Sermons from worship at Epiphany UCC 2008 West Damen Ave in Chicago. We meet Sundays at 10:30, Child care is provided in the basement. If you can't make it, please enjoy this podcast of our sermons!
The topic of praising God is not something we folks in the mainline Christian community do a lot of talking about, or at least in the places that I’ve served and been a part of over the years. Even when I was a teenager and ensconced within a Southern Baptist setting, I don’t remember a lot of conversations about what it means to praise God and why we humans do it or should do it. Maybe it’s nothing you’ve ever thought about twice, because we often are given the words with which to praise God, in hymns, songs, Scripture readings, like the one you heard a few minutes ago from Psalm 150. Honestly, I had never really thought twice about our praise of God until something early on in my ministry, in which I was told how to praise God in a particular kind of worship service. As you know, I once worked in a large congregation that had multiple and different kinds of worship services during the week. As some point, the Senior Pastor asked/told me that I would be leading up the Wednesday evening service, which at that time was a contemporary worship service with a 30-minute slot for preaching/teaching, usually connected to some clever and contemporary hot TV show of the moment. One time they had a series on relationships based on the Simpsons, another time it was around the first round of the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy series, but it was renamed Queer Eye for the Soul. Yes, some of it was a bit much, but I didn’t get to pick the themes or the contemporary connection to pop culture! Anyway, so all of sudden I am leading a Wednesday evening worship service with a 6-piece band, all them quite good, with 6-8 gifted vocalists leading us in a contemporary Christian worship style. This means that in this particular service there was a lot of music for the first 20 minutes of the service for the 200 souls gathered there, with the lyrics projected onto the screen, and lots of repetition, singing the choruses of these songs over and over again. And there were people raising their hands in praise, often standing up with their eyes closed and their bodies swaying. Then I would preach or teach for 30 minutes, do a prayer, and then the service with another round of repetitive choruses, all of which usually were short, uncomplicated and effused with words of praise for God. I had not grown up in that worship style, and here I was leading a worship service that was built around it. It probably wasn’t the best decision the Senior Pastor ever made putting me as the lead on that service – I think he was desperate after a number of our clergy were fired or resigned – since it was pretty clear early on that I couldn’t easily engage in that style of worship – it just simply wasn’t in my bones. One Wednesday he was standing next to me in the front row, with his hands raised and closed eyes, and he leaned over asked me and told/asked me to do the same. I just shook my head “no,” because, frankly, it just wasn’t me, it just wasn’t the way I showed my adoration of the Divine, my praise of the Holy. Needless to say, that experiment of me leading that service was a short-lived one, though I like to think that I wasn’t that bad at the preaching/teaching part of it. Now, to be clear, just because I didn’t easily fit into that style of worship, one that tended to focus heavily effusive and emotional it its way of praising God, doesn’t mean that I think it was the wrong way of praising Divine – it just wasn’t my way of offering praise to God. One of the things I often say to the confirmands was that Protestant Reformation gave birth to such an incredible diversity in the church, diversity that was there from the very beginning and was just waiting to come out when the authoritarianism of the Roman Catholic Church at that time got challenged in the 16th century. It allowed for new ways of engaging and praising God, rather than the one-size-fits-all way before the Reformation. Some people may find diversity in the church disconcerting, but I find it exciting because it actually reflects our lived experience in the world – get 10 people in a room and you get 12 different opinions, ideas, and, well, 12 different ways of praising God. But that little experiment of me leading a different type of worship service where praise of God through what is called “praise music” absolutely helped me to start thinking about the whole issue of what it means to praise God. Why do we do praise God, however we do it – and why does the Bible often encourage us to praise God, often insisting we do it as an expression of our love of God? I want to explore that question by looking at our text today, two snippets of Second Samuel, where the drama of Israel’s struggle to become united under a singular king is finally coming to a conclusion. Remember that Israel had actually been divided into two kingdoms, the Northern Kingdom, often called Israel, actually, and the Southern Kingdom, often called Judah, with the 12 tribes of Israel being divided in loyalty to two different kings. After a lot of false starts, the Northern Kingdom finally realized that it would be better to lead by David, the shepherd boy who had so bravely defended his Southern Kingdom, Judah, from the Philistines – and recaptured the Ark of the Covenant, called God’s chest, in our translation today. Today’s text is that crowning moment when the 12 tribes become one again under David’s leadership – and it almost seems anticlimactic after all intrigue and drama and war that came before it. Now, King David and 30,000 troops march into a town to reclaim the newly captured Ark, this potent symbol of Israel and its God. It was the Ark that Moses used to symbolize the presence of God among the people while they were wandering in the desert for 40 years, and it was believed by some to be the very place that God sat on when she was among her people. Here they have this symbol back, after 40 years of being owned by their hated foes the Philistines, and the party begins. Our snippet of this story ends with these words, this act of praise: David and the entire house of Israel celebrated in the Lord’s presence with all their strength, with songs, zithers, harps, tambourines, rattles, and cymbals. There was so much to be thankful, of course. After so much bad leadership, finally, Israel would be led by a man chosen by God, though, as always this chosen one was as imperfect as all the other people God has ever chosen for leadership in Israel’s history. And really gratitude is the root of all good praise, that sense of gratitude to God for the good gifts he has given us, for all the ways that God shows up to make something whole when it seems like all would be lost. David and the people in our text are ending a long and bloody nightmare where God’s people could not even get along while they were fighting off nearby competitors for power. Finally, they are united, and it is not an accident that the storyteller here introduces the Ark, this symbol of God’s presence, at the very moment when the people of Israel finally become one again. And so they are grateful – and they pull out the instruments, they get the band back together, so to speak, and they celebrate this unity with their praise of God for making it so. Look, all praise of God should be, ought to be, rooted in gratitude for what God has done, and the world God has created. We praise God for the gift of our lives, the goodness all around us, the food on our table, the people in our lives – and sometimes the people absent from our lives! And we praise God for making a way when there seemed to be no way – and that is what the people of Israel are doing as they surround the Ark on its way to the city of Jerusalem. Praise of God, healthy praise of God, the kind found in our Opening Words today, its rooted in the idea that all is gift, all is something we receive from God, even the things we earned by our hard work – the ability to earn something is even a gift from God. I say it almost every Sunday during our invitation to give to the work of the church – all is gift, all is gift – and then we praise the giver of all things, of everything. But, of course, people sometimes praise God for the wrong reasons. Later in chapter 6 of Second Samuel, during the journey with the Ark to Jerusalem with the band making beautiful music, a man reaches out and touches the Ark, likely by accident and God kills him instantly for this breach, or at least that is what the storytellers want us to believe. What’s interesting about that story is that David is angry, very angry, at God for this act – and certainly there must have a pall cast over the parade to Jerusalem from that moment on, fear muting their praise of God. But fear has often been used by people to force praise of God upon the people. There is a lot of fear-based religion in the world, and it sometimes shows up in the Bible sadly, but fear based praise of the Divine never quite works – fearing God, dreading God is not the same thing as loving God and being grateful to God. A few years ago you may remember that first public cabinet meeting of the Trump administration, and how everyone around the table went around praising the President with this jarring Soviet style rhetoric – praise for Trump, what an honor it was to serve in his administration, how he was going to be a world changer, etc. Around the table they went, prostrating themselves before Dear Leader with their words of praise for his brilliance and his importance. It was so uncomfortable to watch and I can’t imagine how personally humiliating this must have been for these men and women. I am sure these men and women believed in the President’s policies, but I think it’s clear that they feared him more than they loved him. The unwillingness by the politicians in his own party to hold him accountable is rooted in fear of what he could do their personal electoral chances in the next election. The problem is that the moment he becomes vulnerable, when they no longer fear him, they will join the chorus that condemns so many of his actions. So, I think David instinctively knew that Gods’ actions in killing that man who touched the Ark was a bad move, and that is why he showed such explicit anger – and interestingly enough, the storyteller doesn’t condemn David for his anger, not at all. I think that the storyteller here thinks that David was right and God was wrong to do what God did. Praise of God, love of God, that is rooted in fear will, in the long term, never produce in people the kind of authentic praise that comes from the heart, that comes from gratitude for what God has done and will do in our lives. Fear-based praise, like fear-based religion in general, is a dead-end in the long-run, not matter how effective it may be in the short term. But why does it matter to God that we praise her? Or at least that is what the Biblical text seems to imply all over the place. Why does God need us to praise him? Is God like Trump, this ball of ego that needs to be praised all the time, as seen in the endless rallies he engineers so that he can be adored by others? Obviously, I don’t think that is the case, but certainly it’s an interesting question – why are we encouraged by almost everyone in the Scripture to praise God? I don’t think God is an egoist and a narcissist, and, unlike Trump, doesn’t need an endless parade of sycophants to be able to feel good about herself. No, I think we are encouraged to praise God, however we praise God, because our praise for the Divine is good for us, actually. I don’t think God needs our praise of him, but WE have the need to praise God for what she has done. And this is the reason why: we have a need to praise God so that we don’t we end up believing the lie that this life, this stuff, this world, is all about us, and our accomplishments, that indeed, we should be the ones praised for the world we think we have created, and not God. You find the temptation all around us as Americans, in the falsehood perpetuated on us, by the myth of the rugged individual, who pulls herself up by the bootstrap, without need of anyone else – and to receive help from others is a shameful thing, much less help from God. Think about how that individualism that believes I have what I have because of me, and no one else, how that idea absolutely flies against the whole of the Biblical witness, how it spits in the face of the truth that everything, EVERYTHING is a gift from God, a gift, a gift, a gift. The temptation to praise everything else but God for all that is, the temptation to praise my hard work, her hard work, his talents, my talent, to take credit for the gifts that God has given to us in first place, is why the Biblical witness tells us to praise God instead. Us taking credit, of praising myself, or others, for what they have done, or who I am, the problem with this is that it makes it very easy to dismiss and ignore the pleas of those who need the very gifts God has first given us. You can ignore the poor, the marginalized, the pushed down and pushed out, if you believe that what you have is from you and your hard work, your good luck, your wise leadership – and not a gift from God, the giver of everything. Don’t believe that lie, the Bible seems to say – you are not seeing the world and life as it really is, which is a wild and wondrous gift to you from God. It is no surprise that the poorest among us are more generous by percentage of their income than those who are wealthiest – more than most, they understand that even what little they may have is a gift from God, and thus they need to share that gift with others. So, the better way, the way to avoid believing the lie that it wasn’t all a gift, is to praise the First Giver, God, and to do so with gratitude for what we have, knowing that it is a gift, and that all is gift. Of course, in the Biblical tradition, we are given gifts not so that we can hoard them, but because they are meant to be given away as a gift themselves. In Luke 12, Jesus condemns a man for hoarding up the grain for himself, not realizing the grain was meant to be given away to the poor, to be gifted to others. I think we’re asked to praise God so that we won’t be tempted in praising ourselves for gifts we were given by God in the first place. Don’t get me wrong – praise of other people is a good thing, acknowledging their goodness, their gifts, their understanding, is needed, more than ever, but that has never been the problem, really. The problem is believing that we should be praised for something that was given to us in the first place – our skills, even our drive, our minds, our whatever. That is the only way you can get praise wrong, to direct the praise to oneself when it needs to be directed to God. All the other ways you praise God, through worship choruses, or more traditionally with hymns, or just saying the word Alleluia, which means “praise,” that you whisper throughout the day, there are just means to this one end – acknowledging reality and reality is this, and has always been this: it is a gift, a marvelous, wondrous, amazing gift, everything that we are, everything we have, every skill we’ve mastered, all of it has been a gift, and if so, then let us praise God forever and ever, with all our strength, with songs, zithers, harps, tambourines, rattles, and cymbals. Amen.
Ruth 1:1-17 During the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land. A man with his wife and two sons went from Bethlehem of Judah to dwell in the territory of Moab. The name of that man was Elimelech, the name of his wife was Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah. They entered the territory of Moab and settled there. But Elimelech, Naomi’s husband, died. Then only she was left, along with her two sons. They took wives for themselves, Moabite women; the name of the first was Orpah and the name of the second was Ruth. And they lived there for about ten years. But both of the sons, Mahlon and Chilion, also died. Only the woman was left, without her two children and without her husband. Then she arose along with her daughters-in-law to return from the field of Moab, because while in the territory of Moab she had heard that the Lord had paid attention to his people by providing food for them. She left the place where she had been, and her two daughters-in-law went with her. They went along the road to return to the land of Judah. Naomi said to her daughters-in-law, “Go, turn back, each of you to the household of your mother. May the Lord deal faithfully with you, just as you have done with the dead and with me. May the Lord provide for you so that you may find security, each woman in the household of her husband.” Then she kissed them, and they lifted up their voices and wept. But they replied to her, “No, instead we will return with you, to your people.” Naomi replied, “Turn back, my daughters. Why would you go with me? Will there again be sons in my womb, that they would be husbands for you? Turn back, my daughters. Go. I am too old for a husband. If I were to say that I have hope, even if I had a husband tonight, and even more, if I were to bear sons— would you wait until they grew up? Would you refrain from having a husband? No, my daughters. This is more bitter for me than for you, since the Lord’s will has come out against me.” Then they lifted up their voices and wept again. Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth stayed with her. Naomi said, “Look, your sister-in-law is returning to her people and to her gods. Turn back after your sister-in-law.” But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to abandon you, to turn back from following after you. Wherever you go, I will go; and wherever you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Wherever you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord do this to me and more so if even death separates me from you.”
Where did ideas such as celibacy and the secondary role of women come from? And when and why did progressive churches like the United Church of Christ abandon them?
Why don’t we see big events like in the past? Is God afraid of us because we have become so mean, dangerous and careless?
It was still the first day of the week. That evening, while the disciples were behind closed doors because they were afraid of the Jewish authorities, Jesus came and stood among them. He said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. When the disciples saw the Lord, they were filled with joy. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, so I am sending you.” Then he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven; if you don’t forgive them, they aren’t forgiven.” Thomas, the one called Didymus one of the Twelve, wasn’t with the disciples when Jesus came. The other disciples told him, “We’ve seen the Lord!” But he replied, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands, put my finger in the wounds left by the nails, and put my hand into his side, I won’t believe.” After eight days his disciples were again in a house and Thomas was with them. Even though the doors were locked, Jesus entered and stood among them. He said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here. Look at my hands. Put your hand into my side. No more disbelief. Believe!” Thomas responded to Jesus, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus replied, “Do you believe because you see me? Happy are those who don’t see and yet believe.” Then Jesus did many other miraculous signs in his disciples’ presence, signs that aren’t recorded in this scroll. But these things are written so that you will believe that Jesus is the Christ, God’s Son, and that believing, you will have life in his name. “Proof – what I want is proof.” That’s seems to be what Thomas needs in our story – proof that Jesus indeed had been raised, proof that the others disciples who had claimed to see him weren’t smoking something, or imbibing too much in the wine in their grief around Jesus’ death. A second-hand account isn’t enough for Thomas – and why should it be? I mean, why do these 10 other disciples get to see and touch Jesus, all because he didn’t happen to be there when Jesus first appeared to them? It’s not fair, and, frankly, why should he believe something profoundly fantastical? Some things you can take someone word on it – but this, this requires more than just the word of a group of grief-stricken disciples. Surprisingly, perhaps, Jesus gives it to Thomas, a moment, an encounter all his own. To help Thomas believe that Jesus is risen, Jesus offers his wounds, the nail marks, the signs that the man crucified is the man before him. It’s interesting that it’s the wounds of Jesus that will be proof to Thomas that it is him, his Lord, this Jesus of Nazareth, truly risen from the grave. And it’s even more interesting that there are, in fact, still wounds and nail marks on that risen body, that love given flesh and bone, buried, and now alive. Look, if you’re going to rise, I would think, wouldn’t you want to rise minus the wounds of crucifixion, or the scars from a long chemo regimen, or lashes found in a body who has died because of an auto accident. And when I rise, which we are promised will happen to us on that last great day, I want to rise with my 21-year-old body, and my head full of hair. And yet Jesus doesn’t rise with a scar-free body – Jesus rises with his wounds, and he offers them to Thomas so that he can put his fingers into the slash of flesh caused by the sword that pierced his side on the cross – and Thomas can run his fingers over the palms where they beat nails into his flesh. We don’t know if Thomas took him up on the offer, but I think I would have, despite the grossness of it all – I would want to know for sure that these wounds were real, because it would make this reality with Jesus very real to me. It’s also clear that the writer of John wants us to take this moment, the proof given in this moment to Thomas and be able to live with not being able to put our own fingers into Jesus’ wounds, to not experience what these earliest disciples experienced. Jesus is reported to have said this: “Do you believe because you see me? Happy are those who don’t see and yet believe.” Even in antiquity, making the case that your Savior is risen isn’t an easy one to make – and the writer of John’s Gospel knows that many of us, most immediately in the late first century, but also us hundreds of years later, will wonder if Jesus really did rise on that day so long ago. There will be doubt, and Jesus words are meant to honor the fact that we won’t be given what the disciples had, what Thomas had, which is a body to touch, warm to the touch, scarred by what happened only days earlier. Doubt will creep in for many of us about this moment, but not only this moment – for some, there will be doubt about God’s presence in this world full of such evil, and doubt about whether or not God is even real. Jesus seems to know this, that we will doubt, and he acknowledges that truth in these words about enormity of what he is asking of us – to believe without the proof, without the body, without the wounds, the scars over which we could have traced our fingers across. And I’m glad Jesus acknowledges that truth, that for some belief in God, in Jesus, in an empty grave, is no easy thing. Certainly some of us never struggle with doubts, or we don’t struggle with them in any significant way – it may flicker here and there, but it doesn’t haunt us, as it haunts other Christians. Jesus seemed to know that it would be hard for some of us to be at ease with the claims of our faith, and he acknowledged the beauty of such faith, such trust, when it happens within the most skeptically inclined among us. As Jana said, doubt gets a bad rap sometimes, as if wondering if something is true or not is somehow an act of unfaithfulness, as if we betray God by sometimes doubting her existence. Now, don’t get me wrong – there is something to be said for those who never doubt much or ever – it is a gift, perhaps from God, that some simply have never doubted parts of their faith. I admire those who’ve never doubted, never struggled with the questions I sometimes do – and I don’t think it’s because they don’t think deeply or has rigorously as I do. The stereotype that some have of a person with a strong faith, a strong set of beliefs, as someone who is willfully ignorant, or not seeing the complexity of the world or faith, or has their head in the clouds, is ridiculous. Some of the smartest people I know have rarely entertained much doubt and some of the, well, not so smart people I know seemingly do nothing but entertain doubts. Each type of people, the doubters and the non-doubters, and the many in-between, exists, and each, in their own, receive a gift from the surety of their faith – and the rockiness of their faith. It’s that rockiness, though, that I think we’re invited to explore today, since it is about Thomas, the one who gets tagged as “doubting” when all he wanted was the same experience the other disciples had just had with the risen Christ. It’s clear that Thomas isn’t the ideal for the writer of John, and yet people like him are acknowledged in this Gospel, that there are people who struggle with their faith, their trust in a God they can’t easily see in this world, and in whose hands they can’t easily see move in this world. It’s been interesting thing for me, my journey of faith, because I’ve always been a questioner, a person wanting answers, a person who welcomes facts and history and context, who revels in the messiness of the Scriptures – and life – that you find all over the place. Last week I spoke of the fact that we are offered four different versions of Jesus’ life and for some that is disturbing, the fact there are differences across the four gospels in something like the resurrection story. It didn’t disturb the early church, of course, who knew of these differences, because they decided to include these different telling’s into our sacred text, the Bible. The beautiful messiness of the stories about Jesus were good enough for them, and I think they would be surprised that it would be problem for some of us centuries later. And yet, I can understand why it would be difficult for some, especially in our post-Enlightenment understanding of the world, and of history – but it never bothered me – it only fascinated and excited me, to see the human among these divine texts. I’ve had doubts about many things, especially around the church, around how we Christians can’t ever seem to live up to what Christ asks us to do, including myself, but a belief in God, a trust that God is here, that God is present, in ways that I sometimes can understand, but often cannot understand, that has remained for me. But I know that isn’t the case for others – and I’m glad it isn’t, in a way. It keeps me honest, it keeps us honest, and because we’re a community that welcomes the doubters, the skeptics, the people who want both their hearts AND minds met, it reminds us that following after the way of Jesus comes in many surprising forms. I was an associate pastor of church many years ago that had a lot people with doctorates in the congregations, mostly in the sciences, and in that congregation I would estimate that at least 5% of the congregation were open about their agnosticism, if not their outright atheism. They didn’t believe, they didn’t have faith, and that lack of faith, that kind of skepticism that Thomas practiced if only for a little while, was right there for us to see. Most seemed to come to church because they were seekers, and curious and wanted to ask questions and to explore the meaning of the big questions with others doing the same. If Thomas wasn’t cast out of the family for not believing based on the word of other disciples, that surely meant that these beautiful rogue agnostics were welcome to be among us as well. I hope that is true for us, when we speak of welcoming others wherever they may be in life’s journey. Some of us may not be at that point, at agnosticisms or atheism, but we have our doubts, we wonder, we question, we raise our eyebrows, and that, my friend, is OK. There is room for people like Thomas among us, as there was room for Thomas in group of early disciples. Proof is something I do not have, or perhaps can ever be comfortable offering you, because if something like God can be proved, then God can be disproved, and that seems not quite right, as if God was simply another theory that can be proofed out, like a math equation. Even to speak of God’s “existence” seems not quite right, because surely God doesn’t exist like you and I exist, or anything else exists like. As is so often the case, language just fails us when we speak of the Divine, of the Holy, when we speak of God, though we are stuck with it, with language that can’t capture the truth. The closest thing I have to offer is my experience of God’s presence in the world – and again, the word “presence” is not quite right, but I am stuck with it at the moment. The writer of 1 John says that God is love, and thus we should love one another. It’s probably a logically false argument, but I know love exists because I’ve experienced it many times, the giving of it, the receiving it – and it is perhaps the truest thing I know, that love is, that love exists, even in a world full of shadow and darkness. Because love is true, is real, then for me God is real, God is true, because God is love. Because there is love, there is God, who is love. That will satisfy no one perhaps, but all the other attempts at trying to prove God’s “existence” leave me unconvinced, and seem so easily dismantled, even by a believer like me. Yes, arguments can be made about the evolutionary nature and need for love for the species to thrive, but it seems to wring so hollow, because love can make us do things that make no sense in terms of personal or group self-preservation, like giving oneself for another, as Christ did on the cross. And that love for us, God’s love for us, is what draws Jesus out of that grave on that great day thousands of years ago. And love is the reason why Jesus showed his wounds to Thomas, as a gift to him, and to us, that the doubters among us are in the family, always. And I want to offer this final truth today that I think the story invites us into and that is this: when we look at what is difficult, like the wounds of Jesus themselves, when we look at our doubts, or whatever is difficult for us to look at, doing so will not end us or nor end our faith. I think some of us are scared of asking the hard questions about God, faith, whatever, and yet Thomas asks the hard question, and he is offered not an easy answer, despite what we may think – he is instead offered wounds, themselves a difficult thing to look at, themselves loaded with a set of questions about who God is and is not. Looking at difficult things, like the wounds on Jesus’ body, doesn’t mean that our doubts will be confirmed, that our worst fears about faith or God will be realized. In fact, we’re actually invited to look at the difficult things in our lives, our faith, even the world, because of this profound truth: we can now look at difficult things differently because of the resurrection, because if there is one thing the resurrection tells us clearly is that our doubts, our trauma, our fears, they will not be the end of us. Because of Christ’s resurrection, we can look at our crosses, we can look at what is difficult to look at, and know that what is looked at isn’t the end of the story – the cross wasn’t the end of the story, it wasn’t then and it never will be. Doubts, trauma, personal and otherwise, it can be met, the wounds can be touched, and it will not be the end of us, not now and not ever. The Lord is risen, and he is risen indeed! Thanks be to God.
