes, continue feeding my people in Loaves and Fishes. Yes, go across the street and help out at the Lutheran Social Services mobile food pantry. Yes, help people access benefits through the Ohio Benefit Bank. And there’s more. Consider educating yourself about hunger nationally, through organizations like Bread for the World, a Christian hunger advocacy organization. Some of you may have read in Friday’s paper, for example, that Congress passed the Child Nutrition bill to increase access to free and reduced-price meals for children. Bread for the World members educated themselves about the bill and then pressed their elected representatives to vote for it. The Ohio Hunger Alliance does the same kind of work on a state-wide level, also asking people to educate themselves about local hunger issues and to take appropriate political action. These are all good things to do, and as Christians we do these things because we understand ourselves as charged to partner with God in the bringing in of God’s future.
But one more thing I ask of you, the Lord says. Love those who are hungry as I love them. Bob Erickson was a volunteer at a free breakfast. Assigned coffee-pouring duty, he drifted from table to table “warming up cups for persons who often embody a ‘down and out’ slice of society,” people from shelters or, literally, off the streets and even from under bridges. Some were physically disabled, some had mental health issues. Few could get or hold a job. At one table, Bob tells us, he met Ben, “who had recently been freed after 25 years in prison. Gradually warming to my interest in talking with him, he told me a predictably sad story: he has no money for rent, is alienated from family, has lost his previous friends, and is aware of few resources in this or any other community, except a homeless shelter where he lives and this once-a-week service….” Yet Ben was confident he could make it, because at some point he had met someone who had accepted him unconditionally as a person, who had enabled him to feel truly loved and able to surmount the many obstacles in his life. Meeting Ben shook all of Bob’s assumptions. Bob realized that, important as our material support of people is, extending the hand of love and friendship, embodying Jesus for them, may be more important. “That someone cares enough to offer themselves -- their time, their attention, and most importantly, their heart -- may be the greatest gift we ever give…. Seeing beyond all that is obvious to criticize about the messiness of how they happen to be standing in front of us, can we accept them as they are as the starting point for who they might become? And by more than ‘bread alone,’ may we have the grace to love them and they, to accept it!”
Repent, change course, make a personal connection with the poor and needy. This is a tall order! Give us grace, O God, to heed the messages of your prophets, and to change our ways. Enable us by your grace to love those whom you love and to be the people you are calling us to be.
________________________________
1. “Amid amber waves of grain, hunger thrives,” Worthington Daily Globe, published November 26, 2010, accessed at http://www.dglobe.com/event/article/id/43356/, 11/29/2010.
2. Hunger Network in Ohio Newsletter, Fall 2010.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Now in the Time of this Mortal Life
“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” Do you know how much time you have left? No one does. Even so, all our advisors tell us, “Be ready, prepare, plan.” My financial advisor tells me that age 92 is the standard planning horizon. I recently saw an Allstate Insurance ad suggesting that now we’re even thinking out to age 100. So we take out life insurance. When we cross over into the second half-century, perhaps we buy long-term care insurance. We may have individual retirement annuities or tax-sheltered annuities. We contribute to, or perhaps draw from, the State Teachers Retirement System, the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, the Church Pension Fund, or company retirement plans. We draw up wills, lay out advanced directives, buy a cemetery plot or columbarium space, and convey our end of life wishes to our loved ones. It’s absolutely prudent and right to make all these arrangements. Should we make other plans too? Perhaps to gather the children and grandchildren and take that long-awaited trip? Perhaps to sell the big house and move into a smaller one, move closer to the children, or just get everything done by Christmas day! All these plans are also right and appropriate. And yet. And yet, despite all our preparation, advice, and plans, the truth is that we have no idea what the future holds for us, we have no idea when our life may suddenly change, and we have no idea how much time we have left.
Today’s Scripture lessons remind us that God invites us to make different kinds of preparations than those our financial advisors, attorneys, real estate agents, travel agents, or women’s magazines counsel. We don’t know how much time we personally have left, but as we begin another church year God invites us to prepare for God’s future. In contrast to the rest of our society, now in the midst of the mad rush to December 25th, we are invited to stop, to take a breath, and to look with hope towards another future.
We get a glimpse of God’s future, a promise of the consummation of God’s rule at the end of the age, in the stirring reading from Isaiah. In God’s future, the prophet assures us, all people and nations will be united, and all will live according to God’s law. In words that ring down the centuries, the prophet also reassures us that God’s future is a future of peace: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” When soldiers are still dying in Afghanistan, when civilians are dying in the busses and markets of Pakistan, Israel, and Palestine, when civil war still plagues Sudan, when people are murdered on college campuses, don’t you cry out to God to bring that peaceable reign into being right now? And what is the prophet’s reply: “O house of Jacob, come let us walk in the light of the Lord.” In whatever time we have left, we too are invited to pursue peace, even as we continue to hope that God’s peaceable kingdom will come soon.
And hope we must. For Jesus sternly warns us in today’s Gospel reading that we do not know when God will fully consummate God’s plan. During this church year, our Gospel lessons will come mostly from the Gospel according to Matthew, a gospel written especially to convey a sense of hope to a struggling Christian community. In today’s passage Jesus is near Jerusalem, near the end of his own earthly ministry. Having just warned his disciples about the destruction of the temple, he now cautions them, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” Throughout the centuries, and still even today, people have claimed to know when the “end of the world” will occur. Think of the many cartoons you have seen of the bearded figure, perhaps wearing a sandwich board, exhorting people to repent because the world is about to end. Think of the Jim Joneses and David Koreshes of our own era who have led so many astray: Think of those who preach the “Rapture.”
We certainly don’t know when Christ will come again, nor when God will bring in God’s future. Nor do we know when our own lives will change – in an instant – despite all our planning. Aren’t we all a heartbeat away from disaster? September 11th, the 2004 tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the recent fires in California. And then there are the tragedies in our own lives. In February, 1995, my nephew Matthew had just turned 18. As he was making plans for his first year at Penn State, he was struck by a deadly leukemia and died that July. A few years back in Athens a 16-year old got behind the wheel after having had too much to drink at an unsupervised party. She missed a turn on a country road and killed her two 14 year old passengers. All of you could tell similar stories. Our lives, our current comfortable lives, truly hang by a thread.
We know that our lives are uncertain, and that we cannot know what the future holds. But as Christians, we do not despair. We don’t know when God will act, or when our lives may change, but we continue to live in hope, gratitude, and expectation. We live in hope, because God has already entered into our world once. We live in hope, because we know that we have been redeemed in Jesus’ death. We live in hope, because we have been given a foretaste of the life to come in the resurrection, a foretaste of what God has in mind not only for us personally, but eventually for the entire world. Because of this hope, we live differently from those who live without it. Because of this hope, we are grateful for Christ’s first coming, and we wait patiently for Christ’s second coming. In this middle time, as we wait for God’s future to come fully, we remain awake and alert to what God is calling us to do now, “now in the time of this mortal life.”
How do we do that? Let me suggest a few ways. First, we can pray about the mission of this parish. We can ask God to show us what God is inviting this parish to do as a parish. In what new ministries might God be inviting this parish to participate? Are there ways in which the resources of this parish can be used to bring God’s future nearer? Are there ministries for which you might take responsibility, or in which you should be participating?
Second, we remain alert to God’s presence in the world through joining the weekly celebration of Christ’s resurrection. On Sundays, when we join with the rest of the Christian community to hear God’s word and partake of Christ’s Body and Blood, we are nourished and even transformed by Christ. And especially in this season of Advent, we can find ways to listen for, and attend to, God’s daily invitation to us to deepen our spiritual lives and become more attentive to God’s presence in our own lives. For some of you, the discipline of lectio divina, in which we meditatively read Scripture, might be a useful discipline. For others of you, daily prayer at night, in which you review the day and give it to God, might be a way a remaining more alert to God’s presence in your life.
Some of you know of Episcopal priest and spiritual writer Barbara Crafton. She’s a frequent visitor at parishes and retreat centers. She also writes e-mail reflections on the spiritual life and the weekly lections. In one e-mo, as she calls them, she described how people in her home parish gather to read daily Morning and Evening Prayer. Beginning in Advent, she tells us,
"We will husband our store of quietness, care for it lovingly, knowing that much conspires against it outside the walls of the little church. Advent will be a time of such husbanding for many people, a time when attention is paid to what the spirit needs to greet the little Prince of Peace, soon to come among us once again. This doesn't just happen to us. We have to show up for it. If we want peace, we have to go where it can be found. Where is that for you? In prayer with others? In prayer by yourself?... Now is a good time to consider this, as the old year breathes its last and a fresh new one begins."1
Advent is not a passive season. God invites us to be alert and intentionally prepare for God’s coming. God invites us to prepare for the celebration of God’s birth in Jesus, to prepare for God’s coming at the end of the age, and to prepare for God’s coming to us in the busyness of our days. Are you preparing for God’s coming? We may not know when God will come. We may not know how much time we have left. But we are invited to stay alert, awake, and ready for God’s appearing in our lives. And so we pray,
"Lord, we watch, we wait,
we look, we long for you.
Dispel the clouds and darkness
and awaken us to your glory,
that we may walk in your light,
through Jesus Christ our Lord."2 Amen
1. Barbara Crafton, “The Almost Daily eMo,” November 26,2007.
2. David Adam, Clouds and Glory, Morehouse, Harrisburg, PA, 2001, p. 5.
Today’s Scripture lessons remind us that God invites us to make different kinds of preparations than those our financial advisors, attorneys, real estate agents, travel agents, or women’s magazines counsel. We don’t know how much time we personally have left, but as we begin another church year God invites us to prepare for God’s future. In contrast to the rest of our society, now in the midst of the mad rush to December 25th, we are invited to stop, to take a breath, and to look with hope towards another future.
