what god does

PENTECOST 2012 | Acts 2:1-21; Rom 8:22-27; Jn 15:26-27, 16:4b-15

 

For many years, I fancied myself a religious agnostic. I was proud of my skepticism, and it required some pretty tricky circumlocutions in my preaching, as many of you probably recall. It was an honest place to be, and truly, the only place to be with integrity at the time. But it was also, in some ways, a very anxious place, and a pretty lonely place as well.

 

My heroes were people of faith, and I admired their courage, their creativity, and their intellectual brilliance. But more than this, I envied their conviction. I couldn’t claim it myself, but I longed for it. I felt the lack of it. It made me sad, wistful, even. Faith, after all, is at the core of my profession—how difficult it was to do without it.

 

So, I decided, after may years of longing and much reflection, to do something which might seem obvious to less clueless people than I—I decided to ask for it. Specifically, I began to pray, asking God to grant me the gift of faith. Up until that point, I had assumed that faith was a choice, a decision to live a certain way, “as if” something were true. But what if it isn’t? What if it isn’t something we do at all, but something that is done in us?

 

I didn’t have anything to lose, I thought. It would be a grand experiment. I prayed. Nothing happened. I kept praying. It became a regular thing. After a while, when nothing happened, I stopped expecting it.

 

Then, as if creeping up on me when I wasn’t looking, something did happen. There wasn’t any one moment. It happened gradually, as I dove deeper and deeper into Martin Luther’s theology. As I read, I experienced an overwhelming sense of welcome, of rightness. I felt loved, embraced, held. It was as if a flame sprang to life, growing larger with the whipping of the wind.

 

The feeling continued to grow, perceptible not only when I was reading theology, but spilling over into daily life. My prayer became less of a discipline and more a time of communion. I found myself choking up at odd moments, stopped in my tracks by an overwhelming rush of lovesickness.

 

Luther speaks of faith as a perceptible thing that we feel, that takes us over and changes us. And what before had been an intellectual understanding became a bodily knowing. My prayer had been answered. It scared the bejeezus out of me. If there’s one thing I can say now with conviction, it’s this: if you are serious about the Gospel, you are playing with fire, and if you pray for faith, be careful what you ask for.

 

This conversion, this change, is not something I did. It was not something that I could do. It was something God did.

 

Our readings are full of similar experiences, with similar dynamics in play. The disciples were bereft after Jesus was taken from them for a second time. They were huddling together, paralyzed and mourning. Jesus had said that the Comforter would come, but they had no idea what that meant.

 

Then suddenly the house was filled with noise, the sound of a hurricane, and flames erupted from their heads. The truth sprang to their lips, and they were unable to quench it—they spilled out into the street and began to tell everyone they met their stories. They spoke their own language, but people heard and understood them in whatever language was native to them.

 

The disciples did not choose to have this experience. It was something God did in them. It must have been terrifying while it was happening. I imagine from reading the text that it must also have been ecstatic. No doubt it was confusing and disorienting. It was probably not what they were expecting, but yet was precisely what they needed.

 

Likewise, in Paul’s letter to the Christian people in Rome, he tells them that our own hope is not sufficient. Hope is good, and our expectation is right. Like the disciples, we wait for God “in perseverance.” But then what happens? Paul says that our own efforts at prayer are inadequate. Connection with God is not something we can achieve on our own. Instead, he says, God sends the Spirit into our hearts, and the Spirit assists us, and teaches us how to pray. The Spirit, he says, prays in us, “with groanings too deep for words.”

 

Pause for a moment to appreciate the majesty of that phrase. “The Spirit himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” True prayer is not something we do, but it is, in fact, something that God does in us.

 

This is resonant with Luther’s great insight—that on our own we can do nothing. We cannot save ourselves, we cannot be “good enough” to deserve heaven, we cannot command the angels, we cannot attain godhood by our own efforts, no matter how strenuous or sincere. Everything we desire—salvation, communion with the divine, or inner transformation—all are purely gifts, all are things that God does in us, not because we have earned them, or bought them, or worked hard enough for them, or did the proper ritual or uttered the magic words.

 

They are given to us because God loves us, because God moved towards us, because God worked within us that which we could not do for ourselves. The disciples could no more summon the courage and conviction to testify to total strangers than you or I could turn ourselves into pumpkins. Likewise, I could not create faith in myself. The best I could do was to ask for the gift, and embrace it when it came.

 

That latter bit was, in some ways, the harder part. As many of you know, I teach the art of spiritual direction at the Chaplaincy Institute and other schools, and the hardest skill to teach is at the same time the most important. It is easy to get two people into a room with one another. It’s even pretty easy to get the client to talk about his or her spiritual life. What’s not so easy is to teach the aspiring spiritual director to shut up and get out of the way so that God can work.

 

And this, really, is the one primary skill of spiritual direction. It is God who does the work, not us. It is very tempting for us as spiritual directors to want to help, to offer suggestions, to brainstorm, to seek out solutions to the clients’ problems. But this is not our job. This is not at all what is called for, and if we do these things, then we fail our clients. The best thing we can do is to hold the space and empty ourselves of all agendas, all fixing, all notions that we know what we are about, or what we’re supposed to do.

 

Because when magic happens in spiritual direction—and it often does—it happens only because we are able to shut up, put our own agendas aside, and pay attention to what God is doing right in front of us. Nothing important that happens in spiritual direction occurs because of anything that the director does, but only because of what God does.

 

It is the same for all of us, in our own spiritual lives. But it is just as hard for us to learn, I think. But just because God is invisible doesn’t mean he can’t be seen. God is always working, in us, on us, around us. The gifts of God are always being handed to us, if only we have the eyes to see them.

 

But this rubs us the wrong way. We have a work ethic here in the US. We want to be worthy of our gifts, we want to earn what we get, we value hard work and personal responsibility. But God’s ways are not the ways of the world. Pelagius was declared a heretic precisely because of this very American impulse. We should be able to earn our rewards, we can be good enough, smart enough, loyal enough, disciplined enough.

 

But that’s not how God works. If there’s one thing we CAN do, it is this: to be open to the Spirit when it arrives. To recognize it when it shows up, to cooperate with it as it’s hurricane trashes our house, to invite it and then have the courage to say “yes” to it when it arrives.

 

And that’s not an easy thing to do. One thing that we concentrate on in spiritual direction is the ways that people resist God’s Spirit, turn away from it, slam the door it its face, thwart its working. And we all do this. We do it because change is scary, because intimacy is scary, because what God wants to do with us and in us is scary.

 

And I want to affirm that. We’re not scared just because we’re facing something unfamiliar. We’re scared—and we should be scared—because what God wants to do in us and through us is probably more than we’re willing to give right now.

 

But don’t worry about that. You don’t have to do anything. The only thing you really need to do is give your permission. If you do, watch out, because God will do the rest in you. And the places the Spirit will take you may surprise you, just as it surprised the disciples, just as it surprised me. Just as it surprises everyone who says “yes” and then gets out of the way. Let us pray…

 

God, we know you want to live in us, and to work through us,

Just as you did through the disciples so many years ago.

Help us to have the same courage and conviction that they did.

Help us to invite you, to cooperate with you, to welcome you

As you work your miracles in us,

Miracles of courage, miracles of faith, miracles of salvation.

Move us, embrace us, and transform us

Through the wind of the Spirit,

For we ask this in the name of him who taught us,

Who went away, and who now fills all things,

Even Jesus Christ. Amen.

the goodness of god

EASTER 4

Acts 4:5-12; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18

In our reading in Acts, the lectionary oddly drops us straight into the tail end of a story. We get the rhetoric, but we get none of the context, which is a shame, because it’s a ripping good story.

 

It happens after the resurrection. Jesus is raised from the dead, and he spends forty days with the disciples. Then Jesus ascends into heaven, and the disciples are left behind, crazy with grief, holed up in an upstairs apartment without direction or ambition. Then, at the Feast of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit comes upon them with great power—they spill out into the street and begin to preach. All that fear, gone. All that uncertainty, gone. It’s like they are bursting with energy, their mission before them, clear as a bell. They are unstoppable.

 

But they are still Jews, they don’t see themselves as a separate religion, not at all. They still observe the Sabbath. They still go to synagogue and the temple. So, even in the midst of all these signs and wonders taking place all around them, taking place because of them and through them, Peter and John pause to observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy as the Law demands. They are in Jerusalem, so they go up to the temple to pray. There they see a man who has been lame from birth, begging by the temple gate. The man sees them, too, and asks them for some spare change.

 

Peter knelt by this man and gazed into his eyes intently. “Look at us,” he tells him. The man does, although by now he’s a little wary. People normally just throw money at him, they don’t stop to talk. Once they have the man’s attention, Peter says, “My friend and I don’t have any money. But we will give you what we have. In the name of Jesus, stand up and walk.” Not pausing to let the man protest, Peter grabs his hand and hauls the man to his feet. And to the man’s great surprise, his legs do not collapse beneath him. They hold. They support him. He takes a staggering step forward. His eyes open wide, and his mouth breaks into a disbelieving “O” of surprise and delight. He’s walking, for the first time in his entire life.

 

Instantly, he starts praising God, rushing around on unsteady but working legs, grabbing everyone who will listen and telling them about the miracle that had just happened to him. The people recognize the man, and a crowd begins to gather around Peter and John.