Six days before Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, home of Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. Lazarus and his sisters hosted a dinner for him. Martha served and Lazarus was among those who joined him at the table. Then Mary took an extraordinary amount, almost three-quarters of a pound of very expensive perfume made of pure nard. She anointed Jesus’ feet with it, then wiped his feet dry with her hair. The house was filled with the aroma of the perfume. Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), complained, “This perfume was worth a year’s wages! Why wasn’t it sold and the money given to the poor?” (He said this not because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief. He carried the money bag and would take what was in it.) Then Jesus said, “Leave her alone. This perfume was to be used in preparation for my burial, and this is how she has used it. You will always have the poor among you, but you won’t always have me.” THE ANCIENT LESSON Deuteronomy 15:7-11 Now if there are some poor persons among you, say one of your fellow Israelites in one of your cities in the land that the Lord your God is giving you, don’t be hard-hearted or tightfisted toward your poor fellow Israelites. To the contrary! Open your hand wide to them. You must generously lend them whatever they need. But watch yourself! Make sure no wicked thought crosses your mind, such as, The seventh year is coming—the year of debt cancellation—so that you resent your poor fellow Israelites and don’t give them anything. If you do that, they will cry out to the Lord against you, and you will be guilty of sin. No, give generously to needy persons. Don’t resent giving to them because it is this very thing that will lead to the Lord your God’s blessing you in all you do and work at. Poor persons will never disappear from the earth. That’s why I’m giving you this command: you must open your hand generously to your fellow Israelites, to the needy among you, and to the poor who live with you in your land. I think you have probably guessed that the figure of Judas fascinates me, not only because I am did a two-part sermon series back in 2013, but because I mention him almost every time we do communion in this church. This wasn’t always the case—I don’t think I gave Judas much thought over last 10 years or so, to be honest. During that time I began clarifying for myself what I believed about God’s grace and God’s mercy, and to what lengths God will go to in order to bring us to God’s own self, to bring us in, to bring us home. And so as I have had to articulate what I’ve come to believe, that God ultimately brings us all home, whoever we are whatever we have done – or not done. I have thought of Judas often because he symbolizes such a seemingly lost soul. You probably know of the medieval story about Judas that I’ve often shared here, the legend where Jesus is said to have reconvened his disciples from that last super around some heavenly table, though there were only 11 disciples there because Judas was absent. Suddenly though the door comes the missing disciple Judas, seemingly startled to see his Master and his old friends around that table. The legend goes that Jesus cries out with joy, “Judas, we have been waiting for thee!” That legend so captures for me the grace of God, that goodness, that mercy that will ultimately include us all. Still, we all know the pain of being betrayed by a friend, a colleague, a spouse, we know that it is one of the most painful of human experiences. There seems to be nothing worse than realizing that our trust in someone was not merited, was not deserved on our part. I once worked at a church where one clergy colleague betrayed another colleague and though I wasn’t either the betrayer or the betrayed on this large pastoral staff, that act of deception, of duplicity, absolutely changed the dynamic among the rest of the clergy, and we were never quite the same again as a team. This clergy leader betrayed our trust in him, and we fellow clergy, numbering 8 or so, never quite knew where we stood with him, because he had criticized the preaching of one of us anonymously, rather than deal with it directly. Probably we have been on both sides of that equation at some point, the liar and the lied to, the betrayer and the betrayed, and that is other side of this dilemma, because it points to this unsettling truth: people rarely, and I mean rarely, are either all good or all evil, either all light or all darkness. Judas wasn’t just some hanger who attached himself to the disciples. He was specifically chosen by Jesus to be one of his disciples, and though that choice carries all sorts of questions with it, one of the things that it clearly does say is that there was a lot of goodness that Jesus saw in Judas, so much so that he brought him into his inner circle, the people that he trusted most. But, of course, that is what most of us did with the friends, the family, the spouse or lover, the colleagues that ended up betraying us, or what we did with those who we ultimately betrayed. That is the human dilemma, that people aren’t all light or all shadow, and that is where so much from where so much pain comes from when we are betrayed, that it was by someone so close to us whom we loved for their light – we often chose them and they often chose us because of what we loved in them, and they in us. And so this Sunday, I wanted us to look at one of the few stories we have in the canonical Gospels about Judas Iscariot, and what might have caused him to handle himself so poorly in this story, that might have caused him to betray Jesus. This story is actually similar to one found in the Gospel of Mark (14:3-9), but Judas is not explicitly mentioned as the one bringing up the objections about the perfume. That probably has to do with the fact that the Gospel of John is likely the last canonical Gospel written, whereas the Gospel of Mark is the first—the figure of Judas is more fleshed out by the time John was written, and thus Judas is, frankly, made a bit more sinister and menacing in this new telling of Mark’s earlier story about this incident. Still, the story doesn’t actually focus on Judas, but on the anointing of Jesus with that costly perfume, and as probably you have heard before from other preachers, in this moment so many seemingly strict boundaries are crossed. Men and women did not touch in this ancient culture, and it’s hard not to note the oddly sensual nature of the moment, even if it was not meant to be read this way. The typical way of interpreting this moment is following the lead Jesus gives here right in this text—that Mary prepares him for his death, for that will be another moment when perfume and strong spices will be massaged into his flesh, though that flesh will be cold to the touch. And yet, I also think it can be understood as a celebration of the good things in life, things like fragrances, perfumes, food, friendship, love, appreciation—even, even when as we, as Jesus’ disciples, strive to relieve the suffering of the poor, and the least of these amongst us. Life is the worth the living of it and there is joy to be found in this broken but still beautiful world. And yet this line by Jesus about always having the poor among us is often used as an excuse to ignore the poor, dismiss the poor, and as justification for not tending to the poor. It often is used to justify selfishness among us Christians, as if Jesus was saying, “well, I mean, really, there is no reason to give generously or change policies to help the poor, because, you know, no matter what you do there will always be poor people, so what’s the point?” Just live extravagantly, live big, enjoy our wealth, and don’t give much thought to those have so little in comparison to usBut as you see in the Ancient Lesson, Jesus is actually referring to a passage in the Jewish law that actually says the opposite. In the midst of a portion of the Law that gives instruction on the need to forgive all debts every seven years, the write warns that just because one knows that the forgiveness of debt is coming soon, that seventh year is approaching soon, one shouldn’t be tightfisted with the poor, the assumption being that the poor may get some relief from the forgiveness of debt. Leave behind resentment for the poor – something that you see so often by so many, as if somehow the presence of those in need is an affront to us, causing us to confronted by our much in contrast to their little. Wendell Berry captures this truth in last few verses of his poem “The Guest,” about a man who ask the poet for help. My stranger waits, his hand held out like something to read, as though its emptiness is an accomplishment. I give him a smoke and the price of a meal, no more –not sufficient kindness or believable sham. I paid him to remain strange to my threshold and table, to permit me to forget him– knowing I won’t. He’s the guest of my knowing, though not asked. Instead of being tightfisted, the writer of Deuteronomy says, we should be open handed, ready to help without judgment or resentment, words that Jesus echoes here in John 12. I’m often asked for help by some through the Helping Hand Fund we have here at church, and my mind always tries to evaluate the truthfulness of the asker and whether or not the need is real, but in the end, it doesn’t matter whether or not I am fooled by the person who is asking – you and I will be judged by our generosity, and not on whether or not we were fooled by some soul. Intention on our part is what matters here, something that concerns the writer of this text from Deuteronomy as well. But let’s go back Judas role here to perhaps explain why some of us, including me, have a hard time being as generous as we know God wants us to be. Here the writer diagnosed greed as Judas’ problem, the reason for his betrayal, for those thirty pieces of silver. But in the Gospel of Luke and also in the Gospel of John, the writer says that Satan entered into him, that he allowed himself to be occupied by a demonic spirit, and that was at least part of the reason he became a betrayer. In Matthew’s Gospel there also seems to be hints that the betrayal was meant to fulfill ancient prophecies about Jesus. Others have wondered whether or not Judas began his campaign of betrayal the moment he realized that Jesus was not going to lead an armed insurrection against the Romans, and so he no longer had use for him—no military leader, no need for him, might have been the mindset. And some have even argued that Judas betrayed Jesus because, like the priests in the temple, he felt it was better for Jesus to die rather than the whole Jewish people to perish in a reprisal if the Roman authorities felt threatened by Jesus and the Messianic murmurings heard about him. So, clearly we don’t quite know exactly why Judas did what he did, and though each of the Gospels try to help us figure it out in their own way, I want to actually go a bit deeper into Judas’ motives, and to do so by trying to tease out what caused Judas to react so badly to Mary’s gesture with the perfume here in this story, and how that might give us a deeper clue as to why Judas betrayed the Lord and why we are so often resistant to being generous as we could be. I actually want us to look at the last part of Judas’ name, Iscariot, a word that has baffled scholars for centuries. There has been speculation that it might refer to a family name, or to a region of Judah, or that might refer to the sicarii, which were a group of Jewish rebels that were active a few years after Jesus’ death. Other possibilities have been offered, including the idea that the name might refer to red color or even “to deliver” in Aramaic, Jesus’ own tongue, or it might mean “the liar,” which might have been derived from the Hebrew language. But when I was researching Judas, I stumbled upon the work of Joan E. Taylor who has argued that the word Iscariot was perhaps a descriptive name given to Judas by Jesus, much like Peter was named “the Rock” by Jesus, and that the word might be derived from Greek-Aramaic hybrid that denotes “chokiness” or “constriction” Now, perhaps that “chokiness,” that “constriction,” refers to one of the Gospels description of how Judas died, suicide by hanging, but I think it also might point to something else as well, to this idea that Jesus saw in Judas, a spirit of anxiety, that he saw him as someone who was overwhelmed by personal anxiety, constantly emotionally on guard, fearful. In family systems theory, which is a theory offered by the therapist Murray Bowen and brought to us preacher types for use in our congregations by the Rabbi Edwin Friedman, in family systems theory anxiety is one of the most fundamental characteristics of what it means to be human—we all are anxious, to a lesser or greater degree, most of which we can and should control, lest it control us. But some people are chronically anxious, always fearful, and for these folks, they carry a constant sense of being threatened with them—in fact, someone has said that you can measure your sense of personal anxiety by the degree of threat you carry within you, and how comfortable or uncomfortable you are in this world. My personal definition and measuring stick when I teach my class on systems theory at churches is to ask the this question: to what degree do you feel the universe is for you and what degree do you feel the universe is against you—how safe do you feel in this world, in general? To be clear, anxiety is not to be confused with a panic attack, because anxiety in our definition is that its imprecise and free floating and most of the time it’s hard to put your finger on exactly what is causing us to live in a constant state of anxiety. But the connection I personally made to Judas, to Judas’ name, is actually found in the Latin roots for our word “anxiety” and those Latin roots are found in other words that denote “to choke” or “to narrow.” If Joan Taylor is right, and Iscariot’s name was given to him by Jesus, and that it was a play on the words “chokiness” and “constriction,” well, you can see the obvious connection – he was an obviously anxious person. Judas’ anxiety is centered around he and the disciples not having enough, and it forms the heart of his objection to the use of the perfume on Jesus. You see, I think the root of the problem for poor Judas is that he is a man absolutely riddled with chronic anxiety, nervous, unsure, untrusting, fearful, and so he attaches to things like the money purse, thinking that if we the disciples have enough in it, we’ll be alright, I’ll be alright, but he then tries to disguise that anxiety as being really a concern for the poor, which is interesting here, since Jesus is all about the poor and their needs. Because Judas cannot manage his fear, which is manifested in his anxiety, there can then be a million reasons for betraying Jesus—fear for his country at the hands of the Roman if they feel threatened by Jesus; fear that he won’t have enough when the gig is finally up with Jesus, and thus leading to his need to cash out as soon as possible, for thirty pieces of silver. I said earlier that my personal way of defining anxiety is asking people to think about the way they either trust the universe, or distrust the universe, how much they think the universe is for them or against them, but the real question I am asking as a Christian is this: how much do I trust God, and how much, frankly, do I distrust God? There won’t be enough, there is never enough, anxious Judas has come to feel in his bones, something many of us also carry within in our bones – if I am too generous, too kind, I won’t have enough, or enough to make me feel safe. But,of course, having much stuff really never does make us feel safe because we then start to fear losing what we now have. In that text from Deuteronomy, God is said to bless those who give much, in all that they do. Do we believe it, do we trust the God who gave us everything in the first place, to give away at least of what were first given by God? I don’t know if I do yet – and I stand humbled by that reality, that truth, that I cannot always model for you what I know to be true, which is the hard dilemma for any minister. But this is all about trusting God, as Judas should have trusted in Jesus, and that is the work before me, before us – to trust God with everything, and trust that we can give away some of it, for those may be in need of our help. May I – and we – gamble on this truth, this truth that Judas could never allow himself to believe, that God is worthy of our trust, and always will be. Amen.
Some years ago, I shared with you that Douglas and I have a personal prayer before we eat at home, our own take on saying grace before our meals. It goes something like this: “Gracious God, we thank you for all things, for each other and for others, and we thank you for this life that gives us life. Amen.” I shared that prayer of grace with you during a sermon where I was speaking of how we need to pay attention to the way our food is produced, that the way we nurture the land and treat the animals we consume, and that such attention is a matter of justice. And when Douglas and I thank God for “this life that gives us life,” we acknowledge that an animal, or even a plant, if you assume that plants live and die, we acknowledge that something had to die for us to be able to live. There is a rhythm to life there that is obvious, though it does not come without its own ethical quandaries, even if Genesis tells us that that God has given us these animals and plants as our food (Genesis 1:29). That topic is for another sermon, but this morning I wanted to tease something else out related to the issue of food and our ethical relationship to it, and that is whether or not we have an obligation to worry about other’s people food or lack of it. Now, you might think that the answer is an obvious “yes” for us Christians, that your lack of food is something I should care about. And it’s obvious that is the case in both the Hebrew and Christian portions of the Bible – caring for our neighbors and helping them is just right there, all over the place. But, there are forces in our culture, even among Christians, who want us divest the church of this notion that we owe each other something, including food, all in an attempt to make the case for a kind of libertarian, you’re on your own, late-stage corporate capitalism. I’ll get to that in a few minutes, but I want us to get a sense of what is happening in our text and how this relates to a larger call for food justice we find in the Bible and especially in the Hebrew Bible, what we often call the Old Testament. Let’s look at the context of this text for a few minutes. The people of Israel have spent 40 years wandering in the desert and finally have reached the edge of the Promise Land. Moses has died on a mountain overlooking the land he will never enter because of a sin he has committed, sin being the overall reason it took the people of Israel so long to get to this promise land after being freed from Egypt. A generation has died and a new generation has risen, but the men of this new generation have not been circumcised, the male foreskin of these men have remained intact, circumcision was believed to be a sign of the covenant between God and Abraham in Genesis 17 (14-19). But there is historical evidence that circumcision was practiced by the Egyptians and the Bible itself says that other surrounding nations also practiced circumcision, in Jeremiah 9:25. Joshua, the new leader of Israel, calls for this new generation of men to become circumcised and they are, leaving a painful mess for the men that had to take a take a long, long month to heal up. The whole ordeal ends with the first verse in our text today, where God says to Joshua: “Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt.” Honestly, we don’t quite know the obvious meaning of this sentence – what disgrace, other than perhaps the older generation having circumcised their male offspring after they left Egypt, forgetting the sign of the covenant God once made with Abraham. Whatever that disgrace was, it has been rolled away and the people celebrate a Passover meal, a meal which commemorates the moment when the angel of death passed over every household whose door was marked with lamb’s blood, during the time when God sent the plagues to try to convince the Egyptian Pharaoh to let the Hebrew slaves go free. We don’t how they got this Passover food, but the very next day, the manna from heaven that God had provided the people just stops, this feathery bread-like substance that fed the people is no more. After 40 years of having that umbilical cord to their Creator, they would now have to eat what the land produced, and – this is very important – they would now have to begin to live under the rules around that land and food that they were given by God through Moses 40 years earlier. These rules, these laws that were in THE LAW, were now to be enacted, because they had moved on from complete dependence on God’s gift of guaranteed manna to one where they had to till the land, care for their livestock, and, and use the land in a just way for their sake and the sake of others. They had just left a life in Egypt where they were forced to work on storage cities, the place where the Pharaohs stored their abundance of food, food they would use to control the people, rather than helping out others, outsider even, unlike when Joseph was in charge of these same storage places generations earlier. And that is important to keep in mind when you hear of the laws of these newly minted invaders of the Promised Land, as they took control of the land from those who were there before them – a reality that would be a tough sermon on its own, but look, I’ve got only a few minutes here. But the whole new system of rules they were to now follow were actually based in the rules of how to use the manna God had been giving them for 40 years. In Exodus 16, in verse 18, the Scripture says this: “those who gathered much had nothing left over, and those who gathered little had no shortage.” In another words, the folks that tried to store away more of the manna then they needed for that day found this stored manna uneatable the next day. And the folks who gathered little to make sure their neighbors had enough found that the little they gathered was enough for the day. The food wasn’t meant to be a way to enrich oneself, especially at the expense of others – that is why manna was useless the next day, to stop the greedy, like the Egyptians they had just escaped from, from using something needed by all to survive as a way to enrich and manipulate others. The manna helped the people keep the Sabbath, the holy day of rest, because the gatherers of this manna were expected to rest as well, and so the manna collected right before the Sabbath would not spoil as it normally did, making sure there would be enough to keep their bellies full. All this was to prevent the Israelites from playing around with their food, so to speak, of using it as a source of wealth building for the few at the expense of the many, as the Egyptians had done. So the people are now to follow a new set of rules that would be echoed by their experience with the manna, rules about “land possession, farming, food choices, food sharing, and the treatment, killing and eating of animals” (Connections, Year C, Vol 2 –77). First, these manna based rules would show up in the idea that the land you were given in this new Promise Land was on loan from God – and that no person would ultimately lose their land because of some misfortune. Every 50 years, in what was called the Jubilee Year, the land would revert back to the original owners if they had previously sold it, which helped to narrow the gap between rich and poor (Leviticus 5:10) You couldn’t store up the manna of the land the forever, so to speak – it was on loan from God to you, and you could loan it out to others for a price, but it would always come back to your family every 50 years. Farmers were to reap from the harvest off their lands, but they were told to leave the outer edges of their fields unreaped, so that the poor and the immigrants could gather much needed food (Leviticus 19:9-10). Underneath it all was this idea that food was meant for all of us, and even those who couldn’t farm or who didn’t have a field to plow had a right to food, since the permanent owner of all land was actually God, who simply loaned it out to us human beings. And yet there is an interesting tension that comes in passage in the Bible that is used by some, while ignoring all of the texts and rules I’ve cited today. The anonymous writer of 2 Thessalonians 3:10 says that those that don’t work don’t eat, which seems to be an interesting contradiction of what the rest of the Bible says. Jesus fed 5000 people who unwisely didn’t bring food with them as they were listening to Jesus, as we all remember, and Jesus seems far more interested in scolding those who have much and do little for others with what they have been given. An interesting tension here found in the Bible, but it is noteworthy that the second Thessalonians text is often use as a way to contradict what the bulk of the Christian and Jewish tradition actually says. But the Thessalonians text is not surprising, not really. There has always been a strain in our scriptures and the history of the church that balked at the idea of people getting something for free, which, I think, shows up in the trouble that some of us have with Jesus’ gift of grace being free and for everyone. Surely we should do something to earn this, and so we do this and this and this, and then it’s free, which, of course, doesn’t actually make grace a free gift at all. I was doing some research on the internet on today’s topic and I stumbled on a website of a think tank called the Institute for Faith, Work and Economics. It’s a right wing Christian organization meant to make the Christian case for a Hayekian, Randian, libertarian, extreme laisses faire style of economics. The website of the organization is quite impressive, reflecting that is a probably well-funded think tank, and its full of articles meant to debunk what Jesus and the Hebrew Bible clearly says by arguing that the ideas I mentioned a few minutes ago, found in Scripture, have been misinterpreted. After all, Jesus telling us to sell everything and give it to the poor, or this whole Jubilee year thing, with land going back to the original owners, is offensive to rights of private property owners – it’s not really God’s land, especially if God’s not going to pay the taxes on it! I read through a couple of articles, and it was obvious that these scholars were doing everything possible to get the Bible to justify our late stage corporate capitalism. Ignore what the Jewish and Christian traditions have taught about this, though rarely followed by the Jewish and Christian people, because these scholars from this think tank will show you that, in fact, the Bible endorses the ideas of, ironically, the atheist Ayn Rand, who called her owns ideas a philosophy of selfishness. Look, I do think of food as a human right, and water as well, since without them we simply can’t survive as human beings – and I think the Scriptures of both Testaments generally agree with me, and with two thousands of Christian and Jewish tradition, though, of course, a set of traditions not always followed by us over the last 3000 years. Our current government is attempting to roll back food stamps, if not outright eliminate them, though these stamps rarely cover a family’s food budget or needs, even at their most generous. We have a tribe in charge, so to speak, that doesn’t really believe anything is a gift, not really, and they certainly don’t think of anything as being on loan from God. They often believe the land or money is theirs and theirs alone, and if you can’t farm, if you can’t make enough money, you shouldn’t even really be able to glean from the outer rim of the fields – “God didn’t make the miracle of that grain, I did,” some seem to believe, “and we don’t owe our fellow human beings anything.” Certainly food banks are often supported by many of these souls, as if food banks could ever match the government resources to meet food scarcity issues in this country. Places like the Common Pantry are meant to supplement a pay check and/or the little help one receives in food stamps. Private charity should take care of it, they say, but of course, ironically enough, we know though studies that the socio-economic group that gives most to charity are the poor and the very poor – they share what little they have because they know what it means to have so little. The upper middle class or rich, by percentage, give less to charity, especially to those charities that directly affect the poor – endowing the Chicago Symphony is good thing, or the Art Institute, but it is no feeding of the poor. Underneath this call for private charity to help alleviate food scarcity and poverty, and not the government is an idea that we humans will always take care of each other, and that our particular compassion and generosity will be enough. Thousands of years have showed us that this is simply not true, because, to get theological on us, we are sinners, and there is a reason that Jesus keeps calling his earliest listeners to do better, be more compassionate, and take care of the poor. And us being, at times, selfish sinners, that truth shouldn’t cause there to be hungry stomachs when there is so much food here in this country. Over the last couple of years, I’ve often mentioned to you and others that food has become the central focus of our outreach ministry here at Epiphany. We’ve housed the Common Pantry since the mid-1980’s, this incredible organization centered around food justice, this belief that if food is what you need, here we are and we will do our best to feed you. Their work has grown so much, through things like providing help getting connected to social services that so many rail against, including the food stamps some want to see gone. I think we should be especially proud of being their partners, because I think it led into another food ministry that became completely our own, our Welcome Meal on Wednesday nights. In the early 2000’s some of you right in this room noticed that the Common Pantry guests could use a meal after picking up their groceries, and thus the Welcome Meal was born. I think we sometimes forget that it is actually rare for a small church like ours to be able to pull off a weekly meal for anyone wishes to come – that is not normal, it really isn’t and I’m grateful we decided to do that work so long ago. The funny thing is that more people come into this building to be fed than to worship God here with us. I wish it wasn’t that way because I would love to have it the other way, that there were more people worshipping here than being fed here, but I would only love that be true if it was because food scarcity was on a steep decline and so many didn’t need our help or the Pantry’s help. Otherwise, let’s worship the God who asks us to feed one another, and do it as an act of worship of God, because every act of justice and mercy is also an act of worship of the living God. It’s clear to me that food justice matters to us, that most of us, if not all, feel that food is a God given right, that all God’s children deserve to eat, just like all of God’s children need traveling shoes, to echo he title of one of Maya Angelou’s great books – all God’s children need to eat and we are the ones to feed them. Amen.
About eight days after Jesus said these things, he took Peter, John, and James, and went up on a mountain to pray. As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed and his clothes flashed white like lightning. Two men, Moses and Elijah, were talking with him. They were clothed with heavenly splendor and spoke about Jesus’ departure, which he would achieve in Jerusalem. Peter and those with him were almost overcome by sleep, but they managed to stay awake and saw his glory as well as the two men with him. As the two men were about to leave Jesus, Peter said to him, “Master, it’s good that we’re here. We should construct three shrines: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah”—but he didn’t know what he was saying. Peter was still speaking when a cloud overshadowed them. As they entered the cloud, they were overcome with awe. Then a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, my chosen one. Listen to him!” Even as the voice spoke, Jesus was found alone. They were speechless and at the time told no one what they had seen. Last weekend and the first part of this week was dominated by the United Methodist Church’s General Conference in St. Louis, Missouri, or at least it dominated the attention of those of us who are always tuned into denominational machinations. The United Methodists sent their worldwide cohort of 800 or so delegates to decide on the issue that has beguiled and stressed them over the last 20 years, and most of mainline and progressive Christianity – the place of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and clergy in the church. The United Methodist Church’s Book of Discipline lays out the social principles of the church, which forbid things like drinking, gambling, and the practice of homosexuality. LGBTQ+ folks are named as people of sacred worth, but the actual doing of homosexuality, so to speak, is forbidden and is one of the reasons those seeking ordination can be barred from being approved to serve as clergypersons. Now, that is the official position of the church, but various more liberal conferences like the one here that covers Chicago, have basically ignored that official prohibition and ordained LGBTQ+ with a kind of a wink and a nod, and a liberal interpretation of the world “practice.” Of course, if charges are filed by a layperson or another clergyperson against them for their sexual practice, they can be defrocked in a church trial – yes, some churches still do this sort of thing – but in a more liberal conferences that is rare but not unheard of. Clergy are also forbidden to perform same-sex weddings, or even same sex unions, which is why I’ve done a few weddings formembers of Methodist churches as a favor to their not so courageous pastors. Yes, I get my judgmental tone, but at some point you have to do the right thing by the people you pastor – and you may pay the cost for doing that right thing, but no pension, no guaranteed church appointment, nothing is worth not following your own conscience, and doing the just and inclusive thing. Pawning off your ministry towards your church members to me in order to protect yourself, well, it is not a good look, but I helped these clergy out because the couples involved wanted a religious marriage service done by a clergyperson and they deserved to have one. All of this came to a head this week in St. Louis, with a proposal before the delegates that was called the One Church plan, a plan that was endorsed by the majority of the bishops. This plan would allow the various parts of the church to make their own decisions around the calling of LGBTQ+ clergy and to discern their own positions on the morality or immorality of homosexuality. The more conservative American parts of the Methodist Church, along with the even more international parts of the church, could enforce their own particular rules around this issue, while allowing more progressive parts of the church to finally openly allow the ordination of LGBTQ+ clergy. But it was not to be, because of a very large coalition of conservative international delegates and a small band of conservative American delegates defeated the One Church Plan and brought forth their own plan, called the Traditional Plan. The Traditional plan passed with the help of the conservative those national and international delegates. This conservative plan defined the definition of “practicing homosexual” to make it harder for the few LGBTQ+ to get through the legal loophole of trying to define the word “practicing.” In addition, it created a mandate that any United Methodist clergyperson would be automatically suspended without pay for one year for conducting a same sex service, and would be permanently defrocked if they ever did a second one. In the United States, many United Methodist churches are fairly progressive on the issue of homosexuality itself, but because of the international nature of the church, they will likely never be able to become what we in the United Church of Christ, as well as the Presbyterian Church (USA), and Evangelical Lutheran Church of America have become – welcoming of LGBTQ+ in all parts of the church, including the ordination of openly LGBTQ+ clergy. As a product of a good United Methodist seminary myself, and who has many Methodist clergy friends, I was deeply grieved by all this, and it touched me personally because of my own struggle to be ordained with integrity and wholeness 25 years ago in the Presbyterian Church (USA) when they were not as open as they are now. There was so much pain in the air at this conference that you could almost feel it through the internet streaming video. During the debate, a young gay seminarian named Jeffrey Warren spoke passionately to the Conference, expressing his hurt and warning that the church was about to lose a whole generation under 40 that simply wouldn’t tolerate being members of a church that wouldn’t welcome their gay friends, their lesbian sister, their same-sex parents. In the picture on the first page of the bulletin, you see Bishop Tracey Smith Malone holding Jeffrey’s face in her hands after the passing of the Traditional Plan, trying to comfort him, perhaps reminding him that he is loved by God, loved by her and supported by many others, despite the fact that he will likely never be able to serve as a clergyperson in the United Methodist Church, as it now constituted. The horror of it all for Jeffrey must have been witnessing this series of votes right before his stunned and heartbroken eyes, something that even I didn’t have to experience. You can’t see it in the black and white picture but in the color version you can see the redness around his eyes, likely coming the tears he had just shed. Friends, I want to invite us to consider that such a moment, such a picture, such light in a place filled with darkness, at least for the losers of this fight for justice, that such a moment was a moment of transfiguration. That moment captured by that picture was like the one when God scrubbed off the human veneer of Christ on that high and holy mountain and showed us the fullness of Jesus, that light within him that was white like lightning. Matthew, Mark, and of course, Luke share this story of Jesus shining forth on some mountain, accompanied by his disciples and welcomed there by Elijah and Moses, the latter whose face once shone in this manner hundreds of years earlier. This trio talk of Jesus’ departure, his death, and I suppose his ascension as well, and the disciples bask in this heavenly splendor, and they offer to build a shrine for all three, build some sort of permanency to hold onto this amazing moment. God will speak to them in a cloud, affirming that Jesus is indeed God’s own Child, and the disciples should listen to him. Later, the scene of light and splendor will disappear, and they will make their way down that mountain and being to make their way to Jerusalem, not quite understanding that despite the joy they will surely know along the way, the path is towards Jesus death, his cruel and unfair crucifixion, and that these disciples will be shattered by it all, at least for a while. The disciples and maybe even Jesus, they needed this moment of transfiguration, this reminder that there is light in this world, that underneath everything there is light, light like white lightning, a truth they would need to recall in the coming days and even years as they followed after the way of Jesus their whole lives, until their own deaths, often as martyrs. To witness Bishop Malone hold Jeffrey’s face so tenderly, so gently, it is a transfiguration, a moment when light shines so powerfully and often so unexpectedly, a moment that will need to be recalled in the many dark and difficult times ahead for Jeffrey and so many others in the United Methodist Church. Like with the disciples, a moment like this will be something he will need to remember when the darkness comes crashing down upon him and the people who love like him. We get the transfiguration we need in order to survive moments when there is no light, when the dark is so deep it feels as if you are in the deepest part of the sea, below where no light can make it way through the water above you. Moments of light, moments of tenderness, of kindness, moments of joy that we witness between ourselves or we witness in strangers, and even our enemies, those moments are gifts from God, moments given to us before we head out to our own Jerusalem’s, times before we yet know of our own eventual resurrection. Simply put, underneath it all, there is the light of God’s goodness, beneath it all. To be clear, transfiguration is not transformation, it is not transformation. The gift of moments when we witness the light pouring into or out of a person, a place, a crowd, a simple flash of divinity given to us just when we needed it, and a memory we can call forth when there is seemingly no light, that is transfiguration, a moment that reveals the world as it really is, as the disciples fully saw Jesus for who he was on that high and holy mountain. Transformation, however, is not just a moment or moments in time, but something longer, something more difficult and yet even more joyous. When we come into our spiritual own, when we decide to do the work of Jesus, and the work of justice in Jesus’ name, that work, that journey is a life-long one. Salvation, or wholeness as the Greek word is probably better translated, wholeness doesn’t happen in one moment, and rarely in moments like the ones we just read about in Luke’s Gospel. No, it happens in the day in and day out choices we make to turn around our lives and go in the right direction, to choose that long obedience in the same direction, as Eugene Peterson puts it, and it is the choice to help the world turn around and go in the right direction. As I said in a sermon a few weeks ago, nothing is harder to change than the human heart, or the soul, if you want to get more spiritual about it and that is why our transformation, our wholeness takes as long as it takes, and likely continues into eternity. And this path into eternity also happens in the world we are co-creating with God if we are to believe the last two chapters of the book of Revelation, where a new heaven and a new earth, a truly transformed earth, one of compassion and justice and love will complete and renew the world we’ve slowly sought to transform. We should to continue to do that work until, as the Shaker song Simple Gifts says, Till by turning, turning we come 'round right. Soul work is hard work, justice work is hard – and the victories in our lives and in the work of justice, they do not come as often as we want, but the whole of those victories and even some of the defeats, do their work of transformation, of setting our souls and the world in the right direction, it does it over the long haul, slowly, but also relentlessly. There is so much I want to say Jeffrey Warren, the young Methodist whose pleas for inclusion and justice were rejected by a majority of the United Methodist delegates on Tuesday. I would not probably say it to him anytime soon – the pain is to fresh – and I think it would be hard to hear for him. I would speak about the difficult choices we all have to make about whether or not our presence in a community that officially rejects gay people is an act of complicity if one stays any longer. But I would also remind him that there are other places, other denominations, other homes, where God can be met, something I think he already knows of course, – and, like me, he might find himself loving his new home as much the one he left behind so broken-hearted. God finds a way when there seems to be no way. However, I do know, Jeffrey, that whether or not you stay, you will find moments of transfiguration all the time, moments when God shows herself to you so fully that you will find yourself stunned by the glory of the One before you. My friend Mark gave me one of those transfiguration moments this week. Mark is a gay United Methodist clergyperson who came out late in late in his life and career, but who has chosen to remain celibate and to follow the rules put before him in the Book of Discipline. Mark gave an interview to a local TV station about the recent decision made at the General Conference. Here is a Facebook post he made after seeing himself during his TV interview the night before. I was privileged to be interviewed by WOOD TV yesterday. It was aired last night, Wednesday, Feb 27th. I watched it and was horrified by what I saw myself say. I spoke out of fear when I said that I would not perform same gender wedding ceremonies. I abandon that fear, I repent of that stance. I WILL PERFORM SAME GENDER WEDDING CEREMONIES! Who am I do deny the unconditional love of God that can flow through me, God's called conduit of grace, justice, peace, and love. I cried when I read those words, after being a witness to so much of Mark’s personal struggle, and his commitment to integrity and honoring the vows he made at his ordination decades earlier. But here he is, putting his career, perhaps some of his pension, his health insurance, on the line only a few years from his retirement. Our transformation can take a very long, long, time but it comes, always it comes. Now, I invite you to turn back to the front of your bulletin, and look at Bishop Malone with her hands holding Jeffrey’s face, and I want you to imagine the Bishop being the very presence of God, the one who is nothing but light, nothing but goodness, nothing but compassion, telling Jeffrey, tenderly, “I love you, I love you, you are one of My Beloved, you are my child.” The transfigurations in our lives, in the greater world, are glimpses of God shining forth, reminders to us of the God who is Love, a reminder that underneath the surface of everything, good and bad, of every joy and heartbreak, there is God, who is draped in light, in goodness itself, a reminder that, as writer of the Gospel of John says in his first chapter says, that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness could not, would not, and will not ever extinguish the light. Amen.