We get a glimpse of God’s future, a promise of the consummation of God’s rule at the end of the age, in the stirring reading from Isaiah. In God’s future, the prophet assures us, all people and nations will be united, and all will live according to God’s law. In words that ring down the centuries, the prophet also reassures us that God’s future is a future of peace: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” When soldiers are still dying in Afghanistan, when civilians are dying in the busses and markets of Pakistan, Israel, and Palestine, when civil war still plagues Sudan, when people are murdered on college campuses, don’t you cry out to God to bring that peaceable reign into being right now? And what is the prophet’s reply: “O house of Jacob, come let us walk in the light of the Lord.” In whatever time we have left, we too are invited to pursue peace, even as we continue to hope that God’s peaceable kingdom will come soon.
And hope we must. For Jesus sternly warns us in today’s Gospel reading that we do not know when God will fully consummate God’s plan. During this church year, our Gospel lessons will come mostly from the Gospel according to Matthew, a gospel written especially to convey a sense of hope to a struggling Christian community. In today’s passage Jesus is near Jerusalem, near the end of his own earthly ministry. Having just warned his disciples about the destruction of the temple, he now cautions them, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” Throughout the centuries, and still even today, people have claimed to know when the “end of the world” will occur. Think of the many cartoons you have seen of the bearded figure, perhaps wearing a sandwich board, exhorting people to repent because the world is about to end. Think of the Jim Joneses and David Koreshes of our own era who have led so many astray: Think of those who preach the “Rapture.”
We certainly don’t know when Christ will come again, nor when God will bring in God’s future. Nor do we know when our own lives will change – in an instant – despite all our planning. Aren’t we all a heartbeat away from disaster? September 11th, the 2004 tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the recent fires in California. And then there are the tragedies in our own lives. In February, 1995, my nephew Matthew had just turned 18. As he was making plans for his first year at Penn State, he was struck by a deadly leukemia and died that July. A few years back in Athens a 16-year old got behind the wheel after having had too much to drink at an unsupervised party. She missed a turn on a country road and killed her two 14 year old passengers. All of you could tell similar stories. Our lives, our current comfortable lives, truly hang by a thread.
We know that our lives are uncertain, and that we cannot know what the future holds. But as Christians, we do not despair. We don’t know when God will act, or when our lives may change, but we continue to live in hope, gratitude, and expectation. We live in hope, because God has already entered into our world once. We live in hope, because we know that we have been redeemed in Jesus’ death. We live in hope, because we have been given a foretaste of the life to come in the resurrection, a foretaste of what God has in mind not only for us personally, but eventually for the entire world. Because of this hope, we live differently from those who live without it. Because of this hope, we are grateful for Christ’s first coming, and we wait patiently for Christ’s second coming. In this middle time, as we wait for God’s future to come fully, we remain awake and alert to what God is calling us to do now, “now in the time of this mortal life.”
How do we do that? Let me suggest a few ways. First, we can pray about the mission of this parish. We can ask God to show us what God is inviting this parish to do as a parish. In what new ministries might God be inviting this parish to participate? Are there ways in which the resources of this parish can be used to bring God’s future nearer? Are there ministries for which you might take responsibility, or in which you should be participating?
Second, we remain alert to God’s presence in the world through joining the weekly celebration of Christ’s resurrection. On Sundays, when we join with the rest of the Christian community to hear God’s word and partake of Christ’s Body and Blood, we are nourished and even transformed by Christ. And especially in this season of Advent, we can find ways to listen for, and attend to, God’s daily invitation to us to deepen our spiritual lives and become more attentive to God’s presence in our own lives. For some of you, the discipline of lectio divina, in which we meditatively read Scripture, might be a useful discipline. For others of you, daily prayer at night, in which you review the day and give it to God, might be a way a remaining more alert to God’s presence in your life.
Some of you know of Episcopal priest and spiritual writer Barbara Crafton. She’s a frequent visitor at parishes and retreat centers. She also writes e-mail reflections on the spiritual life and the weekly lections. In one e-mo, as she calls them, she described how people in her home parish gather to read daily Morning and Evening Prayer. Beginning in Advent, she tells us,
"We will husband our store of quietness, care for it lovingly, knowing that much conspires against it outside the walls of the little church. Advent will be a time of such husbanding for many people, a time when attention is paid to what the spirit needs to greet the little Prince of Peace, soon to come among us once again. This doesn't just happen to us. We have to show up for it. If we want peace, we have to go where it can be found. Where is that for you? In prayer with others? In prayer by yourself?... Now is a good time to consider this, as the old year breathes its last and a fresh new one begins."1
Advent is not a passive season. God invites us to be alert and intentionally prepare for God’s coming. God invites us to prepare for the celebration of God’s birth in Jesus, to prepare for God’s coming at the end of the age, and to prepare for God’s coming to us in the busyness of our days. Are you preparing for God’s coming? We may not know when God will come. We may not know how much time we have left. But we are invited to stay alert, awake, and ready for God’s appearing in our lives. And so we pray,
"Lord, we watch, we wait,
we look, we long for you.
Dispel the clouds and darkness
and awaken us to your glory,
that we may walk in your light,
through Jesus Christ our Lord."2 Amen
1. Barbara Crafton, “The Almost Daily eMo,” November 26,2007.
2. David Adam, Clouds and Glory, Morehouse, Harrisburg, PA, 2001, p. 5.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
The Kingdom of God's Beloved Son
It’s the last Sunday after Pentecost, the very end of the church year. So why does our church calendar tell us that we are celebrating the feast of Christ the King? Americans, understandably, have negative images of kings. Consider how the writers of the Declaration of Independence characterized George III of England: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” The writers lay out eighteen ways in which the king has oppressed the colonists, allude to the ways they have attempted to redress these ills, and finally conclude that, “A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” And indeed Americans have not pledged allegiance to any king since the Declaration was signed.
Nor is the feast of Christ the King in any of our old prayer books. The old lectionary in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer lists no such feast. Indeed, if we were still using the 1928 prayer book today we would be observing the Sunday Next Before Advent and would be hearing the story from John’s Gospel about the feeding of the five thousand. So where does this feast come from? Is it some ancient observance that Episcopalians only discovered when we revised our prayer book in the 1970s and adopted the Revised Common Lectionary? Actually, as an observance Christ the King only dates from the Italy of 1925. In a response to the growing power of Fascism in Italy, and especially to the government of Benito Mussolini, Pope Pius XI, instituted the feast of Christ the King. For nations wracked by one war and facing another, the day proclaimed God’s reign over the entire world. The day also reminded Christians that their allegiance was to a divine ruler and not to earthly political leaders. In concluding our liturgical year with the acknowledgement of Christ as our true ruler, we now join with the Roman Catholics, as well as Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Methodists, in acknowledging the Lordship of Christ in our lives.
O.K. I get it. But if Christ is my king, my lord, my true ruler, the one to whom I owe primary allegiance, why do we hear this Gospel reading? Aren’t there others that better showcase Jesus’ majesty? Wasn’t Jesus truly regal when he calmed the sea and commanded the winds? Wasn’t his power obvious when he fed the multitudes with bread and fish? Surely he showed his authority when he drove demons out of people and healed them from every imaginable illness. And whenever he debated with the religious leadership, the greater depth of his wisdom was clearly evident. Why this Gospel, that shows Jesus at the lowest point of his life, his humiliation on a cross? Isn’t this Gospel reading more suitable for Good Friday?
Well, certainly we read the whole Passion story in Holy Week, beginning with Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, which we celebrate on Palm Sunday, and going right through to his death on the Cross on Good Friday. As I wrestled with today’s readings, it became clear to me that the Church lets us hear this story again to drive home to us just what kind of Lord we actually have, of what kind of king we are actually subjects. The Gospel of Luke is a Gospel of reversals and irony, and in a wonderfully ironic touch, it is those who here mock and reject Jesus who point to Jesus’ true identity. To begin with, Jesus is mocked by those in political authority. Shortly before the scene of today’s reading, Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate, a man dependent on political power and the threat of violence. Jesus had been accused of saying that he was the Messiah, God’s anointed one. Thinking in political terms, Pilate mockingly asked Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus’ answer? “You say so.” Even so, Pilate had the inscription “This is the King of the Jews” put on the cross. But Jesus was not a political ruler.
Secondly, the religious leaders mock Jesus: “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah….” But Jesus was not a religious leader: he did not found a new rabbinical school or Jewish sect. Those welcoming Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday might have been expecting him to take up arms and free Jerusalem from the hated Romans. Indeed some think that Judas betrayed Jesus in the hope of stirring up a military rebellion. However, Jesus was clearly not called to be a military leader. And so, the sneering soldiers similarly denigrate him. As they cast lots for his clothes, they taunt him, saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” Even the first thief, who thinks only of himself, mocks Jesus: : “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!”
Those who mock and taunt Jesus show us clearly that Jesus is no George III. Jesus is a different kind of king from any we could have imagined. No, Jesus is not a king in political, military, or even religious terms. What Jesus models for us is self-giving, sacrificial love. Unlike the tyrants of his own or even our world, Jesus models the servant-shepherd leader foretold by God in the prophecy of Jeremiah, which we heard in our Old Testament reading. Letting go of any possibility of political, military, or religious power, Jesus offers himself up for the life of the world. At the point of death, Jesus reigns from the cross, giving himself up for us, forgiving us, and assuring us of God’s deep love for us.
What would the kingdom that Jesus announced look like in our world? What would our lives be like if Jesus ruled the nations, instead of Kim Jong-Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Robert Mugabe, or even David Cameron or Barak Obama? Unquestionably, every aspect of our lives would be different. We would have peace instead of endless war. Gone would be exploitation of others and human trafficking, the modern-day equivalent of slavery. Instead of a vengeful, punitive system of justice, we would have mercy and forgiveness. Adequate healthcare would be available to all, instead of only to the fortunately wealthy few. Walls between ethnic groups and races would cease to exist, and all would be included within our communities. When God’s Kingdom comes, the kingdom we pray for every time we recite the Lord’s Prayer, we would truly know shalom, the well being of all humankind, and indeed of all creation. This is our hope, this is what we proclaim, and this is what we pray for with all our hearts. The shalom and reconciliation of all creation is the place to which everything that we have heard, preached, and said this year has led us. This is the point of the whole story: that God’s Kingdom, inaugurated by the birth, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus, would come to full realization.