 

Peter, his shrinking violet days behind him, steps up and addresses them boldly. “We did not do this,” he says, “Jesus did. The same Jesus you handed over to Pontius Pilate. The same Jesus who was killed and then brought back to life again.”

 

The Sadducees—the temple priests—heard the commotion, caught wind of what Peter was preaching about, and threw the two apostles in prison. The temple prison, of course. (We have a church prison in the basement, but we don’t use it much any more—I think the last time we used it was to punish some annoying Theosophists in the late 1950s.)

 

Anyway, that’s the scene into which we drop with our Acts reading today. Now the Sadduccees, you’ll recall, are the folks who run the temple cult. They’re the priests and the administrators of the huge temple complex. If we lived back then, we’d probably be pretty sympathetic to these guys. Their liberals, for one thing. They’re big on ritual, but pretty laissez faire bout theology—not agnostic, exactly, but critical in much the same way we are. They were also pragmatists, cooperating with the Roman Empire as the most expedient way to keep themselves and the people of Israel safe.

 

So when Peter and John were hauled before them, they aren’t really upset about the fact that this guy was healed, even if it is the Sabbath Day. What really sticks in their craw is these crazy enthusiasts going on about the resurrection of the dead, which they consider to be a backwards, antiquated, fantastical belief held only by religious fanatics. Now admittedly, Peter and John ARE religious fanatics by this point, which the Sadduccees quickly and correctly divined.

 

But they realized that there was nothing that they could really punish Peter and John for—most of the Pharisees, after all, believed in resurrection, so while they couldn’t make them stop preaching about it, they could at least forbid them to preach about it at the temple, which they did, ejecting Peter and John out onto their ears.

 

It was Resurrection, and specifically talk about Jesus’ resurrection, that got Peter and John into trouble. It just didn’t fly in certain circles, and indeed, the same is true today. Many people in our own time consider the idea of a man rising from the dead to be just as backwards, just as antiquated, just as fantastical as the Sadduccees did. I have to admit that, until very recently, I felt this way myself, and when forced to preach on the subject, I resorted to metaphor and mystical interpretations in order to avoid the fleshy impossibility of such a thing.

 

I’m not embarrassed of those sermons. Indeed, I view my own spiritual progress with wonder and amusement. The idea of resurrection is a scandal, especially to people whose daily bread includes a hefty serving of skepticism. But consider, for a moment, what it would mean if God really DID raise Jesus from the dead. What does such a resurrection say to us? What might it do for us?

 

So much of Jesus’ ministry was devoted to revealing to his followers the true character of God. Jesus had grown up with the same stories, in the same religious culture as everyone else, and the version of God that people were getting sickened him. He knew, deep in his soul, that God was nothing like the God he was hearing about day in and day out.

 

And so his ministry was devoted to teaching people what God was really like. He taught that them that in God’s Kingdom, there were no second-class citizens. Indeed, there were no outcasts. He taught them that God, rather than being a fierce judge, was a loving parent, caring for us, forgiving us and gently correcting us.

 

The crucifixion and resurrection are not the point of Jesus’ life, unlike what many Christians would have us believe. They are one part of a much longer story. Jesus’ whole ministry was devoted to telling us what God is really like. The crucifixion revealed, in a painful, pointed and accurate way, what WE are really like—the horror of what we are capable of. But in the resurrection Jesus continues to reveal God’s true face. The resurrection is the ultimate testimony to God’s faithfulness. The resurrection reveals that God does not abandon his children. He does not consign them to the dust. He does not forget them or leave them behind.

 

Instead, the resurrection shows us not only how much God loved Jesus, but it points toward the future—our future, when God will raise us up as well. It testifies to how much God loves us, to how much God loves the world. The resurrection of Jesus is the sacrament of the great restoration of all things, the object of our Christian hope, and the goal of our Christian life.

 

The resurrection of Jesus answers the question, “Is God primarily judge or lover?” Some Christians would have you believe that the answer is “both.” But I think that the preaching of Jesus, the example of Jesus, and the testimony of Jesus’ resurrection tell a different story. I think it reveals to us a God who never abandons the poor or the weak; a God who stands in solidarity with the oppressed and the betrayed. It shows us a God who vindicates the innocent and forgives the guilty. It shows us a God who is more powerful than death, more gracious than the Law, more accepting than people or culture or religion.

 

There is a clear statement of this in both St. John’s letter and his Gospel. The epistle says that “even if our own heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart.” Even if we feel like we deserve God’s judgment and wrath, even if we feel we deserve to rot in the grave, God’s love for us and grace towards us is so much greater, so much more powerful than our own self-judgment, for God will not abandon us to the grave—not now, not ever. Therefore, St. John says, trust this. Have confidence in God.

 

Jesus, in St. John’s Gospel gives us even more good news, for Jesus says that he loves his sheep, so much that he is willing to give everything for us—even his very life. He says that he is free to lay down his life, he has the power to lay down his life, and he has the power to take it up again.

 

He has the same power to restore life to us, as well. He has the power to restore hope, he has the power to restore innocence, he has the power to restore trust, he has the power to give life both metaphorical and literal. He will hear us in our despair, and will rescue us. He will hear us in the grave, and will not abandon us to it.

 

For when we join our lives to his, we become one life with his life. And that life has already been raised to immortality and incorruptibility.

 

Now, I’ll grant you, this kind of talk made little sense to the Sadducees, and makes even less sense today. Jesus isn’t calling us to rationality. Jesus is calling us to a radical, irrational act of trust. Trust that there is more to this universe than science can divine. More to human life than chemicals and electricity. More to religion than morality. More to life than marking time until we die.

 

Jesus is calling us to trust in the basic goodness of God. A God whose love for us is wildly out of proportion to anything we’ve ever actually accomplished in our lives. A God whose faithfulness is not curtailed by our own morality or mortality. A God whose desire for wholeness is so overpowering that he will not rest until everything that is broken is healed, including your battered and fragile heart. This is the God of Jesus. Let this be our God as well. Let us pray…

 

 

Jesus loves me.

This I know.

For the Bible tells me so.

Little ones to him belong.

They are weak, but he is strong.

Yes, Jesus loves me.

Yes, Jesus loves me.

Yes, Jesus loves me.

The Bible tells me so. Amen.

particular to universal

Jer 31:31-34; Heb 5:5-10; Jn 12:20-33

 

In 1984 a boy by the name of Lorenzo Odone was diagnosed with a fatal condition known as adrenoleukodystrophy, or ALD. ALD is a terrible disease that normally attacks young boys between the ages of five and ten years old. Lorenzo’s parents were told that there was no cure, and indeed, at the time there wasn’t. They were, however, told what would happen to their son—that he would very quickly lose his hearing, his sight, and his ability to move, or even to swallow. Death would follow quickly.

 

The Odones refused to accept this fate for their son, and they searched and searched and eventually stumbled onto a possible cure—an oil derived from olives and rapeseed. Their discovery prolonged Lorenzo’s life, but it did not save it. It gave him an additional twenty years, for which the Odones were extremely grateful, but the real benefit of their discovery was not for their own son, who was too old for the treatment to do any good. Quickly, a test for the disease was developed, and now all babies are tested as soon as they are born.

 

The cure came too late for their own son, but the Odones are still heroes, because their doggedness and determination saved countless other boys from the same fate. Although they could not have known it at the time, their quest for salvation of one particular boy led to the salvation of multitudes.

 

That leap from the particular to the universal is the thread that unites all of our readings today. [Phyllis’ neighbor,] Professor Daniel Boyarin, argues in A Radical Jew, his marvelous book on the Apostle Paul, that this leap was Paul’s great insight, and indeed, a large part of his theological project. It seemed to him scandalous that God should only love or want to save one particular group of people—the Jews. Surely, Paul reasoned, God must love ALL peoples. Surely God must want to save ALL peoples, regardless of their ethnicity. Paul’s theology was his attempt to understand how God, through the ministry of Jesus Christ, was attempting to provide a bridge for gentiles to that very same salvation enjoyed by the Jews.

 

There is an echo of this same concern in our reading from John’s gospel today. Some Greeks come to Jesus, asking if they might speak to him. But when Andew and Philip take their request to Jesus, the Lord gives them this strange “let them eat cake” kind of answer that seems on the surface of it to be a completely dissociative non-sequiter. Jesus answers, “The hour has come that the Son of Man should be glorified.” What? Now, keep in mind that this is the Gospel of John, so it is from Mars and we don’t expect it to have close ties to reality. Still, listen to what he says next: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain.”

 

Now, we usually take this to mean that Jesus is talking about himself—in which case, it really IS a non-sequiter. But what if he’s not? What if, as the context actually implies, this is NOT a statement about Jesus’ own body, but is instead a statement about Jews and gentiles? What if Jesus is saying that Judaism as they understand it, has to die, so that it can bear much more fruit than they can even imagine now?

 

What is stunning about this interpretation is that this is exactly what happened. In the year 70 when the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, razed the holy city, and caused everyone in it to flee—the Judaism that Jesus had known did indeed die. The wheat fell into the earth and died.

 

But it did not stay dead, it rose again, in two streams—one stream was Rabbinical Judasim, the kind of Judaism that we know today. And the other stream were those Jews who followed the rabbi Jesus—and it is THIS stream that indeed, through Paul’s ministry, made the salvation of Israel available to the gentiles, to the nations, to every people of the earth.

