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| Reverend Rita's Sermons (Jul - Dec 2004)...
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Joy - 12/19/04 Choose
Joy 19 December 2004 When I was in my early teens, at that age when belief is very pure, when profound truths can be found in bumper stickers and rock music, there was a Christmas card that had great meaning to me. Every year my mother would string up all the Christmas cards we received, and after the season, the old cards were reused for next year’s Christmas wrapping. But there was one card we got when I was around fifteen that really captured my heart. It was a picture of a small bird sitting on a snow-laden fir branch, and the caption read, “Christmas is the one time of year when, for a moment, peace seems possible after all.” I thought that was a great and profound truth, and I kept that card. I taped it to the mirror on my dresser, and there it stayed all through middle school and high school. I probably took it with me when I went to college. In fact, I might even still have it packed away in a box somewhere along with all the other nuggets of wisdom I used to collect, the way other people collect stamps. “Christmas is the one time of year when, for a moment, peace seems possible after all.” And there is some truth to that, isn’t there? Sure, we all have our inner Scrooge bah-humbugging at all the commercial excess and endless recordings of “White Christmas.” But I’d wager that each of us also has our inner Tiny Tim, waving his crutch aloft and crying, “God bless us, every one!” Or as Burl Ives says in my personal favorite Christmas tune, “It’s the best time of the year!” You get greeting cards from friends and family, some of whom you’ve not seen in years. Many of us will gather with friends and family, sharing good food. And there’s the adrenaline rush of going out and doing a lot of shopping – before the bills arrive next month. Yes, we know that gift giving can be rather crass, but isn’t there something joyful about it as well? Because it’s not just about receiving goodies, it’s also about giving them. I *like* giving presents to my loved ones. And no matter how great the inner Scrooge, can anyone truly drive down a street at night and see those Christmas lights up, and not secretly whisper to himself or herself at least once, “Ooh, how pretty!” But perhaps if Christmas really is the one time of year when, for a moment, peace seems possible after all, it’s due not so much to good will, but to the fact that we’re too dazzled by lights and all the glittering wrapping paper, too busy going to parties and eating specially baked treats, to contemplate wars and rumors of war. And yet the Christmas story itself is so peaceful and beatific. Yes, we know that not every child born into the world is wanted. Not every birth is greeted with great joy – yet still there is something wonderful about a new baby. And that image of the newborn Christ-child, wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger, with smiling sheep and donkeys and cows gathered all around, and the whole bathed in a warm, golden glow: surely there is a part of us that can never be immune to that peaceful, joyful scene. Indeed, Christmas is the one time of year when, for a moment, peace seems possible after all. And not only peace, but hope and love and joy, as proclaimed on our advent banners. Our inner Tiny Tim salutes them with his crutch. Yet Scrooge endures as well – and more than Scrooge, a cynical realism. For we know that even the Christmas story itself is as much a story about hatred and death and fear, as it is about peace and joy. We know what Mary risked in agreeing to this crazy plan, we know how Joseph planned to cast her away from him. We know how King Herod was so fearful for his power that he ordered the murder of all male children under the age of two. We know that Mary, Joseph and the newborn baby would have to flee for Egypt for their lives. We know that the beatific baby would be murdered at the hands of the state. And more than that, we look back over two thousand years of Christian history and ask ourselves, is the world really a better place for that baby having been born? The sad truth is that Christians are just as likely as anyone else to go to war. They are just as likely to abuse their spouses or their children, just as likely to be prejudiced or hateful, to be petty and cruel. How much difference did that sweet little baby, born among the sheep and the donkeys, really make? Is Christmas truly the one time of year when, for a moment, peace seems possible after all? Or is it the one time of year when we willfully blind ourselves to reality? Where is the joy this Christmas? Our passage in Isaiah, the one whose mistranslation is responsible for the whole “virgin birth” scenario, begins with a fascinating little story. God, speaking through the prophet, says to King Ahaz, “Ask me for a sign, let it be as deep as Sheol or as high as heaven.” That’s kind of a strange thing to say. If God is going to give a sign, wouldn’t God just do it? But the way God says it here, it sounds like my little sister Amanda at the Christmas party last night, “Go ahead, ask me what nine times six is!” Or it sounds like a lover making poetic declarations, “Ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no valley low enough.” Whatever it is, God is eager to share, practically bursting with the news. “Go on! Ask me for a sign!” But Ahaz piously answers, “I will not ask, for I will not put the LORD God to the test.” Now technically, Ahaz gives the right answer. Jesus himself will give that answer during the temptation in the desert: “Thou shalt not put the LORD thy God to the test.” But that’s not the point of the story here. The point isn’t about putting God to the test, it’s about not caring to hear what God has to say. Or perhaps fearing what God has to say. Or perhaps – perhaps for us moderns, looking back over what can look like a very disappointing two thousand years – perhaps we refuse to ask because we’re afraid there’s no one to give us a sign at all. Is any of this Christmas story real, or is it all the result of a mistranslation? An animal feed box, laden with germs and diseases, is no place to lay a newborn babe. Maybe we just send each other pretty cards saying, “Christmas is the one time of year when peace seems possible,” because we’re trying to avoid the truth. Has anything really changed? Is there anyone to give us a sign? Is that why we’re afraid even to ask, even to hope? But even when Ahaz refuses to ask, God gives him a sign anyway: “Behold, a young woman will conceive and bear a child.” Nothing particularly miraculous about that! But that is the sign God gives. Maybe Christmas isn’t about God changing the world. Maybe it’s just about God giving us a sign. Maybe it’s about God eager to share good news with us. That is what “angel” means, after all: messenger, bearer of good news. Angels are like heaven’s newsies, running around, shouting, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it! For unto you a child is born!” The remarkable thing in the Christmas story is how everyone reacts to this good news with fear and skepticism. Out of all the players: Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, King Herod – only the Magi seem excited about the good news, and they’re the foreign gentiles. None of this religious stuff means anything to them at first. They’re just astronomers excited about a new scientific discovery. But even though they don’t really know what it means, the sign is a choice. And when they make the choice to follow the sign, they find joy. That’s what is going on in this Christmas story: a sign, a choice, and the decision people make. An angel appears to a young woman named Mary and says, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and you will conceive and bear a child. Will you agree to this?” And Mary says, “Let it be with me according to your word.” An angel appears to her betrothed, Joseph, and says, “This is what is happening to Mary. You can either put her aside, or you can marry her.” And Joseph says, “I will marry her.” The angels appear to the shepherds and say, “For unto you is born this day a savior in the city of David. You can either huddle here in your fields, or you can go see it.” And they say, “We’ll go see it for ourselves!” But not everyone makes the choice that leads to joy. The angel appears to Herod via the Magi and says, “The new king, God’s anointed one, is born! Will you go and honor him?” But Herod doesn’t. He chooses fear instead. He chooses hatred and murder. God didn’t change the world at Christmas. Instead, we were given a sign. A sign, and a choice. Every year we tell the story of that sign again. And every year we have a choice to make. What will we choose this year: peace, hope, love, and joy? Or will we choose despair, hatred, and violence? My Christmas card was right: Christmas is the one time of year when, for a moment, peace seems possible after all. But what the card neglected to mention is this: that we have to choose it. “Be not afraid. For behold I bring you good news of a great joy which shall be for all people.” This message is a sign: hear, then, the choice the angel offers. God’s
Welcome 5 December 2004 Well! For a church that’s always complaining about how no one knows our name, everybody in the country was sure talking about us this past week. In all the newspapers, on the radio – even on the networks that refused to air the ad. Friends of mine from far and wide who know I’m UCC have been sending me emails about the controversy, but what really got to me was that even folks who didn’t know I was UCC were still talking about it! As they say, you can’t buy this kind of publicity! We in the UCC can take pride that if we have been rejected, it was for all the right reasons. Now, maybe we shouldn’t get too much of a self-righteous martyr complex here, but on the other hand, in the increasingly cynical and bitter climate of this country, it’s a good feeling when everyone is talking about the love that our denomination preaches. But let’s look for a moment at this controversy. Is it really because the commercial implies that UCC churches welcome gays? But here’s the thing: I don’t know of a single denomination that does NOT welcome gays. Maybe there’s an obscure, hateful one out there, like Brother Fred Phelps. But I don’t know of any denomination that does not welcome gays along with everyone else into their church. And indeed this was one of the reasons cited for not airing the commercial, that we were implying that other churches don’t welcome gays. But here’s the difference. The gay people in the commercial are holding hands. Did you notice that? I have to confess I saw the commercial about fifteen times before I caught that. The bouncers rejected those men because they were openly gay. And that’s the trick. All churches will welcome gays, but with conditions: they must either convert to being straight, or they must be celibate. But the message in the commercial is that Jesus would have accepted gays just as they are, without condition, and that’s where the controversy lies. Without condition? Is that really what the gospel is about? Jesus accepts people without any condition at all? Isn’t there something in the Bible about sin and judgment? Doesn’t our passage about John the Baptist imply that there is indeed judgment? “The ax is lying at the root of the tree. Every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” Doesn’t that make it clear that there is sin and judgment? Oh yes, I would agree, there is sin and judgment. But that has nothing to do with God’s welcome. Jesus came to welcome all people into full membership in the realm of God. Everybody. Without exception and without condition. Sinners, tax collectors, Pharisees, gentiles, prostitutes: everyone is welcome without condition. That basic welcome is a hallmark of the realm of God. That welcome is, I believe, the basis of peace. Peace is about welcoming the other as your brother and sister, completely and fully. And the fruit of peace is justice. Because you deal with another in a spirit of peace, therefore you will be just to one another, in the way prophesied in Isaiah’s vision. It’s not the other way around, that first there is justice and then there is peace. Because justice implies judgment, and that implies condemnation, and that implies exclusion and rejection. Rather, peace is the tree, the core of how we relate to one another, and justice is the fruit that peace bears. The gospel is based on peace, and this message of the UCC in the commercial, this unconditional welcome, springs forth from that tree like a shoot from the tree of Jesse. And here is the difference between unconditional welcome that springs from peace, and an emphasis on judgment first in order to be welcomed. This past summer I received a phone call from two women who wanted to get married. So I arranged to meet with them and started out asking, as I always do, for them to tell me about themselves, how they met and how they decided to get married. One of the women was very involved with her church, a very devout Christian, and as she talked, she began to say how she knew that what they were doing was wrong. Homosexuality, she said, is a sin in the eyes of God. It just is, it’s written in the Bible, and you can’t change that just because it doesn’t suit you. Her love for her partner was wrong. They were wrong to want to get married, because that goes against God’s law. She talked about being a hypocrite, that if people in her church knew, if people in her family knew she was gay, they’d know she’s been living a lie by pretending to be Christian. It went on and on, and I was at a loss as to how to help her. The message she got from her church was not one of welcome, but one of judgment. It was one of the most painful things I’ve ever witnessed, to see this woman’s completely irreconcilable struggle between her love for God and her love for her partner. Now I ask you: where was the good news in her story? In our passage from Romans, Paul says that the scriptures are meant for our instruction, that they are meant to give us hope. All well and good, and this woman pulled out her Bible and showed me the scriptures that condemned her. But I saw no hope in her. The judgment this woman experienced impaired her ability to love God and to love her partner. It impaired even her ability to love herself, because I can tell you, she hated herself. How can the message she heard from her church be deemed “good news”? How did it bring hope? Or – or – is it possible that the message she received, even though she could quote chapter and verse, represented a perversion of the true gospel? What are the criteria we need to use in evaluating scripture and even judging our own behavior? Because as I said, I do believe there is sin and judgment. John the Baptist certainly speaks of judgment, but he preaches it against the Pharisees and the Sadducees, who under the law were quite free from sin, or so it might appear. They kept faithfully to the letter of the law, but John says that’s not the issue. The issue is whether they bear good fruit, fruit of peace, of hope, of justice. This is the test we must apply to scripture. Does it bring hope? Does it give peace? Does it spread justice? There is indeed sin and judgment. We must judge wisely between that which brings peace and hope, and that which brings death and despair. We must act towards one another in love, not in condemnation. Always in love, always in unconditional welcome. And any concern about sin and judgment must be subordinate to that fundamental message. But how does that work? Some people would say that if there is no judgment, no standards, then the peace you have is false, and the welcome only destroys your identity. But think of how a family works, at least in the ideal. Do parents wait to see whether their kids turn out good before welcoming them into the family and affirming their basic worth? If a kid fails to obey the family rules, do the parents kick them out? Even if a child is hurtful to others, do the parents reject the child? No. That’s not how it works. That basic welcome and affirmation comes first and last and everywhere in between. Yes, there is sin and there is judgment. There are children who get into all kinds of bad trouble: drugs, crime, abuse. Sometimes there is even a need for “tough love,” when a child may need to be temporarily removed from the family in order to reduce harm. But it’s the judgment that is conditional, not the welcome. Any judgment takes place within a context of love and welcome. Any child, no matter how great the crime they have committed, will always be loved by their parents. Because that’s the way family works. Now, you and I both know that families are far from perfect and they don’t always live up to those standards. But surely we can all agree that that’s the way a family ought to be. So are we going to say that parents are more loving and accepting than God? Surely we want to say that parents are imperfect mirrors of the unconditional love and welcome of God. Even the Bible itself points out, a mother will forget her child sooner than God will ever forget us. Over and over again in the Bible, the prophets remind us, “God loves us and welcomes us back.” Over and over again in the gospel, Jesus welcomes the outcast, the sinner, the one who is rejected. More than that, Jesus goes out of his way to seek those people out and extend the welcome to them. And he says that’s the way God is: love and welcome without condition. The whole point of the incarnation that we celebrate in this season is the message that God will even come so far as to be born into the guise of a helpless baby in order to welcome us. The whole message of Jesus life and of his death is that nothing, nothing, not even our sin, can ever separate us from the love of God. And we as the church ought then to extend this same welcome to everyone. This is the good news: God loves you. It’s such a simple message. I might say even a harmless message, and yet people have feared it throughout history. Kings feared it, and they killed the prophets. Herod feared it, and he murdered the baby boys because of it. The powers and principalities have always feared it, because they seek to make peace a condition of justice. And yes, some TV networks feared it, too. In the wake of a contentious and hateful election, a message of love and welcome was deemed “too controversial” for network TV. They claimed they wanted to preserve peace, but it was a peace that bore the fruit of injustice. “There won’t be any peace,” the powers always say, “unless everyone is obeying our rules.” But the gospel says it’s the other way around – peace comes first, through how we welcome one another. “Welcome one another,” Paul says, “just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” And when we truly welcome and love one another, then justice is the fruit that we will bear. So while we take justifiable pride in our denomination’s stand through this commercial, and while we revel in the publicity, let’s also retain some humility. Because all of us and some time or another would rather judge than love. All of us at some time or another would rather exclude than welcome. If we are in the spotlight right now, let us remember why, and let us commit to that practice of welcome in all times and places. Let us remember the good news: a message of peace, a message of hope. The message of Christmas. 