Sermons and Such

2012-01-24T07:15:00.000-08:00

Again, it has been a while since I posted anything. That is largely because since August, I have not been preaching from a text. This past Sunday I learned that I could record my sermon on my i-phone and I ended up with a record of what was said. The problem you will see as you read this is that I don't talk in very writable form. I apologize in advance for the punctuation in the following transcript. I have tried to make it readable, but a proper edit would take me all week. One of these days I'll figure out how to let you listen on the church's web site. For now, here is the sermon.

Sermon Preached on the Second Sunday after Epiphany

January 15, 2012

Ok. I’m looking for a show of hands here. How many of us would like to improve the quality--the living of our lives? How many of us have some idea that we would like to be better people? How many of us have imagined a life where our living reflects our deepest, most heartfelt values even better than it does now? Now, how many of us think we can get there on our own. Yeah. Welcome to Christianity.

Welcome to the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, the story about the God who intervenes in the world in lives of people who long to make it to a better place, often a better place they can’t imagine. They just kind of have this intuition, this hint. They know there is a better place; they somehow know they can be more than they already are. We are talking about a God who meets those people and says, “let me help you make the journey to that new place, let me get you out to that new place.” Welcome to Christianity. Welcome to our faith in which there comes a time in the history of God and people when God says, “you know, it’s time for a new way of joining you and leading you to the next new place, one that will be a surprise to you but that is really what your best heart desires. I’m going to do that in a new way.”

And so we get to the season we celebrate now, the season of Epiphany, where the new way of being among us to help us, to lead us, to help us make our way to the new place is a very up-close and personal way. No longer are we aided by a God who has to be sought in a temple or has to be begged to come near--a God we only see as fire at night or something like that. Our God is very near and comes among us in a very personal and up-close way, and that personal and up-close God has a name. And the name of the personal up-close God is, of course, Jesus.

Now I’ve got to tell you that Jesus has not always been a word that comes quickly to my lips. I was raised an Episcopalian. I heard a lot and thought a lot about God. I eventually began to get interested in the Holy Spirit because I knew there was something going on here but I didn’t know what that was about. I didn’t use the word Jesus very much because I had heard that name used in a lot of ways that were sort of problematic. When I was a kid and I would hear the other kids ask, “do you know Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior?” I would say something like, “I’m an Episcopalian. I don’t think we do that.” That’s just where I was. That’s what I grew up with. That kind of talk just didn’t sound good to me. Growing up there was always a draw to have that kind of a friend that these people were talking about, but it was coupled to what I always took as an off-putting rigidity about ways to understand the Bible and ways to behave, and I wasn’t sure I could do those two things together in any kind of way, so I just quit using that kind of language because the “J” word used to signal hard stuff.

As I grew up in the church I began to understand this evangelical business, you know, the people who say you have to have some kind of rousing experience of Jesus in your life--and you probably have to have a controlled and tight understanding of theology--I began to put that over in a category I wasn’t going to mess with. I certainly never would have called myself an evangelical, wouldn’t call myself that today, but I’m not sure about what I’d say next week or next year. Because what I am coming to understand more and more, the longer I stay with this business, is that Christianity is about nothing else really, nothing else but relationship with Jesus in which we travel with that up-close and personal God to the next place in our lives.

Now as much as I have tried to separate myself from all that evangelical stuff, it’s funny. I was thinking this morning about this sermon and what I was going to say and decided to take a break from sermonizing and check e-mail. There was my friend John, my life-long priest buddy John, whose theology I have shared since teen-hood. He said, ‘we just had this guy come to our area and speak. He caught my interest. He seems to be a progressive evangelical, have you ever heard of him?’ Even John’s getting into this stuff. I wrote back and said I have one of his books on my shelf and I haven’t dusted it off in a long time. Maybe I should take another look. It seems this Jesus stuff is converging on me these days.

There is a fellow here in town with whom I talk about prayer. We pray and we get together every month or so to talk about how that is going. We were talking this week about how it is only in the last year or so that we have both begun to use the name Jesus and to see Jesus as the one with whom we speak as we walk along through life--as we make our journey. I have, for years, spoken to somebody that I have called God or Spirit, but I have been reluctant to use that Jesus word, but now, here my friend and I are in this place Jesus seems to work. What I am finding as I go through my life and I live with this God whom I meet in all kinds of ways, is that I’m beginning to have a little different take on all this stuff. Maybe the person I pray to is Jesus. Maybe this person I walk with is Jesus, and maybe Episcopalians can know Jesus in some kind of up-close way.

I understand that you may think I’m strange for ever having said I didn’t pray to Jesus. You may also, though--and I think it is likely true for more folks in this place--think, oh,oh. Baker’s going off the deep end. Well Baker isn’t going off the deep end, but Baker is discovering, as life goes on, that Epiphany--the discovering Jesus among us--Epiphany is not a one time event. It doesn’t happen all of a sudden. It can happen slowly and gently over time. Until one day you look up and say, by golly he is right here. He is nearby. He is close.

Now there are all kinds of ways for us to know Jesus, and that is part of what I like about this story of Nathaniel and Jesus we have today. Nathaniel kind of had this idea that one day someone would come along who could make things better, who could lead him to a better place. He gets talked into--invited into--going to meet this Jesus and Jesus says, “yeah, I know you. You’re a straight up person, you’re all right. I saw you under the tree over there.” And Nathaniel says, “that’s incredible.”

Now think about that. The beginning of this friendship is nothing more than a little bit of awareness. Nathaniel is kind of aware of Jesus and Jesus says, “yeah, I have kind of noticed you too.” Isn’t that how friendships--life long friendships--begin. First there’s this, “yeah, I kind of have you on my radar, ok, I know who you are.” And then you run into each other again and then maybe at work or in school, maybe someplace you begin to have some more interaction and the relationship changes. And as soon as you’ve had an experience or two together, then the relationship deepens some and in talking with each other you can refer to those other experiences and it just gets richer and richer and deeper and deeper.