 

The Jews of Jesus’ day were saying, “God’s salvation is for us alone,” but Paul said, “This is not congruent with the personality of the loving God that I have come to know. There must be a larger reality to which the story of Israel points that opens a way of salvation for gentiles, too.” Paul’s theology is a work of creative imagination that FOUND that way, that bridge in the person of Jesus Christ.

 

His theology was a leap from the particular to the universal—from the salvation of Israel alone, to the gift of God to all the world. But I suspect that this kind of creativity is needed again, and at regular intervals, because it is the tendency of humans to be religiously conservative, to want to hoard the favor of God, to want to say, “this is OURS,” and growl at anyone who comes near it like a dog protecting a bone.

 

But this tendency is a result of human selfishness and sin, and, as Paul pointed out, is not congruent with the God of generosity and love that Jesus has made known to us. Because it is CHRISTIANS now who are saying, “God’s salvation is for us alone—only if you believe in Jesus in exactly the same way WE do can you share in God’s salvation. If you don’t God’s going to fry you for eternity.”

 

I don’t know about you, but that just doesn’t sound like the God that Jesus preached about. If we truly love the God that Jesus preached to us, we must discover that same generosity of spirit that Paul found. I think we must have the courage to say that God can love another people without loving us less. I think we must not mistake our metaphors and symbols for the TRUTH, or we turn our faith into idolatry. Our symbols, metaphors and stories point beyond themselves to something so large and great that we can barely understand it, and we certainly cannot comprehend it.

 

But we can trust it, and we can trust that the God who has extended his love towards us even when others were saying, “God’s love is for us alone,” is not going to stop here. The generosity of God will extend beyond the boundaries of our symbols and metaphors and will meet every people wherever they happen to be, speaking words of salvation and healing in their own languages, using their own symbols and metaphors. God does not play favorites. God does not abhor the lowly cattle shed. Likewise, the Word will be made flesh in every language, through every symbol set, in every culture of every people in every time.

 

In the Epistle to the Hebrews, the author says that Jesus partakes not in the priesthood of Aaron—not in the priesthood of Israel—but in the priesthood of Melchizadek, a gentile priest, a pagan priest. For God’s salvation was not limited to the people of Israel. And indeed, it is not limited to Christians, either.

 

For “the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant…not according to the covenant I made with their fathers,” not the covenant I made with the Jews or the Christians, but a new covenant. “I will put my law into their minds and will write it on their hearts,” in whatever language they understand, “and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

 

This is the good news, my friends, not that God has promised to be the savior of Jews alone or Christians alone, but that God is the savior of all the world. Our Gospel is an evangelical Gospel not because we insist that everyone must believe as we do to share God’s salvation, but because God’s salvation cannot—will not—be contained by religions or images or popes or idiotic TV preachers—and THAT is the Good News.

 

Let us go forth from this place today, not smug in the knowledge that God’s love is for us alone, to hoard and to cherish, but vibrant with the knowledge that God’s love cannot be stopped, will not be boxed or packaged or limited. For we are the ambassadors of Good News—that God’s salvation is for all peoples, of every covenant, in every time, and in every place. God is the God of the universal, not only the particular.

 

For as much as we cherish our particular tradition, as much as we love it, as much as God loves it—there is so much MORE for us to discover and to love. Let us go forth and love as God loves—all things, all peoples, all metaphors, all creatures. Let us pray…

 

God, we love to play favorites. Forgive us for assuming that you do, too. We know that our assumptions must die so that new truths can guide us. We know that what we hold most precious is often the very thing that we must let go in order to grow, if we are to become the people you desire us to be. Help us to lose our tiny lives and live into your great Life. Make our small stories part of your Large Story—that story that never ends, that story of abundant life, that story of salvation for all peoples. For we ask this in the name of Jesus, who revealed your love to us. Amen.

images and actions

Num 21:4-9; Eph 2:1-10; Jn 3:14-21

In the Metamorphosis, Ovid tells us about a beautiful young woman named Medusa. She was so ravishing that she caught the eye of Poseidon, the god of the sea. They were powerfully attracted to each other, and this eventually led them to do what most mortals and Greek gods do when smitten by Eros. Their mistake was doing it in the shadow of Athena’s temple.

Now Athena and Poseidon were fierce rivals, and for some reason, Athena took great offense to the amorous activity near her sacred precincts, and, in order to punish both of them, she cursed Medusa, turning her into a Gorgon—a monster with slithering serpents in the place of her hair, and a countenance so hideous that anyone who looked upon her would instantly turn to stone.

Yet, Athena’s revenge was not yet satisfied. When a young hero named Perseus was sent to kill Medusa and retrieve her dangerous head, Athena gives him a mirrored shield—the very tool he needs to succeed in his task. As instructed, once Perseus was confronted by the deadly Gorgon, he did not look at her directly, but instead looked at her image reflected in his shield. In this way, he made quick work of her, cut off her head, put it in a bag and used it as a weapon, pulling it out as needed to render his enemies all igneous.

Eventually, Perseus gave Medusa’s head as a trophy to Athena, who no doubt reveled in her victory, so much so that she put the head on her shield—and many others followed suit, including Zeus. Thousands of shields have been discovered by archeologists, dating all the way back to the 8^th century BCE, all bearing the likeness of Medusa. Once a monster, but whose image became a fierce talisman of protection.

Such images were very important to the ancient Greeks—as indeed, they are to us today. Yet images are not without controversy in our Western religious traditions. Just last week we heard the Mosaic covenant’s explicit prohibition against images: “thou shalt make no graven images.” And yet, what do we see in our very first reading, from the book of Numbers? Moses is making a graven image.

Now, honestly, this is one of the strangest stories in the Bible, and I’m delighted to have an opportunity to preach on it. The story starts out familiar—the Israelites are wandering in the wilderness and griping about how much better things actually were back in Egypt when they were slaves. God finally loses his patience with them, and sends a nest of snakes to bite and kill them—and not just any snakes, “fiery” snakes, whatever that means.

So it doesn’t take long before the people are singing a different tune: “Oops, our bad. Actually, things are not so terrible, here—um, except for those pesky snakes.” They plead with Moses to intercede for them, and God gives a very strange answer. He tells Moses to make a serpent out of bronze, perched on a pole. God tells him to show the graven image to the people, and whoever looks on it will live. Which, scripture says, is exactly what happened.

Now why would God say, “Don’t make any graven images” in one breath, but command Moses to make a graven image in the next? No clue, and the Bible doesn’t give any either. It is a very confounding and strange story.

Israel has always forbidden images, and Islam followed suit. While both allow images of vegetables, they are leery of animals and outright hostile to human or divine depictions. Thus, both Jewish and Islamic art are heavy on calligraphy and geometric designs, but short on poker-playing dogs.

Christianity, however, has a long history of embracing images. The fact that Jesus became human—that he actually had a human face, visible to all, lent permission to depict him, so that all may gaze upon him, as indeed, generations of Christians have longed to do. While there was a brief kerfuffle in Byzantia in the 8^th and 9^th centuries over the issue, and although it is true that virulent iconoclasmia was rampant amongst the Protestant reformers, by and large, Christians have treasured their images and kept them close.

But surely the prohibition on images has some wisdom to it. After all, hundreds of millions of Jews, Muslims and iconographically-challenged Protestants can’t be wrong, can they?

Of course not. The prohibition on images provides an important caution against two deadly human impulses: idolatry and magic. Idolatry, of course, is the worship of something AS God that is NOT God. And magic is the effort to bind supernatural forces to the human will. Both, scripture says, are dangerous and must be avoided.

Now, the serpent of bronze was not really an idol—scripture doesn’t tell us that the people were WORSHIPPING it. But was it magic? Certainly it must have seemed so. Was Medusa’s head magic? Again, it certainly seems so. But one can also ask a similar question of things in our own, Christian, tradition: are icons magic? Are the bread and wine—images of Jesus’ body and blood—are they magic?

Certainly all of these things have POWER. If they are not magic, why AREN’T they magic?

Archbishop Cranmer—the liturgical genius behind Henry VIII’s reformation of the Church of England, and the architect of the Book of Common Prayer, was quite conversant with the sacramental debates taking place in his own day between the church of Rome and the German and Swiss reformers. Unconvinced by Rome’s transubstantiation, or Zwingli’s symbolism, or Luther’s doctrine of ubiquity, he struck out on his own in a shockingly original way.

Cranmer said that Christ is NOT in the bread and wine, in some crude and physical manner. Instead, Christ is present in the ACT of eating and drinking. Eating and drinking are acts of faith, and it is the ACTION itself that is salvific, not the elements.

Just so, it was not Medusa’s head that was deadly—Perseus could carry it about without injury. It was the ACT of looking upon it that was dangerous. And with Moses, it was not the brazen serpent that had power, but it was instead the ACT of looking upon it with faith that brought salvation.

This resonates profoundly with what we see in our epistle—we are not saved by works, not by things we have done or images we have made—but by the very ACT of having faith, of TRUSTING God. This idea significantly contributed to Luther’s teaching, especially when Luther says that Christ is in the ACT of trusting. Luther says that if we have trust, we have Christ, and he further implies that we HAVE Christ to the very degree that was have trust.