Brothers and sisters, I want to call your attention to the good news that I preached to you, which you also received and in which you stand. You are being saved through it if you hold on to the message I preached to you, unless somehow you believed it for nothing. I passed on to you as most important what I also received: Christ died for our sins in line with the scriptures, he was buried, and he rose on the third day in line with the scriptures. He appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve, and then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at once—most of them are still alive to this day, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me, as if I were born at the wrong time. I’m the least important of the apostles. I don’t deserve to be called an apostle, because I harassed God’s church. I am what I am by God’s grace, and God’s grace hasn’t been for nothing. In fact, I have worked harder than all the others—that is, it wasn’t me but the grace of God that is with me. So then, whether you heard the message from me or them, this is what we preach and this is what you have believed. THE MODERN LESSON “I Am Not I” by Juan Ramon Jimenez I am not I. I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see, whom at times I manage to visit, and whom at other times I forget; who remains calm and silent while I talk, and forgives, gently, when I hate, who walks where I am not, who will remain standing when I die. I know I’ve already shared with the fact that way back in the spring of 2002, I had the privilege of spending 10 days in a monastery near Snowmass, Colorado. The cost of the retreat was paid for by a generous woman in my congregation who surprised me with her offer – she was interested in getting me to know more about centering prayer. Centering prayer is something we’ve done here at Epiphany a couple of times, and it’s a quiet prayer focusing on the divine in silence, while using a chosen word to remind us, in the midst of many distracting thoughts, that we are here to be present with God, and not to worry about our kids, our bills, our whatever. The monastery where this centering prayer retreat was being held was in a beautiful valley not far from Aspen, and it was a run by an even more beautiful set of Benedictine monks-good people who were providing a space to gather for those interested in deepening their prayer life. As you can imagine, those 10 days were a time of intense prayer—or at least it was time of intense prayer for me. We gathered together for almost 5 hours of silent prayer every day, starting at 5:30 AM, and ending around 9 PM or so, with meditative walks after each session of prayer. It was a great experience, and it was definitely one of those religious highs, hopefully something may have experienced yourself, where you feel incredibly grounded in God, and therefore you feel just incredibly grounded in yourself. By the end of this retreat, I had this ambitious plan to rejuvenate my spiritual life, with more prayer, more Bible study, more focus on God, more everything. In fact, if there was a way to jack up the spirituality quotient of any given spiritual discipline, I was going to do it—I was going to be a spiritual superman. Super Christian, Super Spiritual Guy, I was going to do it and I was going to finally get all those loose spiritual ends of my life tied up and or at least pulling in the same direction. I know its hard to believe but Pastors also struggle with their spirituals lives – we too have our times in the desert, trying to find our felt connections to God, and the Spirit. However, this retreat was going to be the start of something new, a new day in my life, especially spiritually—me and God were going to be closer, best friends, the dynamic duo, right? And then, and then I arrived back home to Oklahoma City, back to what seemed like the real world, which for me was the focus on weekly worship, pastoral care, meetings, and meetings about past meetings, and all the attendant stuff that most people don’t see their pastors doing on a daily basis. My plan for a rebirth in my spiritual life because of a set of new spiritual practices didn’t materialize – and I don’t think I kept a regular practice of any of things I had planned on doing, even the centering prayer, though that type of prayer has profoundly affected me, and comes in and out of my life very often I mean, you just get lost in the real world, oddly enough, you get lost in the ordinariness of it all, those simple things like paying your bills, and making it work on time, and dealing with the family, the kids, the partner. I mean, we know that experience, don’t we? Its what happened to a lot of us when we were younger, when we came back from church camp, on fire, ready to change ourselves and the world…and then it just happened…or I should say, nothing really happened…life went on and the Bible was left unread, and prayer remains stale and the same old stuff happened, just on a different day. That reversion to the means just happens when you aren’t wonderfully stuck up in the mountains, at a monastery where the sole work of the people gathered there is to pray. You know, I must admit that I got discouraged that this self-transformation didn’t happen, and that I didn’t seem to have the ability to be better or do better. Why wasn’t I getting any better at this stuff – after all, I am a professional religious guy, people pay me to be spiritual, so to speak, and yet I felt, at times, like a real failure, that whatever change of heart and mind and spirit that was going on wasn’t happening as quickly as I wanted it to, and I didn’t seem to have the discipline to always help bring it about. The Modern Lesson from today’s bulletin addresses that dilemma, that struggle to be better person and yet not quite seemingly getting there. The poet actually speaks as if he and his ideal self are two different beings – he watches his imagined better self practice the virtues his “real” self cannot actually practice in his real life: I am not I. I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see, whom at times I manage to visit, and whom at other times I forget; who remains calm and silent while I talk, and forgives, gently, when I hate, who walks where I am not, who will remain standing when I die. Yet, over and over again, during those times of disappointment in myself for not being better, I find myself reminded that, in fact, God is at work in my life, despite my best efforts to thwart her efforts to meddle with my plans. Being intentional in our spiritual work is a good and needed thing, and must never be discarded – but whatever plans for self-improvement we have that don’t quite work out, God is still at work in our lives, still doing a thing within us, still changing us slowly and quietly, all of which comes from that long obedience in the same direction, the doing of what we can do for our spirits, our souls, day in and day out. If we think we’re going to get in the way of God’s work within us, with all of our efforts to self-sabotage that work, wittingly or unwittingly, we are going to find that we can’t get in the way of what God is doing within us. The apostle Paul, in the New Testament passage we heard a few minutes ago, seems to be pointing us in that direction as well, this idea that God will do what God needs to do in our lives, on God’s timing, and not necessarily on our timing. Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth was written to a church in turmoil in the city of Corinth. It should be remembered that something like 90% of the New Testament letters are written responses to churches and Christians who were in the midst of some sort of controversy or craziness. In this letter, Paul has spent time telling them about spiritual gifts, and reminding them about what really matters, which is love for each other, amidst all the painful disagreements. Paul then finally writes what we just heard this morning—he begins to write to them about resurrection of the Christ, and about the larger resurrection of the dead—for him, both of those realities are what make life worth living, a reminder to the church at Corinth that the end of the story, the end of every story and any story, the end of the story is life, it is resurrection, and not death; the end of it all is hope, not hopelessness. Martin Luther, the great Reformer of the church, once said, something to the effect “that “this is not the end…but it is the road…” But what I love is that moment where Paul is trying to get them to acknowledge him as someone worthy of being listened to—“listen,” he seems to be saying, “I may not be as close to the events of Christ’s resurrection as others, there were others who gave witness to Jesus before me, and God knows I’ve persecuted the church early on, so I admit I lack a lot of the moral authority that others may have…” Paul is being very humble here, I think, because he knows that they know he was once on the other side, with those folks who were pretty hostile to the growing church. But then he writes this line, something that just stood out when I first read it: I am what I am by God’s grace, and God’s grace hasn’t been for nothing. How incredible—“grace has done its work in me,” he seems to be saying, “though it took its time, and will take even more time in the future, but it was a grace that has done what it was supposed to do, at least for this very moment, and it surely was not a grace that was thrown away, because God knew what he was doing.” Paul simply reminds them at Corinth that he is where he is supposed to be, at this moment, that he is who he is, in that moment, because that is who grace has shaped and molded and crafted him to be. It may not be where he needs to be tomorrow, he may not be the man he is meant to be tomorrow, a greater person of faith. In fact, grace may shape him differently tomorrow, or it may smooth out the edges that need to be smoothed out, but at least for this very moment, writing on some ancient parchment thousands of years ago, he can say to them, honestly and truthfully, this is who God’s grace has shaped me to be, at least for this day – and tomorrow God grace with surely shape me to be the person I need to be for tomorrow. I may not be where I need to be, but I am where I am supposed to be, at least for this very brief moment—the grace given to him, to us, the grace found in our past, that grace God has given to him and us has not been for nothing. Grace is never for nothing, and the grace that slowly shaped us to be who we are today has a purpose – and that purpose is for the present, though we rarely discover that truth until that moment, until the now, when we see where God had given grace in the past so we can handle this challenges, the blessings of this moment. My goodness, though, this slow working grace that happens despite all the things I do to block it, or all the failed plans to be more spiritual, it sure takes a long time, too long for my taste. I may be what I need to be for this moment, I may be aware that I am what I am by God’s grace, but, well, I wish I was more than I at am this moment. Grace works on its own time, of course. It did for Paul—grace had to work long and hard on him—it takes a lot of grace to get from stoning Christians like Stephen when he was younger, when he was persecuting the church, to the point of being the greatest missionary the church has ever known. Grace took its time with Paul, and grace takes it time with us, but it always gets there, it always gets to the place where it is supposed to be, to the nook and crannies of our lives, even those places where we don’t want it to get to. I suppose the key to being changed, is not so much “a doing of something”—I mean after all, grace is not given to you and I because of anything, of something we do—it is a complete gift, so much so that we don’t even need to recognize the gift we’ve been given. The giver of this gift has no need for us to acknowledge it—no thank you cards are required, or expected, or even needed. And that also means that we’re not going to get double grace if we work double hard on our spiritual lives—Paul said he worked hardier because he was not like those early disciples who knew Jesus first hand, but it was, in fact, the free gift of grace inside him that worked harder in him, not he himself. If anything, our Christian faith reminds us that our stories as people of faith are not stories of what we have done, but, rather, they ought to be stories about what God has done in us, and through us, despite our best efforts to get in the way. So, maybe the one thing we are asked to do, I believe, is not much of anything, it is not really a doing. No, friends, maybe, it is not the working hard on our spiritual lives that will change us; it is not our determination that will give us the change we are desperately want in our lives. That work of transformation is God’s fierce and gentle work in us, work that will last a lifetime, work that continue even into eternity. The work of transformation of us is God’s job, and letting go of the lists of things we are determined to change is perhaps the only thing asked of us, or at least that is what I think we are asked by God. Now, Paul does say that he tried harder, because he felt himself to be a nobody compared to the disciples who had direct contact with Jesus while he was here on earth – but he says that it wasn’t his trying harder that gave him what he has now, the spirituality he now possesses, but it was God’s grace within him that has done it, that has changed him into the person he has become. Like Paul, I’m not saying give up all your efforts to deepen your relationship with God or becoming a better or more just person – in fact, keep doing, keep working on it, but let’s be gentle with ourselves when it doesn’t quite work out, because, in the end, God will get her way with us, and we will grow into wisdom, courage, and hope, however imperfectly. In my best moments, this gives me hope, and perhaps it gives you hope as well. We are not where we want to be, or hoped to be, but we are where God’s grace has brought us – I am what I am by God’s grace. I wish I was a better at so many things, more grounded in works of compassion and justice. I wish I was more committed to so many things, doing better, being better, but I am not where I want to be. But where I am right now, where we are right now, is not where we were 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. I know that truth when I sift through my over 37 years of being consciously Christian, of realizing that God’s grace really has done a work within me, that I am more thoughtful, more kind, more generous, more hopeful, and more just and open to God’s work in the world. I understand my racism so much better, I understand my sexism so much better, I understand my classism better, I even understand my own homophobia better, because God’s grace keeps opening up my heart more, bit by bit, time after time. Think of what you have left behind, the ways you’ve grown over the years, the injustices you now understand, the work you are now doing to fight those injustices, however much, however little. Even if we just half-way open our lives to God, God will slip through the doors, and change us, and change the world around us, slowly and in small amounts, of course. Nothing is harder for God or for us than changing the human heart, absolutely nothing, especially the changing of our own stubborn hearts, and so we shouldn’t be surprised that such transformation takes time, and is slow and tedious, and takes years, even for God. So, when we feel as if we’re not the people we had hoped to be, or even needed to be, I ask you to be gentle with yourself, to remember that God is still doing something within us. Yes, we wish it was faster or more complete, but who we are right now, all the progress we’ve made, big or small, over the years, it was no easy thing, because our hearts are not easy to change. And yet, they have changed, and they will continue to change, because grace won’t give up on us, even when we want to give up on ourselves. Amen.
On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.” So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him. I’ve always loved this story, this seemingly mundane little narrative of Jesus’ first miracle, the first of seven that the writer of the Gospel of John tells his readers, signs meant to show that this Jesus is indeed the Messiah. This story about a wedding at Cana that Jesus, his mother and his disciples attend, it just seems such an interesting way to make a case that this particular man was God’s choice to save humankind. It’s a wedding, folks, just a wedding and the miracle itself, the turning of water into wine so that the party can go on, well, it just seems like a pretty minor miracle in the great scheme of things. No one is healed, there is no aha moment, not really, and if you think about it, most if not all the people are oblivious to what just happened, that a miracle had taken place in their midst. Now, certainly, there have been many scholarly attempts to bring symbolic meaning to this story, everything from the meaning of the good wine being served later in the feast to the use of these of huge stone water jars used to religiously clean oneself. I think there is something to many of these interpretations, these lenses we put onto the text – certainly, the Gospel of John tells all sorts of stories about Jesus that are riff with symbolic meaning, which is one of the reasons it is so beloved by so many. There is a lot to work with as a preacher in this text, but what I’m going to do is back off from all the potential symbolism, and simply go with the story itself, and see if there is something there for us, something so ordinary and yet extraordinary, found not in symbolic interpretation of various words and things, but just in the simple story itself, this story of Jesus turning water into wine so that the party could go on. But remember this about John’s telling of the Jesus story – remember that Jesus has quite literally just come out of the desert and he has just begun surrounding himself with his earliest disciples. In John’s telling of Jesus’ story, there are no birth stories, no mangers, not even forty days in the desert like you find in the other three Gospels—Jesus simply arrives on the scene, almost as if he came directly out of heaven—“In the beginning was the Word,” so says John (1.1). And now he is at this wedding, at this pretty raucous party, I suspect, and one that could have lasted at least a few days if not a whole week. Jesus just blended in because he hadn’t really begun his ministry, though he begun to call the first of his disciples—the folks at the party didn’t know who they had in their midst because he hadn’t quite showed the world who was, not yet anyway. But there is one person in that room who knows, who knows what Jesus is capable of, the potential that he has, the gifts he possesses. That person is Jesus’s mother, who is, oddly enough, never actually named as Mary throughout the whole Gospel of John. Nevertheless, the writer of John hints that she knows her own son—mother’s usually do, don’t they? So, Mary asks Jesus to do something about a problem that has happened at the wedding—the hosts, the people throwing this wedding party, they’ve run out of wine, and they’ve run out of it way too early. This was a social disaster of the first magnitude—I mean, I know that we get what it means to be socially embarrassed, but in the ancient world, in Jesus’ day, it was a really bad fo-pau, because being a good host was very much emphasized, being a people immersed in a desert environment. This hospitality could even be a matter of life and death because your life might very well be dependent on the kindness of strangers, the graciousness of your host. So, Mary just goes up to him, amidst the loud and partying crowd, him perhaps at a table, maybe soaking it all in with his disciples, maybe laughing, surrounded by these men who have become his disciples, and she tells him that there is no wine left. A simple statement, really, and yet, like any mother, those innocent words are loaded with a lot more meaning—and a whole a lot more baggage than the statement of some simple facts—you know what I mean, don’t you? She didn’t ask him to do anything and yet…she did, didn’t she? Again, you’ve probably experienced that as well—I know I have—ours Mothers or even fathers saying something seemingly simple and innocent, just a statement, really, but you know she means something else, she’s trying to tell you something or ask something from you without actually saying what she wants. And Jesus also knows that she’s not just giving him an update on the going-ons at the party—he knows that she expects him to do something about this, for whatever reason. And Jesus just simply responds that it’s not his problem and that this wasn’t the right moment—my time has not yet come, he says to her. And yet so many of us are disturbed by this rebuke of his mother Mary, including myself, and I think it would have also disturbed the first readers of this text, in a culture that highly valued respecting one’s parents – so much so that in the Scriptures a child who disrespected their parents could lose their life by stoning. This is not stone-worthy disrespect, but it feels so out of character for Jesus for some reason. But one of the things John does throughout this Gospel is to slowly reveal Jesus to his readers – and at times, I think he even writes the story in such a way that Jesus himself is learning about who he is and what is right and what is wrong. Even if we believe that Jesus is God made flesh and bone, Jesus is still as human as we are, in need of learning from God and listening to God. Like so many of us would, he simply says that this whole mess of wine running out, it’s just not his problem, I didn’t create it, and I don’t need to fix it. In fact, that is what we tell ourselves all the time, when it comes to those moments when we abandon compassion, and ignore the need to live out justice. Not my problem, not my mess. I don’t know how many of you have dogs but if you do, you of course know that they are in need of walks, sometimes 2 or 3 times a day. We’ve got a new young dog we’ve named Bernie who needs at least 3 walks a day, and so as Bernie gains some weight after spending most of his life in a kennel, I’m using these walks to get some exercise and maybe lose a few pounds. I always have a pocket full of plastic bags, ready to scoop up the gifts he litters the lawn of our neighbors, as others do when their dogs do the deed in front of the parsonage. Most people are really great about picking up their dog’s “stuff,” shall we say, but not everyone, and I’m always surprised to find “stuff” in the yards of other people – someone walked their dog, let her do her business, and then just left it there. It annoys me to no end – it’s so disrespectful to the homeowner, and, frankly, it makes us dog owners look awful. I totally understand why some people have put up signs asking us to not have our dogs do their business on their lawns – sure, it may be to protect the plants or yard, but I suspect they’ve just had enough of people letting their dogs do their business and not picking it up. So, sometimes, when I have some extra plastic bags, I’ll clean up after the dogs of strangers, even though it’s not my responsibility, even though it’s not my problem, not my yard – and I usually grumble doing so, cursing out these irresponsible dog owners in Christian love! But, you know, sometimes in life you have to just pick up other people’s “stuff,” because, well, this is your neighborhood, and these are your neighbors, and I don’t want to leave “stuff” in their yards, even if it’s not my dog’s stuff. Lots of things are not our fault, nor our responsibility, but to be a good person means, at times, cleaning up the messes that are not our own, cleaning up other people’s stuff. And I think that is what Jesus is doing here, or will be doing here in a few moments, and that is cleaning up a mess that is not of his making. That is the lesson he is meant to learn here, in this almost silly little miracle, this simple miracle that saves both the party-givers and the steward from a public relations mess, a shameful moment in a culture steeped in the honor/shame dictums of its time. His mother is teaching Jesus, yes teaching him, which is what mothers and fathers do, that when someone is in need, like with these party-givers, one should help out, and though it seems trivial, the helping of this family, helping this steward, it matters, it really matters. And something does shift in Jesus – he changes his mind, he understands what his mother is trying to show him, the truth about our responsibility to one another, to be compassionate, to be kind, to be helpful, to pick up each other’s stuff, when, for some reason, good or bad, others just can’t clean it up or won’t pick it up. So, despite what Jesus has just said, despite the fact that he has told his mother that he is reluctant to use his gifts at this moment and for this meaningless reason, still, he does it—he changes huge vats of water into wine, and it ain’t the cheap stuff, the Gallo wine by the gallon stuff. This is good stuff, the stuff you usually serve early on in the party, when everyone is sober, not the stuff you serve at the end, when people really don’t know what’s being served to them or probably don’t care at that point and couldn’t tell the difference anyway—you see that kind of reaction in the text itself—“you have kept the good wine until now,” the chief steward says to the bridegroom. So, Jesus learns that we are indeed our brother’s keeper, despite Cain’s insistence that we aren’t, and Jesus knows that now, not in theory, but in his bones, and he learns that lesson well, as he will continue to love well, and deeply and do the things that help out the other, even the ones that are irresponsible, who are seemingly not deserving of his help. But I want to point something else here that is just as important as this moment of learning for Jesus and that is where the learning itself took place, the space and place and moment Jesus learned this lesson about picking up the messes of people whom we are supposedly not responsible for. He learns this lesson at a party, a rollicking, joyous moment of celebration, where family and friends celebrate a new couple and the joining of two families into one, where laughter filled the air, and joy permeated the rooms. Jesus learns the lesson within a cocoon of joy, of human happiness. And I think that is purposeful, that the writer of John puts this moment into this place for a reason and that reason is this: even in the midst of sharing with the world what seems unbelievable, the Gospel itself, the truth that God loves us, just loves us, period, in the midst of a resistance to that message that ultimately costs Jesus his own life, there can be and maybe must be joy to be had, joy to be experienced, joy to be shared. This past week there was a 47th Ward Aldermanic Forum for the 9 candidates who are hoping to replace Ameya Pawar. I was a part of the planning team that put it together, along with the local Indivisible chapter, Forward Chicago, the League of Women Voters, Northcenter Neighborhood Association and the group I am part of, the 47th Ward Clergy Coalition. It was a new thing for me, this planning of a forum, and I Iearned a lot, but what I found so interesting was the unusual, surprising joy I found in the work itself. It was surprising because, well, have you ever tried to plan an event with 13 people at the table, all with competing ideas about how it ought to be done? I suspect many of you have, and you know what a joyless thing such a thing can be. Despite the struggles, debates, disagreements had at those planning meetings, it ended up being such a positive experience for all of us, and hopefully for the 400 or so that attended the Forum. It was a joyful evening, and such a blessing to get to know people I probably would not have met if not for this event. The work, the work of doing something for others, and even for ourselves, there must be joy in it, and there can be joy in it. Tomorrow is Martin Luther King’s birthday, a day when we celebrate the good work of this fighter for justice, for racial and human equality. His work back then, as it is now, is serious, serious work, and dangerous, the kind of thing that will get you killed, something Jesus knew all too well. The FBI believed that MLK was a threat to this country, which he was because he threated the white hegemony of his time, and so they often bugged his offices and hotel rooms, his phones, anything they could do to spy on the civil rights movement, as embodied in the Rev. Dr. King. From books and reports that I have read, when listening to the conversations of Dr. King and his colleagues in the struggle, the FBI was surprised by the amount of laughter they heard on the tapes, on the recordings. I suspect they were surprised that these supposed enemies of the state could laugh so easily, could express such joy and fealty during a time of intense scrutiny and challenge by the forces of Rome, shall we say, the forces of Empire, so to speak. Even then, when all the principalities and powers were arrayed against them, Dr King, and others, they laughed, they knew joy, they found a wedding in Cana to attend, because, after all, as the Bible says, “weeping may last through the night but joy comes in the morning.” (Psalm 30:5). Certainly Dr. King invited us to do the work of justice with and beside each other and it was and is serious work, an overwhelming work, sometimes a thankless one and, if we are to be honest, sometimes an unsuccessful work. But in the midst of the work sometimes you just have to keep picking up other people’s stuff, knowing that they’re just not going to pick it up themselves, knowing they’re not going to do the right thing, the neighborly thing, the just thing. Some people will not learn, refuse to learn, unlike Jesus, who learned from everyone, it seems, including his mother. But in the picking up after the messes and stubbornness that we and other leave behind, let’s not forget the joy, the human joy, that can be found in work that is not always successful. There is much to be had, this joy that God invites us into, as we keep learning the lessons of compassion and understanding over the years. This is God’s good world, always – and despite the fact that there is more brokenness and evil and injustice in the world than many of us can imagine, God’s initial words at the time of creation still remains true – God looked over her creation and declared that it was good, so very good. Mary Oliver, the wonderful poet, died this past week, breaking the heart of many of us who love her poetry so much. We’ve heard it here in our past Modern Lessons many times. She was interviewed some years ago and she shared these words with the interviewer: If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb. Friends, let’s not forget that truth, that there is plenty of joy to be had, as we do our work, with our plastic bags in yards that are not our own, as we do the larger work of justice with God and with each other. Amen.