I think that living with this up-close and personal Jesus who comes among us, whom we celebrate in this Epiphany season, I think living with that Jesus is about moving from one level of friendship and acquaintance to another as we grow and become more and more of what we might be able to be. And I find that in that friendship there are wonderful little changes. This is the Jesus who loves us, forgives us before we can think about asking for it, who is just extravagant in the way he offers himself for us, and is also the one who challenges us--is also that little voice of conscience, is also that other little voice in the conversation in our head that comes up with a bit of wisdom or a nugget or something we needed to remember, and in that way, manages to change us. Not in huge ways, I never change in any huge ways, but a little bit. Maybe a little realization about compassion, maybe a little realization about how to take something that people say to you, maybe a little realization about how to give the tiniest bit of love back. Little changes that may not seem like much to the people around us if we told them about them, but that seem like scaling some big mountain to us because we’ve done something we didn’t know we could do until that friendship helped it to happen.

I’ve known Jesus in all kinds of ways. Back when I was a kid taking bread and wine, I knew something important was happening there, I just didn’t call it Jesus. When I hear that voice of conscience sometimes--I used to try to get it to shut up--now I may try to listen to it a little differently. I’m beginning to understand there’s more here than I thought. In exchanges with some of you, in exchanges with others, in receiving love, affirmations, hope--and challenges-- from the people around me I am beginning to understand that’s who’s been there all along.

And so I guess my message to you this morning is this Epiphany business, this Jesus who becomes manifest among us as God up close and personal--I know that’s a little weird for some of you--but up close and personal, that Jesus becomes known to us over and over again in brand new ways so that maybe at some point in our lives, if someone comes up to us and asks, “do you know Jesus as your personal Lord and savior?” you can just substitute for personal Lord and Savior a word like friend and say, “oh yeah.” Or companion and you can say, “sure.” Or mentor, tutor, coach. Any of those will do. But the goal I think for us in Epiphany is to end up in a place where we can all say, “yeah, I know this one. I know this one who showed up among us, who bears God to us in a new way and who is leading you and me to the new place that we can only barely imagine.” Amen

2011-10-25T10:25:00.000-07:00

Long Time No Posting

Dear Friends,

I see that I haven't posted a sermon since June, and it seems a little funny that when I finally get around to posting one it is about money.
Here's the thing.

I really haven't been writing sermons down since June. I was in Longport for the first three weeks of July and I have always just wandered the aisles and talked to those folks. I left Longport and went to my first residency with the Shalem program in August, where the subject of my next Sunday's sermon sort of came to me while I was running one morning. That meant I had a sermon a week before I needed it, which most of you know is pretty rare for me. By the time that Sunday came around, I had decided to wing it, to work without a net, as it were, and I have just been doing that ever since. I sometimes have some notes written down, but not something together enough to publish here. This past Sunday I wanted to talk about money, and I was as nervous about the talking as some of you probably were about having to listen. At 8:30 I stepped into the pulpit and tried to preach from a text which is part of the sermon that follows here. Walking in at 10:30, my faithful associate, Elizabeth, mentioned that the sermon could use something more. As the gospel reading wound down, it became apparent that I just needed to trust and talk. I had enough of this one written that I was able to post it.

I will work on some way to record and transcribe in the future. I'm having fun preaching without notes, and I am sometimes surprised at what I hear myself saying. Thanks for checking out the blog. JB

2011-10-25T10:04:00.000-07:00

A Sermon for Sunday, October 23, 2011

As I begin this sermon, I am thinking about a legend concerning a Virginia priest who enjoyed working youth camps in the summer. I have always liked youth and church camp, and I know the challenges involved in opening up discussion lines about tabu subjects. The story on this priest is that he would gather the kids early in the week and take them into the woods where he would proceed to say all kinds of things that he knew they would never say in front of him and that they never expected to hear a priest say, ever. The idea was to plow down the barriers to real conversation early in their time together. I was told all this by a camper who fondly remembered the experience some forty years after his time as a camper.

I think about him because I am up against a tabu subject this week and I have been thinking about how to begin the conversation. I thought about singing you a song. The subject is so ingrained in our culture that any number of great songs have been written about it. The Beatles did one almost fifty years ago. My favorite is Pink Floyd’s offering on the classic Dark Side of the Moon album. Unfortunately the one that got stuck in head--the one that has been with me all week is one by Lyle Lovett. And the verse that keeps playing over and over I hope will leave me after this morning. No finance, no romance. That’s how she told me goodbye. First she took my love and then she took my m-o-n-e-y. Yes, friends. It’s time to talk about money.

Most years, when this time comes, I try to work some stewardship ideas into a sermon on one of the propers. This year I decided to just talk as plain as possible about giving to the church. I haven’t really paid much attention to today’s readings. I do understand that many people don’t want their preacher talking so plain about money in church, but we’re going to get through this. I’m going to try to make it easier on you by looking at all those reasons you might not want me to talk about money. We’ll get through this. Breathe.

One of the first objections is the idea that You shouldn’t talk about money in church--That somehow, our spiritual lives and our fiscal lives need to be kept apart. Nothing could be farther from what Jesus taught. Jesus talked about money all the time. He talked about treasure and investments and about the concern caused by one lost coin and about the pitfalls of great wealth. He talked to anyone who would listen about their personal finances, about how they did or did not share their money and the importance they placed on their savings. Jesus understood with painful clarity the connection between our money and our spiritual growth and he talked about that relationship in ways that made people uncomfortable.

When Karen agreed to chair the fall stewardship drive, she thought of getting people together to do some reading. Last year and this year she handed out books and encouraged folks to read, not about giving or about money, but about their spiritual lives. She’s been at this for a while and she understands what Jesus was talking about when he said where your treasure is, there will your heart be as well.

Another objection to this talk is I’ll feel bad about my giving. I can help you with that. Let me read you a list of what everyone in this parish gave last year. Just kidding. Breathe. I don’t have a list of who gave what. I do have some numbers though. Seventy-two families gave some amount between a few dollars and three thousand dollars. Twenty-two families gave between three and five thousand. Ten families gave between five and ten thousand, and four families gave ten thousand or more. Wherever you fit in this line-up, you have company. You are not alone. The folks who gave more have mostly just been at this longer. Their giving has grown over time.