John suggests in his gospel that the bronze serpent on the pole is a foreshadowing of Christ on the cross. The serpent, after all, is the symbol of wisdom, and as Paul said in last week’s epistle, Jesus is “the wisdom of God.” Just as the people looked upon the serpent on the pole in the wilderness and were saved from the poison of the snake venom, we who look upon God’s Wisdom on the cross will be saved from the poison of sin and death.

And this is not magic, for there is no power in the hunk of metal that is the snake, and there is nothing but weakness in the dead man on the cross of wood. The power is in the ACT of LOOKING WITH TRUST.

For this act transforms what we are looking at: the brazen serpent was transformed from an image of death to an image of salvation; the cross was transformed from an instrument of torture into the symbol of life eternal.

This is another of those profound reversals that God is so fond of. Even the monstrous head of Medusa was transformed into a talisman of protection. The most humble of meals—bread and wine, are transformed into the fare of heaven—partaking of God himself.

Tomorrow we have a meeting at which we will be discussing the publicity materials for the church. We’ll be talking about branding and image. And these are important discussions—we will often only have one shot to get something into people’s hands, and in very few words and a single image we must convey who we are and what we have to offer clearly and effectively. Our survival as a community depends on it, and our discussions last fall unfortunately stalled out short of completing our work. So I’m very eager to get back to it.

But caution is in order, as well. Because as important as images are, they must also be TRUE. The words and images we choose must reflect who we actually ARE, not who we fantasize about becoming. They must speak to our actions, not just our ideas. We must ask ourselves, “for what are we trusting God?” DO we trust God? These are important discernments.

It is the ACT of trust that saves us, not the ideas or words or images that we use. Images must reflect actions, and reflect them accurately, like the shield of Athena. As we gather tomorrow night, I invite us to discern well the acts of trust that guide us as a community, and seek to convey those effectively and well. More than this, let us gather TRUSTING in God to guide us—like Moses, he may indeed tell us what to say, and how to depict it.

Let us pray…

Wisdom of God, go before us, lead us and guide us

Let us gaze upon you with trust and confidence

That you will lead us to a place of safety and abundance

That we may prepare a place of hospitality and comfort for others. Amen.

stumping evil

LENT 3 | STUMPING EVIL | Ex 02:1-17; 1 Cor 1:18-25; Jn 2:13-22

 

In C.S. Lewis’ epistolary novel The Screwtape Letters, the main character—and the supposed author of the majority of the text—is a demon, specifically, a “senior temptor” by the name of Screwtape, writing letters to his “nephew,” a lesser demon by the name of Wormwood.

 

In the course of their correspondence, Screwtape lets Wormwood in on a little secret, one that actually gets Screwtape into a good bit of trouble. The secret is that demons are profoundly flummoxed by God’s motivation. They believe that “the whole concept of ‘love’ is a cover story for something more selfish and nefarious.”[i]

 

The demons are always wondering what God is really up to, and, in fact, we are told that there is an entire research department in Hell whose job it is to figure this out. Getting a job in this department is the infernal equivalent of being demoted to the mail room. As Screwtape himself writes, “[God] cannot love: nobody can: it doesn’t make sense” (101).

 

Lewis seemed to be saying, in a subversive, underhanded way, “God’s ways are not our ways,” and indeed, our ways are usually bound up with an overarching concern for the self. Even our altruism is self-interested. Our cultural watchword seems to be, “what’s in it for me?” The idea that a person might do something out of simple uncomplicated love is completely counterintuitive. Screwtape cannot comprehend it. I think there are a lot of people in our society who have a similar difficulty.

 

Today’s readings are full of just this sort of confounding wisdom. How is it that Law can bring freedom? The ten commandments given to Moses in our first reading are not given to meet God’s needs, but ours. It seems like a contradiction—why should we bind ourselves to this very limiting set of behaviors? Why should we curtail our life and liberty? Because by doing so, a far greater number of people are granted life and liberty. But why should I limit my rights just so that others—weaker, less deserving people, naturally—can have rights? Again, to evil, this kind of self-giving simply makes no sense. The “What’s in it for me?” factor just doesn’t measure up.

 

And how about Jesus driving out the money-changers? Now, granted, this is not Jesus’ finest moment. Theologians have always tried to justify such bad behavior by appealing to “righteous indignation,” which seems like a bit of a cop-out to me. I think his response is a terribly human one. He, quite frankly, loses his temper.

 

Was he right to do so? Probably not. The goings-on in the temple had to be well-known at the time, it couldn’t have been a surprise. Was it a sinful act? Well, you know, if I hated alcohol and went into a bar with a baseball bat and busted the place up, I’d probably be brought up on charges, and would be right to feel a little shame about the incident. So, no, I don’t think Jesus is in the clear in this one.

 

But here’s what I DO think was right about it: his anger was completely motivated on behalf of others. He saw poor people being exploited, and he went ballistic, completely disregarding the likely consequences to his own life and liberty. And this was not a negligible danger, either. While John places this incident near the beginning of his gospel, the other evangelists place it at the end—and, in fact, imply that it is this very action of Jesus’ that gets him killed.

 

There was no “what’s in it for me,” in Jesus’ actions, here. Abominable as they were, they were entirely motivated out of concern for others, completely disregarding concern for himself. Jesus’ recklessness makes no logical sense. But then again, this is why evil cannot comprehend good—love is not logical.

 

This is precisely what Paul is speaking about in his letter to the Corinthians when he writes, “the message of the Cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” Surely God is powerful—more powerful than any other being in the universe. Why should he consent to being over-powered? Surely God is the very source of life—why would he consent to being killed? Surely God could have come up with a better way to oppose the tyranny of the Empire—why would he submit to it? It was simply too costly to be handed over to torture and death—what was in it for him?

 

And the fact is, there was nothing in it for him, not really. God, if any being is, is self-sufficient. Jesus’ act was one of defiance, of solidarity with the oppressed, motivated entirely out of love for others, with no thought to his own welfare, or indeed, his very life. And that, my friends, is love. And it is not logical. And to many people in the world, it is incomprehensible.

 

Yet it is also the very definition of God. Martin Luther defined God as “self-giving love.” Luther says that when we are first converted, when we are “baby Christians,” we are still motivated by self-serving love, as most people are. But as we walk with Christ, as we learn from him, as we are united to him by faith, a change happens within us. Over the course of a lifetime, the work of Holy Spirit in us is a gradual conversion from self-serving love to self-giving love.

 

When we first become followers of Jesus, we are still asking “what’s in it for us?” Maybe we sign on for the community, or the music, or because doing service makes us feel good about ourselves, or maybe we just want to be sure we have our ticket to heaven. We may even have a grab bag of such reasons, but they are still self-motivated reasons.

 

But the action of the Holy Spirit is both subtle and relentless, because as we grow in Christ, God is transforming us INTO Christ. That IS the work of God in us. And as we grow INTO Christ, God’s will for us is that our self-serving love be transformed into self-giving love, that we gradually leave behind the “what’s in it for me” motivations, and begin to direct our actions more and more out of concern for others, and only for others.

 

From the perspective of finance, or security, or social standing, such a transformation makes absolutely no sense at all. The cross is the symbol of such self-giving love, because on it, Jesus gave everything, the cost to himself was total, and his personal gain from it was…nothing. It is, as Paul says, “a stumbling block” and “foolishness,” but for those who have the eyes to see it, it is the “power and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.”

 

To follow Jesus is to walk toward the Cross. The journey we willingly take as Christians is one from the self-serving love our culture understands and approves to a place ruled by self-giving love, which Jesus called the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom is illogical. The Kingdom is foolishness. The Kingdom asks us for everything, and offers nothing in return.

 

And yet, that’s not true. The Kingdom offers love. Not love we earn, not love we buy, not love we have to angle for. Not love that in any way serves our self-interest or anyone else’s. The world, by which I mean our culture, by which I mean The System, cannot comprehend actual love. I think sometimes that even we, who intend to give our lives for love, do not comprehend love. But I know we want it. We desire it with all of our being. Not to possess it, but to be possessed by it. To be wanted and embraced and cherished by a power so far beyond us that it does not need us, whose very attention, whose gifts, and indeed whose sacrifices on our behalf are not motivated by any need of its own, but only by a DESIRE to save, to EMBRACE, indeed, to LOVE.

 

Let us not seek to understand love, but to be possessed by it, so utterly possessed that our motivations, our way of life, even our very identities are transformed. Church isn’t a safe place. God isn’t calling us to morality, or civic duty, or to fellowship for its own sake. God is calling us to the cross, and it is MADNESS to respond.

 

By the way, I’m going to the cross, so if you want to walk together, we can keep each other company. Let us pray…

 

We don’t pretend to understand you, God,

But then, we know that no one else does either.

We are flummoxed and humbled by your sacrifices for us

For all that you surrendered in order to seek us out and find us,

Us, whom you do not need; us, who do not really deserve such devotion

And yet, here you are, offering yourself to us willingly at this table

Week after week, year after year.

Help us to get a glimmer of what you are up to

Help us to become like you, to be transformed into you

To exchange our self-interest for self-giving

As our concerns transform into your concerns.

And when we choose the way of the cross,

Walk with us, Jesus, every step of the way.

For we ask this out of our need,

trusting in your goodness. Amen.