And what of ourselves? By God’s grace, we have been brought into, transferred to this kingdom governed by Christ. We are now citizens of a different world, not our own. In the world of which we are now citizens, we know that our hope lies not in the agendas of Democrats or Republicans, of capitalists or socialists or communists, of management or labor, of democracy or theocracy. Just as we learned last week that no human monument is forever, so this week our texts proclaim that no human system is forever. None can claim ultimate allegiance from us. Every system ultimately fails. Only Christ is truly sovereign. Only Christ has the authority to claim us as his subjects.
As Christ’s subjects, we are invited to live as he lived. We are invited to see that at the heart of everything is a God who deeply, truly, passionately loves us. We discover with joy that Jesus is the Ultimate Reality who should be our Ultimate Concern. We celebrate Jesus not as a distant tyrant, a George III across a three thousand mile-wide ocean from his subjects, but as a near, dear, close presence in our lives – as close as a prayer. We celebrate Jesus as lover of the world and all that is in it. We celebrate Jesus as pure Mother/Father love, as supreme healer and transformer of life. We celebrate Jesus, God’s anointed one, who through his death and resurrection takes away the sin of the world for all and forever.
And so as we celebrate the feast of Christ the King, and as we give thanks to God for blessing us with the gift of inclusion in his kingdom of grace, let us pray in the words of St. Teresa of Avila, “We are all vassals of the King. May it please his Majesty that, like brave soldiers, we may look only where the banner of our King is flying, and thus follow his will.” Amen.
Nor is the feast of Christ the King in any of our old prayer books. The old lectionary in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer lists no such feast. Indeed, if we were still using the 1928 prayer book today we would be observing the Sunday Next Before Advent and would be hearing the story from John’s Gospel about the feeding of the five thousand. So where does this feast come from? Is it some ancient observance that Episcopalians only discovered when we revised our prayer book in the 1970s and adopted the Revised Common Lectionary? Actually, as an observance Christ the King only dates from the Italy of 1925. In a response to the growing power of Fascism in Italy, and especially to the government of Benito Mussolini, Pope Pius XI, instituted the feast of Christ the King. For nations wracked by one war and facing another, the day proclaimed God’s reign over the entire world. The day also reminded Christians that their allegiance was to a divine ruler and not to earthly political leaders. In concluding our liturgical year with the acknowledgement of Christ as our true ruler, we now join with the Roman Catholics, as well as Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Methodists, in acknowledging the Lordship of Christ in our lives.
O.K. I get it. But if Christ is my king, my lord, my true ruler, the one to whom I owe primary allegiance, why do we hear this Gospel reading? Aren’t there others that better showcase Jesus’ majesty? Wasn’t Jesus truly regal when he calmed the sea and commanded the winds? Wasn’t his power obvious when he fed the multitudes with bread and fish? Surely he showed his authority when he drove demons out of people and healed them from every imaginable illness. And whenever he debated with the religious leadership, the greater depth of his wisdom was clearly evident. Why this Gospel, that shows Jesus at the lowest point of his life, his humiliation on a cross? Isn’t this Gospel reading more suitable for Good Friday?
Well, certainly we read the whole Passion story in Holy Week, beginning with Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, which we celebrate on Palm Sunday, and going right through to his death on the Cross on Good Friday. As I wrestled with today’s readings, it became clear to me that the Church lets us hear this story again to drive home to us just what kind of Lord we actually have, of what kind of king we are actually subjects. The Gospel of Luke is a Gospel of reversals and irony, and in a wonderfully ironic touch, it is those who here mock and reject Jesus who point to Jesus’ true identity. To begin with, Jesus is mocked by those in political authority. Shortly before the scene of today’s reading, Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate, a man dependent on political power and the threat of violence. Jesus had been accused of saying that he was the Messiah, God’s anointed one. Thinking in political terms, Pilate mockingly asked Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus’ answer? “You say so.” Even so, Pilate had the inscription “This is the King of the Jews” put on the cross. But Jesus was not a political ruler.
Secondly, the religious leaders mock Jesus: “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah….” But Jesus was not a religious leader: he did not found a new rabbinical school or Jewish sect. Those welcoming Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday might have been expecting him to take up arms and free Jerusalem from the hated Romans. Indeed some think that Judas betrayed Jesus in the hope of stirring up a military rebellion. However, Jesus was clearly not called to be a military leader. And so, the sneering soldiers similarly denigrate him. As they cast lots for his clothes, they taunt him, saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” Even the first thief, who thinks only of himself, mocks Jesus: : “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!”
Those who mock and taunt Jesus show us clearly that Jesus is no George III. Jesus is a different kind of king from any we could have imagined. No, Jesus is not a king in political, military, or even religious terms. What Jesus models for us is self-giving, sacrificial love. Unlike the tyrants of his own or even our world, Jesus models the servant-shepherd leader foretold by God in the prophecy of Jeremiah, which we heard in our Old Testament reading. Letting go of any possibility of political, military, or religious power, Jesus offers himself up for the life of the world. At the point of death, Jesus reigns from the cross, giving himself up for us, forgiving us, and assuring us of God’s deep love for us.
What would the kingdom that Jesus announced look like in our world? What would our lives be like if Jesus ruled the nations, instead of Kim Jong-Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Robert Mugabe, or even David Cameron or Barak Obama? Unquestionably, every aspect of our lives would be different. We would have peace instead of endless war. Gone would be exploitation of others and human trafficking, the modern-day equivalent of slavery. Instead of a vengeful, punitive system of justice, we would have mercy and forgiveness. Adequate healthcare would be available to all, instead of only to the fortunately wealthy few. Walls between ethnic groups and races would cease to exist, and all would be included within our communities. When God’s Kingdom comes, the kingdom we pray for every time we recite the Lord’s Prayer, we would truly know shalom, the well being of all humankind, and indeed of all creation. This is our hope, this is what we proclaim, and this is what we pray for with all our hearts. The shalom and reconciliation of all creation is the place to which everything that we have heard, preached, and said this year has led us. This is the point of the whole story: that God’s Kingdom, inaugurated by the birth, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus, would come to full realization.
And what of ourselves? By God’s grace, we have been brought into, transferred to this kingdom governed by Christ. We are now citizens of a different world, not our own. In the world of which we are now citizens, we know that our hope lies not in the agendas of Democrats or Republicans, of capitalists or socialists or communists, of management or labor, of democracy or theocracy. Just as we learned last week that no human monument is forever, so this week our texts proclaim that no human system is forever. None can claim ultimate allegiance from us. Every system ultimately fails. Only Christ is truly sovereign. Only Christ has the authority to claim us as his subjects.
As Christ’s subjects, we are invited to live as he lived. We are invited to see that at the heart of everything is a God who deeply, truly, passionately loves us. We discover with joy that Jesus is the Ultimate Reality who should be our Ultimate Concern. We celebrate Jesus not as a distant tyrant, a George III across a three thousand mile-wide ocean from his subjects, but as a near, dear, close presence in our lives – as close as a prayer. We celebrate Jesus as lover of the world and all that is in it. We celebrate Jesus as pure Mother/Father love, as supreme healer and transformer of life. We celebrate Jesus, God’s anointed one, who through his death and resurrection takes away the sin of the world for all and forever.
And so as we celebrate the feast of Christ the King, and as we give thanks to God for blessing us with the gift of inclusion in his kingdom of grace, let us pray in the words of St. Teresa of Avila, “We are all vassals of the King. May it please his Majesty that, like brave soldiers, we may look only where the banner of our King is flying, and thus follow his will.” Amen.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
New Heavens and a New Earth
Since I am older than dirt, I actually studied the classics of English poetry in high school. I think it must have been sometime during my sophomore year that I read Shelley’s haunting poem, “Ozymandias.” The poem was written in 1818, in response, some think, to the recent arrival in London of a colossal statue of Ramses II, the great pharaoh of ancient Egypt. How many of you remember it?
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
I was reminded of Shelley’s poem, and of so many other great deserted statues and monuments, as I tried to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” today’s Scripture readings. In our Gospel lesson in particular, Jesus, now just days away from his own death, reminds his disciples and us that one of the greatest buildings of the ancient world, the great second temple in Jerusalem, is about to suffer the same fate as the statue of Ramses: “the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” And we know that in 70 AD, that vast temple complex, and indeed all of Jerusalem, was reduced to rubble by the Roman armies. Four centuries later the great monuments of ancient Rome suffered the same fate. Despite our pride, despite our trust in earthly power, nothing lasts. All eventually is lost – that is certain.
Actually as we think about the world and our place in it, there are, as Daniel Clendenin reminds us, four different kinds of sure and certain losses.1 The first loss is the one we know best, that of our own bodies. Whether you’re a Haitian male, whose life expectancy at birth is now about 30, or a Japanese female, whose life expectancy is over 85, “mortality rates are 100% certain.” Secondly, we know that civilizations die. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Incas, the Aztecs – all are gone with scarcely a trace. And more: with the climate changes, overpopulation, famine, and wars that coming centuries will surely see, many, if not most, of the cultures in today’s world will also vanish without a trace. The end of the earth as we know it is also sure and certain. Indeed, many scientists believe that the earth is now about middle-aged, and will be incinerated by the sun in about 5 billion years. As particle physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne warns, “humanity and all forms of carbon-based life will prove a transient episode in the history of the cosmos.” Finally, the universe itself may disappear. Astronomers tell us that our expanding universe will at some point collapse in on itself.