Maybe the squirmy feeling we sometimes get when the talk turns to money has to do with another concern closely tied to feeling uncomfortable about our level of giving. The preacher will ask for more than I can give. I won’t. Giving grows over time. Where you are is ok. You are on your way. For the last ten years or so, Mary and I have given somewhere between ten percent of our gross income and ten percent of our adjusted gross income. We certainly didn’t start there. My first pledge was four dollars a week when I was in college. At least one of those checks bounced. The first time we tithed, we did so by accident. We opened a business in 1980 and our income dropped to the point that what we gave the church amounted to more than ten percent. Later, after I’d been ordained, I heard a priest friend giving a talk in which she said that she gave ten percent off the top. I asked her later, “you do? Really?” and she answered, “You don’t?”

My giving has grown over the years, but my reason for giving has not changed. That first pledge was made as my contribution toward the good work and the life a community. My mother had died when I was a teen, my father was not well. One sister was married and the other had gone to live with another family. That first year in college I was wondering how my life would end up. Where would I find support, people to walk through life with me, people to help me figure things out. The congregation was my group. They were my people and I was a real person in the life of that community. I belonged. I have always given, not out of a sense of any obligation, but out of a sense of participation.

You will hear church folks talking about that ten percent number as if it is the only one that counts, but it is a goal, one Mary and I have worked toward for our thirty years together. Ten percent comes from Hebrew scripture where it was held out as the part of one’s production that should be returned to God as a thanksgiving for all the rest. It is a number written deep in our tradition and it has been a standard and guide for many of us as we work at deepening our sense that God is at the center of our lives.

Mary and I recently attended a workshop on retirement planning put on for clergy by the church. We were sitting there with fifty other priests when the financial planner put a budget for retirement on the screen. He had written in five percent for giving to the church and as soon as it went up, several people in the room said, hey what’s that. You’ve got that number wrong. That planner left having learned something. Ten percent was our number. It is a good number that has helped shape a lot of people’s faith over the years, but it is not the place to start.

The best way to approach growth in giving is to look at your giving in terms of what percentage of your income you give and then trying to increase by say, a percentage point. Even more important than that ten percent number is the concept that what we give is related directly to what we have received. Thinking in terms of percentage-giving keeps that important relationship in view.

I won’t ask you to give more than you can. I will, however, challenge you just as I challenge myself to work toward giving more.

And maybe the last question I want to address ties back to that first one about spirituality and money. The question is what are we being asked to support? Should we finance buildings and staff and programs or should we be feeding the poor? My response to that question could go on a ways, so I’ll try to be brief. I have come to believe that the money I give to support the parish is leveraged by the way lives are changed in a faith community. It’s like the old adage about giving someone a fish or teaching them to fish. The worshipping community is where we are shaped over time into people who do more and more out in the world to serve others in the name of the Christ. We are fed and strengthened for that service in this community of friends and fellow travelers. We are called to support the life of this congregation for each other and through each other for the world.

And one last word, not a question as long as I am plain-talking about money. A word about pledging. A pledge, of course, helps the leaders know what they have to work with as they plan for the coming year. Some people are uncomfortable with the idea of making a pledge. I want to tell you that a pledge is just an estimate of giving--it can be changed if need be--so maybe “pledge” is too strong a word. But it can also be more than an estimate, it can be a goal as well. Stretching to meet your “estimate” can be a part of your spiritual deepening process. Growth always involves stretching and reaching a little beyond what we have done in the past. If you have given in the past but but not filled out a pledge card, please consider making a pledge, not just to God and this community, but for yourself.

In the next few weeks you will receive a pledge card and a return envelope in the mail. When it arrives, I hope you will see it as an opportunity. JB

2011-06-07T07:07:00.000-07:00

A Sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Easter

June 5, 2011

Acts 1:6-14

Our ministry is out there. In the world. We hear it often. This Sunday worship is where we are encouraged, fed, strengthened for our work. Out there. In the world. This is where we prepare, refresh. Here we are forgiven and empowered. Here we are called back to love, which is our work in the world. In this place we remember that we are loved and in that remembering we find purpose we can take with us as we go to our various ministries. Our ministry--the ministry of Christ’s Church--is out there. Each week in our last prayer together we say, “send us out into the world, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you.” And then we go back to our families and children, our desks, our jobs, our volunteer responsibilities, our friendships, our chance encounters with strangers. Our ministry is in the world. We say it often because our work in the world is at the core of our baptismal covenant and our faith.

What I don’t say very often is that we all have a ministry here in this setting as well. Our work out there is grounded in our common life of prayer and communion, of sharing and celebration. And because it is easy to get confused about what is sometimes called “lay ministry”, I don’t talk very often about the important ministry we have to each other and with each other in the worship we do together.

Too often in the church’s life, “lay ministry” has called to mind the work that lay people do during the service on Sunday. Chalice bearers, ushers, readers of lessons and prayers are all ministers in worship, yes, and since the arrival of the current Prayer Book in the 70’s there has been a strong emphasis on the ministry of the laity in worship. That inclusion is a great gift of what we old timers still call the “new” prayer book. It is just that with a stronger emphasis on lay ministry in worship services we have to be reminded that the real ministry of the people of God is in the lives we lead outside this room and this gathering. So I try to remind us all often that our ministry is out there. But today seems like a good day to talk about the work we share here each Sunday and what the call to love might mean for us as the community gathers to be fed.

When they went to the city, they went to the room upstairs where they were staying, Peter and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James, son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas, son of James. All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer.

One of the most basic ways we can help each other in our various ministries in the world is to show up here on Sunday. All week long we are challenged in our call to love. What is the right thing to do? Where is justice in this situation? How do I answer him? Do I really need to make that phone call? Why did I respond like that? What should I do now? Our lives are full of questions and they are full of opportunities to be a little more caring, a little more hopeful, to go the extra mile in the service of some good. Every week we will nail some of the questions we live with good answers and actions and we will stumble and struggle with others. We walk through the doors of this place on Sunday looking for grounding, forgiveness, encouragement to go back out and do it all again, maybe a little better. One of the things that can give us courage and hope and strength is knowing we are not alone, that others are struggling and succeeding and growing alongside us. Just showing up here is a sign that you expect to find something here. Showing up is a testimony to what you have found here in the past. Some of us come through the doors each week not sure why we are coming or what we hope to find, and in such times the community becomes the answer. We are all here looking for something--we walk in and see that they are all here looking for something, they must be expecting something, this must be a place of hope. Look around. The people you see right now need your presence. Showing up makes a difference.