28 November 2004 This year we chose the parables of Jesus as the theme for our advent meditations. Advent scriptures tend to focus, not surprisingly, on the theme of coming, waiting: advent. Old Testament prophets, therefore, with their message of God’s immanent coming, are very popular, particularly Isaiah, who thoughtfully wrote so many wonderful passages for Handel to use in his famous oratorio, The Messiah. New Testament scriptures likewise focus on the theme of God’s coming, usually through John the Baptist’s “prepare the way” message, as we will hear next week in the Lectionary, or through Jesus’ own teachings about the end times, as in today’s scripture. But we chose the parables as our advent theme, and while there is sometimes a sense of future times in the parables, they are far more often about right now. In the parables, Jesus usually just launches right into a story, or else he says, “The kingdom of God is like this.” He almost never says, “When the kingdom of God comes, then it will look like this.” Rather he says, “This is what it’s like now.” This active tension of the now that we don’t yet perceive is at the core of Jesus’ teaching. It’s more as if the kingdom of God is not something that we await, but something that we enact now, even in this imperfect world. Our gospel reading today is one of the few future teachings of Jesus, where he describes how on the Day of Judgment the sheep will be separated from the goats. The separation will be made on the basis of how people treated Jesus – but the trick is that neither the good sheep nor the bad goats knew they had ever encountered Jesus at all. It’s as if they just did what came naturally to them, and the sheep were the ones who acted as if the kingdom of God were already here. But how do we become like those sheep? How do we practice, when we don’t know exactly how the kingdom is going to be organized and we don’t know exactly how to live it out? Are we supposed to be vegetarians? Should we support stem cell research or not? What national health care plan is more in line with the kingdom of heaven? These are difficult questions that do not have clear Biblical answers. The Bible is not very clear on the specs. But maybe we’re looking at it from the wrong direction, from the end rather than the beginning. And to illustrate that lesson, Jesus told this parable. [Reading – Nov. 29 - from the Spirit of Peace 2004 Advent Booklet - If you haven't gotten yours yet, they are still available before church on Sundays or by mail if you contact Cylia] The emphasis here is not on results but on the beginning, the planting. Spread that seed, and spread it far! Don’t worry so much about how it’s going to grow. This is a very challenging lesson for us, who tend to be very results-oriented. But the parable advises us to act on the kingdom now, and not hesitate for fear that we’re not getting it exactly right. If we don’t sow that seed in the first place, it will never have a chance to grow. So the first thing we have to let go of is our expectations about the results. Secondly, the kingdom now also means keeping ourselves open to any situation. We must be open to the stranger, to the unexpected, ready to act at any moment and in any circumstance. Just as the results of the kingdom are out of our hands, so are the conditions in which we may encounter it. Jesus tells another parable about that theme of keeping ready and alert. [Meditation Dec. 6 - from the Spirit of Peace 2004 Advent Booklet] Jesus seemed to really like weddings, because he used them in his parables a lot. He also seemed to understand how weddings seldom come off as planned, because his parables about them invariably involve a snafu. But maybe that’s a particularly apt metaphor. Sometimes in weddings we focus too much on the wrong details – the flowers, the gowns, the cake – and we lose sight of what’s really important, the pledge of two people to love one another for a life time, the way God loves us. One thing you can say about marriages: they never turn out as planned! But the true test of a marriage is not how closely it adheres to plans, but how it weathers the unexpected. Here is another parable about a wedding. [Meditation Dec. 14 - from the Spirit of Peace 2004 Advent Booklet] We’re letting go of our focus on results, we’re letting go of the conditions and our excuses about when the time is right, and we’re getting closer: to a prayer that asks, “Ready to serve when God calls me.” But there’s one more lesson we need to learn about the kingdom: we don’t make it happen. The kingdom of heaven isn’t about me and my efforts, it’s about us and the community we build together, a community that shares. To use that metaphor of marriage once more, it won’t work if one person does all the giving and the other does all the taking. That isn’t true sharing at all. Rather, the kingdom is based on reciprocity, mutuality, on connection and relationship. Sometimes we are called upon to help others, and we need to be prepared to do so. But sometimes other people may be called upon to help us, and in that case we must be prepared to receive the gift. [Meditation Dec. 20 - from the spirit of Peace 2004 Advent Booklet] The kingdom of heaven is as much something we receive as it is something we do. Because ultimately it’s really God who does it. Christmas is about God’s gift to us, given to us without us having to do anything to make it happen. It is a gift of grace, freely given – a gift that makes all the difference in the world. Perhaps the parable of the sheep and goats is not finally so much about what they did, but about whether or not they lived in that state of grace that Jesus calls the kingdom of God. It is a state that acknowledges that all we have is given to us, and therefore we may in turn freely give it away. It is a state that recognizes that we are loved, and therefore we are free to love others whom we meet, friends, strangers, and enemies alike. It is a state that knows the kingdom of heaven is already here regardless of our efforts, and therefore we may act as if it’s real. 7 November 2004 When I was a little girl, every night I went to sleep under a patchwork quilt. I didn’t know that was what it was. It was just a pretty blue and white blanket with multicolored stars made out of dozens of different kinds of fabric. It wasn’t perfect. The little stitches that held it together weren’t all uniform in size, and their lines were wobbly, and some of the points on the stars were cut off. But I didn’t care. It was a bright, colorful blanket, and it kept me warm. Then I reached a sophisticated age, around 12 or so, and the quilt was no longer good enough for me because I’d been sleeping under it forever, and I had not picked it out myself. So I got big-girl linens that I got to pick myself, not all uneven and full of flaws like the quilt, but fancy and perfect, the way only a machine can make it, with even, identical flowers printed all over it. The quilt went into the closet, and I didn’t miss it. But you always have a use for those old blankets, and every once in a while the quilt would come back out, when we had guests or when I had a slumber party or on a particularly cold winter night. And I continued to grow up until I reached a slightly more observant age, when I noticed that the quilt was imperfect because it had not been made by machine. Someone had made it. The stitches were done by hand. I asked my mother about it, and she told me that my grandmother had made that quilt. This was the first I’d heard of it. Furthermore, all the fabric in the stars were made from pieces of old clothing, my grandma and grandpa’s, even old clothes that had belonged to my mother and aunt and uncles. My mother could look at those patches and remember what article of clothing each of the patches had come from. I continued to grow, and I went away to college, and I took that quilt with me because I wanted something from home, something that was not made by machine, but by someone I knew and loved. It was also while I was in college that I made my first quilt, and I’ve been a quilter ever since. There are many kinds of quilts: picture quilts, art quilts, monochromatic quilts, and quilters love buying special fabric for their new projects. But to this day, my favorite quilt is the scrap, the ones made up of a variety of random fabrics. Because here’s the thing. If you’re making a quilt with only a few kinds of fabric, you have to choose carefully which fabrics to use. The wrong fabric can clash with the others, throwing the whole thing out of artistic balance. An ugly print will ruin it all. But in a scrap quilt, made up of dozens, even hundreds of different kinds of fabric, there’s not such thing as an ugly print. A piece of fabric may look pretty vile on its own. You’d never make a shirt out of it! But when placed within the context of the overall quilt, that ugly fabric suddenly fits. It may blend the other patterns in a pleasing way, or it may provide an exciting contrast. Placing all that jumble of fabrics together brings out the best in each. You can’t go wrong when you make a scrap quilt, because whatever fabrics you choose will end up looking beautiful. And that’s the way God sews together the patchwork quilt that is the church. Fortunately, God likes scrap quilts, too. Let’s be honest, there are some less than aesthetically pleasing fabrics in the church. Not you, of course, but you know whom I’m talking about! You’d never make a shirt out of them! If there were some pre-planned and organized color scheme, perhaps not all of us would make the cut. Some of us would end up on the discard pile. But in the quilt of the church, God gathers all the scraps, even that lurid polyester that no one else can bear to look at, and assembles them all into a beautiful kaleidoscope. Each piece lends harmony to the whole, while at the same time standing out in its own way. The stitches may not be even, and the points may be cut off, but the result is something unique, something handmade, something crafted with God’s own holy love. And in the end, that’s a warmth you can’t buy in a store. Today, All Saints’ Day, is the day when we celebrate all the fabrics that make up the patchwork quilt of the church. All those people who have gone before, some who we remember, but many, many more whose names we never knew. Yet they have been sewn into the living quilt that is the church. They help make up its glory. They keep us warm when we are shivering in doubt and despair. We are the beneficiaries of their legacy, and today we pause to remember them. And on this particular All Saints’ Day, we single out one fabric in particular, a very beautiful and colorful one called Kathryn Morgan, who was sewn into the heavenly quilt last year. I didn’t know Kathryn anywhere near as long as many of you did. She started playing the piano for my church, Spirit of Peace, back when we were first starting up, back when we didn’t even have the name Spirit of Peace yet. She played for us for the first several years of our existence. I’m no musician, I don’t know much about music. I knew she played the piano well, but it took me a long time to begin to understand what a rare gift we had in Kathryn. But it wasn’t only her ability at the piano that made her so precious. Kathryn had a spirit about her. She had a love for God, and a love for this imperfect patchwork quilt that is the church in all its diversity, great and small, magnificent, and the ones with the corners cut off. Music truly was her calling, and it was a way for her to express her love and blessing. She loved my church, as she loved many another. Kathryn Morgan walking into a room was like the sun breaking forth from the clouds, shining down on everything, warming us up and making us blossom. We miss her. But when we sing certain hymns, it’s Kathryn I hear. When Kathryn died, she left her piano to Spirit of Peace Church. She wanted us to know how much she loved us and cared for us. Since we have no place of our own to keep the piano, we are so pleased to have St. Paul use it, so that this instrument can give glory to God the way Kathryn wanted. Even if you did not have the privilege of knowing Kathryn, you may still benefit from her legacy. And especially on this day, as we hear the sounds of this magnificent instrument, may we remember and give thanks for all the legacies of those saints who have gone before us, each of them imperfect, yet each of them shining beautifully in the patchwork quilt that is the church. Amen. 31
October 2004 I’ve really been looking forward to this service this year. It’s not only because of my aunt’s death, but other deaths I’ve been through over the past months: people I knew personally, but also the loved ones of friends of mine. All kinds of deaths: spouses, parents and children. Deaths of young and old. Deaths due to illness, deaths due to sudden and violent accidents or even to war. Some have been what we might call “good” deaths, dying peacefully of old age in one’s sleep, but also deaths that call into question our belief in a good God. Of all these, perhaps cancer seems like the most capricious, the most like a wild card. It can take some people in mere weeks, whereas others will continue for years. It’s not always a death sentence, and it can affect young and old alike. It’s like you just can’t know what will happen when the diagnosis has been made. My friend Ro was declared “cancer free.” One month later she was dead. I remember when Kathryn was dying, she asked me questions about what the actual experience of death would be like. I went to the bookstore and looked at the cancer section, but all the books were about surviving. Maybe there would be one thin chapter at the very end of a book acknowledging that yes, people do die of this disease. But most of the books seemed to just be ignoring that part. I got the feeling that if you died from cancer it was your own fault. You didn’t fight hard enough. It made me very angry. We do seem to have this image in society that you ought to fight against death. It is perhaps most famously expressed in Dylan Thomas’ poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” A strong manifesto from a guy who drank himself to death before the age of forty. [poem] I’ve been certainly feeling a lot of rage against the dying of the light, myself, this year, but ultimately this is a fight that death is going to win. We all are going to die at some point; we can’t escape it. Even we Christians who profess faith in the resurrection, we still have to pay the death toll before we get there. So what then does death mean to us? John Donne wrote another poem about the matter, more orthodox but no less heartfelt that Thomas’. [poem] Yet this poem seems a bit like a lie, too. I think we can be a bit more sanguine about our own deaths, but it’s the death of those we love that is perhaps the greatest challenge we face in this life. Death is so final. We don’t get to do it over. The death of our loved ones feels like a theft, like robbery. They have been ripped out of our lives. We can never see them or touch them or speak to them again. It’s horrible, this separation that seems in some ways like any other separation. My aunt lived thousands of miles away from me, I hadn’t seen her in several years nor spoken to her on the phone. Logically I ought to be able to deceive myself into thinking that she’s still alive in her little apartment in New York. After all, isn’t it just another form of separation? But it’s not, and I know in my bones that I can’t ever see her again. That is what is so unbearably final about death. I shared earlier this year the comfort I derived from the story of Jesus’ death, knowing that the grief my family has been going through is the same grief that Mary and the disciples experienced on that Friday and Saturday before Easter morning. They, too, knew what it was like to feel robbed of someone they loved. They, too, knew what it is like to feel that soul-crushing grief, even perhaps to rail against God. There was a medieval theologian who said that Jesus had to die an ignominious death on the cross while he was still young, in order to show conclusively that all forms of death were covered by his resurrection. If Jesus had died of old age, then people who died young, or by violence, might be seen as excluded because of their mode of death. Granted, there’s a very twisted sort of medieval logic going on here, but it makes