---

[i] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilCannotComprehendGood

trust

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Romans 4:13-25

 

Martin Luther was a disturbed neurotic who, as a very young man, was completely obsessed with a single issue: his own personal salvation. He felt he was a terrible sinner, and confessed compulsively—driving his confessor absolutely bonkers.

 

He was, in fact, a tortured soul, who, unkindly, passed that torture onto us. Of course, he is not alone in this. A thousand years before Luther was born, another tortured soul by the name of Augustine had a neurotic preoccupation with sex who passed that neurosis on to the Roman Catholic church—a neurosis that is still very much alive and kicking. Luther did the same with his neurotic preoccupation with personal salvation—a neurosis that is still very much with us in Protestant spirituality.

 

As misguided as we might think his obsession is today, however, Luther was wrestling with a very real concern: how can a holy God embrace unholy people? How could a God who was blameless and perfect accept him, with all of his numerous flaws, facial ticks, selfishness—you name it. Luther felt insignificant and sinful—completely unworthy to stand in the divine presence. How could God love him, become one with him, work through him when he was so obviously and profoundly flawed as a human being?

 

Legend has it that Luther’s profound breakthrough came to him while he was reading scripture in the outhouse—as we all do. I have a full set of Baker’s Biblical Commentaries piled up in my outhouse, as I’m sure you do as well.

 

So…Luther was sitting there, enthroned in splendor, meditating on the word, and he happened to read the very same passage from Romans that we read this morning. And it hit him like a bolt out of the blue. It isn’t about merit. It isn’t even about holiness. God knows that perfection is not a human trait and does not expect it of us.

 

Instead, what God requires is something much simpler, and at the same time, much more profound. What God wants is our TRUST.

 

Take a look for a moment at the passage to which St. Paul is referring, in Genesis chapter 17. God is proposing another covenant. Last week, the lectionary readings emphasized the first great covenant, with Noah, in which God promised he would never again destroy the earth. This time, God is making a much more personal covenant. Abraham’s side of the bargain is pretty simple. God asks him to “walk before me and be blameless.” Let’s unpack that a little bit.

 

When God asks Abraham to “walk before him,” what is he asking for? He is asking Abraham to live every day with an awareness that God is present, that God is with him, that God is for him.

 

When God asks Abraham to be “blameless,” we have to be careful not to fall into the same trap that Luther did. God isn’t asking Abraham to be sinless, because that is impossible. The Hebrew word, here is tamiym (ta-MEEM), which means complete or whole. What God is asking Abraham for here is his complete and undivided loyalty.

 

Paul, in his interpretation, is saying that it was not goodness that God required of Abraham—there was no Law, so how would Abraham even know how to define “goodness”? Instead, Paul says, Abraham’s righteousness came by faith.

 

This word “faith” is deeply problematic. Many Christians interpreted this to mean giving their intellectual assent to a list of beliefs. But if we do that, we have just exchanged one kind of legalism for another. I used to think that faith was an act of willed suspension of disbelief, similar to Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith,” living “as if” something were true. But this, too, I think, is insufficient.

 

Instead, the word Paul uses here for faith, pistis (PIS-tis) really means confidence, or trust. Paul means by this the very same kind of trust that spouses have with one another. The kind of trust that is established by covenant, and is daily strengthened by mutual love and fidelity.

 

But just what are we trusting God for? In the story of Abraham, the concern is one fundamental to Jewish life and identity—the survival of the Jewish people. For Jews, this is what salvation means—God will protect their tribe and will cause it to flourish. Abraham is trusting God for progeny.

 

Luther, however, was concerned about his own sinfulness, and was afraid of going to Hell. His concern was for himself, and in trusting God, Luther hoped for forgiveness and a portion of the heavenly kingdom.

 

Does Luther’s concern seem a bit small to you? A bit self-centered? It does to me, too, and I think that scripture testifies to the fact that our Christian hope is much, much bigger than this.

 

I’d like to tell you about something that happened to me last week, something that completely shook me and broke me open. I was driving home from church, thinking about God’s promise of renewal, when I had a mystical experience, and experience of breakthrough which was both ecstatic and terrifying at the same time.

 

In the flash of what must have only been a couple of moments, I saw the Restoration of All Things—I saw all that was broken made whole, I saw people with their dignity restored, I saw an unbroken communion between humans and God, I saw peace between nations and love between neighbors. I saw the earth restored to beauty and balance. I saw all things in heaven and earth in harmony. It felt like an explosion in my brain, and in moments it passed, and I was left sobbing in my car, crying out over and over again to God, “Yes, yes, please, yes.”

 

Now, I’m always open to having an ecstatic vision, but next time, God, if you could wait until the car is not moving, I would be grateful, and the city of Berkeley would be safer.

 

Thank God, no pedestrians were harmed in the transmission of this vision, but the experience is still vivid for me, and I am moved whenever I think of it. On the surface of it, it seems like an impossible hope. And yet, it is the very hope to which all of scripture, to which the teaching of Jesus, to which the assembled wisdom of our traditions points: the day is coming when God will restore all things, when everything that is broken will be healed, when all that has been lost will be found.

 

Impossible? As impossible as a 90-year-old couple having a baby. Impossible? As impossible as a no-name German neurotic bringing the mighty Church of Rome to its knees. Impossible? As impossible as a man rising from the dead.

 

God isn’t actually asking us to believe in something impossible—it’s not an item on a checklist of things we have to assent to intellectually. God is simply asking us to trust that what he has set out to do he will accomplish. God is asking us to trust him—to trust him with our lives, to trust him with our time and talent, to trust that he knows what he is doing, and that this project of the Restoration of All Things is going someplace good, even if we can’t see or understand its end.

 

Belief is active and forceful, but trust is more like leaning back and expecting to be caught and held. Belief is cheap, people believe all kinds of crazy things, and it leads more often to violence and destruction than it does to peace. But trust is hard, trust is healing, trust puts us into the hands of another who is infinitely wiser than we. Let us trust God, not just for the salvation of our family, not just for the salvation of our individual souls, but for the salvation of all things, of all peoples, of the whole of creation. Let us pray…

 

God, when you visited Abraham, you changed his name. Change our names, too. Let us not call ourselves “believers” but those who trust in the Goodness of God. Let us not be satisfied with our own salvation, but be willing to take up our cross and sacrifice, to be co-workers with you, to salvage all that has been lost, to heal all that has been broken, to restore every relationship, so that nations will not make war, families will no longer be torn by strife, children will know their worth, and the dead are reunited with those they love. Give to all of us a vision of the Restoration of All Things, and move us to work for it, as we live into the promise of your dear Son, our savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Cross and Covenant

LENT 1 | CROSS AND COVENANT | Gen 9:8-17; 1 Pet 3:18-22; Mk 1:9-15

Lucretia Borgia was the daughter of one of the most corrupt men in history—Pope Alexander VI. Pope Alexander had, in fact, a secret wife—who was not so secret—and an entire brood of children, some of whom followed him into the family business, the church. Lucretia, being female, was not made a cardinal like her brother, but she certainly found her own way of wielding power, one that was worthy of her family heritage.

 

She was, apparently, very beautiful, and knew it. Her powers of seduction were legend, but beware those who took her up on her offer—because many of them did not live through the night. Lucretia, it seems, was exceedingly fond of a little poisonous powder made from the foxglove plant.

 

Like Lucretia herself, the foxglove plant is beautiful—deadly beautiful. Lucretia was not the only one fond of its fatal charms. It was, for perhaps thousands of years, THE poison of choice. Foxglove was the poison Shakespeare had in mind when Juliet drank her final draught.

 

And more recently, a woman put foxglove flowers in her husband’s salad, intending to kill him. Her husband, a Deputy Sheriff, got suspicious when his wife rushed their toddler off to bed after the child tried to grab something off of his plate. The salad was bitter, and he didn’t eat much of it. Later, he found foxglove plants in the backyard, sporting the same serrated leaves as in his salad. When he wound up in the emergency room hours later with severe stomach cramps and heart palpitations, he got worried.

 

But while foxglove has enjoyed a rather sinister reputation for most of it’s history, it’s fortunes changed in 1775, when an English doctor began experimenting with the plant. He discovered that, in small enough doses, foxglove didn’t take lives, but saved them. Today, medical preparations derived from foxglove are taken by millions of people around the world, known as digitalis. For those suffering from heart conditions, it is salvation itself, as it is one of the only reliable treatments for congestive heart failure and atrial fibrillation.

 

Where once it only took lives, now it mostly saves them. It’s fortunes, it seems, have undergone a complete reversal.

 

Today’s readings are filled with such reversals—reversals that are just as dramatic, and even more iconographic. Take, for instance, our reading from the Hebrew scriptures—the story of Noah. God has just destroyed the world, by flooding it. Yet God has saved “eight souls” as Peter puts it, by commanding Noah to build an ark.

 

After forty days and forty nights of rain, the ark finally comes to rest on Mt. Ararat, and God, it seems, suffers from an acute bout of remorse for his violent actions. So much so that he makes a covenant—a sacred promise—with Noah, and with us, his descendents. God says, “I set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for the sign of the covenant between me and the earth…the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.”

 

The symbolism here is so obvious that it’s nearly invisible. The bow and arrow has been the main weapon of choice for most of humankind’s bloody history. In this story, God hangs up his bow—his instrument of warfare and revenge—vowing never to use it against humans again. Whenever God “brings a cloud over the earth, the rainbow shall be in the cloud,” and God will remember his sacred promise. The symbolism of the bow undergoes a dramatic reversal—from a symbol of warfare to a symbol of peace and protection.