And what comes after that? Here is the good news! Christians believe that the end of humanity and of the cosmos as we know it is not the final end. We believe in God’s promises to us. There is more to God’s plan. In today’s lections, we hear God’s promise clearly in the prophecy of Isaiah. Using a restored Jerusalem as the symbol for an entirely new creation, God promises us that “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth.” God promises us a restored creation in which there will be no more lives cut short, no more weeping, no more loss or plunder. God promises us a peaceable kingdom, in which all the animals and human beings will live together in harmony. God promises an earth in which “they shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.” In the same way, Jesus acknowledges the disruption and pain that the disciples will face in the coming days. Nevertheless, in a passage following today’s Gospel reading, he commands them to “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” And again, Paul reminds the Christians in Thessaloniki to continue valiantly doing the Lord’s work, even as they wait for the fulfillment of God’s promises.
Do we believe any of this? Do we believe God’s promises of a restored creation? Whenever you read Morning or Evening Prayer or witness a baptism or confirmation, you repeat in the words of the Apostles Creed, that Jesus “will come again to judge the living and the dead.” Sunday by Sunday, we affirm in the words of the Nicene Creed that Jesus “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” And in all times and places we pray in the words of the Lord’s Prayer that God’s kingdom will come, that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Every time we say any of these words, we affirm our belief in God’s promises that justice will be done, that wrongs will be righted, that all will live in peace and health, and that creation will be restored and renewed. Blessed hope, blessed assurance!
How and when will all this happen? We have no idea. The psalmist reminds us that “a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, and like a watch in the night.” Truly we are in the realm of mystery here. What should we do as we wait for the unfolding of God’s plan, as we continue to hope for the fulfillment of God’s promises? Here, my brothers and sisters, we are on firmer ground. As Paul told the Thessalonian Christians, we are to pursue conscientiously the work God has given us to do, and we are never to “weary in doing what is right,” as we ourselves partner with God in the bringing in of God’s kingdom.
What does that mean for us here in Gallipolis? Today we give especial thanks for what we have inherited in this region. We are grateful to God for the beautiful land with which God has gifted us, for the mountains, the rivers, the fertile land. We are grateful for the history of the people here, for the music, crafts, language, literature, and arts of this place. We are grateful for the strong communities of faith in this region. At the same time, we know that we also have a responsibility to care for this land and its people. While we wait for the fulfillment of God’s promises to us, we are called to be good stewards of the resources of this region. We pray that God will guide us and our leaders in decisions to be made about energy, mining, and agriculture. We are also called to be mindful of the needs of God’s people. Perhaps we in this parish, as relatively well educated, middle class people, are called to be “bridges,” as one speaker put it, for those who are still mired in the poverty of this region. In our Loaves and Fishes dinners and in our diaper distributions, we provide material help to some of those in need. To what else is God calling us? What else does our community ask of us?
And above all that, we are called to remember that even as we are “placed among things that are passing away,” we are to trust in God’s promises. We may not know how and when they will be fulfilled, nor do we know what we may have to give up in order for God’s will to be done. In a lovely essay in a collection entitled Heaven, Barbara Brown Taylor tells of the death of her father. He was having a hard time dying. As she lay next to him one Sunday, she whispered, “You’re having to let it all go, aren’t you? All the places you haven’t traveled yet, all the places you’ve been. Your first girlfriend, your favorite chair, your prize students, your grandsons…. Everything that makes you you, you’re having to let go now. Oh, Poppa…. It has to be so hard.” After her father’s death, Taylor began to cultivate what she called a “radical trust in God.” Though less attached to specific beliefs about heaven, she nevertheless has an “enduring sense” that “everything will be revealed in the hereafter.” She now hopes that God’s judgment will reveal not only all her shortcomings but also what she may have done right in her lifetime. Most important, she tells us, “in the end my highest hope … is simply to be rescued when my time comes – plucked from the roadside where I have fallen, struck dumb by all there is to love and grieve in this world – and gathered into God’s own safety, whatever that turns out to mean. I am willing to forego the details, as long as I know whose lap I am in.”2
As we confront the mystery of the end of all things, including ourselves, and as we embrace the hope of God’s restoration of creation, of new heavens and a new earth, we continue to trust that God is working out God’s purposes, and that, in God’s good time, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
1. In “Heaven: Our ‘Enduring Fascination,’” The Journey with Jesus – Notes to Myself," http://www.journeywithjesus.net, accessed November 11, 2010.
2. Barbara Brown Taylor, “Leaving Myself Behind,” in Heaven, Roger Ferlo, ed. (New York: Seabury, 2007), 11-12
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
I was reminded of Shelley’s poem, and of so many other great deserted statues and monuments, as I tried to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” today’s Scripture readings. In our Gospel lesson in particular, Jesus, now just days away from his own death, reminds his disciples and us that one of the greatest buildings of the ancient world, the great second temple in Jerusalem, is about to suffer the same fate as the statue of Ramses: “the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” And we know that in 70 AD, that vast temple complex, and indeed all of Jerusalem, was reduced to rubble by the Roman armies. Four centuries later the great monuments of ancient Rome suffered the same fate. Despite our pride, despite our trust in earthly power, nothing lasts. All eventually is lost – that is certain.
Actually as we think about the world and our place in it, there are, as Daniel Clendenin reminds us, four different kinds of sure and certain losses.1 The first loss is the one we know best, that of our own bodies. Whether you’re a Haitian male, whose life expectancy at birth is now about 30, or a Japanese female, whose life expectancy is over 85, “mortality rates are 100% certain.” Secondly, we know that civilizations die. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Incas, the Aztecs – all are gone with scarcely a trace. And more: with the climate changes, overpopulation, famine, and wars that coming centuries will surely see, many, if not most, of the cultures in today’s world will also vanish without a trace. The end of the earth as we know it is also sure and certain. Indeed, many scientists believe that the earth is now about middle-aged, and will be incinerated by the sun in about 5 billion years. As particle physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne warns, “humanity and all forms of carbon-based life will prove a transient episode in the history of the cosmos.” Finally, the universe itself may disappear. Astronomers tell us that our expanding universe will at some point collapse in on itself.
And what comes after that? Here is the good news! Christians believe that the end of humanity and of the cosmos as we know it is not the final end. We believe in God’s promises to us. There is more to God’s plan. In today’s lections, we hear God’s promise clearly in the prophecy of Isaiah. Using a restored Jerusalem as the symbol for an entirely new creation, God promises us that “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth.” God promises us a restored creation in which there will be no more lives cut short, no more weeping, no more loss or plunder. God promises us a peaceable kingdom, in which all the animals and human beings will live together in harmony. God promises an earth in which “they shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.” In the same way, Jesus acknowledges the disruption and pain that the disciples will face in the coming days. Nevertheless, in a passage following today’s Gospel reading, he commands them to “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” And again, Paul reminds the Christians in Thessaloniki to continue valiantly doing the Lord’s work, even as they wait for the fulfillment of God’s promises.
Do we believe any of this? Do we believe God’s promises of a restored creation? Whenever you read Morning or Evening Prayer or witness a baptism or confirmation, you repeat in the words of the Apostles Creed, that Jesus “will come again to judge the living and the dead.” Sunday by Sunday, we affirm in the words of the Nicene Creed that Jesus “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” And in all times and places we pray in the words of the Lord’s Prayer that God’s kingdom will come, that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Every time we say any of these words, we affirm our belief in God’s promises that justice will be done, that wrongs will be righted, that all will live in peace and health, and that creation will be restored and renewed. Blessed hope, blessed assurance!
How and when will all this happen? We have no idea. The psalmist reminds us that “a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, and like a watch in the night.” Truly we are in the realm of mystery here. What should we do as we wait for the unfolding of God’s plan, as we continue to hope for the fulfillment of God’s promises? Here, my brothers and sisters, we are on firmer ground. As Paul told the Thessalonian Christians, we are to pursue conscientiously the work God has given us to do, and we are never to “weary in doing what is right,” as we ourselves partner with God in the bringing in of God’s kingdom.
What does that mean for us here in Gallipolis? Today we give especial thanks for what we have inherited in this region. We are grateful to God for the beautiful land with which God has gifted us, for the mountains, the rivers, the fertile land. We are grateful for the history of the people here, for the music, crafts, language, literature, and arts of this place. We are grateful for the strong communities of faith in this region. At the same time, we know that we also have a responsibility to care for this land and its people. While we wait for the fulfillment of God’s promises to us, we are called to be good stewards of the resources of this region. We pray that God will guide us and our leaders in decisions to be made about energy, mining, and agriculture. We are also called to be mindful of the needs of God’s people. Perhaps we in this parish, as relatively well educated, middle class people, are called to be “bridges,” as one speaker put it, for those who are still mired in the poverty of this region. In our Loaves and Fishes dinners and in our diaper distributions, we provide material help to some of those in need. To what else is God calling us? What else does our community ask of us?
And above all that, we are called to remember that even as we are “placed among things that are passing away,” we are to trust in God’s promises. We may not know how and when they will be fulfilled, nor do we know what we may have to give up in order for God’s will to be done. In a lovely essay in a collection entitled Heaven, Barbara Brown Taylor tells of the death of her father. He was having a hard time dying. As she lay next to him one Sunday, she whispered, “You’re having to let it all go, aren’t you? All the places you haven’t traveled yet, all the places you’ve been. Your first girlfriend, your favorite chair, your prize students, your grandsons…. Everything that makes you you, you’re having to let go now. Oh, Poppa…. It has to be so hard.” After her father’s death, Taylor began to cultivate what she called a “radical trust in God.” Though less attached to specific beliefs about heaven, she nevertheless has an “enduring sense” that “everything will be revealed in the hereafter.” She now hopes that God’s judgment will reveal not only all her shortcomings but also what she may have done right in her lifetime. Most important, she tells us, “in the end my highest hope … is simply to be rescued when my time comes – plucked from the roadside where I have fallen, struck dumb by all there is to love and grieve in this world – and gathered into God’s own safety, whatever that turns out to mean. I am willing to forego the details, as long as I know whose lap I am in.”2
As we confront the mystery of the end of all things, including ourselves, and as we embrace the hope of God’s restoration of creation, of new heavens and a new earth, we continue to trust that God is working out God’s purposes, and that, in God’s good time, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
1. In “Heaven: Our ‘Enduring Fascination,’” The Journey with Jesus – Notes to Myself," http://www.journeywithjesus.net, accessed November 11, 2010.