some sense to me. Christianity is the one major world religion whose founder did *not* die peacefully in his bed. Those first Christians *knew* what it is like to lose someone like that. God knows. God knows this grief. God knows this separation. When we are grieving, the greatest comfort we can experience is the sympathy of friends who’ve been through this themselves, the comfort of presence, of companionship in grief. God can say this, “I know what it’s like to feel such grief.” But there is another truth here, just as great as that loss, and that is that death cannot rob us of our love. The loss of our loved ones feels like a great, gaping hole in our hearts, but our love for them does not fade. All the gifts they gave us in their lives are still a part of us. We don’t stop loving them just because they’re gone. In fact, that’s what makes it so painful: our hearts continue to beat out that love, even long after our loved ones have gone. In that sense, death cannot take our loved ones away from us, because they live in the very marrow of our bones. The testimony to the resurrection in part has to do with this truth, that death is final, but it can never stop love. Years and years can go by, yet the slightest little trigger can remind us of our dear ones and set off a storm of fresh tears and grief and love for them. We are afraid of the power of our grief, of its ability to overcome us, of our helplessness before it. One of the ironies I’ve learned this year is how we tend to cry alone. We don’t want to cry in front of others, in front of people who might offer us comfort. We tend to cry alone. Why is that? Perhaps it’s another way that we rage against the dying of the light: we refuse to give in to our grief. Oh, we know it’s expected to cry at the funeral, but after that we expect to get over it. And I’m not just talking about a societal pressure; we pressure ourselves. It’s as if we take the stages of grief as an agenda. “Okay, I’m on stage three now, it’s high time for me to move on to stage four already!” This despite all of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s disclaimers that we don’t necessarily go through the stages in order, and we don’t know how long each stage will take. But we want to get it over and done with. We don’t want to give in to our grief, to admit that feeling of helplessness. But we don’t ever truly get over our loss, because we never get over love. That’s why this day, el dia de los muertos, is so important. It gives us a day out of every year when it’s okay for us to grieve and cry again. It’s okay to feel our loss, a day both to rage against the dying of the light, but also to say, “Death, be not proud.” Here we bear witness to the people whom we have loved, who have loved us. We bear witness to the people who shaped our lives, and whose death still causes us pain. Parts of our service of remembrance come right out of the service for a memorial or funeral, a reminder that death is part of our lives no matter how much we may wish otherwise. We want so much to be in control of our lives, of our grief, even of our death. But on this day we remember that while death comes to all, it can never kill love. Is that a cheap promise in the face of the abyss? Is it mere pretty words? Is it the poem of Dylan Thomas or the one of John Donne that speaks most strongly to you? No doubt for each of us the answer will be a little bit different. Perhaps we don’t even know for sure what our answer is. But our presence here today is a testimony both to our common experience of loss, but also to our common experience of love. In the end, it’s Paul’s words that speak most strongly to me, more than the poems of either Thomas or Donne. His words are not an explanation, and maybe they aren’t even a promise. They are a truth, one that I believe: “If God is for us, who is against us? God who did not withhold his own Son but gave him up for all of us (in other words, a God has experienced loss as we have), will God not with him also give us everything else? Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through God who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” God lives forever. Therefore, so does love. Amen. Dylan
Thomas Though
wise men at their end know dark is right, Good
men, the last wave by, crying how bright Wild
men who caught and sang the sun in flight, Grave
men, near death, who see with blinding sight And
you, my father, there on the sad height, John Donne Death
be not proud, though some have called thee 24 October 2004 As I was reading different commentaries about our gospel reading for the day, one person observed that in some ways this story is inappropriate for us today. Self-righteous piety is not a sin that many of us commit. Oh, we may think we have a better understanding of Christianity than some others do, but we don’t generally go around thinking ourselves as being grand for how often we go to church, or how large our tithe is. This commentator suggested that we ought to translate this parable into terms that fit our modern condition, such as economics. The Pharisee in the parable, he said, is like the free-market capitalist, the self-made man who is successful and prays thanks that God has not made him like those welfare moms or high school drop-outs or lazy workers who have made nothing of themselves. In other words, the Pharisee is the one who benefits from the current economic order, who thinks he got himself where he is and has everything he needs, whereas the tax collector is like the person who is disadvantaged by the economic order – the welfare mom, the working poor – who knows that he can’t make it in the system, and who prays for mercy. I thought that was a very interesting interpretation, although I’m still not sure how much it would really fit us. We in this church tend to be bleeding-heart liberals, and I doubt any of us look down on so-called “welfare moms.” But it’s interesting that this commentator saw economic self-righteousness and not pious self-righteousness as the central sin of our modern society. All the more interesting, given the sermon we heard from Doug Greco last week. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been thinking about that sermon all week, and the two cultures Doug presented, and now I’m seeing everything in terms of that market culture. Even the church! Now the problem with any parable is that we want to identify with the one that Jesus favors. Jesus favors the outcast, and so we want to identify with the tax collector. But that is a bit self-righteous. We need to be more honest and admit that we are more like the Pharisee. We need to let ourselves be challenged by the lesson, and not just shored up in some self-aggrandizing perception that we are the favored outcasts of Jesus. Yet if we don’t suffer from the pious self-righteousness of the parable, and we don’t suffer from economic arrogance as in the commentator’s interpretation, how then are we like the Pharisee? The Pharisee’s problem is that he thinks he got himself where he is. While he pays lip service to thanking God for not making him like the wretched tax collector, nevertheless his prayer drips with self-satisfied confidence. He’s praying to God, but really he’s praying about his success and privilege. He’s a self-made man. He sees himself as self-sufficient, and in that I suspect we are like him. For while we in this church recognize some of the inherent injustices in our current economic system, I suspect we nevertheless buy into the myth of self-sufficiency. In our heart of hearts, we do believe we are self-made. We take pride in our accomplishments, and chief among our accomplishments, chief of the goods of our society, is the ability to provide for ourselves and our family. Sure, we don’t look down on welfare recipients (supposedly), but don’t we take pride in our ability to pay our own bills? Don’t we see independence as one of the most important marks of maturity? Think of those milestones: earning your first paycheck, buying your first car, buying a home, achieving something. We don’t want to receive handouts, whether from the government, or from family or friends. If any of us has ever had to borrow money from our parents, do we need feel a certain shame in that? Don’t we seek to pay that loan off as quickly as we can? Oh, we can talk about that culture of relationships that Doug Greco preached about all last week, but we take pride in self-sufficiency, in the belief that we do not have to depend on any one else for anything. One of the questions I really wrestle with as a minister is the challenge posed by my friends who are atheist or agnostic. They seem to get along just fine without God, and I continually ask myself how to talk to them about God – about how perhaps they might need God. For as far as they are concerned, they don’t need God. They look to science to explain how the world works. They look to humanist principles for their ethics. They look to friends and family for love. How, then, do they need God? They are apparently self-sufficient. And if they don’t need God, perhaps I don’t need God either. And let’s be honest with ourselves. Don’t we sometimes, with our image of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient – don’t we sometimes see God as one more optional luxury in life? Something that is good to have, like a wide screen TV or remodeled kitchen, but as something that isn’t essential? How often do we think of church in terms of what we get out of it? There is frequently a feeling that we ought to get some personal benefit out of church, that we go to get a high from God, or to hear some beneficial message. And let’s be honest: church doesn’t always deliver, does it? Sometimes you go and you’re bored. Sometimes you go and the sermon is lame, or the hymns or ho-hum. So what’s the harm in skipping church every now and again? Believe me, I’m not trying to make this into the church truant officer sermon! But think about how we view the purpose of going to church. After a long week, and a busy weekend, and the weather is lovely, and you’re just too comfortable on the couch, or you really wanted to catch that movie, and why not just skip church this week? After all, we don’t need it. We can experience God on our own. And if we don’t experience God on our own, well really, aren’t we doing pretty well for ourselves? Religion: something that it’s nice to have, but it’s not really essential. Because we make ourselves. We provide for ourselves, and we don’t rely on anything or anyone else for our well-being. Not even God. Maybe, maybe we can recognize a little bit of that Pharisee in ourselves. But let’s go back to the tax collector. Now, he was an outcast yes, but he was not poor. The was the tax system in those days worked was that the government decreed that a certain amount of money needed to be collected from the provinces, and it was up to the tax collectors to literally go around and collect the taxes from people. The tax collectors were expected to collect a little bit extra in order to earn their own living. But the extra amount they collected varied, and I’m not sure whether there was any specific regulation about how much extra they were allowed to collect. So here’s this fellow, doing well for himself financially, but no one likes him or trusts him. The people he collects from know he skims off the top, and they resent him living off of their hard-earned money. The government knows he skims some off, and wonders if he’s living so large, maybe the government can raise the taxes a bit and cut into this guy’s profit margin. From a Jewish perspective, he was considered unclean because he handled worldly money. From a nationalist perspective, he was resented for working for The Man. So here’s this fellow, self-made, well-off, but with no place in society, no friends, none of those relationships that Doug Greco talked about. He knows how lonely that self-sufficiency is, he knows how hollow his prosperity is. So he goes to the Temple, and in a quiet corner prays, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” And that, my friends, is why I believe we go to church. That is the role God plays in our lives. It’s not that we get to be more pious. It’s not that we go to feel good religious feelings. It’s not that we go to be intellectually stimulated by profound thoughts. We go because we are in need of mercy. Yet mercy is the antithesis of self-sufficiency. Mercy is a gift. You cannot earn it. By definition we depend on the kindness of others for mercy. And that is threatening, because we pride ourselves on being self-made, on not being dependent on others. In our lives we are the Pharisee, proud of our self-sufficiency, but in our heart of hearts we know we are the tax collector in need of mercy. I mentioned earlier some of the great accomplishments we achieve in our lives, but I suspect that those are not the real moments that stand out in our lives. Rather, the times that stand out were the times of mercy, that we did nothing to earn. I once led a men’s fellowship meeting, and the topic of discussion was when we had really experienced God in our lives. And they started out with the usual, excuse me, hallmark drivel about “I experience God in nature.” But then one man talked about the birth of his children. You could feel a shiver throughout the entire room, and the tenor of the discussion completely changed. The birth of a child may seem on the surface to be a story of self-sufficiency. You get married and make a baby – or even adopt one. Science tells us the mechanics of how that baby came about, there’s nothing supernatural about it at all. Having a baby can even seem to be an accomplishment. But tell me the truth: when you first held your baby in your arms, you were scared to death! You hold this helpless human being and think, “What in the world have I gotten myself into?” Holding that baby you are so keenly aware of how you are not qualified for this job. You tremble at the infinite number of ways you can screw it up. Oh, science will tell you how that baby came to be in your hands, but all you can think about is, “This is a miracle.” Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, this baby came from me but is its own being. I have to raise and care for this child but she will never be mine to own. You didn’t earn it and you sure don’t deserve it, but there it is: that is mercy. Or think of marriage. This also seems to be something we do for ourselves: we find our partner, we make the decision, we plan the wedding, we pick out the hors d’oeuvres for the reception. But on that day when you’re standing there looking at your partner, you’re terrified. How will this work out? Will this really last a lifetime? Who can say what will happen? I’m not ready for this! It’ll be a sheer miracle if this works out. Yet despite all those very realistic fears, you go ahead. And if it does all work out, it is indeed only by a miracle. You didn’t earn it and you sure don’t deserve it, but there it is. That is mercy. Or think of grief for someone who has died. We’ve read the self-help books, we know about the stage of grief. We tell ourselves that we need to take the time to grieve, even as we are really thinking that it’s time to get over it and get on with our lives. Because we can’t let grief destroy us. We’re self-made! We don’t want our neighbors to show up with a casserole, because it reminds us of the hole in our lives. We don’t want to cry, because it reminds us of how weak we are. And when people ask us how we are, we smile and say, “Fine.” But then someone insists on bringing that casserole, and when we smile and say, “I’m fine,” they put their hand on our shoulder and say, “I am so sorry for your loss.” And we dissolve into tears, because we aren’t self-sufficient at all. That is mercy. We go to church because we can put up a good front with our friends and family. We can say we’re all right, we can have many accomplishments, we can look self-sufficient. But God knows our bank statement. God knows our cholesterol level. God knows we get bored by the sermon, God knows we want to wring our boss’s neck, and that we don’t know our next-door neighbor’s first name. God knows all our secret shames and fears, above all our fear that we aren’t self-sufficient at all. God knows how lonely and pathetic and inadequate we feel. But God loves us anyway. We didn’t earn it, we sure don’t deserve it, but there it is. That is mercy. Praying in the Temple like the tax collector: that is why we go to church. Not because it’s some extra benefit in our lives, but because we need it: grace and love and mercy. That is the lesson of this parable: that the measure we give out will be the measure we receive. Because we have been shown great mercy, we ought in turn to show mercy to others. Because none of us, whether Pharisee or tax collector, will make it on our own. We are not self-made. We are not self-sufficient. We are forgiven and loved. We didn’t earn it, we sure don’t deserve it, but there it is. That is mercy. Wisdom