 

Peter, in this most interesting passage, points to another reversal—the image of water itself. In the story of Noah, water was the instrument of death. It is through water that God punished the whole of the earth—the guilty and the innocent alike suffered from the flood. It was an act of unspeakable violence, for which God alone is responsible. But look what Peter says, the water which destroyed so many has undergone a reversal, it is now an “anti-type” a reversed-symbol, where once it brought death through the flood, it now brings life through baptism. Again, an instrument of death becomes the sign of a new covenant between God and humankind. Through the water of baptism, we are made one with Christ, our sins become his and his divinity, his immortality, and his resurrection becomes ours.

 

As we begin the season of Lent, we enter into a time of reversal. We are entering into a time of darkness that will be transformed into light, we are entering into a period of introspection that will culminate in celebration, we are moving towards death as Jesus moves toward Jerusalem, a journey that will ultimately culminate in the defeat of death, giving way to eternal life.

 

There’s an antitype for this, too: the Cross. Now, I’ve always said that I’m not a big fan of the cross. It’s hard to feel all warm and fuzzy about an instrument of torture, no matter how many syrupy hymns are composed about it. “When I Survey the Wonderous Cross,” or “…and I love that old cross, where the dearest and best for a world of lost sinners was slain. So I’ll cherish that old rugged cross…” Sigh…it gives me hives.

 

To be honest, most of my objection to the cross as an icon has not to do with what happened there, but the substitutionary theology of the atonement that views the moment of Jesus’ death as the apex of human history, and the only truly important event of Jesus’ life. I also think it absurd that the cross is the instrument of torture on which God punishes Jesus for my sin, thereby saving me from God. Now, I think there’s a lot of things I need saving from, but the God of love that Jesus revealed in his teaching is not one of them.

 

Nevertheless, even if we discard this dispicable theology, the cross is still a potent symbol. The cross isn’t the place where God punishes Jesus for my sin, it’s where empire punished Jesus for daring to oppose its authority. The cross is where Jesus willingly shared the fate of the poor and the oppressed, those powerless souls upon whose labor and blood empire has made itself both mighty and rich. The cross is what happens to someone who dares to recognize a higher authority than the status quo, the government, or the privileged.

 

And the cross, too, has undergone a reversal. It was once the symbol of death, marking the main roads of the Roman empire by the thousands, sending a dire warning to anyone who might have ideas about rebellion or revolution or even protest. But the cross, like the bow, like water, is a living symbol. In a grand reversal, it became for us a symbol of God’s solidarity with the earth, of Jesus’ promise to remain in union with creation, no matter what violence we visit upon it or him, of the battlefield upon which the power sin and death and oppression and hell were defeated and destroyed for all time.

 

Like foxglove, like the rainbow, like water, the cross is both the symbol of curse and blessing. God has taken something destructive, and by some unexpected slight of hand that we can scarcely comprehend has fashioned it into a thing of beauty and hope and promise. This Lenten season, we will be holding both of these realities in tandem and in tension—curse and blessing, pain and liberation, cross and covenant.

 

For this is God’s covenant with us: our suffering is not in vain. It will avail us little merit, but neither will it undo us or destroy us or defeat us. God is the master of taking painful, dire, and destructive situations and re-weaving them into tapestries of beauty and hope and healing. The work of God is the work of redemption. The pleasure of God is the healing of the world. The joy of God is the restoration of relationships—the relationship between God and humankind, the relationships we have with one another, the relationship we have with the natural world, and the relationships we have with our own souls.

 

God’s desire is for all things is reversal and renewal. For God destroys death and fashions from it life. He exchanges destruction for salvation. He takes pain and fashions it into beauty. We may never understand this mystery. But we can give thanks for it, we can cooperate with it, we can enter into this Lent, we can celebrate it this Easter, we can internalize it and make it ours, and we can proclaim it to bring hope to others. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Let us pray…

 

God, we don’t know how you do the things you do

We don’t know how you take the pain that we create

And make it into healing.

We don’t understand it, but we’re grateful for it.

Help us, in this Lenten season, to enter into this mystery

That we, too, may be transformed

That our sickness and despair may give way

To transformation and abundant life.

You set before us the cross, help us to live into its promise.

For we ask this in the name of the one who did not

abhor the virgin’s womb, who did not reject sinners,

who did not refuse the shame of his people,

who did not turn aside from suffering and solidarity,

even Jesus Christ. Amen.

 

“Gratitude in the midst of strife…”

Deut 8:1-3, 6-10; Ps 71; James 1:17-18, 21-27; Matt 6:25-33

 

 

In the early seventeenth century, a young Native American by the name of Tisquantum lived in a small village named Patuxet in what is now Massachusetts. He was returning from trapping beaver one day when an English sailor named Hunt approached him and two dozen of his fellows and offered to make them a good trade. He invited them aboard his ship to show them his hospitality and arrange the terms. Once aboard, however, Hunt clapped them in irons, locked them below deck, and set sail for Spain to sell them into slavery.

 

When he reached the Spanish city of Malaga, Hunt sold many of those that he kidnapped, but was thwarted in his plans to sell all of them by the local Franciscans, who seized his human cargo, tended their wounds, treated them kindly, and taught them about Jesus.

 

Tisquantum managed—though no one really knows how—to book himself passage from Malaga to England, where he took a job with a shipping company treasurer named John Slaney in London. Tisquantum was dispatched to Newfoundland as an interpreter for the English colony there. He performed well, and after returning to England, he was sent out again, this time to New England, where he was instructed to make peace with the local tribes there, who were—not surprisingly—suddenly very hostile to the English due to the kidnapping of several of their people! Imagine.

 

Tisquantum gladly went, secretly overjoyed to be going home, since he had not seen his people in over five years. But his joy was short-lived. No sooner did he go ashore that he encountered not the bustling village that he knew, but a ghost town. Smallpox and other English diseases had swept through his village just months before, killing every last man, woman, and child.

 

Tisquantum was inconsolable, and was only shaken out of his grief by the fact that his boss, Captain Dermer, had been captured by a neighboring tribe—no less hostile than Tisquantum’s own people had become. Still overcome by his loss, Tisquantum nevertheless roused himself and met with the neighboring tribe, successfully negotiating his captain’s release. Dermer sailed south toward Jamestown, but Tisquantum had had enough, and settled by himself in the ruins of his people’s village.

 

But alas, he could not escape the English. A boat pulled into the harbor a couple of months later, laden with frightened people who were fleeing persecution in their own country, and more recently, fleeing the attacks of the very same Native American tribe with whom Tisquantum had just been negotiating, when the English tried to settle near their village.

 

But Patuxet was, of course abandoned, because the entire tribe had perished, and the English were able to go ashore without dodging any arrows, for which they were outrageously grateful. Tisquantum, no idiot, watched them from a distance for a while, trying to take the measure of these settlers.

 

I can just see him shaking his head in disbelief, because, apparently, they were hopeless. They had absolutely no idea how to survive in this wilderness, and indeed, many of them were dying before the Indian’s very eyes.

 

Still, he kept his distance, until a man of another tribe approached him and solicited his help on behalf of the English, since he knew Tisquantum spoke their language. So it was that Tisquantum met with the English, negotiated a peace between them and the neighboring tribes, and began to teach them how to survive the harsh winters of New England.

 

The settlers, are, of course, the Pilgrims at Plymouth, and apparently Tisquantum was too awkward on their tongues, so they simply called our hero Squanto. Without his help, they would not have survived their first year at Plymouth, for any number of reasons—starvation, cold, massacre at the hands of the native tribes, disease—pick one, because any one of them would have done them in. It was only through the ministrations of one heartbroken Native American that they survived at all.

 

That first harvest feast—what we celebrate as Thanksgiving—was no picnic for the settlers, or for Tisquantum. It bore little resemblance to the Thomas Kincaid-lit, soft focus romantic time of plenty you saw in your grade school filmstrips or on the Hallmark Channel. They were grateful, yes, but they were also as shell shocked and traumatized as people come and still function.

 

This is important to remember, I think. I can remember years where I thought, “well, it’s been a pretty crummy year—why should I even bother with Thanksgiving? I’m not feeling particularly thankful.” I now see how childish and petulant that attitude was.

 

We don’t give thanks because God somehow magically makes everything go our way. We give thanks because real life is a mixture of conflict and grace, of joy and pain, of struggle and triumph. At the very least, you know, it could have been worse! And at best, we see that God has not abandoned us to our struggle, but has upheld us in it, strengthening us, encouraging us, even ennobling us.

 

Just look at what God is saying to the Israelites in our reading from Deuteronomy. Their wandering in the wilderness was no piece of cake. Our reading says they were sorely tested, they were humbled, they starved, and yet, they were not abandoned. In spite of their hardships, God did not leave them, did not forget them, but continued to lead them, fed them daily through manna on the ground, and brought them eventually to a promised land of plenty. But in this reading, they’re not there yet—they’re still walking by faith, they’re still wandering, still hoping, still struggling.