2. Barbara Brown Taylor, “Leaving Myself Behind,” in Heaven, Roger Ferlo, ed. (New York: Seabury, 2007), 11-12
Sunday, October 24, 2010
God Knows Who We Are
The Pharisees get a bad rap in the Gospels! Why, to call someone a Pharisee is almost an insult! The Gospels of John and Matthew, describe them in the most negative terms. Matthew, for example, shows Jesus calling them evil and malicious. Luke’s account is not quite so negative, and Luke even shows Jesus occasionally speaking positively of them. And why not? They were the good people in ancient Israel, the fine, upstanding citizens like ourselves. Even though the Law of Moses was detailed and complicated, the Pharisees did their best to follow its commands. They kept the feasts and fasts. They went regularly to the temple and made the required sacrifices. They bathed and prayed at home. They donated generously to the upkeep of the temple and did their best to associate only with people whose moral standards matched their own. They were probably responsible for the survival of Judaism after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD. They were the good people.
And the Pharisee in the parable Jesus tells in this week’s reading from Luke’s Gospel appears to be better than most. He fasts twice a week, and he tithes all his income, not just what is strictly required. Why is he not a model for all of us good Christians? Perhaps it’s because of the way he prays. He doesn’t really express gratitude to God, does he? Instead, he contemptuously compares himself with others: “I thank you that I am not like other people.” Ironically, of course, he is “like other people,” even though he doesn’t see his resemblance to them. Worse yet, in his “prayer” he goes on to judge others, including the tax collector who has also come to the temple with him. And what does the Pharisee request from God? Nothing! He appears to trust solely in his own ability to follow the commandments and asks nothing of God. He has such a high opinion of himself that he almost has no need of God. He may be righteous, but does he love and trust God? Doubtful.
Does the Pharisee sound like anyone we know? A couple of years ago, a woman began a letter to Dear Abby saying, “I know I am a real catch. But for the life of me, I can’t get a date with the right kind of guy.” She went on to recite all her wonderful traits, then ended her letter complaining, “I’m so sick of meeting creeps. I really want someone in my own league. I’ve been told a thousand times that I’m gorgeous and stunning…. Where are the male equivalents?” Dear Abby’s sage response was, “They died of altitude sickness, trying to climb the pedestal you have placed yourself on…. [T]he sooner you become less preoccupied with your own perfection, the more likely you will meet your male “equivalent.” Of course, that attitude is just Dear Abby! We’ve never felt like that letter writer! Or have we?
And what about the other character in this parable, the tax collector? Tax collectors were really scum in ancient Israel. They were not good people. They followed very few, if any, of the commandments. They collaborated with the hated Roman government. They gouged their own people. They were not people I would want to emulate! However, in contrast to the Pharisee, the tax collector acknowledges his sins. Standing outside the holiest part of the temple, he knows he has not lived up to God’s expectations. In remorse and shame, facing the truth about himself, he beats his breast. And then he does the one right thing: he asks God for something! He asks for God’s mercy and compassion. Unlike the Pharisee, who asked nothing of God, the tax collector asks God for compassion, and, by implication, grace to amend his life. And so, as Jesus tells us, the tax collector in this parable went home “justified,” i.e., in a right relationship with God.
So is the tax collector our spiritual model? I don’t think that Jesus expected his hearers, or that Luke expected his readers, or, by extension us, to adopt a criminal lifestyle, surrender our integrity, or enter a morally dubious occupation, just so that we can be forgiven abundantly by God. As Paul asks in Romans 6, “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? By no means!” Then should we do nothing but beat up on ourselves, continually acknowledging and bewailing “our manifold sins and wickedness,” denying any good things we have been able to do? Probably not. Rather, we are to acknowledge who we all are before God, that we “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” That we are needy, unfinished, imperfect creatures. That we are not self-made, that we cannot trust solely in ourselves if we are to grow spiritually, that we must depend on God to work within us. That if we are to have a right relationship with God, we need God’s help and God’s grace. That we must not close ourselves off from God’s grace by thinking that we don’t need it, but, rather we need to be honest and open about our need for grace to amend our lives and to continue to grow as God’s children. God knows who we are, and God loves us as we are, failings and all. When we acknowledge who we are, then God’s grace can work in us. There is no room for God’s grace, if we don’t think we need it, but when we ask God for grace, as does the tax collector in the parable, then God is more than ready to pour out God’s grace on us.
In Vienna in Austria there is a church in which the former rulers of Austria, the Hapsburgs, are buried. When royal funerals arrived there the mourners would knock at the door of the church to be allowed in. A priest inside would ask “Who is it that desires admission here?” A guard would call out, “His apostolic majesty, the emperor.” The priest would answer, “I don’t know him.” They would knock a second time, and again the priest would ask who was there. The funeral guard outside would announce, “The highest emperor.” A second time the priest would say, “I don’t know him.” A third time they would knock on the door and the priest would ask “Who is it?” The third time the answer would be, “A poor sinner, your brother.”
That, my friends, is what we all are. The truth is that we are probably like both the Pharisee and the tax collector – and both were sinners in their own way. Although we may not reach the level of the writer to Dear Abby, there are probably days when we think we don’t need God. Likewise, there are probably days when we feel our need for God acutely. What we want to do as Christians is, by God’s grace, to move further away from the Pharisee’s self-sufficiency and closer to the tax collector’s acknowledgment of our need for God’s grace. One way to do that is through prayer. Notice, in fact, what both the Pharisee and the tax collector are doing in this parable. They are praying. In fact, it is in prayer that we often come face to face with both truth and grace, the truth about ourselves and the grace of God. Like the tax collector, if we can pray focusing our attention on God rather than on ourselves, God will help us to see ourselves as we truly are, incomplete yet beloved by God, and God will help us to become the people that God wants us to be.
And so we must pray. Certainly, some of our prayer must be corporate prayer. We are surely nourished Sunday by Sunday by the corporate prayers that we offer in the liturgy. But we must also, at some point in our day or week, pray as individuals. In the midst of all our work, family obligations, committee meetings, much-needed rest and recreation, travel, visits with relatives and friends, exercise, we must find that quiet time in the day to encounter God personally. As you know, our church has inherited a rich tradition of contemplative prayer. Lest you think that’s something for only monks and nuns, let me quickly add that contemplative prayer is at its heart simply sitting quietly and opening yourself to God. There are many ways to do this. You can sit in absolute silence, you can meditate on Scripture, you can pray with an icon, you can write in a spiritual journal, you can join me here in this church on Wednesdays at noon and on our Advent quiet day in December . There are also many resources available to help you. What is important is to commit yourself to taking some time to let God speak to you through one or the other of these means. Are you willing to let God speak to you in this way? Can you commit yourself to even ten minutes a day being alone with God in prayer? If you do, I promise you that God will richly bless you in those ten minutes and in the rest of your life.
And the Pharisee in the parable Jesus tells in this week’s reading from Luke’s Gospel appears to be better than most. He fasts twice a week, and he tithes all his income, not just what is strictly required. Why is he not a model for all of us good Christians? Perhaps it’s because of the way he prays. He doesn’t really express gratitude to God, does he? Instead, he contemptuously compares himself with others: “I thank you that I am not like other people.” Ironically, of course, he is “like other people,” even though he doesn’t see his resemblance to them. Worse yet, in his “prayer” he goes on to judge others, including the tax collector who has also come to the temple with him. And what does the Pharisee request from God? Nothing! He appears to trust solely in his own ability to follow the commandments and asks nothing of God. He has such a high opinion of himself that he almost has no need of God. He may be righteous, but does he love and trust God? Doubtful.
Does the Pharisee sound like anyone we know? A couple of years ago, a woman began a letter to Dear Abby saying, “I know I am a real catch. But for the life of me, I can’t get a date with the right kind of guy.” She went on to recite all her wonderful traits, then ended her letter complaining, “I’m so sick of meeting creeps. I really want someone in my own league. I’ve been told a thousand times that I’m gorgeous and stunning…. Where are the male equivalents?” Dear Abby’s sage response was, “They died of altitude sickness, trying to climb the pedestal you have placed yourself on…. [T]he sooner you become less preoccupied with your own perfection, the more likely you will meet your male “equivalent.” Of course, that attitude is just Dear Abby! We’ve never felt like that letter writer! Or have we?
And what about the other character in this parable, the tax collector? Tax collectors were really scum in ancient Israel. They were not good people. They followed very few, if any, of the commandments. They collaborated with the hated Roman government. They gouged their own people. They were not people I would want to emulate! However, in contrast to the Pharisee, the tax collector acknowledges his sins. Standing outside the holiest part of the temple, he knows he has not lived up to God’s expectations. In remorse and shame, facing the truth about himself, he beats his breast. And then he does the one right thing: he asks God for something! He asks for God’s mercy and compassion. Unlike the Pharisee, who asked nothing of God, the tax collector asks God for compassion, and, by implication, grace to amend his life. And so, as Jesus tells us, the tax collector in this parable went home “justified,” i.e., in a right relationship with God.