Isaiah 43:1-7Isaiah 43:1-7 But now, says the Lord—the one who created you, Jacob, the one who formed you, Israel:Don’t fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine.When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; when through the rivers, they won’t sweep over you.When you walk through the fire, you won’t be scorched and flame won’t burn you.I am the Lord your God, the holy one of Israel, your savior.I have given Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in your place.Because you are precious in my eyes, you are honored, and I love you. I give people in your place, and nations in exchange for your life.Don’t fear, I am with you.From the east I’ll bring your children; from the west I’ll gather you.I’ll say to the north, “Give them back!” and to the south, “Don’t detain them.”Bring my sons from far away, and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name and whom I created for my glory, whom I have formed and made THE MODERN LESSON Carl Sandburg’s The Windy City, Section 1 Jim Golec The lean hands of wagon men put out pointing fingers here, picked this crossway, put it on a map, set up their sawbucks, fixed their shotguns, found a hitching place for the pony express, made a hitching place for the iron horse, the one-eyed horse with the fire-spit head, found a homelike spot and said, “Make a home,” saw this corner with a mesh of rails, shuttling people, shunting cars, shaping the junk of the earth to a new city… Out of the payday songs of steam shovels, Out of the wages of structural iron rivets, The living lighted skyscrapers tell it now as a name, Tell it across miles of sea blue water, gray blue land: I am Chicago, I am a name given out by the breaths of working men, laughing men, a child, a belonging. So between the Great Lakes, The Grand De Tour, and the Grand Prairie, The living lighted skyscrapers stand, Spotting the blue dusk with checkers of yellow, streamers of smoke and silver, parallelograms of night-gray watchmen, Singing a soft moaning song: I am a child, a belonging. As you many already know, Camie LaPorte and her three boys are in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the moment, as she continues to battle cancer with her extended family. The good news is that she seems to be withstanding the difficult chemo treatments, and there are some good initial signs that she is going to be OK. The boys, Ben, Will and Sam, seem to be making new friends in Grand Rapids, and like being close to nearby family, but, unsurprisingly, they can’t wait to get back to Chicago, hopefully sooner rather than later – and we certainly want them back. In Camie’s latest posting on Caring Bridge, a website where we can follow her journey into healing, she wrote the following: So the boys and I got home last night after spending 4 days in our beloved hometown of Chicago, seeing friends and family we’ve missed so much! We had the best time. Sam said to me as we turned off our usual exit to go home on our way to another friends house, “Mom, too bad we aren’t just going home right now,” and I ached for that right along with him. Our move was sudden. I’ve lived in Chicago my entire adult life. It is our home, and we miss it terribly. I think she and the boys are a lot like many of us, who have found our home here in Chicago – it feels as if we belong here, that this is our city. I often tell people that I’ve lived in a lot places, small places Coloma, Michigan, and bigger places like Birmingham, Atlanta, Seattle, Spokane, Oklahoma City, Dallas and Houston, but none have felt as right as Chicago. I love so many things about the places I’ve lived, but none felt like Chicago does for me – this place, and even this region, just feels right for both Douglas and I. It’s like we belong to this place, this profoundly imperfect place, and for many of you, I suspect that is true for you, whether you’ve lived here all your life and just showed up a few years ago. I know that’s not true for everyone, I get that, but its truer here than I’ve seen it in another places. Carl Sandburg hints at this truth in his famous poem about Chicago – that the city seems to own its people, that those who are here seem to belong to the place, to its rhythms, its skyscrapers, its Great Lakes, its endless prairies. That sense of belonging to something, to a place or a people, to a community, a neighborhood, it matters more than we know, I think, especially if we’ve lived transient lives, or been in one place that didn’t ever quite feel like home. Like so many, my adult life has been a transient one, having lived no longer than five years in one place since my family came back to the States from Indonesia in 1982. Until Chicago, that is. And because I can’t ever go back home again – the oil camp in which I lived during my childhood was itself so transient itself – I’ve never quite felt like there was a place I could quite fully claim as home – I suspect the children of military members feel the same way. My hometown is Meridian, MS, but it’s not really home – its just the place where most of my family was, where we visited during the summers of my childhood. There is a sense of homelessness that many people have, until they discover home later in life, people like me, people like Douglas. And so I feel as if I belong to Chicago, and perhaps even the upper Midwest, where Douglas and I plan to retire in the next 15-20 years. Say what you will about the cold in January, but the August heat and humidity in Atlanta is just as bad! It’s been wonderful to feel as if you’ve found a hometown, a place that feels just right, a place where you belong, that, despite not being native, you feel as if you were always meant to be here. Connection, belonging, a sense of place, it’s important, and that truth is no different for our less than city wide connections, a belonging to a community, a people. “Whose your people?” is something Southerners often ask of the strangers in their midst, “whose your kin, whose your family.” We all have “our people,” friends, families of blood and families of choice, co-workers, neighbors, and even those who have experienced similar joys and sorrows that we have – communities, belongings of the moment, or connections forged through similar happiness and pain. In the creation story, in the more patriarchal version of the two creation stories, Eve is created from Adam’s rib, simply because Adam seemed so lonely, so alone. We are made for each other, made for connection, made to belong to one another, bone from bone, story to story, life to life. This need to belong to something, to someone, to a community is not just a quirk of our creation, an interesting note to the grander story. No, its at the heart of the human story, so embedded is this need to belong to something, to a people, to a community, to fellow travelers, that without it we can fade so quickly and deeply into depression. In his wonderful book Lost Connections: Uncovering The Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions, Johann Hari gathers up scientific date that shows that most depression is rooted in our disconnections from things like meaningful work, meaningful values, from status and respect, from the natural world, and even disconnection from the reality of the childhood trauma that many of us have experienced. But Hari puts forth the idea that disconnection from others is one of the foremost reasons for why we may become depressed. He cites the work of John Cacioppo, a neuroscience research at our own University of Chicago that tracked the mental and physical health of 229 older Americans in our own suburbs. What he found was that loneliness preceded the symptoms of depression – “you become lonely and that was followed by feelings of despair and profound sadness and depression.” (Hari 77) The effect was profound – even what seems a small shift in the measurements around loneliness led to something like 8 times the chance you would begin slipping into depression. To belong to a network of friends, a church, a community, bring us a sense of well-being, even if we are not aware of it, and that shows us how we have been created to belong, created to have connections with each other. Adam was unhappy when he was alone, and so Eve came along – and I just want to point out something obvious: God created a companion for Adam not so that they could have babies (that was simply a happy byproduct), but because God saw that Adam was alone and that made him deeply unhappy. We are creations who need connection to one another, in communities, in places, in order to be healthy and to be whole. In our text from Isaiah in this beautiful and remarkable slice of Scripture, we get a sense of innate, built-in, need to belong, and how, despite the efforts of those who wish disconnection, God asks us to hold fast to connection, to remember our connection to God, and to each other. You see, the supposed best and brightest of Israel—the smart ones, the rich ones, the charismatic ones, and, yes, even the best bureaucrats, had been carted off from Israel to the capital city of Babylon in the late 7th century as part of a strategy by the Babylonians of disconnecting these people from their land and the people left behind. I suspect this strategy goes back to the old adage that it’s best to keep your friends close, and your enemies even closer, because that way you can keep an eye on what’s going on and whether or not there are rumblings of rebellions in the ranks. Decades and decades of living away from their homelands, multiple generations living and dying away from home, had brought the Jewish people to the edge of despair, and the pervasive hopelessness was as thick as the air can be here in Chicago during August. But here comes Isaiah, or one speaking in Isaiah’s name, and he starts in the previous chapters by reminding them of what had gotten them to them to Babylon in the first place—their disobedience, their unwillingness to do justice with the least of their brethren, their decision not listen and hear what earlier prophets had said, had been the cause that brought them into captivity, according to this prophet. Still, there is hope, and that is where chapter 43 starts, where God speaks, and begins at the beginnings, begins by pointing out the biggest reason why God still gives a damn about them: “He who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel,” so says God in this text, and those are words of possession and creation—“you are mine,” the prophet has God saying here. And so the first connection amidst all the connections we have is connection to God -You are mine, God says to us, and our belonging simply comes from being created by God, by simply being born in this world. And what does this belonging to God actually mean, this connection that comes to us simply because we have been created, because we have been made by God? Well, according to our texts, it brings us presence; it brings us a God who is with us, through the waters, through the hellish moments of our lives. In Jewish thought, the waters always represent chaos and fear, and by culture, it was rare for Jews to really head out on the high seas, beyond the lakes, because there was a profound and mysterious fear of all the unknown that sea seemed to represent. Here, in this Scripture, God says this: “Don’t fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine.When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; when through the rivers, they won’t sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you won’t be scorched and flame won’t burn you. Belonging to God means that we are her people, and he will be beside us, during the good times but also during the bad times. But that is also true when we are connected to each other as well – when the going gets tough, our communities of choice, places like this, this church, they are there for us, they embody God’s presence and love for us in tangible ways. Of course, it doesn’t just happen in religious communities, it can happen anywhere, in moments where we just need to be reminded that we belong, that we are a part of something, a tribe, a band of fellow travelers. The rest of the text, well, the rest reminds us what God is willing to do for us, to barter and trade, to push and pull for us, to make the nations give us up, release us, like Babylon one day would give up its Jewish captives, after so many years of enslavement. And if we’ve spent a lifetime wondering to whom do we really belong, about where we belong in this world, the answer to that wonderment is actually here in this text, rooted in our reality as created beings. I know we Christians spend too much time arguing about whose in and whose out—I think it’s one of the earliest Christian sins, these endless arguments about what the Gospel is and who it includes, and it is an argument that has turned off too many of my friends because it so often seemed to exclude them, either by saying you are included if you do this, or love this way, or they simply were turned off by some versions of Christianity because they didn’t want to live in our world that seemed to be divided by insiders and outsiders, the saved and unsaved, the faithful and non-faithful. If religion was all about that, they were pretty sure that it wasn’t about them. And I can’t blame them. I mean, who could, really, if you wanted to actually live within the world that God created, rather than trying live above it, which Jesus never did, and which he decried the Pharisee’s attempt to do so. No, this God includes my skeptical friends whether or not they even know it, like it includes all of us, and this God is for them simply because they have been birthed into this world by the Living God, and this God pull us up and pushes us through, in this messy world and life we live, the real world, even during time when its difficult, even when we would rather succumb to the waters, to the chaos, to the fear, to the loneliness. Some years ago, on a hot summer day in South Florida, a little boy decided to go to the old swimming hole behind his house. In a hurry to dive into the cool water, he ran out the back door, leaving behind shoes, socks and shirt as he went. He flew into the water, not realizing that as he swam toward the middle of the lake, an alligator was swimming toward the shore. The boy’s father, working in the yard, saw the two get closer and closer together. In utter fear, he ran toward the water, yelling to his son as loudly as he could. Hearing his dad’s voice, the little boy became alarmed and made a U-turn to swim to his father. It was too late. Just as he reached his father, the alligator reached him. From the dock, the father grabbed his little boy by the arms just as the alligator snatched his legs. That began an incredible tug-of-war between the two. The alligator was much stronger than the father, but the father was much too passionate to let go. A farmer happened to drive by, heard screams, raced from his truck, took aim and shot the alligator. Remarkably, after weeks in the hospital, the little boy survived. His legs were extremely scarred by the vicious attack. And on his arms were deep scratches where his father’s fingernails dug into his flesh in an effort to hang on to the son he loved. A newspaper reporter who interviewed the boy after the trauma asked if he would show him his scars. The boy lifted his pant legs. And then, with obvious pride, he said to the reporter, “But look at my arms. I have great scars on my arms, too. I have them because my dad wouldn’t let go.” (Homiletics Online website) The God who holds onto us because we are one of his children, that we belong to her, that holding fast to us is just part of belonging to God. And places like this, intentional communities formed around faith in God and the belief that we might need each other as fellow travelers in life and faith, these kinds of belonging places are really important, places where we can show each other’s the scars from the God who would not let us go. Other places can include and help us to remember our birthright, the belonging that is simply part of our birthright as created beings, but the church, the church, at its best, is unlike those other communities. The difference is found in its intentionality, in the fact we don’t just forgive and struggle and laugh and know joy together as a side bonus that comes out a project or a work we are doing – raising money for the PTA, or something like that. The laughing the struggling, the joy, the forgiveness, is why we gather, because those lessons are best learned when we’re conscious and aware that this place of belonging is the one where those lessons should be learned with intentionality. God has given a special purpose to places like the church, we who are called to embrace the lovely and the ugly, the strong and the broken, the easy ones to love and the hard ones to love. But we must, we must be very, very intentional about extending that sense of belonging to everyone and, honestly, we sometimes don’t and we’ve simply got to get better at it. Part of the purpose of creating these Mission and Ministries teams was to help us re-learn that lesson, that we are a place of belonging, of welcome, another place one could call home in this beautiful city and this world, but doing that work consciously and with intention. We belong to God and we belong to each other, and so much of our spiritual work is reminding ourselves and each other of that real truth. We are better when we know we belong and we know that belongin in our bones. You are mine, says God to the world, you are part of me, of my love, of my purpose, of my heart – may we never forgot that truth and may we never forget to practice that truth with others. Amen.
“There will be signs in the sun, moon, and stars. On the earth, there will be dismay among nations in their confusion over the roaring of the sea and surging waves. The planets and other heavenly bodies will be shaken, causing people to faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world. Then they will see the Human One[a] coming on a cloud with power and great splendor. Now when these things begin to happen, stand up straight and raise your heads, because your redemption is near.” Jesus told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees. When they sprout leaves, you can see for yourselves and know that summer is near. In the same way, when you see these things happening, you know that God’s kingdom is near. I assure you that this generation won’t pass away until everything has happened. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will certainly not pass away. “Take care that your hearts aren’t dulled by drinking parties, drunkenness, and the anxieties of day-to-day life. Don’t let that day fall upon you unexpectedly, like a trap. It will come upon everyone who lives on the face of the whole earth. Stay alert at all times, praying that you are strong enough to escape everything that is about to happen and to stand before the Human One.”[b] So, there are some of us who can remember the 1970’s, some as adults, some as children, me being one of the latter, but I’ve always been fascinated with that era, that great time of transition between the radicalism of the 1960’s to the law and order, conformist, economically ambitious 1980’s. I came into my own during the 1980’s but it was one of the books of that earlier era that had a huge impact on my life during the early eighties, though it was published in 1970, and was a publishing phenomenon, and a sure sign that many felt the 1960’s, with its social changes, was not a good time. Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth had already sold millions of copies when I first picked it up, though most of the people I knew in my newly embraced Christian evangelical world had already read it. Hal Lindsey had made him reputation – and a whole lot of money – by making the case that there were signs that Jesus’s Second Coming was right around the corner, signs one could see being literally manifested in world events and, most concretely, the founding of Israel as a nation state after World War Two. Hal Lindsey weaved together passages in the books of Revelation, the book of Daniel, and texts like the ones we have before us today to state his case that everything was pointing to Jesus’ imminent return to Earth. He said that the rise of the Soviet Union and China as world powers were predicted in the Bible, and he even believed the European Union had some role in the rise of a literal Anti-Christ. Lindsey was notorious for making predictions about the actual date of Jesus would come; first it was in the 1970’s, and then later he predicted it would be sometime in 1988, the year I graduated high school, and then even later he said Jesus would likely return in 2007 For those of us who grew in that evangelical culture of constant expectation of Christ’s imminent arrival, I think we approached such bold predictions with both excitement and dread – sure, I wanted to Jesus to come back in 1988, but, well, you know, I wanted to go to college and live a little before the whole “Jesus comes back and transforms everything” happens. For those who in that subculture were obsessed with the rapture, which was this evangelical belief in the unexpected taking of faithful souls to heaven in a blink of an eye, you had this great fear that you wouldn’t be raptured with the rest of your friends and family. You have all these 1970’s and 1980’s stories of young kids coming home and finding their houses unexpectedly empty, and this fear sinking in that they their parents and siblings had been raptured to heaven, and somehow they had missed it. It was a crazy time for this kind of stuff, but the world seemed ripe for the second coming of Jesus – there were signs and wonders, as Jesus said, that couldn’t be dismissed, so said the evangelical subculture that multiple generations of believers have found themselves steeped within. But the problem has always been something I suspect you already know instinctively and that is that in almost every generation of Christians there have always been people who believed that surely, surely, this would be last generation, that all the signs and wonders of their present age was pointing to the end of history, which for us Christians is wrapped up in the Christ actually doing that wrapping up of all history, in that great Second Coming. Even the believers a few decades removed from Jesus’ time here on earth believed that they were surely in the last generation, that Jesus was surely coming, because of all that had happened in their own time, sure signs that the end was nigh – one of my friends whose mother spent the last half of her life steeped in Pentecostalism that expected Jesus’ imminent appearance would tell her constantly that “Jesus is nigh unto the door.” What likely prompted these early believers, the people who were around when the Gospel of Luke was likely written, was the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, the same one that Jesus worshipped and taught within. As punishment for a Jewish rebellion in 70 AD that was eventually brutally quashed, the Romans destroyed the Temple, this center of Jewish life and identity. This caused a crisis within Judaism itself, one would that would eventually shift Jewish identity and worship from being centered in Jerusalem to a synagogue based faith now scattered throughout the world. But it wasn’t just a Jewish crisis – the destruction of the Temple was also a Christian crisis because we Christians, wrongly, to be sure, saw ourselves as the natural heir of the Jewish identity and religion – after all, Jesus was a Jewish Messiah, who came to the Jews first, and then the rest of the world, secondly. The destruction of the Temple was surely a sign that Jesus would return – perhaps it wasn’t a natural disaster that Jesus speaks of here in our text today, but it was a spiritual disaster that both Judaism, and to lesser degree, this new Christian faith, had to find ways of dealing with. And so the text today was likely written after the great fall of the Temple in Jerusalem, and these words believed to be said by Jesus were fresh to those early Christian believers in a way that few of us can now imagine. Seemingly the greatest of disasters had fallen upon them only a few years earlier, and here Jesus is telling his earliest listeners that there will signs and wonders, natural disaster after natural disaster, and unexplained events in the sky that have rarely been seen before. Actually, in the larger 21st chapter of Luke not included in our pericope today, Jesus gives us three signs that signal the end: the appearance of false messiahs, wars and international conflicts, and what we see in our text today – natural disasters. But the reality is that false messiahs and wars on a world wide scale have come and gone – think of World War Two, where it is believed that 70 million people lost their lives – and natural disasters, well, they happen all the time. Some always say, surely, this particular disaster we are experiencing right now is a sign that Jesus was speaking of – surely it can’t get worse than this disaster, which is probably what people must have said during the time of the Black Plague in the early Middle Ages, when 30% of Europe’s population was wiped out over a few decades. Almost always we humans think that the false messiahs of our generation, the wars of our generation, the natural disasters of our generation are the worse the world has even seen, and thus they are surely a sign that Jesus is indeed “nigh upon the door.” We almost always interpret Jesus’ parable of the fig tree as speaking to our generation, because, of course, our generation is experiencing the worst of everything. I can’t tell you how many times people have told me that surely we were in the last days, because of how bad things had gotten, and I try, in my best moments, to remind them that there have been far worse natural disasters, far worse wars, far worse false messiahs, than we are experiencing now. In fact, in many ways, humanity has never had it better than right now in terms of health and longevity and the absence of major wars killing millions at a clip. God knows life is not perfect for any of us, especially the poor and oppressed, far from it, but the world has been a far crueler and meaner place than it is right now. I try to remember that in my best moments, when I am decrying what is happening in this country and in the larger world. It doesn’t mean it can’t get worse, but it’s important to stay in the moment, and to take Jesus seriously here – to look at the fig tree, the signs, and to interpret them in the larger context of history, of what has been and what could be. But what then are we to do with this text, on this first Sunday of Advent, if the end of all things is not probably nigh, that Jesus is not literally “nigh unto the door?” And what are we to do with these particular words: “this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.” The reality, of course, is that first century generation did pass away without the ending happening, despite the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. We don’t know for sure whether Jesus literally meant that particular generation, but it’s obviously true that every generation thinks it is at the end of the historical rope, so to speak, and this current one is no different. The truth of the matter is that we are ALWAYS living in times of turmoil or change, and the world is in fact always ending, ending the world as we know it, because it is always changing, and what was is no more, and what will be is just coming to be, and this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place, until another tumultuous change happens, as it does for every generation, as it will for us, surely. And the world is always beginning again, starting over, because what was before is now ending—and on and on we go. And, yes, I am probably getting the early church and Jesus out of a tight rhetorical spot by interpreting these particular words in this manner, but I really do think that what Jesus is saying here is profoundly true—the world is always ending, and it is always beginning, and what is new contains within it what has been—and what will be. There will be signs and wonders today, natural disasters today, within in our bodies today, within our lives today, within our politics today, within the very ground we walk on today, and some of us will indeed faint from fear today because of the cruelty of it all. Most us, however, will wake up again, and the world will be new again, though not always in ways we want or expect, but it will be new again. One of the interesting things about growing up in that evangelical subculture was one of the things they didn’t try to teach us with all their apocalyptic obsession with how the world was might end: what they didn’t teach us was that the end of all things, the arrival of this Jesus, would be the beginning of something new. The book of Revelation right at the very end of the Bible spends its last few chapters telling us that when Christ comes, the world itself will be transformed and made new again, that there will be a new heaven and a new earth. As I just said, within every ending is the seed for the new beginning. God doesn’t end the story by destroying it all – but renews what God first created, the heavens and earth, into something new, a new beginning, a new life, a new way of understanding the world as it really is. So, you see, even when Jesus speaks of the end, there is always the new beginning that comes with it, because when all things end, all things begin again, in some new way. One of the interesting things about what scholars like to call apocalyptic literature in the Bible, texts like this one before us today, or the book of Revelation, or even the book of Daniel, is that this kind of writing is meant to reveal, to unveil, or uncover the world, to unmask the false powers that supposedly rule the world, and maybe even our lives. I was speaking with someone recently about both a devastating ending, and the possible birth of something new, something unwanted at first, but now, well, fully embraced as a new start, a new beginning. Sometimes the ending reveal what we didn’t know we needed, and the beginning of some new thing we didn’t know we wanted, until it was before us, until it was presented to us by circumstances. I don’t want to give you the wrong impression that all our endings have a happy new beginning – I don’t believe that because it isn’t true. Some endings are as cataclysmic as they actually feel in the moment. But I don’t want us to forget that sometimes, maybe most of the time, when something ends, a sense of safety, a life we thought we wanted, sometimes that ending is a catalyst to a new heaven and a new earth in our lives. Jesus says to us in this text: Now when these things begin to happen, stand up straight and raise your heads, because your redemption is near.” The Temple is destroyed, life collapses, really bad things happen, and they really are bad things – and then from the ashes of ruin some new thing begins, unexpected, and maybe unwanted, but life begins again, as it does on Christmas Day, with the birth of this child, a yearly, constant reminder that life begins again, the great human cycle of beginning, ending, and resurrection, a new thing, a new beginning. Hope arrives after utter hopelessness. In all honesty, I am kind of nostalgic for the excitement of my Hal Lindsey days, with the constant anticipation of just when Jesus would come again, literally, and to be clear, I do still believe that in the literal Second Coming. But the truth of the matter is that we really are always in the midst of some sort of ending, we are almost in the midst of some sort of disaster which threatens to end us, or at least threatens to end our hopes and dreams. There are signs and wonders all around, warning us not to get too comfortable, because the world we are in right now might not be the world we will be in tomorrow – some new thing has happened, the ending of something, the beginning of something else. So, to echo Jesus’s words in the last part of our text, let’s take care that our hearts aren’t dulled by distractions of everyday life, and that we don’t find ourselves stunned by the last Great Ending of all things, the last Great Last Day, but also let’s take care not to be surprised by the everyday endings, the ones that just come with being human and being human in this world, as it is. What is revealed in all endings is a new beginning, an unveiling, an uncovering of that which we did not see beneath the surface of the life we just saw end before us and within us. Some of what is uncovered we will be glad to see, and some of it, not so much, but with the ending comes the new beginning and this promise: that the Human One, the Christ will meet us there, as he will meet us on Christmas Day, as he does in every moment of our lives. Amen.