All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer. I sometimes hear questions about the relationship between prayer and worship and service to the poor. Someone on the Vestry retreat this year asked what will happen to our emphasis on outreach at St. Aidan’s if the rector signs up for a program centered in contemplative prayer. There are always questions in parishes about whether it is ok to spend money on bricks and mortar when there are so many in need around us. We live in a tension, a good tension between the call to action and the call to prayer. We need to be serious about both.

If you are familiar with the cycle of the Church year, you know what’s coming. Next Sunday we will celebrate Pentecost, the day when Jesus’ followers were empowered by the Holy Spirit for their ministry in the world. Today, though, Luke wants us to know that as they awaited the strength and call to go out and do, the disciples spent their time in prayer. And they prayed together. In John’s gospel today we hear Jesus praying that his disciples may be one as he and God are one. Jesus drew his strength for ministry, his call, his identity from his relationship with God. He was steeped in God in such a way that he found the strength he needed for amazing acts of healing and truth telling and even suffering. I had always heard in this prayer Jesus asking that we might be related to God as he is, but his prayer is that they may be one as we are one. That suggests that the relationship meant to strengthen us for our work in the world is our relationship with this community. The relationship that identifies us as agents of God’s love in the world is our relationship with this community. The prayer life of the community fuels and feeds our work in the world.

The community needs each of us. Who knows what our contributions will be? Who knows where the next vision for St. Aidan’s will come from? Luke’s telling in Acts of the disciples gathering in prayer lists eleven apostles. Before the Pentecost story, the eleven will have elected Matthias to take the place of Judas Iscariot. The company must be complete. Everyone is needed.

And of course, if we are looking ahead to next Sunday, we will be thinking of the day when the Church caught fire and began to grow. If you know something about that tension I spoke of between prayer and action, if you want to see the Church get to work in the world, then you know we need all the help we can get. Just as our presence here on Sundays reinforces the importance of our calling and mission for those we already know, it can serve as a powerful witness to those who are looking for a way to make a difference, in the world and in their lives. Those eleven who gathered in prayer mark a beginning, but they were just the beginning. You and I are a part of the great company who have been drawn into the life of prayer and service that defined their little community.

Everyone is necessary, even people we have never met. Everyone has gifts, stories, dreams. Everyone has troubles, shames, pains. We who would love the poor and the needy must learn to love each other and ourselves. The work of the Church is nothing less than the work of love. That work begins right here where we are welcomed, accepted, and loved, simply because we are children of God. Look around one more time. That is what we share. We are welcome, accepted and loved simply because we are children of God. Let that message sink in in this place over and over again. Then you will be ready to go in peace to love and serve the Lord. Amen

2011-05-12T10:25:00.000-07:00

A Sermon for the Third Sunday in Easter

May 8, 2011

This morning’s story of the walk to Emmaus is probably my favorite gospel story. It has everything. Clueless disciples, to help us easily find ourselves in the story. It has Jesus whom the disciples don’t recognize even when he is walking next to them, which again sounds all too familiar. And then it has this great message about how we will discover what is most important in the most unlikely ways--in a chance meeting, in the blessing and breaking of bread, and in the whispers or the burning of our hearts. This story does such a wonderful job of opening up a place of mystery and possibility around the risen Christ, that I don’t want to tamper with or set limits on its meaning by dealing with the story as a whole. I’d rather focus today on one little line in the Emmaus story. I’m interested in what the disciples said after their experience with the Risen Christ. “Weren’t our heart burning within us?” They had had a clue about who their companion was and they had missed it. I wonder if we don’t all do that more often than we know. Chances are, we could all use some practice at listening to our hearts.

We spend most of our time in our heads where we plan and calculate and solve puzzles. Our brains are marvelously crafted so that we can keep all sorts of problems in front of us at the same time, working on several levels at once. We can drive seventy miles an hour while thinking about how much fuel we still have in the car as we listen to and maybe even sing along with our favorite driving music, all while noticing that the car we are passing is the one that passed us just a few minutes ago, and oh oh, is that a blue light up ahead….. and isn’t the sun on those tree tops amazing. We rely on our brains and our thinking ability even when we we’re not thinking about our thinking ability. What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable….and think how far we’ve come since Hamlet.

We create machines as if they were extensions of ourselves, from Swiss watches to smart phones we prize that which functions swiftly, dependably and with great precision. We rely on our ability to use our heads. We expect so much from ourselves, and those around us. The one-word office sign you used to see sometimes said it all…..THINK! It is as if that is the commandment for our species in our time. THINK! Our brains can be fine tuned, taught, filled, sharpened. What a piece of work indeed.

Our hearts…..our hearts on the other hand are messy. While we can take charge of our heads and train them in the ways we would have them go, as it were, our hearts are almost by definition, unruly. They will not be tamed or taught. Hearts feel pain and love and yearning and joy. Hearts leap and break, they swell and ache. Our hearts speak to us in a language we don’t always understand, in a language we are not even sure we want to learn. Our hearts can surprise us, interrupt us in our daily routine, they can change the course of lives we have carefully put in order. Maybe the best defense we have against the messy incursions of our hearts into our ordered lives is to try to ignore our hearts as much as possible.

We can fill our time with all sorts of busy-ness in order to try to drown out the calling of our hearts. We can keep moving, drive to the store, watch TV, read the paper, manicure the lawn, twitter, read the statuses of a hundred of our closest friends, surf the internet. We can oil and tune our brains, work our way up to evil level Sudokus. We have a million ways of tuning out the voice that speaks from deep within and still it tries to get our attention like my cat scratching at the back door. “Go away, you can’t come in.” “Then I’ll just sit and stare at you through the glass.”