So is the tax collector our spiritual model? I don’t think that Jesus expected his hearers, or that Luke expected his readers, or, by extension us, to adopt a criminal lifestyle, surrender our integrity, or enter a morally dubious occupation, just so that we can be forgiven abundantly by God. As Paul asks in Romans 6, “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? By no means!” Then should we do nothing but beat up on ourselves, continually acknowledging and bewailing “our manifold sins and wickedness,” denying any good things we have been able to do? Probably not. Rather, we are to acknowledge who we all are before God, that we “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” That we are needy, unfinished, imperfect creatures. That we are not self-made, that we cannot trust solely in ourselves if we are to grow spiritually, that we must depend on God to work within us. That if we are to have a right relationship with God, we need God’s help and God’s grace. That we must not close ourselves off from God’s grace by thinking that we don’t need it, but, rather we need to be honest and open about our need for grace to amend our lives and to continue to grow as God’s children. God knows who we are, and God loves us as we are, failings and all. When we acknowledge who we are, then God’s grace can work in us. There is no room for God’s grace, if we don’t think we need it, but when we ask God for grace, as does the tax collector in the parable, then God is more than ready to pour out God’s grace on us.
In Vienna in Austria there is a church in which the former rulers of Austria, the Hapsburgs, are buried. When royal funerals arrived there the mourners would knock at the door of the church to be allowed in. A priest inside would ask “Who is it that desires admission here?” A guard would call out, “His apostolic majesty, the emperor.” The priest would answer, “I don’t know him.” They would knock a second time, and again the priest would ask who was there. The funeral guard outside would announce, “The highest emperor.” A second time the priest would say, “I don’t know him.” A third time they would knock on the door and the priest would ask “Who is it?” The third time the answer would be, “A poor sinner, your brother.”
That, my friends, is what we all are. The truth is that we are probably like both the Pharisee and the tax collector – and both were sinners in their own way. Although we may not reach the level of the writer to Dear Abby, there are probably days when we think we don’t need God. Likewise, there are probably days when we feel our need for God acutely. What we want to do as Christians is, by God’s grace, to move further away from the Pharisee’s self-sufficiency and closer to the tax collector’s acknowledgment of our need for God’s grace. One way to do that is through prayer. Notice, in fact, what both the Pharisee and the tax collector are doing in this parable. They are praying. In fact, it is in prayer that we often come face to face with both truth and grace, the truth about ourselves and the grace of God. Like the tax collector, if we can pray focusing our attention on God rather than on ourselves, God will help us to see ourselves as we truly are, incomplete yet beloved by God, and God will help us to become the people that God wants us to be.
And so we must pray. Certainly, some of our prayer must be corporate prayer. We are surely nourished Sunday by Sunday by the corporate prayers that we offer in the liturgy. But we must also, at some point in our day or week, pray as individuals. In the midst of all our work, family obligations, committee meetings, much-needed rest and recreation, travel, visits with relatives and friends, exercise, we must find that quiet time in the day to encounter God personally. As you know, our church has inherited a rich tradition of contemplative prayer. Lest you think that’s something for only monks and nuns, let me quickly add that contemplative prayer is at its heart simply sitting quietly and opening yourself to God. There are many ways to do this. You can sit in absolute silence, you can meditate on Scripture, you can pray with an icon, you can write in a spiritual journal, you can join me here in this church on Wednesdays at noon and on our Advent quiet day in December . There are also many resources available to help you. What is important is to commit yourself to taking some time to let God speak to you through one or the other of these means. Are you willing to let God speak to you in this way? Can you commit yourself to even ten minutes a day being alone with God in prayer? If you do, I promise you that God will richly bless you in those ten minutes and in the rest of your life.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Bloom Where You are Re-planted
What must it have felt like? Just imagine, all the leaders of your people, the royal family, the political leaders, the artisans and craftsmen, most of the priests and royal spokespeople taken into exile, ripped away from Jerusalem and deported to Babylon. The beautiful temple built by Solomon looted and dismantled. That’s what happened to the people of Judea in 586 B.C. To feel the shock of that event, let’s think about it in our own terms. Suppose that after a failed series of political maneuvers and attempts at alliances, some foreign power invaded the United States, kidnapped the president and first lady, the members of Congress, the governors, the editors of the leading news media, the presidents of the colleges and universities, and the heads of the major manufacturing and financial institutions. Kidnapped them all and took them from Washington to their own capital. And on the way, the armies of this foreign destroyed the White House and the Capitol Building. This is what Jeremiah predicted would happen to the people of Judah, and this is what God allowed to happen. You can imagine that all the deported national leaders felt profound shock. You can bet that they were completely disoriented, that they felt dislocated and completely despondent. And what of those left behind? The peasants and workers, the petty artisans and slaves? What must they have felt? What do we feel when the ground shifts under our feet, and the world as we know it completely disappears?
God allowed all this to happen to the people of Judea, but the Exile was not God’s last word to God’s people. In today’s reading from the writings of the prophet Jeremiah, we get an inkling that there will be more to the story. In the midst of the people’s shock and desolation, God commanded Jeremiah to write a letter to the exiles. In the opening part of this letter, which is omitted from our lection, we learn that one of Jeremiah’s reasons for writing it was to contradict the assurances of the false prophets that the Exiles would return to Jerusalem in a year or two. No, Jeremiah tells them straight out, the Exile will last for a full seventy years – in the ancient world long enough for at least three, perhaps four, generations to be born. What is more important, through Jeremiah God commands the people to settle down in Babylon, to build houses and plant crops, to give their children in marriage so that the community will continue to grow and thrive, and to do good for the city in which they will now live. What is most important, as we hear in the verses immediately following today’s reading, God reminds the people of God’s promise of restoration: when the seventy years are done, “I will fulfill to you my promise and bring your back to this place. For surely I know the plans I have for you … plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” Exile is not the last word, says God. But meanwhile, make the best of your circumstances, and “bloom where you are re-planted.”
“Bloom where you are re-planted.” Hai Doo was a refugee from Myanmar. When he arrived in this country, legally, he had virtually nothing. He works in a laundry, and he now owns a home in Phoenix, Arizona. When he first came to Phoenix, he was sure that owning a home was impossible for him. However, matching grants converted his $5,000 in savings into a $24,000 down payment on a house. “I never thought I would get help like this,” he said. We’ve heard a lot in the news about Joe Arpaio, the Maricopa County sheriff who has taken a hard line on undocumented workers in the Phoenix area. However, we have heard almost nothing about the programs in Maricopa County that have welcomed people like Hai Doo. Hai Doo is only one of a long list of people supported by both the federal and the state government, who have been able to settle down and begin rebuilding their shattered lives. The list includes refugees not only from Myanmar, but also from Bosnia and Kosovo, who came in the early 1990s, and more recently from Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Bhutan, Burundi, Ethiopia, and China. Despite the dislocation of leaving their homelands, almost always in the midst of civil war, despite the change in climate, language, economy, and culture, these refugee communities have begun to flourish. Like many other dislocated communities, they have put down roots in the U.S., begun to regrow their families, and even begun to give back to the cities that have helped them. Like the exiled Judeans, they have heard a word of promise and taken heart. They have begun to bloom where they are now planted.
Where are we? Are we in exile? Sometimes, as I walk around this church, I feel as if we think we are. For sure we’re no longer living in the church of the 1960s and ‘70s. The pictures in the hallway celebrate that time and earlier, when children filled the classrooms, sang in the children’s choir, and trained to be acolytes. Adult choir members filled the choir pews. Teens came for youth group, and everyone enjoyed ice cream socials, picnics, and summer camp. There were plenty of workers for rummage sales and covered-dish suppers. It was a great time to be the Episcopal Church – or so we thought. Friends, the sad truth is that the world of those photographs is a vanished world, behind us just as surely as high-button shoes and buggy whips. We need only look around us to know that we are no longer living in that world and will not live in it again, or at least for a long time. Every conceivable activity from sports, to shopping, to entertainment, to school competes with church. There’s no such thing as the Sabbath – we live in a 24/7 world. New communications media enrich – or harm – our lives. Meanwhile, here at St. Peter’s, like many congregations, we have young families and retirees, but no teens, and we have few adults between forty and sixty. As elsewhere, our attendance and pledges are down, from even the 1980s, our choirs have hung up their vestments, and the ECW is the only church group that regularly meets. At a time when many congregations are joining clusters or sharing clergy, you have gone out on a limb to call a full-time priest – at least for now.
So is this God’s last word to us? Are we to remain dispirited and dislocated exiles? Not if we believe what God said to the Judean exiles through Jeremiah. Like them, we too have God’s promise: “I will fulfill to you my promise…. For surely I know the plans I have for you … plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” I myself truly believe that the Holy Spirit is doing a new thing in our churches. We cannot yet see what shape that new thing will take. But we have God’s promise. With God’s promise in mind, while we wait for God’s will to be revealed, for St. Peter’s and for the Episcopal Church and other churches, we do so with hope. We continue to be faithful. We do the best we can, where we are, not where we wish we were. We adapt to new circumstances. We bloom where are re-planted.
What is most important, we hear God’s command to grow. If we believe God’s promises, then we consciously commit ourselves to doing everything we possibly can to reach out to others and to make St. Peter’s a truly welcoming, inviting, and inclusive community. For all of us commitment to growth means continuing to deepen our own relationship with Jesus, continuing to grow as his disciples through commitment to the disciplines, of prayer, study, worship, and giving of self and resources, in other words, as I told the confirmands on Wednesday evening, committing to a rule of life. For all of us, commitment to growth also means taking the needs of our wider community seriously and engaging in ministry that meets the needs of that community. Yesterday at Mountain Grace, we heard about the needs of the younger generation in this region and about ways some churches are reaching out to younger people. My imagination was stimulated, as I’d guess Carolyn Cogar’s and Anne Cappelletti’s were too. Commitment to growth also means experimenting with new ways of worship at new times, perhaps also with new forms of learning. Commitment to growth means making the activities of this parish known to a wider audience through diverse media. Commitment to growth, as Tom Ehrich keeps telling us, may even mean thinking like a marketer – however much we may believe that you can’t say “church” and “marketing” in the same sentence. And, most important, commitment to growth means personally inviting friends, neighbors, and relatives, to join us in any of our activities – or starting new activities that may be attractive to others.