I mentioned in my weekly email to the congregation this week that I have a complicated relationship with the New Testament book of Hebrews, a snippet of which we heard a few seconds ago. Frankly, it’s letter and an argument that has never quite resonated with me, something I’ll try to explain in a few seconds. Nevertheless, a couple of thousands of years ago someone did think they were making a clever point about the nature of Christ’s death and the traditions of animal sacrifice used in Judaism and other religions, so much so that others likely attached the apostle Paul’s name to this work, hoping it would get more traction, more eyeballs on the parchment, so to speak – the more important the apostle, the more likely you would get your work read. But no serious Christian or secular scholars believe that Paul wrote it – the use of the Greek language is so different than the way it was used in the known writings of Paul that it’s rare to find anyone making the case he really wrote it, except in very conservative Christian scholarly circles. But it’s simply not just the use language alone that seems off when it comes to attributing it to Paul, but the ideas themselves. It’s true Paul was certainly all about trying to bridge the divide between his Judaism and this new thing he had embraced, this faith in Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, something you see in Romans and 1 Corinthians, where he talks about the practical elements of being a Jew who follows after the way of Jesus, with all the practical questions about food and circumcision that came up for new believers in those early years. But the book of Hebrews’ focus on the inside baseball of the Jewish Temple rituals and spaces, and the role of the High Priest, and how Jesus has become that High Priest, etc, well, all that seems not all that interesting to Paul in his other writings. But there is one other thing that makes me wary of this book, which is its explicit belief that Christianity should replace Judaism, that we Christians have it right and the Jews do not because they have not accepted this Jesus of Nazareth as the Jewish Messiah. That belief is found in other parts of the New Testament, no doubt, but here it really shines, so to speak, and now the text comes to us with history tainted by a legacy of oppression of Jews by us Christians, rooted in this belief that Judaism shouldn’t exist because Christianity is Judaism’s natural ending, that Christianity should supersede Judaism, and end it, really. You don’t need to imagine how this warped belief has effected the Jewish people over the centuries – you need only look to actual history to see how we Christians and the strain of anti-Semitism that runs in much of our faith has caused such tremendous suffering to the Jewish people. So, why would that matter? Well, to me it matters because I’m in a mood, as they say, to start debunking or to at least challenge some of those toxic ideas in our wonderful but imperfect faith tradition, and though I am not particularly a fan of the book of Hebrews as a whole, there are moments that ring beautifully true, including today’s text, which might help us to answer a question that I’ve been asking ever since I became a Christian way back in 1983. What I want to do is challenge a strain within our faith that perhaps has been there forever, but is now more prevalent than ever and that is this: this idea that intimacy, that closeness to God, is something that we should be feeling, that we should be always be experiencing emotionally, that, in fact, emotions are the marker and measure of whether or not we are close to God or far from God. And I think this idea is certainly related to the current way we understand love in our romantic focused culture – love is what you feel, and when the feeling is gone, so is love. Don’t get me wrong – I know that a emotions are part of romantic love, positive regard is part of love, but anyone who has experienced love over the long haul knows that it’s much more than emotions, muchmore than “the feels,” as the young people like to say these days. And don’t get me wrong again – I know divorces and endings of relationships have more complicated reasons for ending than the lack of the feels – I know that personally, as I suspect many of you do as well – and that sometimes the best thing that can happen is the ending of something, including the ending of a relationship. But I do think we still continue to mistake emotions, what we feel about someone in any given moment, as a measure, or maybe the primary measure of the love we have for them. But that attempt to measure love by what we feel really isn’t the best measuring stick, of course, not in romantic situations or any human relationship and certainly not in our relationship with God, with Christ, hopefully another great love in our lives. So, where to begin in today’s text from Hebrews? First, you need to know that the author has just been making an intricate case about God’s covenant with God’s people, first understood as the Jewish people and now believed by the writer to be the followers of Jesus. Scholars seem to think the writer has been hearing that people have become discouraged at this point in their faith journeys, that they are not as invested as they were once were early on in their spiritual lives. The writer has tried to shore them up with talk of the nature of Christ’s role as the new spiritual High Priest in a spiritual Temple, and he finally comes to this point, where he reminds them that there is no need for anymore for earthly animal sacrifice for sin as was once done in the Temple in Jerusalem, because Christ has become that one sacrifice to God that ends all earthly sacrifices thereafter. What does that mean for them, his earliest readers, and to us, his much later readers? It means that we can enter into the Holiest of Holies, the very interior of the Temple itself, the most sacred space in the Temple, an honor which was once reserved only for the priests who had purged themselves of sin. God was believed to reside in that space like God did in no other place, though, of course, God was also believed to be everywhere as well. The writer of the text wants us to know that a kind of intimacy with the Divine once reserved for only a few is now available to all, to those of us who are not High Priests, or chosen or whatever. We can have that kind of intimacy with God, entering into spaces once reserved for only the few. I can only imagine the emotion some ancient Jewish High priest must have felt when he entered into that most sacred of spaces, after a time of tremendous emotional and ritual cleansing. I think the quote from the wonderful writer Robert Benson in our Modern Lesson captures it – the sheer awe of being in a place completely dedicated to the Holy, a space quite literally created to invoke those emotions of awe and wonder. It would give most of us “the feels,” I think that to be in that place, deep inside the most sacred space in all Judaism, a room in the most interior part of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. I suspect that most of us, not all of us, of course, but most of us, could share a moment like that, one like Robert Benson’s account in our Modern Lesson, or what the High Priest must have felt like, when God’s presence was felt, felt in our soul, on our skins, in the very fiber of our being. We just knew that God was there, was here, was everywhere, and that God was felt to be fully real, or realized, real as you and I have ever known anything. These feelings likely didn’t last long, but they happened, and it gave us a sense of wonder and awe and maybe gratitude that we had been given such an experience. Those moments are truly a gift, they really are, but for most of us they are few and far between. That doesn’t mean that we who craft worship don’t seek to invite you into those moments, into the feels, but I’m always a bit wary of doing it too much – emotions can be so easily manipulated, passions can be so easily invoked and provoked within us that they can be used to invite people to do the wrong things because we are feeling so right at any given moment. Jeanette Winterson, the great novelist, once wrote in her book The Passion that she wanted a God who could meet her with passion with divine passion – and I hear it that desire in her, to have passion always be met with passion, but others also hear that as well, those who know how to work people’s passion, often for nefarious reasons. We have whole swaths of the Protestant Church attempting to make us feel the feels, often with great success, but so much of it is only about the feels, the emotions, that when the emotions desert many of us, there seems to be nothing left of our spirituality – if God is not felt, then maybe God is not there, maybe doesn’t God even exist. You can hear the echoes of those who are not wise in matters of romantic love in that sentiment – if I can’t feel love for my spouse, do I actually love my spouse? Now, to be upfront, I personally have a surprising amount of the feels, often right here in this room, but I try not to lean too heavily into them, count on them as a barometer of my connection to God, as I don’t count on emotions as a barometer for my love for Douglas, my spouse. The problem with using our emotions, our feelings, as a measurement of whether or not we are close or far from God is that emotions, the feels, don’t always tell us the fullest truth about a situation. Feelings come and go in any relationship – one minute I feel close, and then a second later I feel distance with God, with Douglas, with my sister, and many, many others. But the truth of the matter is that such feelings aren’t the actual measure of my love, our love for each other, it can’t be, because it is not possible to always live within the feels, so to speak, and the feels, our emotions can so often lie to us. But there is something else that its actually more measurable, more grounded, more solid, than what you and I may be feeling about God or each other in any moment, something that the writer of Hebrews hints at in our text today. Remember when I said that scholars think that Hebrews was written to an early Christian community that was likely weary of being Christian, had grown tired of being faithful without getting the emotional results or maybe even the feels they once got out of it? Perhaps it was like a marriage in the middle part, where the passion has died down, where the little annoyances at the beginning have slowly built into large annoyances – and you’re not getting the emotional payoffs you did early on in the partnership. That place is where this early church is likely at – and so the writer of Hebrews points them away from the feels they surely experienced when they entered into the Holiest of Holies, and points them to the mundane, the ordinary ways that we experience God, the slow and continuous turning towards God and each other that is the heart of a deep and wide Christian faith. You actually see that turning in our text when we are invited to draw near to God with a genuine heart, meaning a truth-telling heart, and to hold onto our confession of faith, our naming of that trust that God has gotten us through what seemed impossible to get through – that is hope, to trust in hope when all seems hopeless. Make the decision to draw near when one does not feel like drawing near, decide to throw in our lot with hope when, really, all you and I maybe feeling is hopeless. That is what the writer is asking us to do, to make decision to hope and trust when we don’t have the heart or the want to do so. And then comes the kicker, so to speak, because the writer invites them back to each other, with these words: And let us consider each other carefully for the purpose of sparking love and good deeds. Don’t stop meeting together with other believers, which some people have gotten into the habit of doing. Instead, encourage each other, especially as you see the day drawing near, the day, of course, being the coming of the Christ for the final time. Continue doing the right thing when you don’t feel like doing the right thing, choose relationship with your spiritual fellow travelers when you don’t feel like choosing to do so, keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep showing up to the rallies, the protests, the soup kitchen, the art studio, the marriage, the kids, all of it. Encourage each other in the long obedience in the same direction, as the Pastor Eugene Peterson once called it. It’s no easy thing, let me tell you, from my own personal experience. God and me, we’ve had our ups and downs, and I’ve had moments where it felt as if hadn’t entered the Holiest of Holies in years – yes, years – a place, an emotional space, where I could feel God, I could know God’s presence in my bones. And during those desert times, in my best moments, I just keep trying to do the right thing, I just keep trying to pray, I decide day in and day out to be there, to not walk away, to show that my love for God is actually not found in what I am feeling but what I am doing, for me, for others, for the ones that are easy to love and the ones that aren’t. Mother Teresa was called into service for the poor of Calcutta as a young nun, and almost immediately the “feels” she once felt about being in God’s presence deserted her for decades – it was as if God had just abandoned her, at least when it came to her interior spiritual life. From then on, this seeming banishment from the wonder and emotions that come with entering into the Holiest of Holies caused her to find God in other ways, especially in what she did with others and for others, the daily acts of compassion she and her religious order practiced daily. To be intimate with God is to be intimately involved and implicated in God’s world, in acts of love, kindness, justice, goodness, in simply doing the right thing when one really actually wants to do the wrong thing. None of us are likely to go through what Mother Teresa went through, or at least I hope we never do, but when our feelings about God desert us, we need to know what to do when the lack of spiritual emotion challenges our devotion, our long obedience. And what must be done in those periods in our lives is to simply do what needs to be done on the long obedience in the same direction, which is love each other by doing the right thing by each other, by choosing to hope when one FEELS hopeless, to trust when you feel profoundly distrustful of God, or even each other. Still, make no mistake about it – the flood of presence, of emotion that comes when we have those moments when God feels as close to us as the air we breathe, those are real, they are true, but the High Priest in the Temple of old never stayed in that sacred space forever, and we shouldn’t expect to either. Consider it a gift from God when we have that authentic experience, an unmanufactured encounter with the Divine, in all of its wonder – and then, after it has passed, expect to the daily work of being a follower of Jesus, of making those daily choices to be faithful, to do the right thing, to love the profoundly unlovable, to walk in that same direction with others, in that slow and beautiful and challenging journey that leads more fully into the heart of the Holy. Amen.
“The Book of Ruth and Naomi” – by Marge PiercyRuth 3:1-5, 4:13-17
Jesus and his followers came into Jericho. As Jesus was leaving Jericho, together with his disciples and a sizable crowd, a blind beggar named Bartimaeus, Timaeus’ son, was sitting beside the road. When he heard that Jesus of Nazareth was there, he began to shout, “Jesus, Son of David, show me mercy!” Many scolded him, telling him to be quiet, but he shouted even louder, “Son of David, show me mercy!” Jesus stopped and said, “Call him forward.” They called the blind man, “Be encouraged! Get up! He’s calling you.” Throwing his coat to the side, he jumped up and came to Jesus. Jesus asked him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said, “Teacher, I want to see.” Jesus said, “Go, your faith has healed you.” At once he was able to see, and he began to follow Jesus on the way. Hopefully you had a chance to hear Chris Stedman last week, as he shared with us a bit of his story and how he arrived at both his atheism and his eventual desire to find places of cooperation and understanding between theists and atheists. What I admire about Chris is that he is doing something rather different, something pretty unusual, in this day and age, and that is simple bridge building, attempting to find some way people of different opinions can actually have a conversation with each other – and see if that dialogue with each other will give rise to some common good beyond the dialogue. Reading his book, and thinking about the difficulties of being an open and active atheist in our culture, even now, it just reminds me that this is no easy thing. The reality is that Chris gets pilloried and mocked by some in his atheist community who believe that seeking any common ground with religious people is a fool’s errand – and who believe that the goal of atheism should be the elimination of religion. Chris tells a story of a cocktail party he attended right here in Chicago with a group of local atheists who were stunned to hear his views on the need to find points of cooperation with the religious – and how he was derisively labeled by a guest at the party as a “faitheist,” which is where the title of his book comes from. Some in his own community of non-believers are not just indifferent to religion, but campaign for its elimination – not violently or forcibly, but through an intellectual expose of religion’s follies – and sadly, there is a lot of material to work with on that account. But let’s not get too self-righteous on our part about this desire to eliminate religion by some atheists – there has been far more persecution of atheism and atheists by religious people of all stripes than there ever has been of atheists persecuting religious people. Christians, when in political power through the centuries, have had a tendency to outlaw anything that could be seen as anti-religious, and have sometimes tortured or killed those who expressed religious skepticism or outright atheism. And so Chris gets pilloried by some Christians for being an atheist and then gets pilloried by some atheists for being someone who wants to build bridges between atheists and Christians. And yet, he persists in this work, he continues to do this good work of trying to find common ground between theists and atheists, despite our differences. This takes a special kind of moxy, a fortitude that not easy to find, to stay in the game, to show up to the work, when its rarer and rarer to find those who think it is a good work that you are doing – especially the work of bridge building. That persistence, that willingness to remain, to remain faithful, so to speak to this cause, to stay on-course, and to live out of a sense of core principles, it’s a testament to tenacity, to persistence on his part. And that persistence, that tenacity, is something that is present in the story we just heard a few minutes ago, and it is a story of persistence that I think we can learn from, or at least I can. Now, it’s interesting, that this is the last miracle story in the Gospel of Mark—this is it, at least when it comes to the flashy displays of divine healing power because the next thing that happens is Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, into that time of passion when Christ will teach in the temple, when the jealousy of the religious powers within the Temple come to a head, a time when the calculation is made that it is better for one man to die than to have a whole nation be destroyed, and the political machinery of death and crucifixion become greased with the blood of those who are understood to expendable in order to keep the peace. Think about it: the very last story told by Mark, in this the earliest of the written Gospels, before the coming drama of Jesus’ crucifixion, is this story of blind Bartimaeus who comes to receive his sight back. Blindness is not something uncommon in the ancient world—the reality is a lot of people lost their ability to see in Jesus’ day – remember, Bartimaeus had lost his sight, meaning he once could see, and he wants it back again. In the ancient world, one of the most common reasons for losing one’s sight was a highly contagious disease that spread through flies, which would then cause an inflammation of the eyelids, causing the eyes and eyelids to enlarge and eventually cause permanent damage. And, of course, there are the other reasons that people became blind, including being born with it, and so if the person was lucky, so to speak, they would be given permission by the authorities to try to support themselves by begging for a living. Some people even think that the cloak Bartimaeus is wearing and which he throws off when he is called forward to meet Jesus, some think that cloak is a traditional garment meant to designate him as a blind man, thus giving him permission to beg for a living. But before that moment, our friend Bartimaeus is loud and persistent—he is not willing to be told “no.” So when the crowd following Jesus make a rustle as they go through the town, when he hears that Jesus, this miracle worker is passing by, Bartimaeus calls out to this Jesus, this Son of David—“have mercy on me!” Have mercy on me—the great kyrie eleison that has so resonated in the liturgy of the church that it has become a part of our worship, a part of the early Latin mass and even we Protestant use in some of our confessional liturgy. It’s interesting that here you find kyrie eleison being used not to confess sin, but as a way of attracting the attention of the Holy man who walks past, who possibly can give this man back his sight. Nonetheless, Bartimaeus is loud, and his loudness, and its increasing persistence is not making him any friends, and they, the crowds around him, they want him to shut up, they want him to be quiet—they’ve got a celebrity in their midst and he shouldn’t be bothered by someone like Bartimaeus. The reality is that Bartimaeus is low on the totem pole of people that matter in that world, but even that stark reality won’t shut him up, and his cries for mercy grow louder and louder until his persistent cries and screams stop Jesus in his tracks – “he stopped” the texts says – something about the desperation and the volume made Jesus stop and listen to the cries of this man. Jesus asks his disciples to “call him here.” And now, instead of people telling blind Bart to be quiet, they tell him to take heart, to be encouraged, and to get up because “he’s calling you.” That’s the moment the cloak goes flying off his shoulders and the hands and fingers of the people who were moments ago trying to shut him up, those same hands and fingers are now guiding him to this Jesus. And then the question comes, the already familiar question to the readers of Mark’s Gospel, “What do you want me to do for you?” And unlike James and John, who want to be the top dogs in the coming world order, as seen in verses right before this one, this man just wants to see: “let me see again!” And unlike the other miracles that Jesus tends to perform in Mark, this one does not even require a touch from Jesus—there will be no healing balm made from Jesus’ spit and placed on the eyes such as you find in others healing stories centered on vision. Faith is put front and center here, and that faith, embodied, incarnated in Bartimaeus, is persistent and persuasive even, though I suspect he has spent a life time crying out to a million would-be healers passing by him in the dusty streets of his town of Jericho. We sometimes forget that would-be prophets and would-be faith healers were all over the place in first century Roman occupied Palestine, stirring up trouble, making all sorts of claims, though obviously having little of the impact as Jesus finally had. I suspect Bartimaeus had cried out a million times, to anyone within earshot, words like the ones we heard today, have mercy on me, give me healing. And each time he uttered those words, shouted those words, he showed his persistent faith, in his belief that he was somehow going to be healed. Now, of course, it was a literal blindness, but rarely are the healing stories in the Gospels ONLY about the physical – they usually are also a metaphor for the spiritual, the emotional, the social and most profoundly, about the soul being healed, along with the body, with the soul actually being as important, if not more important, than the body. The man wants to see, literally see, and he wants something else – he wants to see the world as it really is, he wants to see the world that God sees, he wants to follow Jesus “on the way” the Gospel says, and to see what Jesus sees in the coming days ahead, and he will, of course, he will likely see so much in the beautiful and dreadful days ahead in that emotionally charged city of Jerusalem, where Jesus will spend his last days. But getting to that point, waiting on the side of the road, crying out to every would-be prophet that found its way to the city streets of Jericho, and finally finding one that could help him see, help him really SEE everything, it took persistence, so much dogged persistence, years and years of just showing up and waiting and shouting and hoping that one day someone would hear his cry, until, of course, one day someone did. Think of the all the times you and I have just shown up, day after day, attempting to do right by our family, our work, our children, our friendships, our simple acts of kindness and even justice that didn’t seem to do much of anything, and yet we did them, because it was the right thing to do, even when the results weren’t obvious, when our cries on the side of road didn’t seem to be heard by anyone, anyone at all So much of our lives is just about showing up – as Parker Palmer has wisely said, I don’t ask myself how effective I’ve been but how faithful I have been. And that is true of faith as well, the simple showing up, being present, and being ready at the side of the road just in case the Savior should pass by on this particular day. Sometimes it’s coming to church on Sundays, and never quite getting anything from the sermon, or even from the people next to us, whomever and whatever, and then the Christ walks by, and the Spirit seems clearly present, at least to us, in that moment – some word is spoken from this pulpit, some act of generosity is accepted, some THING happens, and we have our own moment of throwing off the cloak and being getting it, of getting what we needed, if only for the next couple of hours or days, because that was what needed to get through and get beyond what we were going through. Some of us in this life, including me at times, we stop showing up, and we stop crying out for mercy, literally, figuratively, emotionally, we stop showing up for the ones we love, and we find ourselves struggling to love them, and we just stop showing up, no matter how many times God passes us by, despite all the hints that divinity was found in the rumble of that crowd that just passed us by, the crowd that the one with our Savior right in the middle of it. And we don’t cry out for mercy, and we ignored the rustle of the God passing by us, or we stop crying out simply because we’ve made our way to another place, a place where we were sure God would not find us, unwilling to be in relationship with a God who allowed us to be blind for too long. The life of faith requires persistence, like all of life does – you and I don’t get where we are without showing up to class, to a marriage or relationship, to a friendship, to a job, to a child, day after day, moment after moment. I know we will live in a culture that demands everything right now, including spirituality, including even salvation – but the Bible over and over again seems to imply that salvation, which implies wholeness in the original Greek, salvation, wholeness takes a long time, and is a long journey, this slow turning to God, and the ability to see comes to those who cry out constantly for God to give them mercy, who show up at the side of the road, listening always for the rumble of the God passing them by. I think the persistence of Epiphany, with its Welcome Meal served every Wednesday for many, many years, with its many thousands of meals served, its many volunteers come and gone, and come again, as well as the many guests who have come and gone, and come again. And yet, hunger remains, and so does homelessness and yet we show up on Wednesday night and we serve a meal to some soul, and we do it again the next week, week after week, year after year – we are persistent. The ancient Greek poet Ovid said that “dripping water always eventually hollows out stone, not through force, but through persistence.” So, to follow after the way of Jesus, to go with him on the way, as the Gospel of Mark says, we must do as Bartimaeus did: we must show up, here, and there, and we must listen for the rustle of God passing by us in this world, and we must cry out until we are heard by the God who just passed us by, until she stops, and asks for us to come closer, and who says to us, that our faith, our persistent faith, our persistent trust, has helped to heal us, and helped to heal this world, a world so in need of people who will show up, and do the right and kind and just thing. “Jesus, Son of David, show me mercy!” Bartimaeus cries out until he is heard by the Master amidst the rumble and din of the crowd passing him by on those dusty streets of Jericho.
Humanist sharing his perspective on interfaith cooperation.