to Know the Difference 10 October 2004 The story in today’s gospel reading is another one of those strange healing stories we often get. It’s perhaps easy for us to get distracted by the miracle healing and lose sight of some of the undercurrents going on. Here we have ten lepers being made clean, and only the Samaritan comes back to give thanks. Now, remember that the Torah said that anyone who had leprosy or a similar skin infection was declared unclean and cast out of society. We get a little self-righteous in looking back on Bible-era people for their cruelty, but in the age before antibiotics, this was actually a practical measure. Isolating people with a communicable disease was one of the few ways to control the spread. But of course what was intended as a health measure ends up acquiring a lot of social baggage as well. So lepers were looked down upon, seeing as having earned their disease through sin, and being cut off from family and friends and any place in society. It’s interesting, therefore, that when the lepers see Jesus they don’t actually ask for healing. Instead, they cry out for mercy – for compassion, for some recognition that they, too, are children of God. For his part, Jesus doesn’t answer by immediately healing them. Instead, he simply tells them to go show themselves to the priests at the Temple. This was a leper’s gateway back to society, because according to the Torah, only a priest could declare you clean and therefore reinstate you to society. So the ten lepers trot off, and as they are going they are made clean. But one of them, a Samaritan, turns back and gives praise to God. Now Samaritans, as you recall, were not considered good Jews. They were the ones who remained behind while the other Jews were carted off into exile, and they developed their own ways of worshipping after the Temple had been destroyed. They centered their worship on Mt. Gerizim rather than Jerusalem, and were viewed as unorthodox. So while the Jewish lepers went to the Temple in order to reenter their community, the Samaritan leper would not have been welcomed at the Temple. Instead, he returned to Jesus, recognizing the kingdom of God in Jesus’ ministry, and that was the community that the Samaritan chose to enter. While Jesus praises the man for his faith, I don’t think it follows that the others didn’t praise God in the Temple. In fact, you could see here a version of the split that would happen between Jews and Christians – that the Jews continue to worship in the ways according to the Torah, whereas the Christians admitted “heathens” into worship of God in a new way. We could see in this story a message of tolerance for diversity. What matters is that God is praised, not where or how. With that story in mind, therefore, there was a particular verse in our 2 Timothy passage, which stuck out at me. The author of this letter is counseling church leaders about how to deal with doctrinal disputes. Our passage begins with Paul reminding Timothy what is essential: “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David – that is my gospel.” Period. End of sentence. That is the key point. And later he says, “Avoid wrangling over words, which does no good but only ruins those who are listening.” That really struck me, because it seems like a lot of doctrinal argument in the churches today – and throughout history – has been about wrangling over words. Think of the reformation arguments over transubstantiation and consubstantiation! Today our arguments may not be quite so obscure, but we still have them: over ordination of women, over the place of gays in the church, over abortion, the death penalty, you name it. I don’t think the author is trying to say these arguments are not important, and indeed we know that Paul himself can be quite harsh in dealing with people who teach something different from his own message – but what I’m picking up here is a criticism of arguments that do no good but only ruin those who are listening. This passage says to me that the most important thing we must remember is Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David, and all our other arguments are secondary to that. Indeed, if we fight over those secondary arguments, calling each other heretics or oppressors or whatever, it does no good but only ruins those who are listening. Because this is not the church, the body of Christ, forgiven and reconciling. This is the Church wrangling over words. The author of the letter here seems to be saying, “In essentials unity, in non-essentials diversity, in all things charity.” Again, tolerance for diversity. This theme is reinforced again in our Jeremiah passage. Here the prophet is counseling the people who have been carted off to exile in a foreign land, away from the Temple and the life they had once known. The exiles could have sought to keep themselves completely separate from the alien culture in which they found themselves, to keep themselves pure of defiling influences. But Jeremiah instead urges them to settle down into this alien land. And here is the verse that caught my attention: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” Rather than cutting themselves off from their new community, the exiles are called to once more exercise tolerance for diversity, to see their own welfare as bound to the welfare of those around them, to focus on what they have in common, rather than their differences. Now these values might seem self-evident to us. Don’t we in the United Church of Christ praise ourselves for our open-mindedness and diversity? Yet we, too, sometimes “wrangle over words.” We too sometimes see ourselves as holier than others. When we take our stands on justice or on theological openness, we can be quite condemning of people who do not see eye to eye with us. How do we view those fundamentalists? Or Promise Keepers? Or the Exodus ministry that tries to convert gay people to being straight? Or churches that deny ordination to women? On these and many other issues, don’t we sometimes get self-righteous? Ah, but we’re speaking in the name of justice! We are in the right, and they are wrong! We have a calling to speak truth to power, to be the prophetic voice, to call others to account! This isn’t a matter of wrangling over words; these issues are central to God’s reign of justice! Aren’t they? I don’t want to downplay the significance of our witness, but I think again of those words in 2 Timothy: avoid wrangling over words, which does no good but only ruins those who are listening. When we get so self-righteous, whom are we really speaking for? Who are we shutting out of the community? Are we praising God? Or are we playing judge? This past Thursday I went to hear Mitchell Kattine, who was the lawyer who argued the case before the Supreme Court that resulted in the sodomy laws being struck down. I wore a clerical collar in order to make a statement, but I felt nervous walking in there, fearing that people would see me as the enemy. And sure enough, during the question and answer period, a member of the audience asked Mr. Kattine about how to respond to “religious people” who claim that homosexuality is a sin. And Mr. Kattine had a wonderful answer. He says he doesn’t argue religion with them. He tells them he respects their beliefs, and that as a lawyer he would defend their right to their beliefs in court. But that the United States has separation of church and state, that the laws of our country are not based on religion but on human rights. He knows he can’t argue with some people on the issue of religion; it would just be wrangling over words, doing no good and only ruining those who are listening. So instead he rephrases the issue, finding our common ground as Americans who live in a nation based on civil rights. He ties their welfare to his welfare. He draws a wide circle that includes both him and the people who want to argue with him, and he does it without compromising or denying their differences. I thought it was a brilliant response, and one that is very, very Christian. This can be a hard message for us to hear, because sometimes we believe so strongly that we are right and they are wrong. We are passionate about that prophetic calling to justice, and I am not saying we should not be passionate. But what is the essential news of the gospel? What is the most important? The author of 2 Timothy himself forgets his own advice in wanting to correct those with wrong teaching, and so he quotes this hymn: “If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he will also deny us.” That last part is the line drawn in the sand, saying who is in the community and who is not, threatening those who disagree with him, who “deny Jesus.” But even as he says it, the author seems to realize that this isn’t quite the gospel, and so the last line of this hymn says, “if we are faithless, he remains faithful – for he cannot deny himself.” For indeed Jesus did not deny those who denied him. Look at Peter, who denied Jesus three times, yet Jesus forgave him. Jesus cannot deny himself – and what he is the messenger of forgiveness and reconciliation. That is the essential. All other issues of justice, of theology, of whatever else, important as they are in their own way – all of these must serve that primary ministry of forgiveness and reconciliation. So what does it matter if the Jewish lepers praise God in the Temple, and the Samaritan leper praises Jesus? The important thing is that God is praised. What does it matter if we live in the Holy City, or in the city of exile – in either place our welfare is bound to the welfare of the people around us. What does it matter if we wrangle over words, so long as we remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David. In essentials unity, in nonessentials diversity, in all things charity. It is a high calling, and one that is very difficult to follow. But when we do follow it, the gospel is indeed proclaimed and God is praised. Amen. Contentment September 30, 2001 This sermon was shaping up to be a tough one. The Lectionary was particularly focused today: the love of money is the root of all evil. That may seem easy. I mean, how much more straightforward can you get? But for me this theme presents the same difficulty as preaching on the Good Samaritan in that we have heard it all before. What new thing can you find to say about a subject everyone already knows so well? It gets boring to always trot out Standard Sermon #3: the evils of money. As much as I love that sermon, I always preach it with a guilty knowledge that we are all living in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and few of the people in the congregation have ever truly experienced anything remotely like poverty. None of us is pure when it comes to the sin of loving money, and I often feel I’m gaining extra days in purgatory for my hypocrisy in preaching the sermon. But
as I was doing some background reading on these texts, I found a
focus on the Timothy reading, and it centered on the word “contentment,”
which proved to be a stumbling block for some folks. To some people,
the word implies comfort, complacency, self-indulgence. How often
have we as ministers been urged to “comfort the afflicted
and afflict the comfortable?” And yet here Paul says, “There
is great gain in godliness combined with contentment.” What
is going on here? This, from the guy who always liked to brag about
the number of times he’d been arrested and flogged by Roman
authorities? But
this story has a certain – dare I say – contentment
in the way we often read it: Lazarus gets his reward and the selfish
rich man is punished. But the parable is darkened by Father Abraham
laughing at the man suffering in Hades, rubbing it in. Where is
the compassion in this story? What happened to “turn the other
cheek and go the extra mile?” The rich man begs Abraham to
send Lazarus to give him some relief from his suffering –
and such a poignantly tiny gesture – to dip his little finger
in the water and cool [his] tongue.” But Father Abraham refuses,
saying, “Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed,
so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do
so.” Even if Lazarus wanted to help, he may not. Isn’t
there something sick about this vision of the afterlife, in which
the blessed are rewarded by seeing the wicked suffer torment? How
is that heavenly at all? How does it sound like anything that Jesus
would condone? Take
Up Your Cross 5 September 2004 A challenging Lectionary selection today! The infamous “unless you hate your mother and father” passage in Luke, which is so hard to preach on because it always sounds like you’re making an excuse for it. “That isn’t really what Jesus meant to say!” I as a preacher don’t like to be so obviously altering Jesus’ words and putting my own words in their place. But this passage has a lot of very challenging images: unless you hate your father and mother, unless you give up all your possessions, unless you take up your cross you cannot be my disciples. It’s a recruitment speech that won’t exactly inspire thousands of people to sign up on the dotted line. It is sorely tempting to water these sayings down, to say either that Jesus was exaggerating and never meant for these standards to apply to every day Christians, or Jesus was somehow not speaking about the real world and real life matters. But maybe teachings like this, as radical and challenging and difficult as they may be, are best illustrated through a story. So I want to look at one of our other passages today, in order to see what light may be shed on this passage. Let’s look at this letter to Philemon. I’m very fond of this letter because it’s one of the shortest books in the bible. It doesn’t even have chapter divisions! But lest you think that’s a superficial reason to like this letter, let me hasten to add that a short letter like this, gives us a more coherent vision of what’s going on than some of the longer letters and books. You know that biblical writers had a tendency to ramble, and it isn’t always clear how the parts of any one book relate to each other. The Bible can be very difficult to read, precisely because it is so unlike any literature of our day. But the short books are more clear and concise, and therefore a bit easier for us to follow what is going on. Philemon is also unique because it is the most personal letter in the Bible. Indeed, it almost seems too personal – Paul writing to one man about a private issue. Philemon owned a slave named Onesimus, who had run away and come to where Paul was in prison. Paul is writing to ask Philemon to forgive Onesimus and receive him back. It’s not really clear why such an intimate, ordinary letter should make it into the Bible at all, although there is a tradition that Onesimus later became a bishop. But for whatever reason it was included, it gives us a glimpse of Paul dealing with what we might call a personal, pastoral matter. I’ve shared before how about one-third of the students of the seminary I attended were black. The subject of this letter came up once, and the black students got very passionate about it. They were horrified that Paul would send a slave back to his master. If women tend to hate Paul for saying, “Let women keep silent in the churches,” blacks tend to hate him for this letter. I’d never quite read this letter that way before, and I could see how it could be abhorrent, especially by our standards today. But Paul’s world was totally different from ours. Slavery was an inescapable part of life, yet it had not become the racially bound institution that we know from our own country’s history. Slavery, classicism, sexism, imperialism – all existed on a monumental scope in Paul’s day, and they were backed by all the might of the Roman Empire. Around the time of Jesus, a gladiator named Spartacus led a slave rebellion in which the Romans ended up crucifying thousands and thousands of slaves. Indeed, the phrase “take up your cross” had real meaning back in those days. But there are all kinds of subtle things going on in this letter to Philemon. While on the surface of it, Paul is sending Onesimus back, while asking Philemon to forgive him, if we read between the lines, we encounter a very different message. Paul starts out by praising Philemon, emphasizing his love and his goodness. “I always thank my God because I heard of your love for all the saints…I pray that the sharing of your faith may become effective when you perceive all the good that we may do for Christ.” He uses many terms of endearment, calling Philemon “my dear friend and coworker, my brother.” He’s setting a standard for Philemon, defining him in the highest possible terms of love and generosity, so that he sets the stage for what comes next. “For this reason, though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do your duty, yet I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love.” Once more, an appeal based not on authority (though he certainly reminds Philemon of it!) but based on love and relationship. He even stresses his own weakness, calling himself an old man and a prisoner. And then he brings up the matter of Onesimus. “I am appealing to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I have become.” Now the he applies that same intimate relationship to Onesimus, twice in the same sentence. This is no mere slave: Onesimus is Paul’s own son. Now there is a pun intricately woven into this letter, because the name Onesimus means “useful” or “helpful,” so Paul says, “Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful both to you and to me.” And now he lays it on thick, “I am sending him that is my own heart back to you. I want to keep him with me in my imprisonment…but I prefer to do nothing without your consent, in order that your good deed might be voluntary and not something forced.” This is diplomacy at its highest! He appeals to the very best nature in Philemon, speaking of his reputation for love and good deeds. He speaks of Onesimus in intimate terms, and stresses that it’s up to Philemon to figure out how to do what is right. And what is this “good deed” that Paul wants Philemon to perform? Technically, all he asks is that Philemon take Onesimus back and charge any debt he owes to Paul. But again, listen to how the request is made: “Take him back no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother…. Welcome him as you would welcome me…. I know that you will do even more than what I say.” It’s clear to me at least that Paul wants Philemon to set Onesimus free. In speaking of Onesimus’ debt, Paul notes all that Philemon owes to him. Indeed, the implication is that just as Christ through Paul’s ministry has set Philemon free, so ought Philemon to set Onesimus, a brother in Christ, free. Indeed, it would be very difficult for Philemon now not to free Onesimus, not when Paul has set it up so well. But the outcome is by no means certain. Onesimus has been sent to deliver this letter