Are we up to the charge? Do we hear God’s command to bloom in this new world where we are re-planted? Do we believe God’s promises? Are we ready to our part? With all my heart, I pray so.
God allowed all this to happen to the people of Judea, but the Exile was not God’s last word to God’s people. In today’s reading from the writings of the prophet Jeremiah, we get an inkling that there will be more to the story. In the midst of the people’s shock and desolation, God commanded Jeremiah to write a letter to the exiles. In the opening part of this letter, which is omitted from our lection, we learn that one of Jeremiah’s reasons for writing it was to contradict the assurances of the false prophets that the Exiles would return to Jerusalem in a year or two. No, Jeremiah tells them straight out, the Exile will last for a full seventy years – in the ancient world long enough for at least three, perhaps four, generations to be born. What is more important, through Jeremiah God commands the people to settle down in Babylon, to build houses and plant crops, to give their children in marriage so that the community will continue to grow and thrive, and to do good for the city in which they will now live. What is most important, as we hear in the verses immediately following today’s reading, God reminds the people of God’s promise of restoration: when the seventy years are done, “I will fulfill to you my promise and bring your back to this place. For surely I know the plans I have for you … plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” Exile is not the last word, says God. But meanwhile, make the best of your circumstances, and “bloom where you are re-planted.”
“Bloom where you are re-planted.” Hai Doo was a refugee from Myanmar. When he arrived in this country, legally, he had virtually nothing. He works in a laundry, and he now owns a home in Phoenix, Arizona. When he first came to Phoenix, he was sure that owning a home was impossible for him. However, matching grants converted his $5,000 in savings into a $24,000 down payment on a house. “I never thought I would get help like this,” he said. We’ve heard a lot in the news about Joe Arpaio, the Maricopa County sheriff who has taken a hard line on undocumented workers in the Phoenix area. However, we have heard almost nothing about the programs in Maricopa County that have welcomed people like Hai Doo. Hai Doo is only one of a long list of people supported by both the federal and the state government, who have been able to settle down and begin rebuilding their shattered lives. The list includes refugees not only from Myanmar, but also from Bosnia and Kosovo, who came in the early 1990s, and more recently from Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Bhutan, Burundi, Ethiopia, and China. Despite the dislocation of leaving their homelands, almost always in the midst of civil war, despite the change in climate, language, economy, and culture, these refugee communities have begun to flourish. Like many other dislocated communities, they have put down roots in the U.S., begun to regrow their families, and even begun to give back to the cities that have helped them. Like the exiled Judeans, they have heard a word of promise and taken heart. They have begun to bloom where they are now planted.
Where are we? Are we in exile? Sometimes, as I walk around this church, I feel as if we think we are. For sure we’re no longer living in the church of the 1960s and ‘70s. The pictures in the hallway celebrate that time and earlier, when children filled the classrooms, sang in the children’s choir, and trained to be acolytes. Adult choir members filled the choir pews. Teens came for youth group, and everyone enjoyed ice cream socials, picnics, and summer camp. There were plenty of workers for rummage sales and covered-dish suppers. It was a great time to be the Episcopal Church – or so we thought. Friends, the sad truth is that the world of those photographs is a vanished world, behind us just as surely as high-button shoes and buggy whips. We need only look around us to know that we are no longer living in that world and will not live in it again, or at least for a long time. Every conceivable activity from sports, to shopping, to entertainment, to school competes with church. There’s no such thing as the Sabbath – we live in a 24/7 world. New communications media enrich – or harm – our lives. Meanwhile, here at St. Peter’s, like many congregations, we have young families and retirees, but no teens, and we have few adults between forty and sixty. As elsewhere, our attendance and pledges are down, from even the 1980s, our choirs have hung up their vestments, and the ECW is the only church group that regularly meets. At a time when many congregations are joining clusters or sharing clergy, you have gone out on a limb to call a full-time priest – at least for now.
So is this God’s last word to us? Are we to remain dispirited and dislocated exiles? Not if we believe what God said to the Judean exiles through Jeremiah. Like them, we too have God’s promise: “I will fulfill to you my promise…. For surely I know the plans I have for you … plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” I myself truly believe that the Holy Spirit is doing a new thing in our churches. We cannot yet see what shape that new thing will take. But we have God’s promise. With God’s promise in mind, while we wait for God’s will to be revealed, for St. Peter’s and for the Episcopal Church and other churches, we do so with hope. We continue to be faithful. We do the best we can, where we are, not where we wish we were. We adapt to new circumstances. We bloom where are re-planted.
What is most important, we hear God’s command to grow. If we believe God’s promises, then we consciously commit ourselves to doing everything we possibly can to reach out to others and to make St. Peter’s a truly welcoming, inviting, and inclusive community. For all of us commitment to growth means continuing to deepen our own relationship with Jesus, continuing to grow as his disciples through commitment to the disciplines, of prayer, study, worship, and giving of self and resources, in other words, as I told the confirmands on Wednesday evening, committing to a rule of life. For all of us, commitment to growth also means taking the needs of our wider community seriously and engaging in ministry that meets the needs of that community. Yesterday at Mountain Grace, we heard about the needs of the younger generation in this region and about ways some churches are reaching out to younger people. My imagination was stimulated, as I’d guess Carolyn Cogar’s and Anne Cappelletti’s were too. Commitment to growth also means experimenting with new ways of worship at new times, perhaps also with new forms of learning. Commitment to growth means making the activities of this parish known to a wider audience through diverse media. Commitment to growth, as Tom Ehrich keeps telling us, may even mean thinking like a marketer – however much we may believe that you can’t say “church” and “marketing” in the same sentence. And, most important, commitment to growth means personally inviting friends, neighbors, and relatives, to join us in any of our activities – or starting new activities that may be attractive to others.
Are we up to the charge? Do we hear God’s command to bloom in this new world where we are re-planted? Do we believe God’s promises? Are we ready to our part? With all my heart, I pray so.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
If You Had Faith....
“If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”
Why are you sitting in this church? Are you here out of custom or habit? Or do you hunger for the nourishment of God’s word and sacraments? What do you seek? More to the point, what does Jesus expect of you? If you’re here, sitting in this church, then perhaps you’ve already made some commitment to being one of Jesus’ disciples. If that weren’t the case you’d be home enjoying your coffee and Sunday paper. Even so, if we believe we’re trying to follow Jesus, then it’s not hard to wonder what true discipleship really entails. Even we long-time Episcopalians sometimes feel as clueless as the disciples in Luke’s Gospel seem to be.
For the last three months we’ve been on the road with Jesus, heading for Jerusalem and the inevitable conflict there. Along the way, Jesus has been offering the disciples, the Pharisees, the crowds, and, by extension, us glimpses of what discipleship involves. What have we learned so far? Through the story of the Good Samaritan we’ve learned that when we’ve landed in the ditch, God comes to our aid, often through people very different from us in social class or ethnicity. When Jesus visited the home of Martha and Mary, we learned that deepening our relationship with Jesus supersedes all personal and social obligations. Through watching Jesus heal on the Sabbath, we learned the importance of doing good to others even when the need to act violates community or liturgical boundaries. We’ve learned about the need for humility. We’ve been reminded that when we’ve gone astray God actively seeks us out. Last week we were warned of our obligation to take care of the needs of the poor in this life while we still can. In the verse immediately preceding today’s lesson, Jesus tells the disciples that they must forgive others as much as seven times a day! What? No wonder the disciples feel overwhelmed! Perhaps we do too, when we consider all that the Lord seems to want from us.
So the disciples ask Jesus to “increase” their faith. Perhaps they assume that they need more faith in order to live up to Jesus’ demands. But Jesus shatters their assumptions. I’m not talking about quantity of faith, he tells them. With even the smallest amount of real faith, with faith equal to a barely visible mustard seed, you can do anything that God calls you to do. You can be a full disciple, you can accomplish great things for God. All that’s needed is that you rely on God’s grace and not on your own powers. Certainly it’s human to fear that we’re only very limited beings. And often we let our fear excuse us from moving beyond “we’ve always done it this way.” Jesus doesn’t care about whether we think we have enough faith or not. He wants us to stop being concerned about ourselves and turn to God, whose Spirit is already in us producing the faith that we do have, the faith that drew you here today. Jesus offers the strongest possible assurance that whether we have enough faith for the life of discipleship is immaterial. If we trust God and share God’s love for us with others God will enable us to be the faithful disciples God has called us to be.
What might such a life of trust in God’s power look like? Tomorrow the church remembers Francis of Assisi. This afternoon we will bless animals in his name. Francis was born in 1181, one of seven children of a rich Italian cloth merchant. As a young man Francis was fond of wandering minstrels, bright clothing, rich friends, and worldly pleasures. At the age of 20, he joined a military expedition, was taken prisoner, and possibly experienced a spiritual conversion during his imprisonment. He began seriously to talk about betrothal to “lady poverty,” and repeatedly asked God for enlightenment. After a pilgrimage to Rome he had a vision of Jesus in the Church of San Damiano just outside Assisi, in which the icon of Christ crucified told him, “Francis, Francis, go and repair my house which, as you can see, is falling into ruins.” Thinking this meant the ruined church in which he was praying, he sold some of his father’s cloth and gave it to the local priest for the repairs. When his father repeatedly tried to draw Francis away from service to the poor and back into the family’s commercial life, Francis publicly renounced his father and his patrimony, even stripping off the clothes from his father’s house. After living for a time as a beggar, Francis heard a sermon on Matthew 10:9, in which Jesus instructed his disciples to go forth without any money or baggage to proclaim the nearness of the Kingdom of Heaven. Francis committed himself right there to a life of poverty and preaching. Within a year, Francis had 11 followers all dedicated to his vision of absolute poverty. Francis was moved to create an order of “Friars Minor,” i.e., brothers who would not be priests but would be committed to evangelism and living a simple communal life. In 1209 Clare of Assisi and her brother Rufino heard Francis preach and realized their own calling. In 1211, Francis received Clare, and the Order of Poor Clares for women was established. By God’s grace, the Franciscan order began to grow, and its final rule of was approved by the Pope in 1223. As he was praying in his mountain retreat on or about September 14, 1224, the Feast of the Holy Cross, Francis had another vision and received the stigmata, i.e., wounds in his hands and feet that correspond to Jesus’ crucifixion wounds. Suffering from the stigmata and from an eye disease, his body weakened by years of hard work and travel, Francis’s health began to decline. He died on the evening of October 3, 1226, at the age of only 45.