Some Pharisees came and, trying to test him, they asked, “Does the Law allow a man to divorce his wife?” Jesus answered, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a divorce certificate and to divorce his wife.” Jesus said to them, “He wrote this commandment for you because of your unyielding hearts. At the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. Because of this, a man should leave his father and mother and be joined together with his wife, and the two will be one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore, humans must not pull apart what God has put together.” Inside the house, the disciples asked him again about this. He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if a wife divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” During my senior year of high school, in the late 1980’s, I moved from rural East Texas to rural West Alabama along with my sister to live with my aunt and uncle during of particularly tumultuous time in my parent’s lives. At the time I was a Southern Baptist, as were my aunt and uncle, and so I went with them to Gilbertown Baptist Church to worship and I got involved with their youth group, which was about 15-25 kids. Youth group meetings always happened on Sunday night, and was usually led by a young, vibrant couple who were probably in their early thirties, at the oldest. I liked them, and I think all the youth liked them – they were easygoing, positive, and a good looking couple, the very picture of a young, promising Southern Baptist goodness. But one Sunday evening, after whatever activity or lesson we had for that time, the couple as well as one of the deacons of the church called us together into a circle to announce that this couple wouldn’t be leading the youth group anymore. There were looks of shock on the faces of the youth, and the couple had tears in their eyes, as the news was announced. No reason was given for their departure, though we hugged on them, and thanked them – but I do have to say that we never saw them again, or at least not during the time I was there – poof, they kind of disappeared from our lives, and seemingly from the life of the church. Eventually, the rumor mill explained why they had been “disappeared” from the youth group and perhaps the church – they were getting a divorce, and seemingly the thought was if they had “failed” at their marriage, they couldn’t possibly be in any kind of leadership in the church, and especially with the youth. After all, Jesus was really clear about divorce - it was right there in the Bible, right there – Jesus said that divorce was impermissible, and so the church, if it wanted to uphold godly standards, could not allow them to lead us youth because they did what Jesus told them not to do. I remember being surprised by it, and then saddened, and maybe, even then feeling as if their expulsion felt graceless, a particular cruelty exacted upon them, and perhaps a signal to us youth about what was to be expected if we too ended up having to make the decision to end a marriage. We too would likely be disappeared out of the church for good. Certainly, things have changed some since those days, even among the Southern Baptists – divorce is actually more common among evangelicals than it is among those have no definitive religious beliefs – and so even they have had to adapt to this new reality. You sometimes see “divorce care” support groups in those same churches that would have disappeared a divorcing couple a generation ago and that change is a good thing. But Jesus’ words are still there, his almost fierce condemnation of divorce, and they are troublesome to many of us, because, frankly, there are times when it’s obvious that the best thing for a couple and their children would be a divorce. It’s not just us modern types that have struggled with Jesus words – even Paul struggles with them, because he both endorses Jesus’ words about divorce, but thinks it’s OK for a believer and non-believer to end their marriage, if the non-believer wishes to do so, all for the sake of peace between them. So, there are circumstances when even the earliest followers of Jesus left a little wiggle room around Jesus’ blanket condemnation of divorce. And interestingly, unlike the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Matthew has Jesus giving at least one reason why a divorce might be allowable – sex outside the marriage – which is something Jesus doesn’t say our Gospel reading today from Mark. Nonetheless, whatever the outs given in certain other texts, it’s clear that Jesus had a negative view of divorce, and, unlike his otherwise liberal interpretations of Jewish law, he actually is more stringent and conservative than even the people asking this question, the Pharisees. And that questioning of Jesus here needs to be noted, this attempt to get Jesus to say something controversial or heretical or even silly, something that would discredit him and tamp down on his popularity with the crowds. The Pharisees are often portrayed as his theological enemies, and so on this day they come to Jesus with a long-standing disagreement between different schools of Judaism around the issue of divorce. One side argued that a man – yes, only a man – could divorce his wife, issue her a certificate of divorce and he could do so for any reason, even for something so trivial as burning some food. The other view was the only reason a man could divorce his wife was for un-chastity, again, the sexual unfaithfulness of the wife. Now, note that there was no equivalent permission for a wife to divorce her husband for his un-chastity – in fact, in general, Jewish Law only allowed the husband to begin divorce proceeding, unlike the larger Roman world they lived in, which allowed both women and men to initiate a divorce. This is the background of this question, and Jesus lands squarely beyond even what Jesus Law allowed – unlike the Jewish Law, which allows for divorce, he declares divorce to not be an option for his followers. Jesus grants that the Jewish Law does indeed technically allow for divorce, but God allowed it be so because of our unyielding hearts, because we were stubborn, at least in Mark’s telling of this moment. And then Jesus goes into why he thinks divorce is impermissible, citing two verses from the book of Genesis about the union that happens when a couple marries, they become one flesh, and humans should not tear apart what God has put together. You sometimes hear the familiar wedding words in this texts, filled with beautiful imagery of becoming one with your mate – and then a word of warning in there, telling us that one should not tear apart what God has put together. It has to be asked why Jesus went in this direction, with such a strict prohibition of divorce that far exceeds anything found in Jewish Law or interpretations of that Law, or at least he does in Mark’s telling of this moment? I don’t want to dismiss the theological reason he gives in this text, of this union between a married couple having importance, but it does seem almost over the top, and shows a kind of rough absolutism that Jesus rarely practiced. Now, to be frank, there has always been a rich symbolism of the Jewish people being God’s bride, and the church being the bride of Christ, so you can see why you wouldn’t want a central metaphor of this union between God and God’s people to be challenged by divorce – could God ever divorce God’s people? Still, though, it’s interesting that Jesus often said that the Sabbath, the holy Day of Rest, was made for humans and not humans made for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27), which hints that practical reasons may sometimes compel one to violate the letter of the law for the sake of compassion, justice or simple common sense – don’t let your animals lay stuck in a ditch on the Sabbath because technically you’re not supposed to be working on that day. And surely he knew of marriages that were toxic, for everyone involved, marriages that needed to end because of abuse, incompatibility, whatever – for goodness sake, probably most of the marriages he saw were arranged ones, where the couple really had no real choice of a mate. Some of those marriages were probably very happy ones, but others, well, surely, there were ones that were a simple misery for everyone involved, including the children. Does Jesus’ ideal of two becoming one ring true in those cases, when it becomes clear much later in a marriage that a couple shouldn’t have been put together by their families or by their own choice? In fact, often parents and match makers didn’t put people together for love, but for social and economic reasons – and sometimes love flowered in the marriage despite that and sometimes it didn’t. God didn’t necessarily put them together – their status in the community and their dowries made them seemingly compatible for each other, at least initially. Obviously, we’ve moved on from arranged marriages in the West, and though one can argue perhaps that when we marry for romantic reasons, we are not always ready for the hard work that comes after the romantic feelings lessen, I don’t think anyone wants to go back to the model of arranged marriages that Jesus and his peers experienced, or at least not giving persons the right to opt out of an arranged marriage, if they so wish. But maybe, maybe that very model of couple hood and arranged marriage are the reason why Jesus seems to slam the door on divorce so forcefully. In that world, where women were especially vulnerable to the whims of men who were given the sole right to initiate a divorce, Jesus wanted to make sure that women were protected. You see, if a woman in the religious world he lived is was divorced, they were highly, highly vulnerable economically. Women were loved, surely, by their families, but they were also seen as property, transferred from one man to another, to the household of a father to the household of a husband. You can see vestiges of that idea in some of our marriage ceremonies, where a father walks down his daughter to greet her soon-to-be husband, and the preachers asks – “who gives this woman to this man?” And the father replies, “I do,” or sometimes, “her mother and I do.” In Jesus’ world, a father of a daughter pays a dowry to the man who will marry her or to the family of that man, and not the other way around. The would-be husband has to be paid for taking on this new economic burden into his household, so to speak. So, when a man divorces a woman during that time, there is no alimony for her or her kids, no house for them to stay in, and often divorced women were quite literally kicked to the curb to fend for themselves economically. They could not go back to their father’s household, since she would have disgraced the family by such a scandal, the scandal of her divorce. Often women turned to begging and prostitution in desperation. Again, another clue of how vulnerable women were when not in a man’s household is how often both in the New and Old Testaments God directs Her people to take care of the widows and orphans, ones without the patriarchal protections found within a male-led household. I have no doubt that Jesus really did feel that there was a spiritual union of sorts within a married couple, and certainly there is, for the ones who are happily married, but I think his primary reason for forbidding divorce was to protect women, and to not allow men, or at least his own followers from simply dumping their wives and sending them into extreme poverty. I’m not going to argue that I am 100% sure of it, but I can’t imagine that Jesus didn’t see couples that shouldn’t be married to each other, because of abuse, because of simple dislike of each other, because of incompatibility in so many ways. I do know that Jesus was always concerned about the poor, the vulnerable, the outsiders, and divorced women in his times were all those things. Jesus saw the unfairness of it, and interestingly, he assumes the Roman position on who can initiate a divorce in his words about adultery and divorce only a few verses after the ones we just heard this morning – in Jewish Law, only a man can initiate a divorce, while Jesus opts for the more egalitarian Roman assumption that women can also initiated divorce. Again, it’s a clue about how he understood women in far more egalitarian terms than most in his religious milieu. Of course, Christians have divorced for thousands of years, when it was legally allowed, despite Jesus’ seemingly clear prohibition of it. The church assumed that the answer Jesus gave to the Pharisees and his disciples two thousand years ago, which was likely an attempt to protect women from social and economic disaster, was to be for all time, no exceptions. When divorce happened in the secular courts over those two thousand years, it still made women vulnerable, or at least more vulnerable than the man. My grandmother got divorced in her twenties from an abusive husband, and received no court ordered alimony from him, and so she worked three different jobs, almost seven days a week. Certainly things have gotten much better when it comes to spousal support, so Jesus words meant to protect women are not so pressing, so absolute anymore. And yet, the church sometimes treats the divorced so poorly, even now – I have clergy friends who lost their careers when they got divorced, and certainly you see how my former congregation in Alabama treated that young couple – it practically shunned them out of the church. Even now, some Christian traditions, including Catholic and some Protestants exclude divorcees from leadership, and exclude them most heartlessly from the Communion Table. Look, sometimes things end, and sometimes that ending is for the best, and sometimes it’s not, of course, but they do end, and I’ve counseled a few people in my time to end a marriage because it was really clear that the toxicity was so deep in the marrow of a marriage there would likely never be a cure, no matter how much one or both of the couple tried to find their way back to each other. Marriage is hard work, and it needs to be taken seriously and worked hard on – and hopefully that hard work is enough, but sometimes it just isn’t and couples find themselves more happy and whole when they decide to part ways. That is a reality – and I don’t think people should be shunned because a marriage ended, either in church or society. And that certainly goes for this Table, the Communion Table, this reminder of God’s goodness, God’s grace and God’s relentless mercy, a mercy that included Judas, when he too took from the bread and wine offered to him by the Christ, right before he headed deep into the night to sell out his Master for 30 coins. Worldwide Communion Sunday is a reminder to us that all of us are welcomed at this Table, and that we have a connection to Christians across the world, who are as imperfect, broken, sinful, strong, wise, and beautiful as we are. Even if one believed that divorce remains a sin in God’s eyes, the idea of excluding a sister or brother from this table because of that means all of us are not worthy to come to the Table – who is without sin that comes to this Table? I love Dorothy McRae-McMahon’s words from our Modern Lesson today, the pain she reflects in her words, and letting go of all those expectations she and other people had around her marriage, ones she and her ex-husband could simply not live up to. We know there are costs that come with divorce, emotional and spiritual, to the whole family, and I believe Christ knows that as well. But there are for some a chance to heal and become whole that comes with a parting of ways, and that must be noted and blessed as well. I believe that Christ sees what we see, and his words around divorce were meant for a time when women always paid the heaviest costs when it came to the whims of men, as they still do today, in many ways – and Jesus said what he said about divorce to mitigate that harm. And to exclude each other from this table of a divorce, well, I do not want to answer to Christ on Judgment Day for doing something like that, and so today, in a few minutes we’ll do what we think Christ is calling us to do at this church, which is to welcome all to the Table, wherever we are on life’s journey, and to be reminded that we worship a God who loves us all, includes us all, and welcomes us all.
If any of you are suffering, they should pray. If any of you are happy, they should sing. If any of you are sick, they should call for the elders of the church, and the elders should pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. Prayer that comes from faith will heal the sick, for the Lord will restore them to health. And if they have sinned, they will be forgiven. For this reason, confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous person is powerful in what it can achieve. Elijah was a person just like us. When he earnestly prayed that it wouldn’t rain, no rain fell for three and a half years. He prayed again, God sent rain, and the earth produced its fruit. William Hoffman, who was a writer and a professor at Hampton-Sydney College, wrote a short story called The Question of Rain, one I’ve shared a couple of times in the past, because, well, it really is one of my favorite short stories. Hoffman tells of a town and a minister caught in a theological tussle about prayer and its meaning, and especially the appropriateness of its use in asking God for those things we need/want/desire. In this short story, we have a well-meaning minister who is beset by his congregation to hold a worship service specifically calling for rain for the drought stricken farming land of his congregants. But Wayland, the minister, is reluctant, in good Calvinistic fashion, he’s simply reluctant to specifically ask God for rain, since rain may not be in God’s will for the people of that county, at least not at the moment – you see, classic Calvinists, followers of the Protestant reformer John Calvin, hold fast to the idea that God is sovereign, that God will do what God will do, and that humans have little real sway over this divine King – the spiritual world is not a democracy, but a kingdom with God enthroned as the all-knowing, all powerful ruler of the universe. So, when Wayland was first asked by some members of his congregation about this possible prayer service, the minister promises to pray personally for rain but declines the suggestion to lead a prayer service for rain. In response to a delegation from the church, he says, “Bess, to repeat my position, let me state that I’m strong in favor of prayer, but I feel what people really want is a medicine man and I never rattle bones, do a rain dance, or wear chicken feathers.” And to another person, Wayland says, in a classic Calvinist vein, “Caroline, we can’t twist God’s arm, and all we have has is given us by His grace, and we are undeserving of even that.” Nevertheless, the congregation persists, and again and again he is asked by yet more members for a prayer service, and even people outside the church begin to ask him about a possible prayer service to ask God for rain. Eventually these request becomes a crisis of faith of sorts for Wayland, one that is echoed by an older member of his church, though he gently challenges Wayland by using the collective we when he asks Pastor Wayland, “are we afraid to put our faith to the test? “And if we fail?” Pastor Wayland replies. “Then it’s us, not God, whose failed,” the member says in turn. Now, I must say that this wiser, older member may have been wrong when he says such a thing, because I don’t know if it’s possible to “fail” at prayer – and blaming ourselves when God says “no” to us, to our good prayers, is not fair to human beings, and assumes that God will only answer our prayers if certain prayers are said in a certain way. A parent praying for the health of a child does not fail in prayer because the child never gets better. Still, there are haunting themes in this story, questions of whether or not Pastor Wayland believes that God actually does or does no intervene in the world – and his fear that if no rain comes, what will that do to the faith of his church members, and, perhaps to his own faith as well. And underneath that is a question about what prayer is for – what does it do, to God, to us, to the nature of the lived world? So, in the text from the letter of James, we have the writer inviting us to do the very thing Pastor Wayland is reluctant to do, to ask God to do a specific thing, in hope and expectation that God will do what we ask, and in this case, a prayer for healing for the sick. Again, note the specificity of the text from James – if someone in particular is sick, they are told to call upon the elders of the church, the leaders of the congregation, and to have them pray over this person and anoint them with oil. Anointing is all over the Bible, from its use in cosmetics and its use in hygiene, to its use in a ritual where the oil is placed on the forehead, marking that person as one destined for change, in terms of status or identity, especially as seen when it comes to anointing a king to service to Israel. Here James says to anoint the sick, something that Jesus asked his disciples to do when he sent them out to share his message and be instruments of diving healing (Mark 16:17-18). And again, the specificity is all over the text – if anyone is suffering, if you and I are suffering, the elders of the congregation should gather and pray for us, for me, for you, in particular – not just a general prayer, but a prayer for Kevin in particular. And James is very confident that if we pray for those who suffer, for those who are in need of healing, God will hear that prayer and God will heal the sick and alleviate her suffering. James has great trust that what is prayed for will be given. He even uses a story of Elijah and rain, rain, where Elijah prays that God will shut the heavens up so that the people will be forced to repent and acknowledge the power of God’s messenger, the one calling the people to faithfulness and justice. Elijah prayed for no rain, and no rain came, and when the time was up, when the people were ready to repent, he prayed again, and the rain fell. But, of course, in all honesty, texts like these, ones of that are so often put forth to show the efficacy of prayer, that if only we will pray the sick will recover, and the sufferer will cease to suffer, they come with some baggage, some complexity, something you feel in Pastor Wayland’s reluctance to pray so specifically for something. There is the reality that each of us can share when we prayed fervently for someone to be healed and it didn’t come to pass, something that seems to challenge James’ certainty about the power of prayer. And then there is the linkage between sin and health that is certainly problematic, at least partially. James is pretty clear here – he links health and confession of sin, assuming that somehow and someway our sin has caused us to become unhealthy, that sin has caused our disease. Now, to be fair, James does say that IF they have sinned they will be forgiven during the act of healing, so the connections between sin and health is not clear, though a few words later he seems to imply that if only we will repent and confess our sin, we will be healed, as if our sin was getting in the way of our healing. That is troublesome because it seems to blame the sick for their own sickness, the disabled for their own disability. Again, maybe is there is a sometimes a connection between sin and sickness, but it is rare – and frankly, there are clear indications that Jesus consistently disconnects sin and sickness because he simply he doesn’t believe they are, in fact, connected at all. In the Gospel of John, in chapter 9 Jesus is asked whether or not the blind man before him has sinned or have his parent’s sinned – you see the bad assumptions Jesus’ own disciples share with the writer of James. Jesus replies that neither the man’s sin or his parent’s sin have anything to do with this man’s blindness. And in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 5, Jesus says that the rain falls on the just and unjust alike, indicating that challenges that happen to people have nothing to do with their goodness or badness. Bad ideas are hard to shake, as you can see from James’ bad assumption in our text, even decades after Jesus was among his disciples, though I understand why we believe bad theology like this. These untruths help us navigate the world, poorly of course, but they help us explain why some get sick and others don’t, why some get well and others don’t. The truth is that the rain, well, it falls on good and evil among us, the kind and cruel in our midst, the believers and the unbelievers beside us, the ones who have no doubts and those who have nothing but doubts. Maybe James didn’t know of Jesus’ words – remember, there were only oral traditions about Jesus when this letter was written, and thus no written Gospel for James to check his assumptions against what Jesus said and taught, including being able to check their bad theology against Jesus’ better theology. So, does prayer for healing make a difference? Does the anointing of the sick do anything for sufferer, the one in need of physical, spiritual and emotional healing? I think the writer of our Modern Lesson is trying to answer that question, the former Archbishop of the Anglican Communion, Rowan Williams. When we pray for others, often called intercessory prayer, we do something so obvious, so plain, that we often forget it – and that is we throw in our lot with the one we prayed for, we cast our lot in with humanity, in our prayer for them, we enter into their world of uncertainty and sickness. It is interesting that James calls for elders, plural, to gather around the sick one, plural – the leaders of a community gather around the one in need of God’s healing, and they, THEY pray for him or her. I’m very skeptical of the idea that somehow God responds more to twenty prayers for healing than one prayer for healing – this is not God won’t do a thing until a certain threshold is met and then finally God will relent because some sort of divine quota was met. But the gathering together, the praying that we do for each other, over the sick, during our times our joys and concerns every Sunday during worship, something about that we do it together, it seems to matter to us, and maybe to God as well. What Rowan Williams seems to be saying here in our Modern Lesson is that when we pray for others we create more and more space for empathy, for care, for concern – we become open to the crucifixions of others and somehow within us an empty space is cleared out where the world is not just not about me and my joy and my suffering, but a space within that can be filled with the Spirit of God that helps us recognizes that when you suffer, I suffer, than when a child is taken away from its parents at the borders, that is my child being taken from me. Somehow, when we throw in our lot with the crucified of the world, the hurting of the world, which includes all of us, at some point in our lives, somehow when we clear space in our lives to pray for others, the Spirit can change the world because we have been cracked open with our concern for this singular soul before us, this one who has asked for our prayers. We become God’s hands and God’s healing of others, when we allow our prayers for others to become embodied in our kindness and our passion for justice – and we do so as a people, as God’s people. And, of course, we have to acknowledge that so often our prayers are actually answered the way we’d like them to be answered, more than we often recognize. It’s the ones that didn’t get answered that we remember so well, and which are so painful, so challenging and sometimes God just says no and sometimes the natural course of time and disease just take their course. Look, miracles are actually pretty rare – there is reason why people were so excited by Jesus’ ability to heal – it wasn’t something very common. Prayers for miracles do get answered sometimes, the anointing of the sick can have an effect, but remember that those prayers for others can change us, personally and as a people. You only have to look at how our story by William Hoffman concludes, because in the end the pastor says yes to their requests for a prayer service and so the community gathers and they pray together, together. And then, and then, well, let’s hear Hoffman end his short story. [Wayland, the pastor,] would not anticipate. Rain wasn’t necessary. He and his congregation had acknowledged God’s fathership, which was the main thing. He turned his back to the window, so he wouldn’t be tempted to judge the quality of the afternoon sunlight edging the drawn shade. Yet he felt a stillness, the absolute hush of the day. Even the locusts were silent. A distant rumble had to be a truck. He stood, went downstairs, and walked out onto the screened porch where [his wife] Mims sat. She wore her lavender church dress in case of visitors, but had pushed off her white pumps so that her heels were free. The expression on her clean face was strange as she gazed upward. He looked at the sky and, tingling, saw the dazzling cloud growing, building rapidly into a thunderhead, the underside purplish, the crown of radiant whiteness seething as it mounted into a cathedral of a cloud. People came from their houses to stare. Then Wayland felt a coolness, a nudge of air, and knew rain must be close. In wonder Mims watched the sky. Wayland’s amazement gave way to rapture as the majestic thunderhead conquered the heavens. He realized his mouth had opened as if to catch the rain on his lips. The pressure of gratitude brought him near to weeping. During the slashing, luminous rain, he put on his shorts to walk in the yard. With his face uplifted, he gave thanks. Children, despite lightning, ran in the streets, and across glossy lawns. Adults too splashed through puddles. The artificial pond in his rock garden overflowed. The telephone rang so often that Mims, now wearing her pink bathing suit, took it off the hook. Friends, I invite you to come forward if you are need of healing, any kind of healing, of any wound, emotional and physical, and receive the anointing from Pastor Megan and me. We will anoint your head with olive oil, but if you open your palm, we will anoint there instead. Come please come forward as you feel lead to.
Proverbs 31:10-17, 25-31 A competent wife, how does one find her? Her value is far above pearls.Her husband entrusts his heart to her, and with her he will have all he needs.She brings him good and not trouble all the days of her life.She seeks out wool and flax; she works joyfully with her hands.She is like a fleet of merchant ships, bringing food from a distance.She gets up while it is still night, providing food for her household, even some for her female servants.She surveys a field and acquires it; from her own resources, she plants a vineyard.She works energetically; her arms are powerful. Strength and honor are her clothing; she is confident about the future.Her mouth is full of wisdom; kindly teaching is on her tongue.She is vigilant over the activities of her household; she doesn’t eat the food of laziness.Her children bless her; her husband praises her: “Many women act competently, but you surpass them all!”Charm is deceptive and beauty fleeting, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.Let her share in the results of her work; let her deeds praise her in the city gates. The one tasked with the preaching from the text of sacred Scripture every Sunday has a particular power, as you can imagine, and a lot of that has to do with her or his selection of what texts from the Bible they choose to preach on. The reality is that everyone, and even preachers, have a personal set of texts from the Bible they value more than other texts, favorite passages, favorite stories, favorite themes they pick out consciously and unconsciously as they decide what word to bring to a particular congregation. That truth struck me this week, as I chose to take on a text that is both beautiful in a way but not without problems, not without its issues, so to speak. Sometimes I like a challenge, one that invites me to engage a text I would normally avoid for fear of offending someone or not being able to contexualize it properly, or simply having to deal with the obvious harm it has caused believers and unbelievers over the centuries. For example, I have never dealt in the pulpit with the texts on genocide in the book of Joshua, which were often used to justify genocide later in history, including the genocide of Native Americans in this country. Yes, we’ve studied those horrible texts in Bible studies I’ve lead – but to speak of such things in detail from the pulpit…I don’t know if I have the courage, or maybe even the stomach to do so. Now, to be clear the ancient lesson we heard today is really not like those Joshua texts I just mentioned but it is not without its own complications. And yet, I just want to say that after reading it after a long time of not doing so – again, we preachers have our favorite texts, after all – I have to admit that I was surprised by its tone, its praise of this “competent wife” and its praise for what this woman does. This text is probably the most familiar passage from Proverbs, a book that has beguiled scholars for a long time. The book itself is composed mostly of one-line wisdom sayings, pieces of good advice about honesty, integrity, and the best way to live one’s life. Interestingly though, the first 9 chapters are different from the rest of the book, and different from this last chapter from Proverbs we just heard a few minutes ago – you see, in those first 9 chapters, there is a call to live a wise life, to embrace what the writer calls Lady Wisdom, or Woman Wisdom, Wisdom being often personified here in the Bible as a Woman, sometimes to the point that Woman Wisdom is believed to be a co-creator of the world as you find in Proverbs 8. Now, the writer does set up a duality for his readers – and it was likely a “he” who wrote this book, as with all the books of the Bible – because there is Woman Wisdom, on the one hand, and the Mysterious Woman, the temptress who leads people astray, inviting them to make bad choices, unwise choices. You can see the virgin or whore dichotomy that has been imposed on women throughout the centuries in these first nine chapters, though it is not the focal point of the text, just the lens with which the male author is trying to make his point about choosing the right path. Of course, there is no similar virgin/whore dynamic for males in the Bible or in our culture, a reminder that the Bible, however much we value and love it, is still a patriarchal text, one written by males with the assumption that its primary readers would be fellow men. Nonetheless, despite the obvious patriarchal lens through which today’s text is written, there are some real surprises in terms of what this ideal wife or woman is praised for. But first, know this: the Hebrew word for “competent” can also be translated as “strong,” and the Hebrew word for “wife” can also be translated as “woman” though I think the translators simply go with the way that those words are usually translated in other parts of the Bible. Still, though, the possibility of that translation, a “strong woman” adds a different tone to the hearing of these words, especially as it relates to what this woman is being praised for. Not only is this woman given accolades for doing those things associated with her expected household duties, she is said to have surveyed a field and acquired it with her resources, her own funds. In a generally patriarchal system, you wouldn’t expect a woman to both make the decision to buy a piece of land AND does so with her own financial resources. Not only does she work joyfully with her own hands with wool and flax, she trades successfully with those goods, bringing in income through the sale of those items. And yes, it should also be clear to us that this woman being praised is clearly a woman of means – she has female servants after all, but she acts kindly to these other women, making sure they have food while they are employed with her – she is about generosity and mercy. She is kind with her tongue, this King Lemuel proclaims, this king of who we have no record of, either of him or his kingdom, and yet her arms, her arms are powerful – it reminds me of those Rosie Riveter posters from World War 2, with Rosie flexing her biceps! Obviously, though, the writer, whomever he may be, still makes the assumptions of his time and place, which we all do, of course – we are all creatures of a time and place. He praises her for excellence within her “appropriate” domain, the household, and though, in another passage I didn’t include in today’s reading, he will praise this strong woman for running her household so well that the husband can join the other men at the city gates to adjudicate the conflicts of his day, the assumption being of course, that she will not or should not join him there in the practice of this civic duty – this is men’s work. Of course, there is Deborah in the book of judges who leads her people well but she is indeed a rare female leader in the Scriptures. The patriarchy dictates the rules and the duties of both men and women, this male dominance decides where and how men and women can function in a society, limiting women, certainly, but also limiting men and what they can be and how they should function in the society. The patriarchy, the assumption that men should dominate all strata of personal and public life, it has cost women so much over thousands of years in terms of dreams, hopes, and talent – so much has been lost to the evil of patriarchy, and women have paid a horrible price for men’s inability to see that these assigned roles for women and men have squashed so much talent, intelligence and leadership. Think of all that we could have accomplished if both men AND women had been able to equally tackle medicine and engineering and architecture and parenting and religion through the centuries. Sadly, our Bible has been a weapon used in patriarchy, either as perpetrator of it, or, perhaps, more realistically, a reflection of the worst of ancient cultures, and of human character, this need to control, dominate, and limit others for personal, economic and social reasons. Not only does this description of a strong woman both surprise us in its historical context and yet also assumes the rightness of the patriarchy, it also puts an impossible burden on women. Even if one wishes to embrace the patriarchal world of the text with its assumptions of what a competent wife looks like, it just seems like an impossible list to actually do – and once again women are burdened with expectations that rarely can be met by anyone. I remember my lovely and wonderful and strong Baptist Aunt Linda, whose husband Jim would praise her using the words of Proverbs 31, our text – and she’d accepted the praise, though knowing Aunt Linda, she did with a raised eyebrow – you’ve got some pretty high and somewhat unrealistic expectations of what any woman, much less any person can possibly be. The haunting thing about this list of almost impossible traits to fulfill is there is no equivalent text in Scripture that names what a competent or strong husband or man looks like, no listing out of what is expected of a man – the list of expectations is largely a one-way street, sadly, falling most heavily on women. Again, though that doesn’t mean that men haven’t paid a price for the assumptions that the ancient Biblical writers wrote into texts that one day would be named as holy – the patriarchy destroys so much possibility in men, as Betty Strong wrote in words from our Modern Lesson, words she crafted for the World Council of Churches. “There is a woman tired of being called ‘an emotional female,’ and a there is a man who is denied the right to be weak and to be gentle, and “there is a woman who is tired of being a sex object and there is a man worried about his potency.” And then there is the unintended, unexpected victims of the patriarchy. Some have argued that the root of homophobia is actually to be found in sexism, since gay men have often been reviled for being like women, for denigrating themselves by acting like a woman in public, or even in the bedroom – the dismissal and sometimes hostility towards woman become transferred onto gay men, who are not fulfilling the gender role that the patriarchy has assigned them from birth. Lesbian women too have felt the effect of the patriarchy – to be non-stereotypically female, to carry traces of the stereotypical male within a female body, as with a male carrying traces of the stereotypical female within the male body, it causes such rage in some men that it sometimes comes out in violence. The horrific death toll that trans women have paid for trying to live their authentic selves is a testimony to the wreckage caused by the patriarchy. Still, the burden almost always most acutely falls upon women’s lives and bodies, as we can see in the recent Supreme Court controversy with Judge Kavanaugh and Professor Blasey Ford. It all reminded me of an incident that happened in the small town in Michigan I once pastored in, where a teenage girl accused one of the more popular boys, a star athlete, of raping her. It really divided the town in two, but it was so damning that the most concern voiced was for the young man who was being accused – what would these charges do to his future, his life, to be accused of this heinous deed by this young woman? There were rumors, of course, of her sexual prowess, which is almost always the typical way of trying to discredit women’s stories in these matters, hinting somehow, even if it was true, that for a woman to embrace and desire sex, getting raped is getting what she deserves. Not surprisingly, there was not much talk of his sexual past – it was the old virgin/whore dynamic coming into play once again. Whether or not you believe Professor Blasey Ford account about what happened so long ago, know that it will almost always be the female accuser of men that will pay the heavier costs – that’s what the patriarchy does, the patriarchy re-victimizes women, prioritizing men’s reputation over the witness and testimony of women who have often experienced sexual trauma at the hands of these very men. So, what are we followers of Jesus, this One, who though steeped in a time and place where equality was far from the norm, followers of this One, who acknowledged his female disciples and seemed to embrace them in such surprising ways for his time – what are we followers of this Jesus to do with this text, the good of it, the bad of it, and the fact that so often our sacred texts seemingly support the patriarchy? We know that women dominated the pews of the early church, as they do now – remember that patriarchal slur hurled at the church by some of its earliest enemies, that Christianity was a women’s religion, centered around a man who challenged the patriarchy and the ancient assumptions of what a man should be and say, challenging it so often through his words, and his simple gentleness, his compassion, his love. And remember this, as I said a few weeks ago – when the church won’t listen to the still-speaking God, the Spirit of God will go outside the church to do a work of justice, and then that same Spirit will reach back inside the church to change the church from the outside in. God’s Spirit will not be thwarted, will not be denied, and though we so often get in the Spirit’s way, God wins, and God will do whatever it takes to get the Church, Christ’s own body, to do the right thing. If the church won’t listen, God’s spirit will speak elsewhere, until the church catches up – thank God for the women’s movement – and I mean it, thank God for the women’s movement. At the recent installation of the Rev. Kim Shelton of the Good News Community Church this past weekend, a speaker mentioned that she was once in a group of men, one of who told her that he didn’t believe in women preachers – and I kept thinking, well, I guess you don’t believe what’s clearly in front of you? I mean, why believe your lying eyes, because here she is, just being a woman preacher, and she’s doing a really good job at it, better than most men I know. What I’m grateful for is this: God is relentless, and though we humans resist, God eventually overcomes that resistance – and justice comes, eventually. I wish the justice was faster and more complete, but I also wish we weren’t so resistance to what God is doing in the world, I wish we humans didn’t resist God’s Spirit so much. I suppose that is the cost of having free will, the ability to say no to God’s yes’s, but this free will also puts such importance on us saying yes to God’s yes, choosing to stand with our sisters, honoring their stories, celebrating their truths, and for us men, resisting the patriarchy, the lies we’ve been fed with our own mother’s milk, to play off a line from an Audre Lorde poem. God’s doing a new thing, through the #Metoo movement, and even in the #churchtoo movement, a church version of the #metoo movement, and thankfully less of us are being resistant to those difficult truths about some men’s behavior. But men, myself included, need to do our work, which means unmasking our assumptions, challenging our sometimes warped instincts and biases, and opening ourselves up to voices that tell of women’s often very different experiences in the world, of struggles we’ve not known or have barely begun to acknowledge. What are we to do as followers of Jesus? We’re not to resist God’s movement in the world, and instead we are to embrace the difficult and yet liberating truth we have been forced to confront in ourselves and within the patriarchy that we all inhabit. I am grateful to women, and to men, and to all of us in-between, for listening to the still-speaking God, who loves us, and who will not let us stay in our sin and who asks us to listen to the still speaking God, and to voices we have denied for too long – voices that likely carry the words of the Still speaking God. Amen.