himself, with no guarantee that Philemon will do what Paul asks, let alone set him free. Think about what it meant for Onesimus to go back to this man. Why had he run away in the first place? Slaves were often treated quite well, sometimes almost like members of the family. So if Onesimus ran away, maybe even stole from his master, the implication to me is that he was not treated well there. Of course we can’t say for certain, but at the very least we know that the law would say that Onesimus had committed a double crime: running away and stealing from his master. The law would not deal kindly with him. Yet at Paul’s bidding, he goes back without any guarantee. With Onesimus’ story in mind, that phrase, “Take up your cross and follow me,” takes on a whole new level of meaning. Even the illustrations from Luke’s parable: which of you intending to build a tower does not first sit down and estimate the cost? Or what king, going out to wage a war, will not sit down first and consider if he has the forces to win? Or which slave, seeking freedom, will first sit down and figure out a plan of escape? These illustrations are just as problematic as the “hate your mother and father” part, but they tend to get overshadowed by the more dramatic attack on so-called family values. But some of the reading I’ve done suggest that the illustrations of the tower (which might be a military defense) and the king going to war and meant to illustrate the way of the world. Many of Jesus’ followers wanted him to wage war against the Roman Empire. But Jesus rejects that plan, saying you need to count the cost first. And the key, perhaps, is in this final statement: “If [the king cannot win the war], then while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So therefore none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” But what possessions? Not only material wealth, but also worldly expectations of conquest and victory. Onesimus dreamed of freedom. He wanted to escape slavery. It was an unjust institution in an unjust age, so he ran away. How could Paul help him? I doubt there was an Underground Railroad in those days. There were no free states. Onesimus would have been a wanted criminal. Paul calculates the cost, studies to see if he has the forces to win this battle. And then he sends a delegation to ask for the terms of peace. But he does not come from a position of weakness, for all that he talks about how old he is, languishing in prison. While apparently giving Philemon all the power to make the decision, Paul sets the terms himself, and the terms he uses are: love, good deeds, faithfulness, brother, son, father, useful, obedience, and “even more than I say.” But the most important thing that happens in this story is not the letter, or Philemon receiving it in the end, or the decision that he makes. Because the one with the real power in this story, the one with the real decision to make is Onesimus. Picture Paul in that dank prison, signing his name to this letter and handing it to Onesimus. “Now is the time, my son,” he says. ”Will you take up your cross?” Because the cross is not a metaphor for hardship or trial. The cross does not mean battling cancer or losing your job or having a hard day. The cross means counting the cost, going out to meet with the enemy that wants to make war on you, confronting the power that will use deadly force in order to preserve its position of privilege, yet going out to meet them in a spirit of reconciliation. That is what it means to take up your cross. That is what it means to be a disciple. That is what it means to give up all you possess, even your own freedom. Paul’s cross was to give up Onesimus whom he loved, and to make no demands but rather entrust Philemon to do the right thing. Onesimus’ cross was to return home to his master with no guarantees, to risk not only continued slavery but even punishment. And Philemon? His cross will be to reject the rights and privileges that are his under the law, to give up the slave he owns, in order to embrace Onesimus as a brother, not of blood but of the spirit. Because what is at stake in this story is about far more than runaway property. It is about more than the institution of slavery. What is at stake in this story is salvation itself, the reconciliation of enemies to become brothers. That is true justice. That is a freedom that no one can ever take away. That is the greatness and unstoppable power of love. That is the way of the cross. Sabbath
Work 22 August 2004 It’s amazing to think about just the past century and the enormous number of technological developments since then. My grandparents were born in 1900, and in their lifetime, cars became widespread, airplanes were invented, and people walked on the moon. Telephones evolved into cell phones that film videos and send email; calculators became computers with high-speed Internet. Microwave ovens zap our food for us in a fraction of the time that it used to take cook. The list of laborsaving devices is endless. Yet it’s also interesting to see how people in the first half of the century viewed the marvelous future that awaited them with all these amazing machines. With so many laborsaving devices, we’ll be able to do our work in a fraction of the time! Why, we’ll only have to work fifteen-hour workweeks in order to accomplish the same amount of work! Yes! The future will be a bright era of leisure and relaxation! That part of the vision did not come true. When some device enabled us to do in fifteen minutes what it once took an hour to do, we didn’t then take the remaining forty-five minutes off. Instead, we came up with things to do in that extra time. Productivity increased, but now we’re running around at top speed. In fact, with a bit of multi-tasking, we can do five things at once: We can talk on the phone while driving our car, at the same time that the laptop is sitting in the passenger seat sending a fax via wireless internet, while we’re rushing to the kid’s basketball game. So amazing! The wonderful laborsaving devices! Now – where did all our leisure time go? So we look with a certain longing back to those Bible days when people actually rested on the Sabbath. Let’s be honest: don’t you kind of wish someone would forbid you from turning on the computer or using the phone on the Sabbath? When I was a kid, there were still “blue laws” that mandated that malls and movie theaters must be closed on Sundays. But that has changed, too. When I was a minister trying to run a Sunday confirmation program, I found that half my students had sports events or tests scheduled on Sunday mornings. I was shocked! I bet secretly we look with envy at those Pharisees in the Bible with all their rules about what you couldn’t do on the Sabbath. We could use a day of rest! But when we read these stories about Jesus doing work on the Sabbath, perhaps we miss the point when we focus on the issue of rest. Jesus certainly wasn’t addressing the multi-taskers of the modern world with our army of labor-saving devices that give us more and more time to do more and more things. There is another issue at stake here. Let’s look back a minute at how the Sabbath got started in the first place. We know the story: how God created the world in six days, and on the seventh day God rested. We also know that this is not a literal story, not a literal cycle of 24-hour-periods, and was God tired after all that work and needed to recharge the divine batteries? Was this the origin of labor laws? Not quite. The Sabbath is the day of completion, when creation had been finished and pronounced good, but it is also the day of potential – because so far God has done all the work, and the creatures haven’t really done anything themselves. The Sabbath is therefore a day of blessing, but also a day of promise. It’s a day for remembering that we didn’t make this world, Someone Else did. This world was already here before we entered the picture, and it was already blessed even without our presence. We were created, like everything else. That identity binds us to the world around us, in a way that we moderns often like to deny. That’s the first lesson of Sabbath, and one that is well worth remembering: We didn’t make this world, but it’s the only one we’ve got, and it is a blessed and good thing. The second lesson of Sabbath is about promise: God made this world and made us to go in it. So now that we’re here, what will we do with that gift? Will we blow it, like Adam and Eve did? Listen then to these words from Isaiah: “If you refrain from trampling the Sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the LORD honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs; then you shall take delight in the LORD, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth; I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.” Sometimes the command to honor the Sabbath can indeed seem like a burden. For us moderns so pressed for time, we sometimes need to work on the Sabbath. It may be the only day we have available to get certain chores done. Indeed, the Pharisees had such elaborate rules about the Sabbath precisely because they knew that some work still needed to be done. For example, there were rules about what kind of knot you could tie on the Sabbath – this was precisely to allow you to untie your domestic animals and lead them to water, which is the example Jesus refers to in our passage from Luke. So the key here is not so much whether we are doing any work or not, but what kind of work. The key here is whether the work we do honors the Sabbath, or more accurately, honors God’s creation of the world or not. Our gospel story shows us the nature of the good Sabbath work that honors God. Here is an old woman with a spirit that has crippled her for eighteen years. Eighteen years of being unable to stand up straight. Eighteen years of not being able to look a person in the eye. Her condition does not reflect all the promise and blessing of creation. Not only because she is crippled and in bondage to pain, but also because her physical ailment has prevented her from the full life of the community. When the synagogue leader sees Jesus heal this woman, he becomes indignant, declaring that healing this woman is a desecration of the Sabbath. He places his Sabbath laws above the needs of this woman. But Jesus paid him no mind. In healing her, Jesus did not break the Sabbath rules against work. Rather, he did the very best work you can do on the Sabbath. He did work that restored the blessing of creation, that restored the promise that was the woman’s birthright as a child of God. Hear again those words from Isaiah: “If you refrain from trampling the Sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the LORD honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs; then you shall take delight in the LORD.” The synagogue leader followed his own interests on the Sabbath by emphasizing his personal piety over the woman’s needs. But Jesus continued the creative and redemptive work of God, and thereby honored the Sabbath. Indeed, freeing people from bondage is what the Sabbath is most about. This is seen most clearly in the biblical laws about the Sabbath year. Every seventh year, the bible decreed that the land should remain unplanted so that it may rest and recover from tilling and harvesting. Farmers today know that this is a good practice. In the Sabbath year, all debts were canceled, so that people held in financial bondage could start over. In the Sabbath year, slaves were set free, because no person should remain captive to another forever. In the gospels, Jesus frees people from physical affliction, from social ostracism. He frees them from their demons and from their sins. This is holy and honorable Sabbath work. What then does this mean for us moderns, with all our infernal labor-saving devices and our break-neck pace of life? It would be very difficult for us to go back to a Sabbath as literal as we see in the Bible. But we can still ask ourselves these questions: What are we in bondage to? What is it that enslaves us? And how can we be liberated on the Sabbath? This day was created for us and for the world, created to celebrate the blessing and the promise of creation. How then can we honor that? What work that we do on the Sabbath honors creation? And what work that we do on the Sabbath can further the work of creation by freeing others? For like the woman in the story, all our multi-tasking can weigh us down. We are stooped over, unable to stand tall. We too need to be set free. And we need to be set free in order to continue the holy work that God began in creation, the holy work that God continues to do every day. For to God, every day is the Sabbath, and every day is worthy of honor. The
Sword of Peace 15 August 2004 By the very name we have chosen for our church, we demonstrate our commitment to peace. So a passage like this one in Luke is rather disturbing. The imagery is so violent: not peace but division. Or as some of the older translations more graphically put it, not peace but a sword. Like a thunderstorm or a heat wave, Jesus claims to bring something powerful and frightening, something that can even split the intimacy of a family and set members against one another. It’s disturbing, and it’s hard for us to know what to make of this passage. But we might ask ourselves, when is peace not really peace? When does the image of peace mask something far more disturbing? Say there is a family that lives in our neighborhood. They are a very close-knit family; everyone always sees them together. The parents drive the kids to school, attend all their soccer games. They go to church regularly, they go on family vacations. They appear to be the model family. But inside the walls of that house, something very different might be going on. One of the family members might be an alcoholic or struggling with drug addiction, stealing money from the others, lashing violently out at them. Yet no one in the family ever says a word to anyone outside. There might be abuse in the family, yet the yelling always takes place behind closed doors, and the bruises are always kept very well hidden. Or perhaps an even more sinister kind of abuse is going on, accompanied as always by its promise of secrets: “Don’t tell anyone about this, or they’ll take you away.” Some families that appear united on the outside are in fact bound together by a network of lies and deceit, meant to preserve the illusion and mask the real problems. Are such families truly at peace? Or perhaps if true peace came to that family it might very well look division: son against father and father against son, daughter against mother and mother against daughter, as for the first time they confront one another, they refuse to remain silent. And the situation doesn’t have to be anywhere near as sinister to still illustrate that “peace” can be kept at too high a cost. Any family that goes through divorce knows that sometimes you need to divide in order to know any peace at all. This kind of false peace happens in more than just families. The prophet Jeremiah was born into a prospering nation, a nation at peace. While the Northern Kingdom of Israel had fallen to foreign invaders, the southern kingdom of Judah was still going strong. The nation was wealthy, prosperous. Gross National Product was up, and people offered many costly sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem. Indeed, the prophets of the king called out, “Peace! Peace!” But the peace they proclaimed was a lie. Jeremiah saw beneath the white-washing to the corruption that it hid. Yes, some were wealthy, but thousands of others languished in poverty, enslaved to their debts. Yes, religious practice seemed to be widespread, but it was more about showing off and parading one’s piety before others, rather than truly attending to the word of God. The false prophets told people what they wanted to hear, proclaiming peace and prosperity and ignoring the truth of what was going on. Jeremiah alone stood up to cry out against the injustice, and he was sorely persecuted from it. The high priest had him arrested and whipped, he was driven from the country, and he may have finally been murdered by his own countrymen. Yet Jeremiah’s words proved to be true, and within his lifetime, Judah fell to foreign invaders, weakened by their own corruption and injustice. We can see this story repeated throughout history, from the most intimate level of the family, to the grandest level of entire nations and even religions: people clinging to the illusion of peace to masquerade conflict and trauma and horror within. People refusing to face controversy, not wanting to stir up trouble. “Don’t bring that up, because it will only make people angry. Don’t say anything because it will only cause conflict.” Churches refuse to tackle difficult issues for fear of driving members away, nations that cannot handle dissent. But there is nothing so peaceful as a police state, no family so stable as one dominated by a tyrant. We all hate conflict and controversy. In so many small ways, in our own lives we shy away from difficult issues for the sake of peace and quiet – especially quiet. Some of us have struggle with great problems of abuse and addiction, but certainly all of us have at one time or another given into that temptation of complicity. Let’s just not talk about it, I don’t want to deal with it right now. Yet even those little silences can have their price as we get angry with ourselves and resent others for not doing anything about the problem. Meanwhile, that problem continues to grow and fester. Silence doesn’t heal anything, and ignorance is not knowledge. In such a context, people who dare to uncover the lies and speak the truth are often seen as the ones who brought conflict in the first place. The family member who brings up the problem no one wants to deal with, the teacher or friend who notices that things are not quite as happy as the family wants everyone to believe, the church member who will not let the church languish in avoidance, the social prophet who says that our current unjust practices cannot continue. The Book of Hebrews, in speaking about the cloud of witnesses that surrounds us, mentions many people who suffered great hardship, who even died, as a result of their commitment to that true peace that comes from God. Faithfulness does not necessarily lead to material blessing, as Jeremiah could certainly attest. Faithfulness may in fact land us right in the center of conflict and controversy. But the author of Hebrews advises us to keep our eyes on that prize, to keep our hearts set on that greater purpose, the peace that passes all understanding, the only truth that can set us free. Jesus said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain;’ and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat;’ and it happens.” A storm can be frightening. It can change the landscape, it may even alter our lives forever. But sometimes a storm is just what the earth needs. A family that is bound by lies is not united. A nation that is based on injustice can never be strong. Sometimes truth brings division, and sometimes peace cuts like a sword. But if we are sensitive to the movement of God’s Spirit, if we are able to read the signs of the times, then we will be able to discern the difference between conflict that brings harm and conflict that forces us to deal with the truth. May God grant us the wisdom to know the difference, and the courage to stand by our convictions, for that is the meaning of true peace. Pack