Stories of Francis’s deep faith and trust in God abound. Perhaps you’ve seen a collection of legends and folklore about him called “The Little Flowers of Saint Francis.” Many of these stories deal with his love for animals. On one journey, for example, it is said that he stopped in a forest grove and told his companions to “wait for me while I go preach to my sisters the birds.” The birds surrounded him, drawn by the power of his voice, and all stayed to listen. In another legend, Francis was said to have persuaded a wolf to stop ravaging the livestock of a village. Throughout his life of charity and poverty, Francis had a great love for all of the natural world. He preached to all, both humans and animals, of the universal ability of all creatures to praise God and of the human duty to protect and enjoy nature as both protectors and members of God’s creation. Having renounced by faith in God’s promises the inheritance of a cloth merchant’s son and having courageously embraced the life of poverty to which God had called him, Francis left the church a rich legacy of numerous communities dedicated to his ideals.
What does such a life of trust in God’s power look like in the 21st century? In addition to communities of monks and nuns, Francis’s legacy also continues to flourish among lay people. Anglicans and Episcopalians, for example, can join the Third Order of the Society of St. Francis, whose members live by Francis’s rule of evangelism and the simple life while maintaining their secular vocations. If you would like to see some examples closer to home of folks working together and faithfully following God’s lead in serving others, I invite you to come to Mountain Grace this coming Saturday. There you will hear about the Common Friars, an intentional community created by Paul Clever at the Good Earth Mission Farm in Athens and about Jonathan Youngman’s urban Jezreel Community. You can hear Harry Chase describe how the Maple Tree Learning Center reaches out to lower income families in the Appalachian region of Tennessee. If that’s not enough, you can hear about Academic Day Camps in Charleston, WV and about summer reading camps in our own diocese. Would you like to screw up your courage and put together a mission trip? Gordon Brewer, a deacon in the Diocese of East Tennessee, will tell you how. Would you like to be greener? Let Frank Edmands, a priest in this diocese, lead you into a deeper awareness of environmental issues for churches.
All of these people and many others model for us the life of faithful discipleship. Most of them probably started with less than a mustard seed’s worth of faith, but all of them let God lead them along the path that God had marked out for them. We thank God for their faith and their ministries. We thank God for the witness of Francis of Assisi. We also thank God for our own faith, the faith that has drawn into this church today. Trusting God, we step out in faith to do the great things that God will do as God works through us.
Why are you sitting in this church? Are you here out of custom or habit? Or do you hunger for the nourishment of God’s word and sacraments? What do you seek? More to the point, what does Jesus expect of you? If you’re here, sitting in this church, then perhaps you’ve already made some commitment to being one of Jesus’ disciples. If that weren’t the case you’d be home enjoying your coffee and Sunday paper. Even so, if we believe we’re trying to follow Jesus, then it’s not hard to wonder what true discipleship really entails. Even we long-time Episcopalians sometimes feel as clueless as the disciples in Luke’s Gospel seem to be.
For the last three months we’ve been on the road with Jesus, heading for Jerusalem and the inevitable conflict there. Along the way, Jesus has been offering the disciples, the Pharisees, the crowds, and, by extension, us glimpses of what discipleship involves. What have we learned so far? Through the story of the Good Samaritan we’ve learned that when we’ve landed in the ditch, God comes to our aid, often through people very different from us in social class or ethnicity. When Jesus visited the home of Martha and Mary, we learned that deepening our relationship with Jesus supersedes all personal and social obligations. Through watching Jesus heal on the Sabbath, we learned the importance of doing good to others even when the need to act violates community or liturgical boundaries. We’ve learned about the need for humility. We’ve been reminded that when we’ve gone astray God actively seeks us out. Last week we were warned of our obligation to take care of the needs of the poor in this life while we still can. In the verse immediately preceding today’s lesson, Jesus tells the disciples that they must forgive others as much as seven times a day! What? No wonder the disciples feel overwhelmed! Perhaps we do too, when we consider all that the Lord seems to want from us.
So the disciples ask Jesus to “increase” their faith. Perhaps they assume that they need more faith in order to live up to Jesus’ demands. But Jesus shatters their assumptions. I’m not talking about quantity of faith, he tells them. With even the smallest amount of real faith, with faith equal to a barely visible mustard seed, you can do anything that God calls you to do. You can be a full disciple, you can accomplish great things for God. All that’s needed is that you rely on God’s grace and not on your own powers. Certainly it’s human to fear that we’re only very limited beings. And often we let our fear excuse us from moving beyond “we’ve always done it this way.” Jesus doesn’t care about whether we think we have enough faith or not. He wants us to stop being concerned about ourselves and turn to God, whose Spirit is already in us producing the faith that we do have, the faith that drew you here today. Jesus offers the strongest possible assurance that whether we have enough faith for the life of discipleship is immaterial. If we trust God and share God’s love for us with others God will enable us to be the faithful disciples God has called us to be.
What might such a life of trust in God’s power look like? Tomorrow the church remembers Francis of Assisi. This afternoon we will bless animals in his name. Francis was born in 1181, one of seven children of a rich Italian cloth merchant. As a young man Francis was fond of wandering minstrels, bright clothing, rich friends, and worldly pleasures. At the age of 20, he joined a military expedition, was taken prisoner, and possibly experienced a spiritual conversion during his imprisonment. He began seriously to talk about betrothal to “lady poverty,” and repeatedly asked God for enlightenment. After a pilgrimage to Rome he had a vision of Jesus in the Church of San Damiano just outside Assisi, in which the icon of Christ crucified told him, “Francis, Francis, go and repair my house which, as you can see, is falling into ruins.” Thinking this meant the ruined church in which he was praying, he sold some of his father’s cloth and gave it to the local priest for the repairs. When his father repeatedly tried to draw Francis away from service to the poor and back into the family’s commercial life, Francis publicly renounced his father and his patrimony, even stripping off the clothes from his father’s house. After living for a time as a beggar, Francis heard a sermon on Matthew 10:9, in which Jesus instructed his disciples to go forth without any money or baggage to proclaim the nearness of the Kingdom of Heaven. Francis committed himself right there to a life of poverty and preaching. Within a year, Francis had 11 followers all dedicated to his vision of absolute poverty. Francis was moved to create an order of “Friars Minor,” i.e., brothers who would not be priests but would be committed to evangelism and living a simple communal life. In 1209 Clare of Assisi and her brother Rufino heard Francis preach and realized their own calling. In 1211, Francis received Clare, and the Order of Poor Clares for women was established. By God’s grace, the Franciscan order began to grow, and its final rule of was approved by the Pope in 1223. As he was praying in his mountain retreat on or about September 14, 1224, the Feast of the Holy Cross, Francis had another vision and received the stigmata, i.e., wounds in his hands and feet that correspond to Jesus’ crucifixion wounds. Suffering from the stigmata and from an eye disease, his body weakened by years of hard work and travel, Francis’s health began to decline. He died on the evening of October 3, 1226, at the age of only 45.
Stories of Francis’s deep faith and trust in God abound. Perhaps you’ve seen a collection of legends and folklore about him called “The Little Flowers of Saint Francis.” Many of these stories deal with his love for animals. On one journey, for example, it is said that he stopped in a forest grove and told his companions to “wait for me while I go preach to my sisters the birds.” The birds surrounded him, drawn by the power of his voice, and all stayed to listen. In another legend, Francis was said to have persuaded a wolf to stop ravaging the livestock of a village. Throughout his life of charity and poverty, Francis had a great love for all of the natural world. He preached to all, both humans and animals, of the universal ability of all creatures to praise God and of the human duty to protect and enjoy nature as both protectors and members of God’s creation. Having renounced by faith in God’s promises the inheritance of a cloth merchant’s son and having courageously embraced the life of poverty to which God had called him, Francis left the church a rich legacy of numerous communities dedicated to his ideals.
What does such a life of trust in God’s power look like in the 21st century? In addition to communities of monks and nuns, Francis’s legacy also continues to flourish among lay people. Anglicans and Episcopalians, for example, can join the Third Order of the Society of St. Francis, whose members live by Francis’s rule of evangelism and the simple life while maintaining their secular vocations. If you would like to see some examples closer to home of folks working together and faithfully following God’s lead in serving others, I invite you to come to Mountain Grace this coming Saturday. There you will hear about the Common Friars, an intentional community created by Paul Clever at the Good Earth Mission Farm in Athens and about Jonathan Youngman’s urban Jezreel Community. You can hear Harry Chase describe how the Maple Tree Learning Center reaches out to lower income families in the Appalachian region of Tennessee. If that’s not enough, you can hear about Academic Day Camps in Charleston, WV and about summer reading camps in our own diocese. Would you like to screw up your courage and put together a mission trip? Gordon Brewer, a deacon in the Diocese of East Tennessee, will tell you how. Would you like to be greener? Let Frank Edmands, a priest in this diocese, lead you into a deeper awareness of environmental issues for churches.
All of these people and many others model for us the life of faithful discipleship. Most of them probably started with less than a mustard seed’s worth of faith, but all of them let God lead them along the path that God had marked out for them. We thank God for their faith and their ministries. We thank God for the witness of Francis of Assisi. We also thank God for our own faith, the faith that has drawn into this church today. Trusting God, we step out in faith to do the great things that God will do as God works through us.
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