Of course we all live and work out of a mix of head and heart. We practice caring for others, we work at relationships, we sometimes seek out a friend or someone else to talk to, someone who can listen with us to what our hearts are trying to tell us. But in the busy, business world of high achievement, in the day to day world of simple chores, our hearts can can be drowned out by the storm of all that has to be accomplished in a day. And because our hearts are so uncontrollable, we can’t easily imagine how they can help us get our work done, so we turn up the radio and get back to work.

But here is the thing. It is precisely because we can’t control our hearts that we need to listen to them. Our hearts aren’t meant to be used as tools, they’re not meant to be trained or focused by us, they are meant to instruct us….to lead us…..to speak speak to us about deeper, less graspable things. Heart does speak its own language, and we can practice, not so much to change and shape our hearts, but to let them change and shape us. It is in our hearts that God is creating us, singing to us, whispering deep truth that we might miss unless we are very attentive. I find it interesting that the disciples who walked with Jesus that day were involved in a deep discussion about scripture and all the while they missed the message their hearts were trying to deliver. It is in our hearts that God touches us, becomes real for us, greets us.

John Wesley said of his profound experience of deepening faith, “my heart was strangely warmed.” St. Augustine said “our hearts are restless till they rest in thee.” And Mary treasured the promise of God delivered by the angel in her heart.

We don’t have to choose between head and heart, we have been given both because we need them. It’s just that since we spend so much time in our heads, most of us could use some practice learning the language of our hearts.

So…. and I hate to say this as the days are getting pretty and the beauty of nature is beginning to call, but I am beginning to understand those who tell me that they can be with God in their gardens just as easily as they can in church. In the quiet of such times we have a chance to listen deeply, to be aware of the one who is always with us. I have no doubt that many people encounter God in the garden or at the beach. They say the same thing about golf, but I don’t believe them. I’ve played golf. Learning to recognize the language of our hearts involves spending some time in solitude. If we can commit just some of our time to being present, available to God--if we take our hearts out for a walk or sit with them in silence or let them fall open as we pull wild onions, we, like those disciples on the road, may discover our divine companion right there beside us, known, familiar, greeting us as friend. We desperately need the council of the voice only our hearts can hear. Only by giving our hearts some room in our days can we ever come to trust them. Only by believing in our hearts can we come to know that the messages they would bring us are as important as anything else in our day.

“Were not our hearts burning within us” they asked. Would that it were so for all of us.

2011-05-01T11:27:00.001-07:00

A Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter

May 1, 2011

Today we have the story of Thomas. One of my favorites. I have always loved Thomas the skeptic, the pragmatist who isn’t going to be taken in by wild stories and emotional outbursts. Thomas who’s motto is, “seeing is believing.” My people come from the show-me state so I’ve always liked Thomas because his story suggests that there is room in this faith of ours even for people like me.

So...every year on the second Sunday of Easter I get to go off about the great contributions doubters and skeptics have made to Christianity down through the ages. I like to use this Sunday to remind all you doubters and skeptics in the congregation that you--that we--are a necessary part of the mix, that we are welcome here and needed.

So when I realized I was preaching this Sunday, I was all ready to get on my soapbox again and do my doubters-are-faithful-too routine. But then something happened and I find myself paying attention to Thomas in a new way this year. I’m not even sure after all these years if this story really has that much to do with doubt and skepticism. Maybe it has more to do with how difficult it can be to reveal and claim our deepest longings, and to hold any hope that they might be realized.

Mary and I have this great new screened porch with a couple of rocking chairs. That porch and rocker have already made a great difference in my spiritual life. It’s a great place to sit and meditate and read. A place for thinking about sermons. Recently I have been reading a collection of articles written for the Shalem News by Gerald May. The Shalem Institute here in Washington has provided support for contemplative living and leadership for thirty years. They train lay people and clergy in deepening their personal spiritual lives and connecting that spirituality with their work in the community. Gerald May was a teacher, mystic, and writer in the area of contemplative theology and psychology. I have been reading the articles he wrote for Shalem because I will be doing some work with Shalem over the next year and a half and I want to find out more about what I am getting into.

As I was reading the other day, I found myself pulling back a bit from the words on the page. Something there was a bit uncomfortable, and I soon realized it had something to do with his talk about love. May was talking a lot about love. He used the word a lot. He was talking as if love was really at the heart of everything. He was speaking in such a personal way about love that I thought I was hearing things I shouldn’t be hearing. And then I heard myself ask a question that surprised me. I asked, to no one there on my back porch, “do guys really talk like that?” Now let me assure you right now that this isn’t going to be a sermon about men and feelings and the need to open up and all that sort of thing. I just mention the reaction because it surprised me. Soon I was thinking about all the ways that love can mean trouble. I thought about all the ways that love can change the landscape of one’s life and realized that I was going to have to get past some barriers if I want to get serious about deepening my spiritual life.

Thirty years ago, before I started courting Mary, I got my pilot’s license. I had a couple of friends who flew for the airlines and who owned little planes. We would sometimes spend a whole Saturday out by a little grass strip, tinkering with engines and wires and such and flying over the farms and fields of northern Mississippi. One of my flying buddies, Jim, reacted when I told him about Mary. I said I had started dating someone and was in love. He said, oh that’s too bad. “Love’ll really screw up your flying.” And of course he was right. My relationship with Mary really cut into my flying time. I haven’t flown in over twenty years.

As I wondered about my reaction to Jerry May’s articles, I began to think about love and how much trouble it can be. I thought about all the great love-is-hard songs. Great country moaning songs about the pains of love. Folk, country, rock…..Love is a hard waltz…..Love Hurts….and the songs of encouragement….Give yourself to love…. If you listen to the radio at all, or read or are awake on the bus, you know that our culture talks about love all the time. It fascinates, frustrates, wounds and woos us. We can’t let go of the idea that it holds something we need…..that it can make us...complete us.

And…..

We are smart, self-reliant people who know enough to protect ourselves. We have all been fooled at some point and we aren’t going to be taken in easily. Loving too quickly can expose us to pain. Loving too broadly might demand too much of us. Love is...and I love this word...fraught. Some of us discover the depths of love for the first time when it is lost, a death...a leaving. Having loved someone to the brink of sobriety, a relapse exposes love’s danger. Love makes us vulnerable, so we tend to be cautious. We are advised to be cautious. But if everything does depend on our opening up more and more to love, then how do we ever get there? In our Easter story, Jesus helps us by giving it all up first. The story is that Jesus loves us until it hurts, until it does him in completely, and in the end that ultimate kind of love is redeemed.