Only What You Need 8 August 2004 Our scriptures talk about several trips, which is rather appropriate for summer, since summer is usually prime vacation time. Trips can sometimes seem like more of a headache than they’re worth, though, and one of the trickiest parts of getting ready for a trip is the packing. With other decisions: your destiny, your mode of travel and where you will stay, other people do a lot of the work for you. Even if you’re traveling by car, you get someone else to prepare the car for the journey. But according to airport regulations, no one else is supposed to do your packing for you. And packing, for me, is one of the more nerve-racking aspects of travel. I mess up more often on packing than on anything else. Indeed, we’re usually so afraid that we’ll leave something important behind, that we end up taking too much. This is why our luggage ends up weighing forty pounds each. When I was a kid, my mother would prepare long packing lists in preparation for our annual road trip to Colorado. Even when we girls packed for ourselves, my mother still made lists. Yet having a list wasn’t fool-proof. One year I managed to leave without packing any shoes! I still do that: I make packing lists, yet invariably manage to forget something important, like toothpaste or socks. On the other hand, I take too much of other things. One year my sisters and I took every single stuffed animal in our possession. This was in the days before air bags, of course, yet I tell you our car could have gone off a cliff and my sisters and I would have walked away without a scratch, because we were so tightly packed into that back seat, surrounded by stuffed animals. Nowadays I don’t overload on stuffed animals. In fact, I’m a very light packer – too light, for as I said, I invariably forget something important. But I still can’t resist over packing reading material. And books are a lot heavier than stuffed animals! The travel books always say that you should lay out everything you intend to take, and then put half of it away. Half the clothes and twice the money, they always say. This is very good advice, yet ironically, it’s very hard for us to leave those clothes (or books or stuffed animals) behind. We feel this compulsion to bring everything with us, even though we can always replace whatever we left behind. That time I left home without any shoes? We just stopped at a Wal-Mart that night and bought me some cheap sneakers. When I left home without toothpaste? You can buy that anywhere. For that matter, I never have trouble acquiring reading material on a trip. Indeed, I invariably end up coming home with more books than I left with. If you think about it, this packing dilemma can be an interesting parable of “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Whatever it is that we over pack for, is probably a good indication of what we think is important. But what do we really need for a trip, especially a vacation? Is that extra pair of jeans really that crucial? Do I really need to take four books? Are those truly the essentials? Or perhaps what we really need for any trip is a spirit of openness, of relaxation, fun, and exploration. Those are the things that will make or break a trip, especially when we find out we did forget something important. Because no matter how thoroughly we prepare, not matter how carefully we plan, something will always go wrong on a trip. How often have you seen people on vacation griping and complaining because the weather is bad, or they missed their plane, or their luggage is too heavy? But if we have packed a spirit of openness, then every trial and obstacle just becomes part of the adventure. I think that’s what our passage from Hebrews is talking about when it describes how Abraham and Sarah went forth on faith, not knowing where they were going. God called them, and off they went: destination unknown. How could they really pack for such a trip? They had to count on God, that no matter what trial they faced or what they forgot to pack, God would provide for them. Hebrews makes them look like the ideal trip-packers, but Genesis gives a slightly different account. Here we see Abraham arguing with God. God had promised to provide Abraham and Sarah with an heir, but Abraham notices that God forgot to pack one. He rebukes God, saying, “I had to make Eliezer of Damascus my heir!” Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Abraham placed his treasure with that heir, not with God’s ability to provide one. Abraham wanted to hedge his bets in his own way, rather than trusting in God’s providence. Now perhaps this seems reasonable for Abraham to be so worried. After all, both he and Sarah were very old and had never had children. We moderns tend not to have such a simplistic faith. Yet some of our fellow moderns do. This summer I have been reading a book called, “The Rapture Exposed.” It is, as you might expect from the title, about belief in the rapture, and it shows how this belief is not biblical. Now, I don’t need to be told that, and I doubt you do, either. Even though some of us grew up in religious traditions where belief in the rapture was important, I doubt it is for any of us now. I certainly didn’t grow up in such a tradition, so I was reluctant to read this book. But I’m glad I am reading it, because even though I don’t believe in the rapture, many other Christians do. More to the point, it has come to be generally accepted in society that the rapture is one of the central doctrines of Christianity. And even though I don’t believe in the rapture, I have to confess that even I sometimes almost accept that this is a part of basic Christian belief, and so it ends up becoming yet another doctrine that I have to explain away or reject entirely – rather than recognizing it as the modern addition that it is. And that false assumption on my part can end up shaping the way I view scripture. For example, our passage in Luke – all this talk about “be ready” and the thief that comes in the night – doesn’t that start sounding like rapture theology? These are the passages that make me cringe, and rather than reacting to the passage itself, I react to the way it’s been interpreted by rapturists. So let’s look a bit at these rapture assumptions and this passage from Luke. Because here we also see a journey. We see the master coming back from his banquet. Some people see this as relating to the rapture: we don’t know for sure when it will come, so we need to be ready for it at any time. But rapturists change the story a bit. For them the emphasis is on being taken out of this world – yet another journey. Believers will be taken from this world, and this world will be destroyed with all the bad people, and then God will make a new world for all the good Christians that got raptured. So then who needs to worry about environmental degradation? We might as well use up all the earth’s natural resources, because you can’t take it with you! Indeed, let there be no peace in the Middle East, because that will slow down the rapture! There needs to be a big war before the rapture happens, so any attempt to make peace only slows down God. I don’t have to tell you that some of our policy makers have these exact beliefs. Yet like Abraham, they’re trying to hedge their bets. It’s not enough to rely on God to work things out; they have to destroy the earth and thwart peace in order to make that master come home from the banquet. It’s as if they read the parable this way: the master comes home from the banquet and finds the house full of dust, with dirty dishes piled in the sink, and all the servants with their bags packed, ready to go. Their treasure is in that other-worldly destination, so they don’t care what happens to this world. Let it be destroyed! They’re out of here! Yet that’s not what the parable says. The master comes home and finds the house ready for him. Even though they didn’t know when he was coming, they kept the house in good order, clean and ready to welcome him. And when the master shows up, he doesn’t pile the servants onto his minibus and blast the house into oblivion. Instead, because they were ready for him, he sits them down and serves them. So our charge isn’t too fret about the packing, worrying about where we’re going and what we will take. Rather, we need to be ready in spirit, ready for whatever happens whether near or far, sooner or later. The point is to live as if God might show up any day. So rather than let the world go to hell because we expect God to blast it, we should concentrate on making this world fit for God. We shouldn’t fret over the details, the whens and the hows and the wheres. Rather, we pack as if we’re already on the adventure. We live as if God has already come into the world. To me, that’s what that wonderful verse in Hebrews is all about: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Abraham and Sarah went forth in faith, not knowing where they were going. They weren’t sure what to pack. They worried about what they might have left behind and where they might end up and how they were going to get there. But despite all these normal anxieties, when God showed up, they were ready. They made God’s promise their treasure, and that was where their hearts were: not with their packing or their plans, but with the adventure God had called them to. So let us be careful where we make our treasure, for there will our hearts be also. Teach
Us How to Pray 25 July 2004 It might seem a bit strange that the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray, but it’s a very good question to ask. Prayer is tricky. For some of us, prayer comes easily. As it has bee said, “As long as there are tests, there will be prayer in schools.” It comes naturally to some of, to talk to God in time of trial as well as celebration. It’s as if God is a close friend, the ultimate Friend, and as it is when we get together with a good friend, we never run out of things to talk about. But the instinct for prayer does not come easily for everyone. Others of us may have difficult relating to God as if God is a close personal friend. Some of us experience God as something not quite so anthropomorphic -- God as Spirit, God as sacredness, God as goodness or love. These perceptions of God are just as real, just as accurate and inaccurate, as God as personal friend. That’s fine. But it makes it harder to figure out how to pray. But however we conceive of God, whether prayer comes easily or with difficulty, the question remains how do we pray? What do we pray about? Take the classic example of intercessory prayer: praying for someone who has cancer. The instinct to pray for that person is, no doubt, strong for all of us. Prayer is a way to show our love and concern. But how do we pray, what do we pray for? So I did some research about what various people have said about prayer. Richard Foster, the author of Celebration of Discipline, said that when he studied Jesus’ examples of prayer, he found that Jesus prayed boldly, even as a command: be healed! Take up your mat and walk! And Jesus never qualified his prayers with an “if it be your will,” except when he was seeking guidance, as in the garden of Gethsemane. Foster concluded that we likewise ought to be bold and confident in our prayers. Pray for our friend with cancer to be healed, confident that it will take place! Now, I don’t think Foster is naïve. I know he knows that our prayers aren’t always answered in the way we want. I do think I understand his point about praying with confidence, but this still seems troublesome. Because what does it mean when we pray for someone to be cured of cancer, but they die anyway? Does this mean that our prayer was left unanswered? And there is something troublesome about this logic, that God will only help us when we pray. You have no doubt heard about those studies that indicate that people who are prayed for heal faster. Scientists obviously challenge these studied, but some theologians do, too. Does this mean, they ask, that God won’t help people whom no one prays for? Would God really show such favoritism? There are indeed all kinds of troublesome implications. Yet it still seems right to pray for others. Another person I read was Kathleen Norris, author of Amazing Grace, who wrote that we pray in order to be changed. We’ve no doubt heart this before as well. C.S. Lewis in the play Shadowlands says much the same thing. We don’t pray to change God’s mind. We pray to change ourselves. So we might pray for our friend with cancer to make peace with herself, to be content, to go gently into that good night. Yet something seems inadequate there as well. Is that the best we can hope for? Pray for resignation? Actually both of these reasons seem rather self-centered, as if prayer is all about what I want and need. If it’s wrong to pray by presenting a wish list to the cosmic Santa, it also seems wrong to pray as a form of self-help. Where is the relationship? Isn’t there more to prayer? But what? Another article I read hit on something rather different. Bishop John Robinson criticized many of the conventional concepts of prayer, especially prayer that entails removing ourselves from the busyness of life to create a special wilderness place or quiet time for prayer. What is the point, he asks, of cutting yourself off from others in order to pray, to speak with God or center yourself on the Holy One? Prayer needs to happen I the midst of our busy lives. Now certainly we see examples of Jesus and others getting away from the crush in order to pray, and sometimes removing ourselves helps us clear our minds and get focused. But look at the examples Jesus gives in our passage today: your neighbor bangs on your door in the middle of the night asking to borrow some frozen pizzas to feed his unexpected visitors. Your four-year-old, tugging on your pants leg and whining, “I’m hungry! I wanna go McDonald’s!” and this is what Jesus compares prayer to! But what unites these two examples is a bond, a sense of community and responsibility that calls to you even when the asker is being obnoxious and you’d just as soon ignore them. There’s something very primal going on here, a deep, deep truth – one that we understand best when we are in the thick of things. Both these examples involve caring for one another. Both these example, dare I say it, involved encountering the sacred in the very – oh, so very! – mundane. And that, Robinson says, is what prayer is all about: more than a wish-list, more than self-help, prayer is about recognizing the holy in the ordinary, being mindful of the presence of God in our everyday lives. For we as people of faith perceive a deeper reality, a greater truth present in the world around us. We don’t deny the world, rather we see it as God sees it – good. We see how God is present, acting in the most tedious details of everyday life. We see this greater reality in and behind and below and around the reality of the world. Prayer, then, becomes a way of focusing, recalling us to that greater truth, practicing perceiving the sacred in the mundane. So our prayers should always point to that greater, holy reality. With that in mind, then, let’s look at the prayer that Jesus teaches his disciples. It’s a fascinating prayer. What we see here is neither a wish-list nor a self-help mantra. What we see in this prayer is a testimony. Our passage today comes from Luke, so this prayer is a bit more streamlined than the one from Matthew that we say in church every week. It begins simply Father, hallowed be your name. Now some people make a bit fuss about this “Father.” Jesus said it, they argue, therefore it is the only way to address God, and none of us can change that. And for some people, to call God Father is a powerful gateway to the divine. It can be a powerful testimony to a loving God who cares for us even more deeply than the most loving parent. But for others, this is a gate that slams in their face ad cuts them off from the divine. Whether because of the abuse of real-life fathers, or whatever other harmful baggage comes with that term. That name is not a source of holiness for some people, and I don’t think Jesus meant for it to be an obstacle. I came across an interesting contemporary translation of this prayer which read “hallowed be your name” as “may we get your name right.” I thought that was brilliant. May we not call you the wrong thing – even if we call you Father. May