 

The Jews look back on this time by celebrating Sukkot, the Festival of Booths, what we might call Jewish Thanksgiving, because that’s really the kind of holiday that it is—a harvest celebration, in which they remind themselves of God’s faithfulness even in their time of struggle and uncertainty. The way may seem hard now, their celebration reminds them, but let us stay faithful, let us stay grateful, let us praise God even in the midst of grief and danger in the faith and hope of better days ahead.

 

It’s a fine spiritual practice, friends. As James exhorts us, “let us be doers of the word, not hearers only.” Lip service to God is easy, lip service gratitude is expected at holiday time, lip service religion helps us to “pass” when we’re not really feeling it.

 

But lip service isn’t what God desires from us. It doesn’t grow our souls, it doesn’t make us better people, and it sure doesn’t help anyone else. But to face our struggles with courage, to be conscious and mindful in the midst of them that God is present with us, even when all seems dark and uncertain, to praise God in the midst of uncertainty—this is the source of true gratitude, not a superficial rainy-day thankfulness, but a gratitude that starts in the depths of our bones and radiates out to every part of our lives.

 

This has been a hard year for a lot of us—hardly as traumatic as what Tisquantum had to face, but difficult nevertheless. But there’s nothing Pollyanna about the Christian faith. We don’t follow a god who is sweetness and light all the time, or who promises unsullied joy and prosperity. Not at all. We walk in the way of the crucified. With Jesus, we stand up to injustice. With Jesus, we befriend the outcast. Like Jesus, we march toward Jerusalem when only danger is in store for us. With Jesus we pick up our cross. With Jesus, we cry out, “God why have you abandoned me?” With Jesus, we surrender our illusions of control over our lives and learn to simply trust.

 

And hopefully, with God’s grace, and a little self-awareness, we learn to say, “thank you” for the gift of life, for the people who love us, for the food and shelter that we take for granted, for soulful work and cool breezes and the tangy bite of a crisp apple.

 

Let us sit down at table this week, in the company of family or friends, and practice the kind of mindfulness that Jesus calls us to in the Beatitudes. Let us be grateful for the million myriad ways—both tiny and great—that God has showered us with grace this year. Let us hold our grief and our gratitude in two hands, forsaking neither. Let us give thanks to God for the gift of life with all its hardships and joy, all at the same time.

 

Because that’s the only kind of life there is. Let’s celebrate what’s REAL. Let us pray…

 

Our prayer comes from the 71^st Psalm:

In You, O GOD, I put my trust;

Incline Your ear to me, and save me.

Be my strong refuge,

For You are my rock and my fortress.

You are my hope, O GOD;

You are my trust from my youth.

My praise shall be continually of You.

Do not cast me off in the time of old age;

Do not forsake me when my strength fails.

O God, do not be far from me;

O my God, make haste to help me!

 

I will hope continually,

And will praise You yet more and more.

My mouth shall tell of Your righteousness

And Your salvation all the day. Amen.

leadership

Joshua 3:7-17; 1 Thessalonians 2:9-13; Matthew 23:1-12

The common thread connecting all of our readings for today is Leadership. In our reading from Joshua, we’re at a crucial moment in the life of the Israelites. Moses has just died, and has appointed Joshua to succeed him. But will the people follow young Joshua? God intends to make sure that they do. The people are marching towards Canaan, their promised homeland, with the ark of the covenant going before them. And just as they come to the river Jordan, what happens? God does the same for Joshua that he did for Moses—he parted the waters, and the people walked across on dry land.

In doing this, God put his seal of approval on Joshua. Before the whole of the people of Israel, God ratifies Moses’ selection, so that there can be so question about his election or his authority.

What we see here is a miracle story, and triumphant story of vindication, of leadership—but it’s kind of an old-paradigm model of leadership. It’s a leadership model with absolute power given into the hands of one man—and just as importantly, one MALE. The subtext of this story is that this man Joshua now speaks for God. Don’t you dare cross him, question him, or gainsay him. This is an archetypal example of external authority—the ultimate authority, God, deputizing an absolute authority amongst human beings whom none dare cross.

This may be a fairly recent cultural change, but I think the old model of leadership is going the way of the dinosaur. People no longer trust hierarchical authority. There may be places for it, such as on the battlefield, maybe even in business, but there certainly is no place for it anymore in spiritual communities. I watch with chagrin the pain of our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters as their leaders cling so desperately to this model, wrecking so much violence and pain in the process—and, quite frankly, coming off more often than not as buffoons in the media. It’s painful to watch.

But this is the way that leadership has been done in the church—until the late Reformation, at least, and the founding of our own Congregational tradition. But even back then, although authority was shared amongst members, you can bet it was only male members.

But “this is the way it’s always been done” is not an effective argument in religious matters, especially when it flies directly in the face of the words of Jesus. Look at what Jesus is doing, here. He’s refuting the so-called religious authorities of his own day, in pretty nasty terms, actually. He’s saying the scribes and the Pharisees claim Moses’ authority—just as Joshua does in our Old Testament reading—but unlike Joshua, Jesus doesn’t think that they deserve it. Because they use their power to keep other people down and make themselves look good.

Jesus isn’t exactly arguing for internal authority, here, but he IS instructing his listeners to question those in authority, to use their own discretion in spiritual matters, to reject those who set themselves up as leaders—which is pretty close to the same thing.

And his critique is harsh—he’s accusing them of using their religion to puff up their own egos at the expense of the spiritual health of ordinary people. He’s saying that they are abusing their authority, and that, in fact, they have no authority. That God himself is the authority. That, in fact, you should call no mere human “teacher” or “rabbi” or “father.”

Our readings challenge me to look at my own life. When I was first ordained, I would get a thrill whenever I would pass a mirror and see myself in a collar. I would feel proud, special, and I enjoyed the “special treatment” I would receive when I wore it about town. It was my own version of “wide phylacteries and broad fringes,” and yes, I loved it when other people saw it. I also loved being called “father.” I loved, in fact, everything that Jesus is railing against in this reading, and I was guilty of it 100%.

I like to think I’ve grown up a little bit. These days, I don’t wear a collar very often. I do it, usually, when I have to. It isn’t so much about being seen anymore, but mostly about what is expected. First of all, I want to be comfortable. And I’m not comfortable when I’m dressed formally. If I can’t wear jeans and a t-shirt someplace, I don’t really want to go. But for another thing, it is quite literally putting on airs, and that’s not something I’m comfortable with any more. But it’s expected of me, here, on Sundays. And it’s helpful in navigating through a hospital or nursing home without being challenged.

On the other hand, just yesterday, as I was driving up to Sacramento to do a baptism, I thought for a moment I was going to be pulled over for speeding—because, actually, I WAS speeding—and I reflexively reached for my collar. Privilege dies hard.

Even without my collar, I’m still not the Invisible Man. None of us are. People still see us while we do the work of the Gospel—they still judge us, for good or ill, they still notice what we do and say. How do we minister in a way that honors Jesus’ warnings and yet is realistic about our somatic visibility? Our reading from Paul is clearly in tension with Jesus’ tirade, and his instructions are sober and wise.

He’s reminding the Thessalonians of when they first met, about how Paul and his companions comported themselves among them. Paul is saying, basically, “remember how we behaved ourselves? We taught you, we comforted you, and we challenged you so that you would walk in a way that is worthy of the God who called you.”

Paul is talking about setting a good example. He knows that people were watching him and his companions. They were evaluating him, judging him, reckoning whether this was a man who could be trusted or not. Paul is reminding them that people are likewise watching THEM and evaluating whether THEY are trustworthy.

 

Note the tension between the two readings: Jesus is saying, “Don’t do these things so that people will think well of you,” and Paul is saying, “Be careful, because people are watching, and you want them to think well of you.”

Is it possible to reconcile the two? I think it is. There isn’t a question of whether we’re going to do religious stuff—we are, because we’re religious people. There isn’t a question of whether we’re going to be visible—we’re not Claude Rains, or Kevin Bacon, thank the gods. People are going to see us. The key question, I think is, “Who are we doing this for?”

If we’re doing it for ourselves, to puff ourselves up, to make people admire us, or to lord our alleged “authority” over them—then Jesus’ rebuke is well deserved. If, on the other hand, we’re doing it out of love and concern for others, we want to be careful not to undermine our own credibility, because then no one will trust us. The difference here is not between external authority and internal authority, but between something far less frequently discussed. The tension is between authority and responsibility.

As ministers of the Gospel—and if you are a Christian, you ARE a minister of the Gospel, the collar is entirely optional—as ministers of the Gospel, WE HAVE NO AUTHORITY. The old paradigm has passed away, and good riddance, I say. But what we do have—and plenty of it—is responsibility.

We are not the authority on people’s lives, or on what is true or not true, or what is virtuous or sinful, or who is holy or wicked. None. No authority whatsoever. Such judgments are best left to God.

But we do have RESPONSIBILITY. We have a responsibility to ourselves, to live lives of integrity. We have a responsibility to others in our spiritual community, to live in a way that reflects well on our brothers and sisters. We have a responsibility to this broken and hurting world to be the hands and feet of Jesus to them, feeding, healing, consoling, advocating, befriending, bringing the hope and salvation that we ourselves have received. And we have a responsibility to God to be worthy of the Kingdom and the glory to which we have been called.