So as I pondered my reaction to Mays writings, I was put in touch with how much I long for the call to a deeper level of love….and….I was very aware of my defenses against that same love. And then I thought about this sermon and looked at today’s story from John’s gospel. There stood Thomas, not unbelieving, but torn between his deep hope that there might be some truth in the others’ story about the resurrection that there might be something real to answer his longing--caught between that hope and the habit of protecting his heart from disappointment. Sometimes the strength of our hesitation is directly proportional to the depth of our longing. And then something finally tips. For Thomas it took a lot of help and an invitation from Jesus. Touch me. Feel my side. Your longing is not in vein.

So that’s where I was as I turned the corner with this reading. Thinking about that invitation from Jesus. Wondering where this sermon would end up. I went back to my rocker read a little further. Instead of telling you about what I read, I just want to read it to you.

May says about this piece: At the end of a Shalem, Psychology/Spirituality Day I read some words that seemed to be whispered by God to me.

I know what is inside your heart.

I see your courageous impotent love, and your fear,

and the tears you would cry if you could.

And I do so love you.

I feel how you hate your own selfishness.

When you see the poor ones in the street,

I melt as you detest your defenses against them.

I feel your deep heart-secret:

You wish you would not run away

but could embrace those poor ones, kiss them,

love them completely, caress their souls.

And I do love you so.

I know how you feel, deep, so deep,

when you bar your doors and secure your house

and invest your money and try to enjoy your possessions.

I know your dis-ease, your unrest,

And I love you.

and I drink from your discomfort, and find it good.

No, it is not guilt, nor shame;

I know the tastes of them, and spit them out.

It is your impotent love, your stifled love, your helpless love,

your yearning love that feeds me,

Yet I starve, I thirst. With you.

You are so rarely aware of me,

how I embrace you as you read the morning paper,

My arms cradle you, my breath is on your hair

as you listen to the news.

I know your unspoken feelings, for II am closer to your heart than

you are now or will ever be.

I feel your love, screaming out against injustice,

bleeding, wounded from the pain of others,

love become revulsion when the agony is too much,

The starving children, the hungry homeless, the tortured innocent,

and all the broken, broken hearts.

You cannot bear it, so I must

almost alone.

I drink up what I can from your love

in little sips, but I starve, thirst, and ache for you.

And I love you and cry for you when you cannot,

And I love you and cry in you when you must turn away

and go about your business.

ANd qwhen you can cry, I kiss your blessed tears

and drink them.

You feel my pain, you see my beauty,

You ache for my goodness,

And that is me, loving you and birthing in you,

Again and again, coming to you

in utter surrender.

Oh how I wish you could know

How completely I am surrendered to you,

For if you knew that, even just a little,

You could not help but surrender to me.

Your love would awaken

And we would become a mountain spring and a sparkling ember

And we would grow, into river and flame,

into ocean and lightening

Cleansing, searing, burning, renewing the earth.

Your love would grow wings of power and wisdom

And together in unbearable passion we would fly and die and fly again;

Our courage would encompass the heavens.

Knowing nothing but our love we would look

straight into the heart

of every broken being, every creature,

every plant and mountain

And live in them and caress their wounds,

and bring them nourishment,

and die for them and with them.

We would be relentless, my love.

We will be forever.

Gerald May in Living in Love, 2008 Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation

2011-04-26T07:40:00.000-07:00

Sermon for Easter Vigil, 2011

Matthew 28: 1-12

In this morning’s Washington Post, David Waters asks what seems to be a very strange question. He asks whether ordained people should seek public office. “To put it bluntly,” he says, “the question is can ordained people serve God and government.” David used to write for the Commercial Appeal in Memphis where I read him often. These days he lives in our area and writes on religion for the Post, including a blog where I’m sure his question has been tossed around all day. The flaw in his question is so basic that when I read the teaser for the blog I was surprised he had asked it. My guess is he was fishing for a particular answer and he posed the question expecting to slyly sit back and let his readers make his point. Being an old-fashioned newspaper reader, I’ll probably never go to the blog, but I am glad he printed the question in the version of the paper that lands on my lawn. It feeds right into what is speaking to me this year in Matthew’s telling of the resurrection. But we’ll get there in a minute. First I want to deal with David’s question.

The question suggests that faith orders the lives of ordained people differently than it does the lives of lay people. Otherwise, he would have asked whether people of faith can serve in the government and of course, we all know they can and do--thank goodness. The question he asks suggests that somehow clergy have a more pressing commitment to the moral and ethical demands of their faith than those who are not ordained--that somehow people with collars are more deeply formed Christians than those without collars. Well I’m here to tell you that just isn’t the case. If I thought that was how this business worked I’d be out of here tomorrow. The vows that clergy take have to do with specific service in a specific capacity among the faithful. The vows that might--that should--affect the way we approach our public lives and our work are the ones we will hear and renew this evening. I know we just sprinkle water on people’s heads these days, but the symbol of the water represents a full-immersion rite that makes us Christian from head to toe. You will never be any more Christian than you are when you are baptized.

So my answer to David’s question is, Yes. Of course ordained people can serve God and Government. This faith of ours belongs in the world. In fact, everything we do here in this place of worship is meant to fuel us and feed us so that we can live our faith well when we leave here. That seems to be the message for this evening, for we hear tonight that it is out there, in the world where we can expect to find Jesus.

Three times in the resurrection story we just heard Jesus’ followers are told that he will meet them in Galilee. Not here, but out there. Not right now, but out in their future. Tell them to go, he says, I will meet them.