Jesus and his disciples went into the villages near Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” They told him, “Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, and still others one of the prophets.” He asked them, “And what about you? Who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Christ.” Jesus ordered them not to tell anyone about him. Then Jesus began to teach his disciples: “The Human One must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and the legal experts, and be killed, and then, after three days, rise from the dead. ”He said this plainly. But Peter took hold of Jesus and, scolding him, began to correct him. Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, then sternly corrected Peter: “Get behind me, Satan. You are not thinking God’s thoughts but human thoughts.” I have to confess that this past year has been an unusual one, not only because of the sabbatical, but also because of a wave of deaths of people I’ve known and pastored and worked closely with. It all seem to begin with my friend Michael Swift, the former choir director, who was roughly my age, who passed away from a cancer in Hawaii, after a wonderful career as a nurse. He was fun to be around, a lovely man, and so smart, and the kind of nurse who you simply trusted within seconds of meeting him. And then recently Joyce from my former congregation in Michigan died of cancer, only a month or so ago – again, a kind and gentle woman whose smile could light up a room. I have two German/English language prayer books from her childhood she gave me before I left the church to pastor here in Chicago – they are on a shelf in my office right now. Amazingly, she and her twin sister died within 2 weeks of each other. Douglas and I lit a candle for her at the Protestant Cathedral in Berlin. Karen, another member of my former congregation in Michigan, died a few weeks – again, a backbone of the church, always handing out the bulletins on Sunday, and sending out her homemade cards she made on her computer, for every occasion, including get well cards for a simple cold. And then there is Laverne, the church secretary for many years at First Congregational in Houston, who was charter member of that church, and who could tell stories of growing up in Houston before air conditioning become affordable for the masses – Houston without air conditioning is my idea of hell! And Sylvia, who reinvented herself as a mental health counselor after her marriage fell apart and spent decades providing psychological services in an office tucked away in the tower of the Houston church. Both Sylvia and Laverne also passed away within a few weeks of each other. The passing of every one of those souls was a shock to me and it’s not as if they were all unexpected deaths – but when I got the news about each of them, a flood of memories about them would overwhelm my soul, and then the grief and sadness came, even as I have hope and believe to the core of who I am that they are with their Creator, who is love itself, according to Jesus. Almost all of us in this room have experienced grief at the death of a beloved, human and sometimes not human, and sometimes the force of it can be overwhelming, almost a surprise in its intensity, even if we’ve had a sometimes ambiguous relationship with them. The experts often try to mark out the stages of grief, or they hand us a model for what to expect – but grief is so particular to each person, and ultimately there are no right ways to express grief or even not express it. I watch too much of the television show Dateline, where true-life murders are unraveled, and there is always that detective who states that so-and-so is just not grieving in the right way for the victim, which was their first clue that this person may be guilty of the murder. As someone who has walked beside a lot people in their grief, and have known my own so acutely, I just roll my eyes when officers say stuff like that – there are no ordinary and right ways to grieve – there is just grief, and it comes out in sometimes surprising ways. We can’t judge people’s ways of getting through grief, not really, though certainly there are healthy and unhealthy ways to deal with loss, sorrow and anguish. We can’t know another’s experiences, the complexity of their experience, the ways they’ve been taught and not taught about how to deal with loss. And yet, it’s not healthy when we decide not to sit with our grief, or when we try to run away from our own sorrow, or even the grief of others, the deep suffering within and without. It’s the very challenge that the disciples in our story are surely struggling with in today’s text, in their denials of the reality that Jesus has set before them – that difficult things, heart rending things will greet them in the coming weeks and they will know grief in ways they have never known before. But first, he asks them a question, a pivotal question, in a pivotal place like Caesarea Philippi, and in a pivotal moment in the story that writer of the Gospel of Mark is telling. Jesus asks them who the people say he is, who do they think he is? They reply that some think of Jesus as being the resurrection of dead prophets, ones who have died recently, like John the Baptist, and others who have long since gone, Elijah and the prophets of old. “Fine,” he seems to say, “but who do you say that I am” – and the disciples, well, they say he is the Messiah, God’s promised Savior to the people of Israel. When they say Messiah, they imagine with so many of their fellow countrymen that this Messiah would defeat God’s enemies and bring with him a new golden era of Israel, one not even matched by Kings David and Solomon. “Quiet, then, don’t tell a soul what you believe about me,” he tells them. But then Jesus immediately begins to challenge the ideas they have about what a Messiah should be – he tells them that instead of winning he will lose, that instead of defeating his enemies and the enemies of Israel, they will defeat him – they will kill him, though he will rise, he will rise again only three days later. What’s interesting about this moment is two things: first, you should know that Mark says that this took place in Caesarea Philippi, while Matthew and Luke have the story taking place in another town. Why? Well, scholars think that Mark wants to make some connections to the time Mark and his listeners were living through, years after Jesus’ life and resurrection, but during the Jewish Civil War fought against the Romans some forty years later. At the time this Gospel was likely written, Caesar Philippi had being used by the Romans as Prisoner of War camp, holding the Jewish revolutionaries who had rebelled against Rome – and in Caesarea Philippi they tortured and killed them in a public manner, as a signal to the population that if you do what these men did, this will be your fate as well– the Romans were always about public displays of state cruelty so as to send a message to the conquered populace. With this horrific scene in our mind, the writer of Mark, in words following today’s verses, but not printed in your bulletin, the writer has Jesus telling his disciples that they must deny themselves, take up their cross, and possibly lose their life for the sake of the Gospel. All of this is said in a city whose streets have only recently run crimson with the blood of Jewish martyrs, men who had laid down their lives in an effort to throw off the shackles of Rome. But only moments before this call to follow after Jesus, to take up a cross and follow him, we see Peter literally taking hold of Jesus, grabbing him, so distraught was he about Jesus’ words about dying and rising, that Peter tries to correct him – “don’t be a fool, Jesus, Messiahs don’t die, they live, they win, they defeat the enemies of God.” But Jesus won’t be dismissed, won’t be corrected by someone who doesn’t know what he is talking about – and he literally calls Peter Satan, and says that he is thinking human thoughts rather than divine thoughts – thinking like people who crave revenge and victory rather this new thing he is doing that will defeat the sting of death in the act of resurrection, for all of humankind. What’s interesting here is that Peter, and certainly some of the other disciples, is that they don’t want Jesus to be like them, they don’t want him to be human, to live and die as humans must, and always will – to them, a Messiah who can die is a pretty useless Messiah. Jesus shouldn’t be like us, hostage to the sting and the horror of death, the fear that knocks at the door of even the bravest and most faithful of us. Messiah’s don’t know death – and there shouldn’t be any need for a Messiah to rise after three days because he shouldn’t be dead in the first place! But it’s the beautiful taut tension that runs throughout the Jesus story, this belief that Jesus was as a human as we are, that he felt love and knew joy, felt desire, and knew grief, knew it as deeply as we did. And yet, Jesus was somehow also something altogether different than human – not a different creature, but somehow, mysteriously was divinity itself walking through the streets of Caesarea Philippi, healing the sick, stilling the storms and simply showing us the face of God in ways we had humans had never seen it before. Jesus was not simply God disguised as one of us, but God was actually one of us, one of us humans. But to be human, to do what God has done in Christ means that God now knows not only the joy and love and laughter and family and friendship that comes with being human. It also means God knows pain, knows loneliness, knows despair, and knows human grief, knows that it means to lose a beloved to death, to life on the other side of life. We Christians call this idea of God being both fully human and fully God the doctrine of the incarnation, this crazy idea that God came to humankind thousands of years ago in the form of a peasant from a backwater town, and was immersed in the world as deeply as we are, completely awash in the human experience as we all are here in this room. Since the very beginning we Christians have tried to make sense of the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection – the debate is all over our New Testament and continues even today. One of the ways some Christians have explained what God did in Christ, what God brought to humankind in the Christ, the possibility of wholeness, salvation, is that God entered into the human experience through this Jesus and that has made all the different – it changed God and it changed us. Gregory of Naznanius, one of the great theologians of the 4th century, said this: “that which he has not assumed he has not healed.” “That which God has not assumed, that God has not entered into, God has not healed, maybe cannot heal.” God cannot heal us or the world if God has not entered into the world. Listen to the story of the shaman we heard in our modern lesson, the one that heals through the experience of “feeling with” the patient: “I feel for the sores, the aches and the pains. When I put my hand over the body I can feel every little muscle and every little vein. I can feel the soreness. It hurts me. If they have heart trouble, my heart just beats. Any place they are hurting, I hurt. I become a part of their body. There is something about entering into the human experience that changes the healer and healed, the Creator and the creation, and many Christians, including myself, believe that God’s choice to do such a thing, to enter into the joy and into the hurt of the world, it somehow gave us the possibility of wholeness. The God who created us, the God who walks beside us in the Christ, and the God who is within us through the Spirit, this God knows our pain, our joy, our grief, our love, our hurt, our fear, our strength and now even our death, and somehow this choice by God to do so has changed God, and can change us, if we will only allow it to. Wholeness is possible, perhaps not completely on this side of the veil, but wholeness in particular moments, that wholeness really is possible because of what God has done in Christ. But, like God, we, you and I have a choice about whether or not to enter into the world of others, of the life of the greater world, to listen to what is difficult to hear, to what is difficult to understand, the choice to listen to the stories of others, to their truths, their sorrows, to their joys. I talked last week about the need for us Christians to listen to others, to each other, and to God – to echo Matt Smucker’s summary of my sermon, “my pastor said we should shut up and listen!” Part of the reason why I think that is good advice is that it’s exactly what God did through Jesus – God listened to us, and though certainly God spoke to us through Jesus, God also listened to us, and I think the listening made all the difference. And because God listened to us, we should listen to each other, and in listening to each other, we’re sometimes going to hear God speaking through others. But we humans don’t have to, do we, we don’t have to listen to each other, and to listen to the pain and suffering of the world. Some of us spend a lot of time avoiding having to listen to anything that hurts, that feels what the shaman feels, the hurt of the world and others, and we are like Peter, wishing not to look at the reality, the difficult reality of it that is before him. Some of us only want to surround ourselves with joy, laughter, goodness, and I am tempted by impulse, and sometimes seek out only the light – and there is nothing wrong with that, of seeking to laugh sometimes or even most of the time – and sometimes you just need to watch a bunch YouTube videos showcasing puppies to get through the day! But it’s funny, I think, that even then sorrow can creep into our joy, something I was reminded of this summer during my sabbatical. To get away from the heat in Zurich, Douglas and I went to see Mamma Mia 2 in a nice cool theater, and though the films are nothing but cotton candy, they do have Abba songs, which was the music of my childhood – and usually I just find myself smiling throughout the movie, just smiling with quiet joy. But this particular time, right there, in this joyous, fun movie, I just started crying because memories just flooded into my mind, memories of my deceased mother and I dancing to Abba when I was seven years old in the 1970’s, dancing with the kind of abandon I don’t think I’ve ever replicated as an adult. Joy and sadness, all mixed up, surely, as it with so much of life, so connected to each other and so impossible they are to sometimes disentangle from each other. But moments like the one I experienced in that theater are what we are asked to experience, to do what God has done, to take a chance on this world, to choose what God has chosen, to not always look away. Look, I know there are times when it is impossible to not listen, to not look – the cross is before you and me and there is no going back – it just must be gotten through, just gotten through so we can get to our third day, the day of our resurrection. But so often we won’t listen and we won’t look because we fear that what awaits us in our personal Jerusalems will somehow consume us, or destroy us. Sometimes we do have to look away, just to survive – emotional denial is a real and sometimes needed human coping mechanism. But, in the end, we can’t change what we can’t look at, what we can’t listen to, within us, or within the world – that truth is what God seemed to have discovered in the Christ, and what Gregory of Nazianus was trying to say when he said “that which he has not assumed, he has not healed.” It seems that God decided to change the world from the inside out, in and through the Christ, and I think that’s the only way, changing ourselves and the world from the inside out, is the only way we’re going to be able to do the same. So, we have a God who knows joy, who knows pain, and, for me, a God who knows grief, my grief, my human grief, our human grief. And for me that is a God worth journeying towards Jerusalem with, a God who we can trust to meet us in our crucifixion and who knows that resurrection can and will meet on the other side, on that great and surprising and amazing third day. Amen.
James 2:1.10,14-17 My brothers and sisters, when you show favoritism you deny the faithfulness of ourLord Jesus Christ, who has been resurrected in glory. Imagine two people cominginto your meeting. One has a gold ring and fine clothes, while the other is poor,dressed in filthy rags. Then suppose that you were to take special notice of the onewearing fine clothes, saying, “Here’s an excellent place. Sit here.” But to the poorperson you say, “Stand over there”; or, “Here, sit at my feet.” Wouldn’t you haveshown favoritism among yourselves and become evil-minded judges?My dear brothers and sisters, listen! Hasn’t God chosen those who are poor byworldly standards to be rich in terms of faith? Hasn’t God chosen the poor as heirs ofthe kingdom he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored thepoor. Don’t the wealthy make life difficult for you? Aren’t they the ones who drag youinto court? Aren’t they the ones who insult the good name spoken over you at yourbaptism?You do well when you really fulfill the royal law found in scripture, Love yourneighbor as yourself. But when you show favoritism, you are committing a sin, andby that same law you are exposed as a lawbreaker. Anyone who tries to keep all ofthe Law but fails at one point is guilty of failing to keep all of it...My brothers and sisters, what good is it if people say they have faith but do nothingto show it? Claiming to have faith can’t save anyone, can it? Imagine a brother orsister who is naked and never has enough food to eat. What if one of you said, “Goin peace! Stay warm! Have a nice meal!”? What good is it if you don’t actually givethem what their body needs? In the same way, faith is dead when it doesn’t result infaithful activity. One of the great gifts, and maybe the primary gift this church gave to me this pastsummer in granting me a sabbatical, even more than the books I read and theconversations I had with other pastors in Europe, was the gift of rest, of just beingable to pull back and decompress and think about the last 20 years of my life as aminister – and to consider the next 20 years of my life in this good work. I will neverbe able to thank you enough for that good gift, but I will try. Yet I have to admit thateven in the resting there was some amazing and surprising moments where Godseemed to say, “You, pay attention!” Out of all the cathedrals and places I visited, orwords that I read and the ideas I had sifted through, the most profound experience Ihad, one that I think was God-given, was in a moment where I simply watching thecrowds, mostly of tourists, in the Alexanderplatz, a plaza in what was once on theEast German side of Berlin. It’s not far from the famous TV tower you have surelyseen in those pictures of Berlin that surely crossed your view. There is also thatfamous Cold War era world clock, looking as if it was right out of the 1950’s. I hadstrolled into the plaza for a second time that particular week and was just sittingaround watching the crowds, full of fellow tourists and lots of locals, when I noticed abunch of young people gathered together who didn’t strike me as German andimmediately and perhaps instinctively I suspected it was some sort of well-meaning evangelical Christian proselyting group – I can spot my former spiritual tribe from amile away! Within a few minutes my suspicion was quickly confirmed when the group startinginviting the crowd of tourists and Germans to join them in a fun and simplechoreographed dance to the sound of popular pop song. People seemed to love itand this group did their dance a couple of times and probably 30 other folks joinedthem. And then when they had finished their dances, they did a simple skit aboutfriendship. After this, an older adult leader, perhaps in his mid-twenties, beganspeaking, speaking with the help of a translator, witnessing to his Christian faith. Hetold us why he and they were so happy and that was because they had a friendshipwith God and he began to tell them how they could be happy too, if only they toowould become evangelical Christians. But within minutes the crowd justdisappeared, in almost record time, with some rolling their eyes, and some beingdisgusted by the seeming bait and switch they had just experienced, with thedancing and the attempt to catch their attention. I felt so sorry for the guy, speakingout into the world that wasn’t listening to him at all. And then it struck me, as I was watching this young man flay, that most of thesewould be listeners had heard it all before, in different places and in different spacesand they were simply not interested, they weren’t buying what these sincereChristians were selling, especially after the bait and switch they used to get people’sattention. The message, the good news these well-meaning Christians were trying tosell just didn’t have any buyers – and if anything, it seemed to turn the crowd againstthem – someone hurled a glass bottle in their direction, which thankfully missedthem, even as it shattered before them. Perhaps these Christians thought thecrowd’s indifference and hostility to them was because they were of the world, so tospeak, just like with the early church, but I think it is more complicated than that.Unlike the first century where Christianity was born and where religion, all sorts ofreligions, were part of the air people breathed on a daily basis, people in highlysecularized Berlin thought of religion, especially any kind of organized religion, wassimply a waste of time, something not needed, something that been so deeplydiscredited over and over again by its own followers, recently certainly, but alsohistorically, over and over again. Jesus may have been a cool guy, but his followers– they’re absolute worst, and sadly, that is often very true. Many people think ofmost religions as simply useless, if not outright dangerous to women, lesbian andgay people, the powerless, and is so often used to shut down free thought andpeople’s acceptance of science and facts. So I sat there, both feeling sorry for thesewell-meaning souls and yet, surprisingly, also angered somehow by their inability tosee that this thing they were doing, this dog or dance and pony show, this clunkyattempt at reaching people wasn’t working, and the arrogance they were showing –“we have the truth, and we’re willing to share it with you, and there is nothing wrongwith us or even the church, but there is something wrong with you, if you don’t havewhat we have.” Now, let me leave that moment in the Alexanderplatz for right now, and I want to invite you to enter into another more ancient story, one that we have hints of in this morning’s text, where the focus is not a proclamation, the speaking of and out of theGospel, the good news of Jesus’s love for all. In fact, they, like the young Christianevangelicals I witnessed in Berlin, the believers that James writes to have lots ofwords to express their faith, their experience of this risen Christ, but they werehaving a hard time actually practicing what they preached, embodying the wordsthey were embracing with their tongues. The writer of James takes these Christiansto task for how they were treating people in different ways, that the wealthy weretreated with partiality and the poor were ignored. He points to the supposednobodies of this ancient world, the ones with nothing, literally and culturally, as thepeople God has chosen to inherit the realm of God, echoing Jesus words that themeek, the poor, will inherit the earth and not the rich and powerful they so favor. Andthen the writer reminds them and us that you, that we, can spew out all kinds ofreligious language we want, that we can write a million love songs to God, but if wedon’t love the starving and naked woman before us by putting a coat on hershoulders or a meal in front of her, our words about God are simply meaningless,are dead words. Now, as someone who personally moved out of a conservative evangelical traditionthat emphasized words about Jesus’ love over actions that embodied Jesus’ love, toa progressive tradition that emphasized the practice of faith more than the speakingof faith, I find myself agreeing with James, thinking that we ought to probably do a lotless talking about Jesus and more doing of what Jesus asked us to do – to love Godand to love each other. I often imagine the Protestant American Church, especiallythe primarily white strands of it, as being divided up between the speakers of faith,the white evangelicals, and doers of faith, the more mainstream traditions, as well asthe liberals Christians of which we count ourselves as being part of. One of thingsthe more mainstream strands of white Christianity have had to reckon with was thatour religion was used to justify all sorts of sorts of really bad behavior – colonization,sexism, homophobia, all which get lacquered up with a veneer of Christianity. Andso we ended up backing away from words about the Gospel and diving more deeplyinto trying to practice the Gospel – we involved ourselves in movements like theones around Civil Rights and women’s rights in this country and beyond, becausewe recognized that we Christians had baptized so much social injustice in Jesus’name and we needed to try to undo it by shutting up and doing the right thing. Thewhite evangelical parts of the American church went in the other direction, retreatingeven farther away from involving itself from justice work and burrowing itself intowords about Jesus and theological gate-keeping and keeping certain kinds of peopleout of the church and at the margins of society. You see that tendency in them eventhis week when a group of primarily white evangelicals said that the church shouldNOT involve itself in the work of justice (https://statementonsocialjustice.com/), the“social justice” movement, which is, of course what these same white evangelicalssaid during the Civil Rights movement, the women’s right movement, and often evenduring the Civil War itself. Jesus has nothing to say to the marginalized of the world,has nothing to say those suffering under racial injustice, nothing at all, they would argue and we should let it be, it is of no concern to the church, they would say. Thisis an imperfect generalization, but I think, in general, one part of the white AmericanProtestant church spoke of their faith, while others, like us, sought more to practicethe faith in concrete ways in the world. Now, we liberal, progressive mainline Christians didn’t give up on the sharing of theGood News, we really didn’t – we just assumed that by practicing the Gospel, ofdoing good work, like feeding the poor, fighting for civil rights, being on the side ofthe oppressed, that somehow the world, those of others faiths or no faiths, wouldsee the Gospels in our actions. Mother Teresa once said, “Enough words, let themsee what we do.” And for a long time I believed it, I really did. Now, look, I’m not surewe liberals should have completely given up our words about faith and sadly, we’vepersonally struggled to even speak to each other and the world about our ownpersonal faith, but I have certainly endorsed the sentiment that we ought to practiceGod’s love more than we speak of God’s love. I think we thought that surely thenpeople would be attracted to this faith, that saw people motivated by somethinghigher than them to love people and fight for justice and help those who neededhelp. But you know what? I think I was wrong, I think we were wrong, in our retreatinto just helping others, and fighting for justice – not wrong in doing that work, butwrong in thinking people would be attracted to the church because of it. They didn’tshow up at our doors, but they did show up to evangelical’s doors, at least for awhile – their words attracted more people than our good works, our decisions to beon right side of history. And yet even now, in especially the last 20 years, the whiteevangelicals are struggling, struggling to fill the pews themselves, decliningnumerically after decades of growth, after years of gloating over the decline of themainline and liberal church. Neither words nor works are especially meaningful to ageneration of people who find themselves deeply skeptical about religion. Not onlyare they skeptical but they see much of American Christianity as being hostile toscience, to women, to the LGBTQ community, and they see some Christiansdemanding the right to choose what women can and cannot do with their bodies,and they want to decide what kinds of marriages should and should not berecognized – and most people are just not interested in that kind of faith, a faith thatexcludes and seems to knowingly seek to harm others. Now, I want to invite you back into Alexanderplatz in Berlin, and to my time gazing atthese well-meaning fellow believers, and I want to share what I thought, as thecrowds started to desert the poor young man who was pouring words out into acrowd that wasn’t interested at all in his story or his message. In that moment, Iactually wondered if they had tried something different, if they hadn’t just rolled out abig sign that said “We’re sorry – sorry for Jesus being used to silence and hurtwomen, sorry for the real pain caused by our homophobia, sorry for so often beingon the wrong side of history. We understand your anger, skepticism and disgust.Speak to us, and we’ll listen, just listen, because you have something to teach us.”I’ve often said and have always believed that when the church was unwilling to hearwhat God was trying to say to us, the Spirit will go out into the world and speakthrough others, those who won’t believe or who can’t believe or who believe something altogether different. If we the church won’t listen to the spirit of God, thespirit will go to a place and people who will listen and often they will not and cannotclaim the Christ. I don’t think if we progressive Christians decided to amp up ourwords more, if added a lot more words to our works, that it would do much goodanymore because the language about faith has begun to ring hollow to the world,and frankly has been co-opted by our fellow believers to mean stuff we don’t mean itto say. Even our fellow white evangelical believers are struggling with anyone takingtheir words about God seriously anymore, especially in an era when they havedecided to tie themselves so closely to political power, especially in the last fewyears. And though I don’t think the rest of us Christians, we who have chosendeeds more often than words, should give up on doing justice and feeding the poor,and trying to make a more just and kind culture, I do think we need to dispense withthe idea that our good works, our deeds, will actually end attracting many people toour church and our faith – after all, doing good in the world is the very least weChristians can do, according to James, practicing the faith in acts of kindness andjustice for the marginalized and oppressed. So, if neither words nor deeds impress anyone in our perhaps rightfully skepticalculture, what shall we do? James tell us to back up our words with deeds, but what ifeven our deeds are not enough to attract people to this good news of God’s love?Perhaps the only thing we Christians haven’t tried is something we have rarely donein two thousand years – and that is to listen, listen for God, listen to voices of others,to their stories, to their experiences, both of how God has and has not met them inthe world, to their pain and their deep disappointment in us, the church, for not livingup to Jesus’ words about love and justice. Look, I’m not saying that just listening willsolve the problem of why so many don’t think of the church as a place to grow intheir spiritually – but we’ve worn out words and our works and our deeds just notenough to make the case that a community of Christian faith can be a place whereone can meet God, or the Holy, or the Divine. Maybe it’s just time to humbleourselves, and to shut up and just listen, listen to what people are saying, andhonoring it, and not arguing with others, but seeing if somehow God might bespeaking through them to us. “Enough words, let them see what we do,” is certainlytrue, but I wonder if this is even truer: “Enough words let us listen.” In a month or so,we’ll be welcoming Chris Stedman, an atheist into Epiphany to speak about howatheists and Christians can make common causes on some things – we’re going tolisten to him, really listen to him, and see what God might be saying through him.Overall, I don’t know what the spiritual practice of listening might actually mean forthe church universal, or what it even means at Epiphany, at least right now – I don’teven know if it has ever really been practiced much in Christendom. Yet, I have thissense that we ought to perhaps just to be quiet and listen, to listen to how God issaying something new to me, to us, to the church universal, through other people,people who are also God’s children. What if we became a listening church, and whatif we became a listening people – not just here, but in every part of our life – what ifwe just chose to listen to people – and refrain from saying much in reply, resistingour desire to argue people into truth or diagnosis others? Words and deeds are notworking anymore – we’ve got to try something else in this new world we’re living in, as a congregation and as human beings who follow after the way of Jesus. And so, Iinvite us to do more listening than speaking right now, listening to God through thewords and lives of others and listening to the Scriptures, just listening – just shuttingup, sitting down, and listening for the still speaking God who is still speaking into theworld through others and through the Bible. There is a line from a well-known oldAfrican American spiritual that goes “God’s trying to tell you something” – but to hearGod we’ve got to be ready to listen to God, and to expect that the divine voice willcome from the most unexpected places, the most surprisingly places. So, shall welisten? Shall we be quiet? Shall we see what God has yet to say to us, to our souls,and to the church? Amen.