we not make an idol out of our own conception of God, because our understanding is always limited. We know that Father is a metaphor, a pointer toward God, but it is not the full reality of God. So if the name “Father” has become an obstacle to God for someone, then it has become a false idol. It has not gotten the name right. For me, the greater truth being testified in this opening phrase, “Father, hallowed be your name,” is first that God is about relationship, that God – the Holy One who is ultimately beyond any name – cares for us and is bound to us even deeper than blood. Whatever name we use, it should point to the reality that the ultimate truth of this world is love. And the second part, “hallowed be your name,” means that however clever we think we are, we are not the smartest beings in the universe. There is something far greater than anything we can conceive, and we should stand in awe of that. We should have reverence for the truth of God. May we get your name right, O God. Hallowed be your name. The next phrase: Your kingdom come. It’s a bit more concise than Matthew’s version. This phrase seems obvious, but any of you grammaticians out there may notice how ambiguous the grammar is. Is this a command? A conditional statement? Does it mean the kingdom will come, is coming now, or has already come? There’s been a two thousand year old debate about whether Jesus believed God’s realm would be coming at a future date, or whether it had already come with his ministry. But I rather like the ambiguity. I think the greater reality being testified to here is that the realm of God is right here, immanent, but not yet complete. As Isaiah said, “It springs forth even now, do you not perceive it?” I think this phrase here testifies to what the world really is: the arena where God acts and inspires and creates and renews. It’s hard for us to remember that sometimes when we watch the news and see all the many, many ways in which we fall short. But this prayer reminds us that the realm of God is not something distant, existing elsewhere. The only realm of God is going to be here. So “your kingdom come.” Give us this day our daily bread. For me, this is the easiest phrase in the Lord’s prayer. We even have a Bible story about it. When the Hebrews were in the desert fleeing from slavery in Egypt, God sent them manna to eat. And there was plenty for everyone to gather for their daily needs. But what happened when they gathered more than they could eat in a day? The next morning they found the food had rotted. Only on Fridays were they allowed to collect extra, and then just for two days in order to observe the Sabbath. Indeed, I think this phrase is about economics, which means how we provide for our household. Worldly economics is often based on scarcity, the idea that you have to get more in order to preserve against want. But God’s economics is based on sufficiency: there is plenty for everyone, so don’t hog it. This prayer doesn’t say, “Give us this day our daily bread, and a bit extra so we can put it in the bank at 5% interest and have enough for our retirement days.” This prayer says, “We have enough. Everyone has enough.” That’s a powerful testimony! And if that phrase deals with God’s economics, the next one deals with God’s politics: Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those indebted to us. Whoa. That’s a very loaded phrase. By the way, do you know why the King James Version says “trespasses?” Because the prisons were full of people who owed debts. They didn’t want “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” to appear in the Lord’s Prayer! My NRSV says, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those indebted to us.” I think every version of the Lord’s prayer I’ve ever seen used in church tends to balance the verb in the two halves of that phrase, whether it’s trespasses, sins or debts. But we know basically what this means. As I said, this speaks of God’s politics. Politics means having to do with the city, in other words, our community. How we all relate to each other, how we all get along. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that our politics is not based on forgiveness of anything. But this prayer testifies that God’s politics is based on forgiveness. And finally, Do not bring us to the time of trial. Again, a very strange thing to say, and I’m not sure what it means. Maybe if this prayer came true, there would indeed be no more prayer in schools because there would be no more tests! But perhaps this prayer asks, “Do not give us something too heavy to bear.” Perhaps it testifies as our UCC Statement of Faith does, God’s presence in trial and rejoicing, and courage in the struggle for justice and peace. Well, that’s my mediation on what is the greater truth that the Lord’s Prayer gives testimony to. Like any great prayer, it bears much meditation. But perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he told the disciples to ask, seek, and knock. Not so much that they would get anything they asked for, but that if they ask and seek and knock for that greater reality, God’s truth which lies within and beneath this world, then they will find it. As if to say, “Be careful what you pray for, because you might get it.” So we had better make sure it’s worthy. And to go back to our earlier example of praying for our friend with cancer: I think we *do* pray for a cure. The greater testimony which lies within our prayer is that the person is more important than the cancer. We pray love for our friend, and comfort, and care. But yes, we also pray for a cure, even though we know it may not ever come about in quite the way we expect. But whenever we support cancer research, whenever we volunteer our time and effort, we are always hoping for that day when cancer will never take a life again. So whatever vision we have that seems insane and out of touch with reality: cures for cancer or AIDS, an end to hunger or suffering, world peace, when we pray for these things, we are testifying to the reality of God’s holy realm, where every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill made low. Where nation shall not lift up arms against nation, neither shall they wage war any more. Where God will wipe away every tear and death itself shall be overcome. It’s a bit of a wish-list, it’s a bit of self-help. But above all it is a testimony to a truth that is work asking for and seeking. So knock on that door! The
Other Shoe 18 July 2004 This story of Mary and Martha follows directly on the heels of the Good Samaritan parable, and it’s actually a necessary part of it. Because as much as we love the parable of the Good Samaritan, it only deals with half of the equation. The commandment, you recall, is to love God and love your neighbor. The Good Samaritan does not address the first point. So we need an additional teaching, and Luke provides us with this story. Mary and Martha, sisters who live in Bethany, are known in the other gospels, but this story is found only in Luke. Jesus goes to stay at their house, and Mary sits at his feet listening to his teaching while Martha is working in the kitchen. I’ve often heard it said that Mary is listening in while Jesus is teaching his disciples, implying that there is something surreptitious going on, and that the teaching was primarily meant for the disciples. But the Bible doesn’t say that. Granted, the Bible isn’t very good at providing stage directions, but we could just as easily interpret that this is more like a private conversation: just Jesus and Mary talking. That would make Mary’s presence here much more significant. But whatever the setting, Martha resents it. She says, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to come help me!” Women in particular tend to really resonate with that sentiment! (Not all of them, though. If you’ve ever been to my house, you can tell I’m a Mary.) But think about that: women tend to really respond to this story. And even though I’m a Mary, I feel like I *should* be a Martha. I don’t know what it’s like for you gents, but we women experience a lot of pressure, both internal and external, to be Marthas: to keep the house clean and tidy, to be the perfect hostess, to make sure things get done. So if we consider that this story belongs with the Good Samaritan, we find that the Good Samaritan parable – which focuses on doing things, particularly in showing compassion on others regardless of their status or role – has all male characters. And the Mary and Martha story, in which Jesus commends Mary for choosing the better part, for loving God above serving others, has all female characters. These are even more radical stories than we thought! The lesson, of course, is meant for everyone, that we should show compassion for our neighbors and we should also choose the better part, but the teaching of the lesson also reverses traditional gender roles. After all, in the Good Samaritan parable, the two men who pass the injured man by are a priest and a Levite, two men who serve God. Even the man who asked the question, a religious lawyer, all of these could be seen as Mary characters, people who “chose the better part” of loving and serving God and studying God’s word. Yet they are rebuked for their lack of compassion. Meanwhile Martha, who is “distracted by her many tasks,” such that Jesus tells her, “You are troubled and worried by many things” – she serves others, yes, but not with compassion. Perhaps she, like the lawyer in the previous story, is seeking to justify herself, to prove how worthy she is because she keeps the kitchen clean and serves homemade canapés. Both her concern and the lawyer’s are selfish, primarily interested in looking out for themselves. But the Samaritan and Mary are not selfless in comparison. On the contrary, they are both very much self-present in their respective stories. The Samaritan is moved with compassion, recognizing himself in the man in the ditch. Mary is likewise asserting herself, either eavesdropping on the disciples’ lessons or maybe even hogging Jesus’ attention in an exclusive conversation. So they both asserted themselves in very particular ways, yet in ways which enabled them to love God and love their neighbor. So self-denial is not being lifted up as the virtue here, because in order to love God and love your neighbor, you have to love yourself. Both the Samaritan and Mary chose the better part, because they chose out of love rather than a desire to justify themselves. These stories are divided in two to teach the lessons, but we all need to learn both these lessons, whether we see ourselves as Marys or Marthas, Samaritans or Levites. The commandment has two parts, but it is one: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength, and the second is like it: love your neighbor as yourself. Both are needed. We do one by doing the other. And we need to be present in both. This great commandment is echoed throughout the Bible, including in our Amos passage. I don’t know about you, but I find this a harsh passage. “Never again will I pass by my people…. The songs in the temple will become wailing.” But the sins that are named should sound familiar to us from the Good Samaritan parable: “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the Sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.” Isn’t this selfishness all over again? People who don’t care about religious observance because they can’t wait to make profit for themselves, even profit gained by cheating, theft, and the selling out of their neighbors. God is outraged and vows dire punishment. But look at what that punishment consists of: “The time is surely coming, says the Lord GOD, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the LORD, but they shall not find it.” The people neglect and exploit their neighbors, therefore God will cease speaking to them. Both parts of the great commandment are destroyed. I think it’s telling that the worst punishment God can devise is simply to sever relationship with us. But surely we all know how painful the silent treatment can be. God’s punishment cuts straight to the heart of the matter: we will be cut off from the One who loves us most. Wouldn’t any other punishment be more bearable than that? By contrast, our psalm says that those who love their neighbors, who treat others fairly, and with respect and compassion – those people will always be welcome in God’s dwelling. But
the good news is that even though we have earned that separation
from God many times – indeed, who can dispute that? Even though
Amos warns that So are we Marys or are we Marthas? God loves us just the same. Whoever and whatever we are, we are all called to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our strength, and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Do this, and whether the dishes have been washed or not, whether or not we’ve had our quiet time for the day or picked up that spiritual reading we really meant to do, we will inherit eternal life. Justify
Yourself
11 July 2004 I was recently watching TV, which is something I very seldom do. Let me first explain that the reason why I don’t watch TV isn’t because I’m superior to all you cultural lemmings. Believe me, I am just as capable of wasting my time; I just do it in other ways, because there’s little on TV to interest me. But the other day I was actually watching TV, and it’s always a culture shock when I do. The commercials! They are really scary! If you watch a lot of TV, you’re probably used to tuning them out, but if you’re not in the habit, those commercials are really frightening. So the commercial that frightened me on this particular day was one of those “adopt a starving child in Africa” programs. And this one was particularly bad. It showed pictures of children with distended bellies and flies on their faces, and these horrible voiceovers of childish voices saying, “I’m hungry, I have no home.” It was appalling the way they were using those pictures and what story they were telling through them. Because the kids in these pictures were only from other nations, living in mud huts. None of them was in an industrialized place. Furthermore, not a single one of them was white. The commercial was so patronizing, and so utterly uncritical in portraying poverty as something that happens to those poor wretches over there, and won’t you out of the goodness of your heart spare $24 a month from your cable satellite TV and your SUV gas bill and your air conditioning costs for your over-sized home to give to these poor colored children? Ick! No wonder I don’t watch TV! And yet as awful as the commercial was, is it a bad thing to send $24 a month to help a starving child? Certainly not! Even when the commercial trades on the wealth and the guilt of rich white Americans. Then again, maybe the commercial is doing it on purpose. After all, it’s probably effective. But the whole thing raised that age-old dilemma for me: what is charity really about? Is it about helping those in need? Guilting the wealthy into sharing? Is it about making philanthropists feel good about themselves? Is it about taking care of the least of these? And all of these are questions that are raised in my least favorite parable, “The Good Samaritan.” Poor me: the Good Samaritan comes up every year in the lectionary, and I’m forced to come up with a sermon about it. It’s not my least favorite parable because it’s a bad story, but because what on earth can I say about it? This is a parable that is so easy to turn into a treacly plea for charity, yet it can also illustrate some of the most profound truths about humanity. But it’s really, really hard to preach on, because it makes human wisdom look so very, very foolish – and ministers don’t like to look like fools in front of their congregations. But I have to preach on it, and as I was desperately surfing the internet for ideas (which is my preferred way to waste time), I found some intriguing thoughts, so I’m pretty optimistic about today’s sermon. But I still feel I have to issue a disclaimer: I am a mere worm! Who am I to try to understand the mind of God? I cower in humble awe before the might and wisdom of this parable! Having said that, let’s get into it. Because what I found on the Internet hit the nail on the head for me about why this parable disturbs me so much. These Internet commentators focused not on the story itself, but on the context in which the story is told. I’d never thought about it that way before – though maybe you have. But let’s take a look at it. We probably remember that the story begins with a lawyer standing up to say, ”Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Now, you’ve got to watch out for those lawyers because they never just ask a question. They’re trained to study an issue from every possible angle, so when they ask a question, it’s because they’ve already got an answer. Especially the biblical kind of lawyer, because they studied religious law. Earlier in chapter ten, Jesus has been teaching people some pretty harsh lessons. We heard last week the command to wipe the dust off your feet of the towns that don’t welcome you. Jesus then goes on to chide various towns in Palestine for being even more wicked and unfaithful than foreign nations. (I guess he wouldn’t have made that commercial I referred to earlier.) And right before this story Jesus has prayed for everyone to hear: “I thank you, God, that you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and given them to infants.” So he’s been pretty tough on the crowds lately, and we can perhaps understand why the lawyer stood up and asked his question. On the surface it seems quite sincere, “Um, given all this that you’ve just been saying, about hiding truth from the wise, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus, because he’s a pretty good lawyer himself, turns the question back on him and says, “What do you find in the law?” To which the lawyer confidently answers, “Love the Lord your God, and