Years ago I read a commentary that suggested Galilee was not the best of neighborhoods. Some people in the gospel story ask about Jesus whether anything good can come from such a place. I have had some fun over the years playing with the idea that Jesus was from the wrong side of the tracks. This year, when I looked up Galilee in another source, the Oxford Companion to the Bible, the Oxford folks made a point of saying there was no basis for thinking Galilee was some sort of unappreciated backwater. Galilee, they said, was home to many devout Jews as well as Gentiles, it was known for good and abundant produce, and in the first century after Jesus it became a home to schools and communities of pious Jews. They made Galilee sound like a pretty ordinary place, not much different from anyplace else in that part of the world at that time. I felt a little sad reading that because I had always liked the other version, where Jesus had that rebel-outsider stain to heighten his irritation of the rich and proper. Jesus told his disciples, go to Galilee and I will meet you there. And Galilee turns out to be nothing special at all. Maybe that’s the point.

Tomorrow we will fill the room with flowers and sing great hymns of praise about the amazing thing that God has done in raising Jesus from the dead. Tonight, though, we are told that our meeting Jesus is yet to come and we are told that meeting will take place in the most everyday parts of our lives. Matthew, Luke and John all tell stories in their gospels about Jesus appearing to the disciples. Mark’s gospel, the earliest, has several endings in the ancient texts. The shorter and supposedly older version has no appearance of Jesus. Just a young man sitting in an empty tomb telling the disciples that Jesus would meet them later in Galilee--out there, in the plain old, ordinary world where they would live their lives, where we live our lives.

I am persuaded by those who say that the stories of the resurrection appearances in the the gospels have a lot to do with the experience of the early Church. I can imagine people discovering the truth of that simple message--you will meet Jesus in the world--and telling all kind of stories. I have stories of meeting Jesus, of being loved better than I deserved, of being called out of myself by another’s need, of being challenged to amend my life, of being touched by awe. I have had heated, impassioned, intimate conversations with someone nearby and unseen, real and present. I have been surprised by Jesus in the the strangest, most ordinary moments. I’m pretty sure Jesus has asked me for spare change, and I know he has asked me to contact my congressman. Out there. In the real life world. Do Christians belong out there in the real world. We have been sent there by the one who promised to meet us there. We had better run for office and more.

So, Robert, Grant, Vance. The good news is that being baptized tonight won’t keep you from becoming president some day if that’s what you want to do. Being baptized will make you a Christian, though, as much a Christian as anyone can every be, just as much as a bishop or even a pope. And the promise that Jesus makes to you as the water is poured over you is that you will encounter him, in this moment yes, but most importantly, in the life that lies ahead of you. Keep your hearts and minds and eyes open and you will see him. In Galilee. In the plain old every day world. JB

2011-04-17T12:02:00.001-07:00

Sermon for Palm Sunday

April 17, 2011

There is a lot going on here today. First we welcome Jesus into town with great flourishes of palm waving and music. The celebration doesn’t last long though, for as soon as we are in our seats the tone of the day shifts as we hear Isaiah’s suffering servant say that he has “set his face like flint” knowing he will not be put to shame. Then Paul tells us that Jesus humbled himself and emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. And then comes the story we all know, the story that is so difficult to listen to and to hear.

One minute we are hailing Jesus as king, inviting him into our lives and the next we are standing with the crowd yelling “crucify him.” I find it a little hard to get my bearings on Palm Sunday.

Maybe it will help to remember what this faith of ours is about on the larger scale before wading into the stories of the day. What seems to me to be the center of the Christian message, the good news that we are to spread into the world in word and action is this: that we are all loved by God who will never quit working with us to love us into being the best people we can be. That kind of sums it all up for me. I find room in that explanation for sin and forgiveness, transformation, spiritual awakening, solidarity with the poor, self-giving--all of those are a part of God loving us into being new, more complete, more God-grounded people. The gospel is about love and change. I think it is that “change” part that sets the stage for what happens here today.

Now when I say that God loves us into being the best people we can be I assume that we have a good ways to go--that we are not and will not be, in this life at least, the best we can be. I also suspect that the best out in front of us--what we may yet become--involves becoming what we may not even be able to imagine. Maybe we will find somewhere down the road that we are made happy by things we would rather avoid at this point in our lives. Who knows, maybe growing into the full stature of Christ--that’s how Paul talks about our being changed--maybe growing into the full stature of Christ could even involve becoming the kind of people we don’t really like right now, or becoming the kind of people we think are silly. Maybe we will become like people who are on the other side of the political spectrum or whose religion seems strange to us. One of the concerts we had here at St. Aidan’s featured the group, We’re About Nine. In one song the speaker is explaining to a friend that, yes, he has changed in unexpected ways. He says, “the people we called obnoxious, the ones that we thought were funny, live the dreams that I aspire to now.” The trouble with change is that it doesn’t happen to us until it happens. And, when it comes right down to it, most of us are more comfortable with what is familiar than with the idea of moving to some new place we’ve never been. Change means losing something we have known and most of us don’t sign up quickly for change and loss.

Jesus rides into town, hailed as a king. He ends up outside the city on a cross.

Sometimes it is easy for us to embrace the idea of Jesus, or growth, or spirituality, or changing our lives, but then comes the reality that in order to move in any of those areas we have to give something up. Some part of ourselves has to die in order for the “new” to come. A little “God” in the areas we want to improve is one thing, but a god who wants to weigh in on our whole life can be troubling. C.S. Lewis likened God to a dentist. He said we go in with some problem we want taken care of and that part goes ok, but then the dentist starts poking around and picking at other teeth we’d just as soon not have to work on. As soon as the pain we came in with is gone we want out of the chair. Dentists, though, are by nature concerned with the whole patient. So is Jesus. The people who welcomed Jesus wanted something, but in the end, they weren’t sure they could take what Jesus had to offer. That seems to be the theme of Palm Sunday and the theme of our lives as we work in the tension between the old life an the new one.

Of course part of the story is that the Jesus who ends up on the cross is the emissary of the one who is determined to love us into being. Jesus is living out to the extreme the transformational relationship of love he had heard about all his life. That love was the heart of the faith in which Jesus grew up, the faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Jesus went to the cross knowing about the patience and persistence of the God of love. Those who had known him and who saw him die came to understand that Jesus embodied the love of God in a way no one had before. Even Jesus was called to change, to leave his old life behind in hopes of living a new and promised life.