By: Bob Feeny Modern Lesson: Fear and Trembling By Kierkegaard Acient Lesson: Gensis 22:1-14
By: Bob Feeny Modern Lesson: Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer THE ANCIENT LESSON Matthew 10:16-23
By: Pastor Bob Feeny Modern Lesson: Lowering Your Sandards For Food Stamps Acient Lesson: John 6:1-14
Moddern lesson: “Footprints in the Sand”Acient Lession: Psalm 23
THE MODERN LESSON“Sabbaths 1999, VII” by Wendell Berry THE ANCIENT LESSONMark 4:26-34
Sure On This Shining Night by Morten Lauridsen Salvation Belongeth To Our God Paul by Tchesnokov Thy Word by Michael W. Smith & Amy Grant The Lone Wild Bird Southern Harmony, arr. Joe Burt Ride On, King Jesus by L.L. Fleming
In the year of King Uzziah’s death, I saw the Lord sitting on a high and exalted throne, the edges of his robe filling the temple. Winged creatures were stationed around him. Each had six wings: with two they veiled their faces, with two their feet, and with two they flew about. They shouted to each other, saying: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of heavenly forces! All the earth is filled with God’s glory!” The doorframe shook at the sound of their shouting, and the house was filled with smoke. I said, “Mourn for me; I’m ruined! I’m a man with unclean lips, and I live among a people with unclean lips. Yet I’ve seen the king, the Lord of heavenly forces!” Then one of the winged creatures flew to me, holding a glowing coal that he had taken from the altar with tongs. He touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips. Your guilt has departed, and your sin is removed.” Then I heard the Lord’s voice saying, “Whom should I send, and who will go for us?” I said, “I’m here; send me.” On Memorial Day weekends I will sometimes to go to the computer, and do something macabre, or at least macabre to some, though I think of it as my attempt to remember the ravages of war, to remember that so many young men and women in the armed forces of every country were cut off and cut down in the very prime of their lives, times when they should have had no more worries than who they were going to the dance with on Saturday night. We just forget that most of these young men were not career soldiers, men in their late twenties or thirties but boys ages 18, 19, 20. I look at their faces, handsome and dressed in their dress blues, or even sprawled dead in some foreign country they had only just recently learned the name of, and you can see the summer in their faces, the summer in their bodies, as the writer Andrew Holleran says of the young, life still in its potential, youth at its most glorious. And yet it is a summer, a summer that becomes suddenly stilled, a horrifying moment, when they were just gone, gone from their mothers and father’s arms forever. And I don’t just do this macabre search with only the American men we Americans have lost to war, but I search out the faces of Korean, German, Vietnamese faces, so that I can remember the other mothers and fathers who never saw their children again. Whatever lofty principles we fought for, that we were willing do die for, many of them worth dying for, perhaps, the other side of those principles is all these lives cut short, all those summers cut short, and it’s simply a damned shame and damned waste of life, no matter how good the principle, no matter how just the cause – and damned, not of God, is the right word in this case. The faces of people I will never know remind of that truth, that there is no real glory in war – but just pain and grief and love cut down too early and too cruelly. But, in truth, human faces have always fascinated me, to the point that I even find myself preferring art with human faces – paintings of pastoral settings with no human faces, or beautiful photographs such as the ones done by Ansel Adams simply do not interest me, or at least don’t interest me enough that I would put them up on my walls at home. I was waiting in the hallways of the hospital this week, and they had some beautiful reproductions of nature paintings – but it was the old Norman Rockwell paintings that caught my attention, and his wonderful ability to capture the folly and beauty of human life, and human faces. To quote a cliché, they say that faces are a mirror to the soul, though others have said they it was only the eyes, but nonetheless that cliche points us to the fact we glean so much of what people are going through in their lives, their joys or pains, their crucifixions or resurrections, all of particular selves just shows up in their faces, even if we don’t express these hurts explicitly. A pain, a hurt, shut away behind a stoic face eventually shows up in the face nonetheless – the masks we wear to hide eventually subsume the mask, and it ends up showing up, we eventually reveal our joy, our pain, our despair, our hope, despite our best efforts not to do so. Faces are a revelation, their beauty, their ugliness, their youth, their wrinkles, all of it, and they divulge us to others, and our reactions to other faces reveals who we are, showing us our prejudices, our desires, our hopes, our compassion, our cruelty – but, at their best, of course, they also reveal the marks of their Maker, the very face of the living God. And so today we have a moment where the Divine Face is shown to brother Isaiah centuries ago, though it must be noted that Isaiah, or the writer of this portion of Isaiah, speaks in the first person and yet he never tells us what the face of God actually looks like. What’s odd is that he gives us a description of everything else going around God in this throne room setting – but never, ever does he say that God looks like this or that, exploding, in a way, the patriarchal and racist image of God as a white bearded male figure we’ve been fed by in our culture. In the Bible, we are often told that no one has seen the face of God, including even Moses, who only saw God’s backside, because the glory of God’s face was believed to be too much, too much for humans to handle, and would likely kill those saw it. And yet, here is Isaiah, seeing the face of the Divine, and living to tell the tale, though with no details – mystery is mystery and remains so, even in this moment of revelation. Really, this whole text is a call story, of Isaiah’s call to speak God’s words after a time of political upheaval in Israel, but I don’t want to focus so much on that part of the story as I do the images found in this divine throne room itself. The whole thing is startling, in many ways, and when you look deeper into the Hebrew, it even gets weirder because, in describing the creatures found there, the word for “feet” is usually euphemism for male genitalia in the Bible, and the word “hem” here is sometimes used in other parts of the Bible as euphemism for “uncovered genitalia.” See, I told you it got a bit weird – but that is probably the patriarchy showing up, an expression of the writer’s early belief that males rule, thus God must be male or male like, though again, Isaiah doesn’t describe a male face. But what’s not surprising really is that when we encounter God face to face, everything is truly uncovered, including ourselves, and that is what Isaiah is experiencing in this text. To be in the presence of the fully revealed God caused a revelation in Isaiah himself – and that revelation, that uncovering, so to speak, was that, having seen God’s face, he found himself so unworthy of being God’s voice to the people. This encounter with God’s face unmasks Isaiah, strips him naked and he seems himself fully and he does not like what he sees – “he is a man with unclean lips, he is ruined,” he cries out, simply for having seen the unseen God, a showing and a seeing that has unmasked Isaiah’s image of himself. Ever graceful, God purifies his lips with that symbolic red hot coal, cleaning his lips, sterilizing them, really, so that he can indeed be God’s voice to Israel. The face of God reveals nothing and everything to Isaiah, to us, and perhaps the same can be said of our faces with each other, though I agree with Emmanuel Levinas, the Jewish philosopher and theologian, who has said that the human face is the borrowed presence of God – and that the human face is where traces of divinity, of God, are ultimately to be found. You’ve heard me speak of Levinas in past sermons, he who was trained as a philosopher, but when World War II began, he joined the French army, eventually being captured at the beginning of the war. Though he was a Jew, he wasn’t sent to the concentration camps, but was instead was treated as a prisoner of war. Still he saw, he saw the brutality of the Nazi treatment of his fellow Jews in another camp, a concentration camp that was nearby his own POW camp. After the war, he sought some way to find a universal ethic – and he found it in the human face. Levinas argued that it wasn’t the sameness of human faces that should drive our ethics, that is, we shouldn’t do the right thing by others because we are all the same, that our commonality shouldn’t be the foundation of ethics, that human sameness shouldn’t be what compels us to be ethical and humane with each other. Instead, Levinas argues that it is the differences in those faces that should invite us to do the right thing – and that the foundation of ethics is resisting the temptation to kill, destroy, eliminate those who are not the same as us - we ought to resist that temptation to kill what is different from us, to resist giving priority to only our experience, only our understandings, and only the “faces” that look like our face, so to speak. Each human face is the borrowed presence of God, and thus, indeed, “Thou shall not kill the other, kill that which is not me, those who are not us, because to do so is to wreck violence on the borrowed face of God. Resist the temptation to erase that which is not me, not us, because in trying to eliminate those who are not me, the other, like the Nazis tried to do with the Jews of Europe, we are actually trying to erase the presence of God in this world, found in the human face, the God who passes by us in that human face, the borrowed presence of God found in every human face. God is not found in the sameness of things, of people, but God is found in their differences – divinity is found in diversity, not uniformity. The root of bigotry, prejudice, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, sexism, war even, is a desire for sameness, a desire to dictate uniformity in the world, to make all things, all people the same, and to erase all differences. We must resist that demonic pull to erase difference because the many different kinds of human faces, in all their diversity, are the borrowed presence of a God who seems to be deeply interested and frankly, invested in variety and not similarity – one need only look at the diverse world God created to see that truth on full display. And the witness of Jewish and Christian Scriptures is to the continual unfolding, revealing of God, in new and different ways, from a veiled face, to an unveiled face, to a covenant reserved for the few, to a covenant given to all of humankind, from one to many, from Moses to Isaiah to Jesus, from uniformity to diversity. God seems to love different faces, different ways of being, different ways of loving, and if so, perhaps we should love that diversity as well. And that brings us to the diversity of faces we find in that troublesome, beguiling, doctrine we Christians call the Trinity. As I’ve stated in the past, I believe what the Trinity says, that God manifests, God reveals God’s own self in the Father, the Mother, the Creator, and God reveals God’s own self in the Christ, the man from Nazareth, and that God reveals God’s own self in the Spirit, the God within us, the Divinity we bear within us. But I personally think it is a doctrine of the church, not of the Christians scriptures, though I don’t think it ultimately conflicts with those same Scriptures. Even our text today, which is used every three years for Trinity Sunday, is an effort by some to argue for the Trinity’s Scriptural basis, but, frankly, I’m not buying what they are selling. Some point to the Holy, Holy, Holy in the text, a refrain often called the Sanctus, for proof of the Trinity’s presence even in the staunchly monotheistic Old Testament, but, again, that seems to stretch the text a bit. And others will point to the plural found in the words “Whom should I send, and who will go for us?” but that is more likely God using the plural in the context of the heavenly court, the kingly throne room scenes like this one, the king speaking for the people, so to speak. Feel free to disagree with me about its Scriptural bases, but that does not mean I don’t believe the Trinity as a doctrine points to something profoundly true. In fact, I think the early Christians who came up with this way of speaking of God were simply trying to explain the ways that God actually shows up in our lives, the many diverse faces that God wears when She encounters us in the real world. The Trinity as an idea, as a doctrine, is simply trying to name what we know is true – God shows up in such surprising moments and in such surprising ways, and in such surprising faces. And it’s interesting that Isaiah’s experience of the Divine in this scene, this experience of seeing God’s face and then suddenly him realizing the truth of who he really is, a man unworthy of even the calling he has been tasked with, I think we can have that experience with others, we can see the face of God in others and find ourselves suddenly realizing something about ourselves that we had never quite seen before. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve witnessed the face of God in you, in others, and simply been humbled by your goodness, your generosity, your patience, all of it. The primary way we encounter the Divine is through each other, and that is why Christian community exists, why the Church exists, to tell the Good News of God’s encounter with the world through the Christ, and God’s encounter with us, we who have chosen to walk together in the community of the church, the one place in most of our lives where we are told over and over to look for the face of God in the face of your sister brother and sister, the one sitting right next to you, and in strangers and friends and enemies outside these walls. So, my invitation to you during my absence this summer is to look for God for everywhere, just seek God’s face, and do it through the faces of human others, your encounter with human other. I think I’ve shared this with you in the past, but one of my great teachers was also probably the most difficult church member I’ve ever pastored. It’s a long story, but Jackie and I were like oil and water, and that is unusual for me – I think one of my gifts is that I can get along with about anyone – but that wasn’t the case with her. Jackie was a constant thorn in my side, complaining constantly about me, about what I did or didn’t do to her or for her, and though we eventually sadly learned much later that some of her behavior was likely due an undetected hormone base cancer, something we and I didn’t know it at that time. I have to tell you, though, that no one has ever, ever taught me more about himself than sister Jackie did – she was my great teacher, and I think God used her as a way of teaching me about all the shadow and anger I can sometimes manifest, the ugly parts of myself I don’t want to look at within myself – she uncovered me to myself, and that was a great gift. And I think I did the same for her in our encounters with each other – she too was unmasked to herself. Jackie is now in God’s arms now, having passed away over some 15 years ago, but she was the face of God to me, in whose presence I was unraveled and unmasked and revealed to be sometimes unkind and impatient – but that is what you get when you see God face to face. When the pupil is ready, the master will appear, as the Buddhist saying goes. I invite you to do the same this summer – prepare your eyes so that when the Master appears, you will recognize her, you will recognize him, one of the many faces of God that may unravel, may unmask you to yourself. But the unraveling that happens when we see God face to face, when we stand before the borrowed presence of God in each other, well, there is just a good gift in that moment, and that is we get to see what God sees, and to know this most important of truths, to know it in our bones: God loves, still loves us, unconditionally, after having been unmasked by God. Nothing will change our lives more than knowing that deep truth in our own bones. Amen.
“When the Companion comes, whom I will send from the Father—the Spirit of Truth who proceeds from the Father—he will testify about me. You will testify too, because you have been with me from the beginning. “I didn’t say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you. But now I go away to the one who sent me. None of you ask me, ‘Where are you going?’ Yet because I have said these things to you, you are filled with sorrow. I assure you that it is better for you that I go away. If I don’t go away, the Companion won’t come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. When he comes, he will show the world it was wrong about sin, righteousness, and judgment. He will show the world it was wrong about sin because they don’t believe in me. He will show the world it was wrong about righteousness because I’m going to the Father and you won’t see me anymore. He will show the world it was wrong about judgment because this world’s ruler stands condemned. “I have much more to say to you, but you can’t handle it now. However, when the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you in all truth. He won’t speak on his own, but will say whatever he hears and will proclaim to you what is to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and proclaim it to you. Everything that the Father has is mine. That’s why I said that the Spirit takes what is mine and will proclaim it to you. As always, this past week’s events seem to only add yet more fodder for preacher’s like me to connect with texts like this, but sadly the events are often painful ones, such as the one we had recently in Jerusalem, with the opening of the American embassy within its ancient walls. Certainly some Israeli political forces had their reasons for wanting to place the embassy in Jerusalem, to fortify their claim to Jerusalem against the claims of the Palestinians, but you also had two incredibly controversial Christian pastors saying prayers at the Embassy, who also had their own motives for having embassy be in Jerusalem First, you had John Hagee, the man who believes that God used Hitler to force Jews to consider a political state in Palestine, which says something who he believes God to be, a God willing to massacre 6 million Jews and also cause the death of at least, AT LEAST 45 million others, in order to bring about Israel as a political state. Secondly, you had the Pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, Robert Jeffries, who believes Jews will not go to heaven because they don’t believe in Jesus, giving a second prayer of thanksgiving to God. Now, please know that Jeffries nor Hagee have any use for the state of Israel other than as a prop in bringing about the literal second coming of Christ – which, according to Jeffries will mean the destruction of the Jews and their damnation. In their reading, and misreading of parts of the Bible, an interpretation that is truly new and novel to Christian history, only when Israel is reconstituted as a nation state, something it wasn’t even in Jesus day, and only when Jerusalem is recognized as the capital, can Jesus finally come again. Now, most political actors in Israel do not take this theology seriously, of course, and consider people like Hagee and Jeffries to be idiots, but they are useful idiots, in the sense that these sorts of Christians come to their defense on all sorts of matters, including always taking Israel’s side against the claims of the Palestinians. For Hagee and Jeffries, Israel can do no wrong, can oppress no people, does not need to find a solution to the Palestinians situation, because the Jews are God’s people, though, ironically, in the end, Jeffries believes they are all going to hell, and Jesus is coming back very soon, which will then settle the Palestinian problem, so to speak. You can imagine that this horrifies Palestinian Christians, Christians who live in Israel and in the region, and it explains why they too decried the moving the embassy to Jerusalem, as justification for a new and novel theology that is unrecognizable to them and the vast majority of Christian church. The lust, the hunger, for Jesus’ return, a return rooted in Hagee and Jeffries misreading of the book of Revelation during which they believe Jesus will wipe out non-believers, this lust, this desire for this kind of triumphalist return of Jesus, it excuses all sorts of injustices done to others. And it goes without saying that this corrupted Christian theology has such a diminished sense of who God and Jesus are – the idea that we have to clear the decks before Jesus comes back, as if God could be manipulated by our actions, as if God was simply looking for us to get 1, 2, 3 in order and then She would return. Who is this God that I can control by my actions, and our actions, manipulated by his children? This lust for the end amongst some conservative Christians has caused so much pain and hurt in this world, to people of other faiths, and even to our fellow Christians living in the Middle East. And yet, if you look at our text today, it’s interesting that Jesus seems to imply that it would be better if he wasn’t around anymore, that without his leaving, without his death on the cross and his resurrection – and his eventual departure from them in the Ascension, without this leave-taking the Spirit, his voice in them, his voice in us, his love in them, his love in us, that voice, that Companion, would not come, could not come to them. Jeffries and Hagee are wanting Jesus’ return, as if somehow the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit given to the church on this day, wasn’t enough. Perhaps they don’t trust Spirit, perhaps the Spirit doesn’t give clear enough answers, or doesn’t clear up who’s the wheat and who’s the chaff for them, which is always part of the insider/outsider framework that every fundamentalism works within, including our own Christian forms of fundamentalism. “It is better that I go away,” Jesus says, “If I don’t go away, the Companion won’t come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” The assumption here is that without Jesus’ absence, the presence of God within them, and through them, the assumption here is that without Jesus’ bodily absence, the Companion, the Spirit of God that would eventually would fall upon them like a rushing wind, and as flames above their heads, this Spirit could not be released into the world. I think I’ve preached this in another Pentecost Sunday sermon, but it’s important to remember that Jesus could only have a limited impact on a small group while he was alive – the disciples, other women and men who formed his posse, as they say. There is only so much a human Jesus can say and do in this world– but with the Spirit, who is essentially Jesus within you and me, he can reach farther and wider than this small band of disciples who had surrounded him in his ministry. So many of us wonder about and wish for the chance to have known Jesus like the disciples knew him, in his flesh and blood, but Jesus seems to think otherwise. Interestingly, Jesus clearly believed that we would know him better in his absence, because we now have the Spirit of Truth within us, because the Companion, the Spirit, is in fact closer to us than he ever was with Peter and John and Mark and Mary Magdalene when he walked beside them thousands of years ago. Despite what Jesus says, for some believers that is not enough, the Jesus within them through the Spirit is not enough – only Jesus in some bodily form coming down from the sky and rendering judgment will satisfy them, though what it satisfies is not their thirst for Jesus, since he has said the Spirit within them is more than enough, and is all we really need of him in this life. No, it is something else they are lusting for, and it has nothing to do with Jesus – perhaps a desire for some spiritual revenge, or some sort of desire to be proven right, or maybe a thirst for power, or maybe an enactment of some sort of revenge fantasy, in which God will eliminate those they disagree with. But if Jesus offers nothing like those things – the revenge fantasies, the control over others, etc – through his actual presence in the world, through the very Spirit that each of us bear within us, then what does this Spirit do? Jesus spells out here what this Spirit does, and though a quick reading of it sounds a bit negative, context is needed to understand why the writer of John has Jesus saying these words. Remember that the Gospel of John is likely the last Gospel written down, perhaps completed 70 to 80 years after Jesus’ death. The writer drew upon a different set of oral traditions about Jesus than the other three Gospels, and he was likely part of a Christian community that had probably experienced some recent trauma around no longer being welcomed in the Jewish synagogues where they once worshipped without any problems. As a faith in Jesus as a Jewish Messiah grew, there were obviously fellow Jews, the vast majority of them, that disagreed with this belief, and it is likely that some Christians were told to go worship elsewhere, since they professed a belief in Jesus as the Messiah that was outside the Jewish mainstream. This was clearly traumatic for this early Christian community and there are moments in the Gospel of John where this shows up, either in defensiveness or in places like this, where Jesus seems to be arguing that he will be proven right by the Spirit, or perhaps this early Christian community will be proven right, despite being told to go away by some early Jewish synagogue. Now, having now put it into context, I don’t think that means that we can look over the truth of what Jesus is saying here about the Spirit, that when it comes to them on Pentecost, it will, as Jesus says, the Spirit will show the world it was wrong about sin, righteousness, and judgment. He will show the world it was wrong about sin because they don’t believe in me. He will show the world it was wrong about righteousness because I’m going to the Father and you won’t see me anymore. As the disciples are making their way to Gethsemane, as they are doing in our text today, they don’t realize how shaken they will by the events to come and by their own reaction to it. They will abandon Jesus, they will deny knowing him, they will hid away in fear of the Romans, they will doubt why they ever followed this man, and they will wonder if anything Jesus taught them about sin and goodness and judgment and love and the Father was actually right, was true. The fact that he died was an incredible trauma as well, that he didn’t win in the way they had expected a Messiah to win. But the Spirit, the God, the Christ, within them will make it plain that the way world operates is wrong, that might doesn’t makes right, that truth isn’t settled at the edge of a sword, that there aren’t just winners and losers in this world. Jesus will be proven right, and Spirit will be the one doing the proving, the revealing of all the ways the world is wrong, wrong about the meaning of his death, wrong about what motivated him, wrong about this foolishness, this idea that love is at the very heart of the world. The spirit of Truth is what Jesus calls this gift he will leave with early church, and with us, this Companion who will tell us the truth about the world, and the truth about ourselves. Now, the difficulty is that this Spirit of Truth seemingly hasn’t always helped us Christians discern what the truth is, or even the truth about who Jesus is. Even this disagreement I have with Pastor Jeffries and Pastor Hagee about the nature of Jesus return and their decision to ignore the suffering of the Palestinians is seemingly symptomatic of Spirit not giving us clear guidance, or perhaps, really us not doing a very good job of listening to the Companion, the Truth within them, within me, within you, within us. Maybe it isn’t it the Spirit of the Truth revealing the truth that is the problem, but it’s us, and our unwillingness to listen to this God we bear within us, and who keeps showing us and the world the truth. How many of us pray, on a regular basis, “show me your truth, show me the way, show me what love would have me do?” But even when we must pray for guidance, the question arises – is what I think is true, actually true? Aside from always filtering everything we believe through the lens of love when it comes to truth, I think Jesus leaves us with another clue on how to discern right from wrong and that is this: whose side do we take, who you and I are in solidarity with? Who stands beside us? Are we a Companion to those who are weakest, as Jesus always was? Are we fellow travelers with outcasts, the untouchables, the exiled, the nobodies, the “losers: of this world? The world says might makes right, the winners win and losers lose, and that is the way of it, and will always be the way of it. People like Jesus will always be hated by the world, because of their naiveté, their willful ignorance that he, that we might believe, really believe that a loser like Jesus, who gets himself crucified, might be the savior of the world. I’ve recently said that sometimes we need to check our Jesus, which is really me saying that if your understanding of Jesus makes you a crueler, meaner, greedier, myopic, uncaring towards others, especially the losers of this world, then your Jesus isn’t the real Jesus. But only those willing to listen to the Spirit of Truth are going to know the difference between our personal, made-up Jesus and the Jesus who actually is, the Jesus not of my making, the one who challenges me and us to love more deeply, to show compassion more broadly, to celebrate joy with others and beside others, and to do it with everyone we know, whoever they may be. As much as many of us struggle with what is truth about religion or politics or family or our marriages, or even our children, perhaps the greatest challenge around truth is the one Socrates left us with and that was to “know thyself.” Sometimes the difficult truths within us are the hardest ones to deal with, and we do everything in our power to not let the Spirit of Truth reveal a difficult truth to us. As I’ve grown a bit older, I do know myself a bit better, I know the truth of me better than I did even a decade ago. So much of what I have come to know about myself has been difficult to deal with – I thought I was better than that, as they say, but I’m not, I’m not –, but if you love the Spirit of Truth, the God of Truth, ultimately we’re going to want to know the truth of who we are, for better and for worse. Interestingly, the difficult and painful truths about ourselves are the ones we most often struggle with, but it needs to be said that the Spirit of God, the Companion within us, tells us more than just the difficult and hard truths about us. In fact, sometimes it is harder to listen to the Spirit telling us the good and powerful and empowering truths about who we are than it is the difficult ones. If we actually do believe Jesus’ words that the Spirit of Truth is even better than having a bodily Jesus in the room with us, then this is certainly good news, very good news and Pentecost has always been treated that way in the church calendar, as a day of celebration. And some, if not most of that good news about the Spirit is not just about unmasking the ruthless and demonic elements of this world, or the ruthless and sometimes demonic truths about who we can be sometimes, then what is it telling us of the good news of us, and this world? Actually, if we listen, the Spirit of God will also show us the beautiful world we live in, and will show us that God is love, and will show us that every loving moment we’ve ever experienced has been a God moment. And that Spirit is all about showing us the goodness still within us, the goodness that can and will grow and grow until the light within us will eventually extinguish the shadows within us. If we don’t know that we are bearers of such goodness, such love, such possibility, we may extinguish our lives and thus the power of the Spirit within us. My clergy friend Matt Laney recounted a story about St. Augustine, the great African monk, who when presiding over the communion table in the 4th century, was heard to say something quite different to those coming forward to receive the gift of the table, different than the traditional words like “the body of Christ, the blood of Jesus.” No, instead, we have a record of Augustine saying to those who were about the receive the body of Christ, the bread, that he said, “receive who you are,” which is true of course, because we are indeed the body of Christ, and we are the host of the Divine, the bearers of Jesus. And after these 4th century persons received the bread, Augustine would say to them, “Go and be who you are called to be,” which was surely an invitation to be the Christ in this world, to be love in this world, to be justice in this world, to be compassion in this world. Alongside all the ways God’s spirit, the Spirit of truth, reveals the less than beautiful parts of us and the world, the Spirit also does opposite, which is showing us that we also bear the Christ, and that we can become more like love itself, more like God, than we had ever imagined possible. Come, spirit of truth, shows us everything, the light and shadow, so that we can become who were meant to be – you. Amen
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