That’s leadership. But it’s not leadership from the top-down. It’s leadership from the inside out. It’s leadership based not on some farcical authority bestowed on us from above, but on the responsibility that is common to all of us, responsibility for each other and to each other. Let us pray…

Lord, you called us not to set ourselves up

as kings and rulers and teacher and authorities,

but as friends and companions and servants to one another.

Help us to heed your warning, not to act for our own benefit

But for the benefit of those who are hurting.

Hold us accountable, and let us be accountable to one another

As we lovingly encourage and correct and exhort one another

Evolving into the Body of Christ that is truly in thine image.

For we ask this in the name of the one who loved us,

sought us out, called us, and sent us out

for the healing and salvation of the world, even Jesus Christ. Amen.

 

 

 

relationship changes us

Ex 33:12-23; 1 Thess 1:1-10; Mat 22:15-22

 

As many of you know, Lawson (our minister of music) and I have known each other for a very long time—since our days at California Baptist College, in fact. You might be surprised to know that we weren’t actually friends back in college, although we had several friends in common. I’m not exactly sure why that is, but it wasn’t until we’d graduated that we started hanging out and discovered we had more than a few friends in common.

 

Which is not to say, by any means, that we are alike. If I had attempted to choose a best friend more different than I, I could hardly have chosen better. Lawson is naturally introverted, I am naturally extroverted. Lawson is almost anarchic in his ecclesial sensibilities, while I enjoy the structure of the liturgy. But the thing that has always driven me nuts about Lawson was his relaxed attitude about…well, almost anything. I have often joked about him that he is the most un-ambitious man I have ever known, in contrast to myself, who must always have a project of some kind going, always pushing myself to “succeed”—whatever that means, and for whatever good it has ever done me.

 

And yet, as I look back over our relationship of the last twenty-five years, I can see that it is precisely this maddening quality in Lawson that I most appreciate today. When I compare our lives, it is clear to me that Lawson has always been happier than I. He has certainly been more unflappable. He lets trouble roll off his back, doesn’t seem to take anything personally, and nor does he worry or obsess about anything—in contrast to myself, who must obsess about at least three things before breakfast.

 

I used to disparage this trait. I then came to admire it. Later, I gained enough wisdom to learn from it. It is not uncommon for me, when faced with a situation that spikes my blood pressure, to stop and ask myself, “What would Lawson do?” and then try, to the best of my imperfect ability, to do precisely that. I cannot speak to any way in which knowing me has enriched HIS life, if indeed it has, but I can certainly say that I am a happier and wiser man today because I have learned from Lawson HOW to be a happier man.

 

I reflected on our relationship this week while pondering our readings, because they all seem to be pointing to the same profound truth: relationship changes us. It transforms us. We see this clearly in our passage from Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians. Here, he’s just saying “hi,” he’s opening the letter, not actually saying anything substantial. But on the other hand, he’s saying a great deal. He’s noting with pleasure—and not a little bit of pride—that the Christians at Thessalonica have comported themselves well, they have made a good showing of it, they have very quickly gone from being non-believers to exemplary representatives of the Gospel.

 

And how did they get that way? Paul says, “you became followers of us and of Christ.” Because of the time they spent with Paul and those who worked closely with Paul, they became like Paul in some very important ways, becoming “examples to all in Macedonia and Achaia who believe.” The RELATIONSHIP between the people in this tiny Christian community and Paul transformed these people, it made them better people, and effective ministers of the Good News. Like Lawson and I in our friendship, this is an example of how the relationship between people created something greater than what was there before.

 

We see this in a larger scale in our Gospel reading. This is a familiar story—perhaps too familiar, because knowing it well, I think we overlook its profundity. Jesus’ fellow Pharisees are jealous of his following and incensed at his criticisms, and so they set a rhetorical trap for him. They flatter him in an oily and obsequious way, and then ask him, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”

 

It’s a trick question, of course, because if he says “yes,” they can condemn him for collaboration with the Roman occupiers. If he says “no,” they can sick the centurians on him for inciting defiance of the empire. But our hero is clever and sees right through their trap. He tells them to show him a coin, and asks them, “whose image is on this coin?”

 

“Caesar’s,” they say.

 

“So give what is Caesar’s to Caesar, and give what is God’s to God.” It’s a very smart answer, partly because of what Jesus says, and partly because of what he does NOT say. In asking whose image is on the coin, he implies that imperial money does indeed belong to the empire. But the unspoken question is just as important, and would not have been lost upon his hearers. If Caesar’s image is on the coin, upon whom is God’s image? Human beings, says the book of Genesis, are made in the image of God. Our money may belong to Caesar, but our LIVES belong to God.

 

This verse has long been used in our country to justify the separation of church and state, but I’m afraid it’s not that neat. Because human beings cannot live in a society such as ours WITHOUT money—not for very long. And we cannot live together in any kind of numbers for very long without government of some kind before an outbreak of The Lord of the Flies occurs. Humans beings need government, and of course, government is meaningless without human beings. The two are not really separable. We are subject to both God and the state, at the same time, and as such we are a people of divided loyalties, and it cannot be otherwise.

 

We can do our best to separate church and state, and it is a noble ideal, but since you cannot separate God from those made in his image, and you cannot separate the state from the human beings that comprise it, you cannot, ultimately, divorce religion from government. Nor should you. Let me explain:

 

It is important that no religious institution should have any government influence, but faith influences government all the time. It is largely for reasons of faith that Catholics oppose both abortion and the death penalty—and is that wrong? Hardly. Faith, at its best, calls us to be the best people we can be—compassionate, kind, and moral people. The state is a reflection of us—IT bears OUR image, so to speak, and if we are compassionate, kind, and moral people, we want those values to be reflected in our government as well.

 

It is people of faith who led the civil rights marches in the 1960s, people of faith who have tried to shut down the School of the Americas, where the US military has been training Central and South American terrorists for nearly thirty years, it is people of faith who stand outside San Quentin every time there is an execution. I have an ongoing argument with a friend who insists that “there’s no place for politics in the church,” but there are very clearly political implications to Jesus’ teachings. You can separate church and state, but you can’t separate the state from people of faith, unless you want to make a rule that only atheists can vote. The fact that I follow Jesus INFLUENCES how I vote, and it should. Faith and politics should never be the same thing in a democracy like ours, but they are surely married.

 

And this is the point—there is a RELATIONSHIP between government and religion, and that RELATIONSHIP, ideally, makes both parties better. Relationship TRANSFORMS. Faith calls government to be moral, to be just, to be GOOD. Ironically, through its laws, government calls religion to precisely the same things. Is the relationship stormy? Sure—many of the best relationships are. But does it make both parties better in the end? I would argue that it does.

 

Finally, take a look at our reading from Exodus. Israel has just had its big “golden calf” fiasco—Moses has broken the tablets of the covenant, and God is ready to give up on them completely. God, in fact, is ready to abandon them in the desert and go in search of another people to bless. He’s fed up, he’s done, he’s grabbed his hat and is headed for the door.

 

But Moses stops him and argues with him, and he succeeds in talking him out of it. Moses says, “If your Presence does not go with us, then don’t bring us any further. We can’t do anything without you—we’ll die. Look at us! We’re not only vulnerable, we’re stupid. We admit that. We need your blessing to survive. We need your help. We need you to be with us.”

 

Maybe it’s flattery, maybe it was the force of a well-reasoned argument, or maybe God just felt sorry for the poor, stubborn, starving Hebrews. For whatever reason, God relents. He changes his mind. He tells Moses, “My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.”

 

Scripture implies that God learned something in this encounter—that God came away from this experience a little more understanding of human nature, a little more forbearing, a little more compassionate. The encounter with the wayward Jews brought out his true colors, but his argument with Moses invited God to growth, to become more than he was. The RELATIONSHIP between God and Moses transformed God, it made him a better God, just as the covenant made the Jews a better people.

 

Our readings show us that this is a truth that happens at every level—relationship between people makes us better people. Relationships between people and government make better people AND better government. And Relationships between people and God make for better people AND a better God.

 

Our theologies point at this, but I think they point at the side effects, not at the cause. The Catholic Church has always said that it was grace that transforms people. The Reformers said it’s faith that transforms people. But I say to you that it is relationships that transform people. Like St. Paul pointed out, it is relationship that produces faith. As with Moses, it was relationship that PRODUCED grace. It isn’t grace or faith that saves us, it’s community—the power of relationship to support, to correct, to heal, to grow.

 

That’s what we’re here, for. The church is a laboratory for relationship. We’re not here for any other reason. We come here to learn how to love one another, because we know that’s hard work, and there are few places in our life where that is the main focus and not just a side-effect. We come here to learn how to be in relationship with one another, to be in relationship with God, to be in relationship with the wider culture in responsible and effective and transformative ways.

 

It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. We have to give up our notions that we’re right about everything. We have to be teachable. We have to learn to say, “I was wrong and I’m sorry.” We have to learn how to forgive and forbear. And not just us, that goes for God, too. We teach each other. We grow together. We transform in community.

 

Let us pray…

 

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

You are yourself a community.

Through Jesus Christ, you called us into community

With one another and with you.

Through St. Paul you taught us how to live in community

With grace and humility.

Thank you for the gifts you have given us

Thank you for those we love gathered here

Thank you for the gift of yourself,

Your faithfulness, your kindness and care.

Continue to teach us, and to learn from us

As we journey together towards the Community you intend us to be,

For we ask this in the name of Jesus. Amen.