your neighbor as yourself.” “That’s the correct answer!” Jesus says. “Do that and you will live.” But the lawyer doesn’t let up, and it’s not just that the answer is not complicated enough for him. Because I passed something over in the first verse. It says the lawyer stood up to test Jesus. He didn’t ask the question for his own enlightenment; he’s wanting to catch Jesus in a logic trap. Jesus eludes the first attempt, but the lawyer won’t give up so easily, and here the gospel says, “Wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘Who is my neighbor?’” To which Jesus answers with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Think about that: wanting to justify himself by asking who is my neighbor. To justify means to prove to be right, to prove to be in the right. He asked the question because he wanted to prove that he already obeys the commandment. He sends $24 a month to help starving children in Africa. Who is my neighbor? It’s whoever I’m already caring for. It’s whoever I already surround myself with. But Jesus tells this parable about a respectable Jew, not unlike this lawyer, who gets robbed and beat up and left for dead in a ditch. The priest and the Levite, who no doubt run in the same circles as the good Jew, and maybe even live in his subdivision and belong to his Neighborhood Association, both pass him by. But the Good Samaritan, who we all know was considered a social and religious outcast among good Jews, saw the man in the ditch and was moved to help him. Moved “with pity,” as the NRSV says, though that sounds as condescending as my commercial. “With compassion” sounds better and is probably more accurate, because the Greek word basically means feeling it from your gut, a visceral, deep-seated feeling. The Samaritan saw the man and didn’t run away thinking, “I’ll be made impure, or the robbers might get me too.” He saw the man and thought, “That could be me.” And he helped him – not out of condescension or a feeling of superiority or abundance. He helped him because it was the only thing he could do. Pete has told us from his Bonhoeffer readings how there have been studies to explore why some people helped Jews and others escaped the Nazis, while others didn’t. And what they found is that the people who helped didn’t do so out of a sense of obligation or religious duty. They weren’t on the face of it any better or worse than anyone else. Every single one of them said they did it because it was the only thing they could do, and they didn’t think there was anything remarkable about it. They recognized themselves in the people who were being persecuted. They were moved with compassion. To be compassionate means to recognize our common humanity. In other words, it is to recognize that we are all neighbors. Think again, then, about the lawyer’s question: “Who is my neighbor?” The very question implies that there are some people who are not our neighbors. The opposite of compassion is denial – the denial that we share humanity with other people. Everywhere in the world, throughout history, we have always only been able to harm others when we first deny our common humanity with them. And everywhere in the world, throughout history, we have connected our charity, our works of kindness, to those who are “deserving” of it – those with whom we share humanity. But there are always some we seek to exclude, the ones who are not our neighbors because they are foreign, they are drunk, they are uneducated, they are dirty, they follow a different religion or have different colored skin. And if we do deign to help those wretches anyway, like in my TV commercial, it’s out of the overflowing goodness of our hearts, because we are so noble and gracious – because we are justifying ourselves, our deeds and our thoughts. Just like the lawyer tried to justify himself. But in this story Jesus says we cannot justify ourselves. The man in the ditch didn’t justify himself. He was justified, that is found right – found human – by the Samaritan. And the Samaritan didn’t justify himself because that’s not what he was trying to do. All he was thinking was, “That man in the ditch could be me.” If we hear this parable and say to ourselves, “I’m going to be like that Samaritan and help every wretch I see in the gutter so that I can gain eternal life,” then we’ve learned nothing from this story. This story is about the heart – or more accurately, the gut, the deep seat of emotion – and that’s why it’s so hard. It’s about more than just our actions; it’s about the heart inside us that motivates those actions. So giving to charity is good, helping robbery victims in ditches is good, but it won’t justify you. It won’t get you eternal life. It’s almost as if Jesus is saying, “You get eternal life because you already have it.” Very Buddhist, actually. But Paul’s letter to the Colossians makes a good accompaniment for this story. Paul says that he prays every day that the Colossians will be “filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God.” That fruit-bearing analogy – because no matter how you try to justify yourself, people will know your heart by the fruit you bear. And in the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus says that the key is to have compassion – to recognize our common humanity, that we are all neighbors. It’s a very hard lesson, one that I hate, because whenever I read this story, I feel myself lacking. I hate this lesson because I feel like it strips me of all my pitiful attempts at self-defense, at self-justification, much like that lawyer. But there is a message of hope here as well. “All you have to do,” Jesus says, “is to love God and love your neighbor. That’s it. Do this, and you will live.” It’s that simple. It’s that difficult. But with God all things are possible. So I pray with the psalmist, Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”
4 July 2004 It isn’t very often when the Fourth of July falls on a Sunday. Secular holidays always pose a bit of a problem for the minister. To what extent should we acknowledge the culture that we all live in, and to what extent should the church hold itself apart in order to distinguish ourselves from the bland civil religion that causes people to proclaim “God, Mom, and apple pie.” Take the American flag, for example. Many churches, if not most, have two flags in their place of worship: the Christian flag, white with one blue corner and a red cross; and the American flag. People argue about the presence of those two flags, and not just in seminary, but in the local churches as well. Is it right to have such a national symbol in a place of worship, in God’s living room, as it were? Many churches in many countries around the world have their national flag in their sanctuary. Indeed, some of those churches are the official, established churches of their nation. But isn’t the United States supposed to be about the separation of church and state? What, then, are we to do about the flag in our sanctuary, or about the Fourth of July in our worship? What is the proper relation between religion and government, between faith and politics? I’m sure I don’t need to argue on behalf of the separation of church and state for this particular congregation. My guess is, people on this church would tend to be more on the “no flag in church” side. Separation of church and state might seem quite clear cut, but of course the reality can be quite complicated. I was reading Thomas Cahill’s book “The Gift of the Jews” recently, and he argued that our very system of government, a democracy based on equality of rights before the law, is itself an outcome of our Judeo-Christian heritage. He isn’t quite going so far as some people who argue that the United States is basically a Christian nation, but he does say that without Christianity, and Judaism before it, our government might not exist. Take those words that all Americans (hopefully) know by heart: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Cahill points out that in fact there is nothing at all self-evident about those truths. They’re a faith statement, based on Judeo-Christian principles. The principle of equality is a rare one in history. Throughout the world, cultures have divided people into various classes, often based on their family bloodline. The station you were born to in life was the station you would keep until you died, and virtue was defined by learning your place and sticking to it. But things were different in Judaism, where God spoke to anyone God pleased, regardless of their station in life. This God called Abraham and Sarah to leave their station in life and strike out for something new. This God frequently chose the weak and powerless to be God’s messengers. Even when the people clamored for a king just like other nations, what they got was not quite the same. The history of kings that we see in the Bible is hardly one of Divine Right. Saul, an unlikely candidate, is chosen as the first king, and when things don’t work out with him, God bypasses Saul’s son and heir to choose David as the next king. After that, God doesn’t even seem to take an active part in the choosing of kings. Instead, kings are expected to adhere to religious law just like everyone else in their realm, to the lowest shepherd. That’s equality before the law, for you. “The truth that all people are created equal” is based on Judaism’s experience that God can choose to speak to anyone at all, so we’d better not bind ourselves to rigid social categories, because we might end up missing God’s message. This basic principle of American society and government is a statement of faith, not of reason. Certainly the separation of church and state as we now understand it was not a known concept in the Bible, but neither did the Bible exactly identify religion with the ruling government. The king did not set religious policy. As I said, he was expected to adhere to the same religious rules as everyone else. But the king was not the spokesperson for God. That role fell to the prophets – specifically, to prophets who were not part of the official court system. There were prophets even in Israel who worked for the king and who played the role of the king’s advisors. But of all the books of prophecy in the Bible, not a single one belongs to a court prophet. Instead, the prophets God chose were people outside the system: shepherds, farmers, and others. Some people today say that just as government should stay out of church business, so should faith stay out of politics. But the prophets in the Bible constantly spoke about politics. Indeed, that was their primary subject: government policy, both domestic and foreign. War and peace, justice and law, mercy and good works. And their messages were addressed just as much to the every day person as to the king himself. We see in the Bible that both faith and politics were the task of every person, from the greatest to the least. The prophets may have addressed their message to the king, but they proclaimed that message in the streets where everyone could hear it. But the period of kings was a very short one in the entire history of the Jewish people. For most of their existence, Jews did not have kings. Whether they were organized into their own loose tribal affiliations, or were living under foreign governments, Jews always found a way to live their faith even through politics. Faith was never a personal, private thing for Jews. Rather, faith was the basis for their public lives. We see the same thing in Christianity. Jesus never shied away from political issues. His famous teaching, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s,” can be interpreted as a kind of separation of church and state, but it can also be understood as an engagement. Certainly Jesus’ actions in the political realm were very much informed by his faith. This is our heritage, a heritage that would eventually lead to those self-evident truths proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence. So what does this mean for us today? Certainly “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This reflects the kind of sensibility the Jews developed when they were learning to live under foreign rule, and it reflects Jesus’ context as well. Government does not exist to impose religious beliefs or practices on its people, and the rights of religious minorities must be protected. We all know that. But beyond such issues of protection, we see that our faith should indeed inform our politics. If our faith is so very private that it has nothing to do with public life, then what good is it? I can’t really argue against people, who lobby to end abortion rights for religious reasons, not when I would lobby to end the death penalty for religious reasons. The difference is that government should not pass any law for religious reasons, but rather for the good of society as a whole – a good that is determined not only by people of faith, but also by atheists, agnostics, and everyone else. Faith is not an argument that trumps everyone else’s rights. Rather, our arguments must hold their own within the arena of public debate and discussion, regardless of our personal motivation. But again, I’m sure I don’t need to make this argument to any of you. So instead, having looked at the Biblical relationship between religion and government, faith and politics, let’s go back to that first question of what to do with a secular holiday like the Fourth of July. It is an inevitable part of the human condition to organize ourselves into nations. The Bible does not question the right of nations to exist; it only questions whether they are just or unjust, and sometimes it is Israel that is found wanting, whereas gentile nations are found to be just. Regardless of a nation’s religious affiliation, they will still be judged on the principles of justice, such as all religions speak of. So on this Fourth of July, let us “render unto Caesar.” Let us honor the United States of America, first of all because it is our home. It is the country in which we were raised, the nation that shaped many of our principles. Let us honor the vision of those founding fathers – not for what their vision lacked, but for what they aspired to. While we know that the founding fathers did not in fact view all men as created equal, the history of our country has been expand that concept of equality, rather than to restrict it. And in the history of the world, that really is something worth celebrating. At the same time that we honor our country, let us also acknowledge and confess its sins. Far from being unpatriotic, an acknowledgement of our failings is one of the most patriotic things we can do. Indeed, a country that refused to admit its flaws is a country that sets itself up as an idol, higher than God. Regardless of our religious beliefs, none of us should ever revere our country so highly that we identify it with God. Finally and especially, let us pray for our country: for its people and for its leaders. We don’t insist that all people in the United States be Christian, but we as Christians can pray for all people, and we will be doing so in our pastoral prayer. After all, every country, like every person, could always use prayer. The Fourth of July: a time to remember, a time to confess, a time to lament, but above all, a time to celebrate. On this day, I am willing to say from the pulpit: “God bless America.” Pastoral Prayer Gracious and loving God, father and mother of all nations and all peoples, on this day we pray for our homeland, the United States of America. Our country has always been a place of expectation and hope. In its greatest moments, we have stood for the greatest principles of the human heart: equality and freedom, justice and liberty. These are worthy goals to strive for, and we give thanks that time and time again, the people of this country have stood for greater justice and equality. O God, even as we celebrate this vision, we also acknowledge how our country has failed to live up to it. From the very beginning, we have excluded people from those unalienable rights: indigenous nations, women, the poor, Africans forcibly abducted from their homes into slavery, immigrants from all nations who have found exploitation and oppression here, rather than the freedom they sought, gays and lesbians who even today are victimized by unjust laws. We know that many problems still plague our nation: poverty, racism, the oppression of civil rights. God, we confess the sins of our country, not because we do not love it, but because we want it to do better. We pray for the people of this nation, immigrant and native, citizen and alien. We pray that they will learn the great heritage and principles of the United States, and that they will live up to our noble calling of government of, by, and for the people. We pray that we will recognize that the strength of our nation lies in its people, regardless of their origin. May all forms of prejudice cease. We pray for all the people who serve our country: government employees and politicians, teachers in public schools and members of the armed forces, garbage collectors who keep our streets clean and police officers who keep our streets safe, volunteers who give of their time from the Peace Corps to neighborhood associations. We ask that they will perform their tasks diligently and faithfully. We ask your blessing on them that they will not lose faith in the dignity of public service. We pray for the leaders of our nation: the policy makers who determine and rule on law, from the President to city council members. We pray that they will be just and righteous in the execution of their duties, and that they will be faithful to the covenant of our nation. Guide them with your wisdom, O God, that we may be a nation of blessing and virtue, not only for our own citizens but for all people around the world. O God, hear now the particular prayers of our hearts as we name them before you….
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