The good news is that God is determined to love us into being, that we will be changed. The hard news is that we will be changed, and sometimes the cost--to God and to us--of bringing about that new life is almost to much to imagine. JB

2011-03-29T10:16:00.000-07:00

A Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent

March 13, 2011

So if you’re a Christian, raise your hand.

That’s good.

Some hands flew up. Others came up a little more slowly. Some of you, I’m sure, might have thought it was a trick question, as in ‘what comes next if I raise my hand?’ I asked Mary last night how many hands would go up if I asked that question and she said she thought everyone would raise their hands. This is a pretty safe place, maybe the safest place in all of our worlds to claim our identity as Christians. We all have some idea of what we are about in this setting. We can be reasonably sure that the people around us are here for reasons similar to ours. This is the place where we come to remember our life in God and our connection to God through Christ. We come not just because we are Christians, but to mark ourselves as Christians again so that at the end of the hour we can head out into the world again, newly confident in our identity as Christians. This identity thing is so important for our spiritual lives and for our work in the world, but living into even an identity we have chosen can be difficult.

A few weeks ago I spent a day praying and chanting and talking about faith with a group of clergy from many traditions up at the Shalem Institute in the city. As we began the day we went around and introduced ourselves and were asked to give our name, what faith community we belonged to and one other important thing about ourselves. When my turn came I told them my name and I mentioned this community and then I told them I was a painter. I don’t think I’d ever actually used those words to describe myself before. I said, “I’m a painter.” I had gone to Shalem hoping for a safe place to spend a day just being part of the congregation. I was hoping for the kind of spirit-friendly setting where unspoken ideas and truths find their way to the surface and are met by grace. I was a little surprised at myself as I heard the words coming out, I am a painter.

Though I have painted most of my life and was an art major for a while, I have never called myself an artist or a painter. Several reasons come to mind. I have always thought you had to be a good painter, maybe a commercially successful painter to call your self a painter. I have admired the works of painters and wished I could be one, but the gulf between my work and theirs always seemed very wide. I sometimes paint out in public, I set up my easel along the trail and paint the marsh or I go downtown and set up. People walk up to me when I am painting and for some reason--I mean they see the paints and the canvass and all--they will ask, “are you a painter?” I guess I figure if they can’t tell at that point then I must not be one so I usually say something like, “Oh I paint a little on my day off” and try to move them along. I think too that I have thought being an artist would make painting easy. If I were really an artist, I wouldn’t be scraping this onion off the canvass for the fifth time trying to get the color in that shadow right.

I have always been able to see the reasons I shouldn’t be called an artist and I had somehow come up with the idea that that identity would be conferred upon me by others or in response to the wonderful work I hoped to do someday. What I heard that day at Shalem was my own voice claiming the identity of artist, knowing somehow that claiming that identity was a necessary beginning to growing into it. Maybe I was able to say that about painting because I had gone there knowing I needed to give some attention to growing into my identity as Christian.

Maybe it is true that there can be no separation between who we are and who we are becoming.

If our identity as “Christian” is an unfinished business, not just a description of who we are but also of the life to which we aspire, then we need to be reminded from time to time that becoming who we are takes some effort. We are at the same time Christians and we are not yet finished becoming Christians. The identity we have taken on is one we must live into intentionally. The season of Lent reminds us that we still have work to do.

We hear in the readings today just how hard it can be to live into the identity we have chosen. Adam and Eve discover honoring a relationship isn’t automatic, that we humans are quite capable of choosing to do the exact wrong thing, even with our eyes wide open and in the best of situations. Paul is sure that there must be something in our DNA that causes us to miss the mark when we set out to be the people we know we want to be. And Jesus knows that even the desire for good things like food and safety and some power over our lives can lead us into danger. In the seasonal cycle of the Church year we are reminded today that it is time to apply ourselves, take stock of where we are and do whatever it takes to fit ourselves for the next part of our journey. Welcome to Lent.

The main reason I wanted to talk about identity today is that in this season of Lent we will be hearing as we always do, quite a bit about sin. I think sin reads differently for people who understand that they have at the same time already claimed their identity and are also living into that identity. We have all probably heard that sin separates us from God. Scripture doesn’t seem to bear that out. In the stories of our faith God just doesn’t give up. That is the message of our tradition. Sin does, however, show us where we need to be working. Lent isn’t the season of realizing that we are somehow cut off from God and in need of salvation. It is the season in which the God who has called us into our true lives pulls up alongside us on the path and asks, “how’s it going?” God may listen for a while and then ask again, “No, really, how’s it going?” expecting us to get honest about our answer. There may be sins and omissions of which we are not proud, but the promise of Lent is that checking in and getting real about our lives is a part of moving forward. We have all promised to follow Jesus. We have all promised to live into the God life. Lent asks us, How’s it going?

Maybe I was helped in claiming my artist-hood at Shalem by my reading the writings of some of the great artists. Robert Henri, the Amercian painter in his fine book, The Art Spirit, and Twyla Tharpe the great choreographer, in her book The Creative Habit, both say the same thing. In order to call yourself an artist, you have to know yourself to be a student. To be an artist is to be in the process of becoming an artist. So I ask you now, who in this room is still learning to be a Christian. Amen.

2011-02-10T09:13:00.000-08:00

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

February 6, 2011

Matthew 5:13-20

I come to you on this Super Bowl Sunday with what I’m sure will come as good news to many of you. I’m sure many of us are wondering, after hearing Jesus talk about the law today in Matthew’s gospel, how we could in good conscience watch the game tonight. I know it was troubling me. I mean when Jesus says that every letter and stroke of every letter of the law still counts the implications get kind of personal and pervasive. Of the over two hundred laws laid down in the pentateuch only one seems to apply to tonight’s game, but it sure sounds like a stopper. The book of Leviticus tells us clearly that it is an abomination to touch the skin of a pig, so the thought of cheering on a bunch of guys whose goal is to not only touch the pigskin, but to take possession of it, hold it tight, steal it from the other guy and even lie on top of it every chance they get seems a bit over the line. Knowing that those who observe the law faithfully might feel a bit uncomfortable about watching the game tonight I have done a little research. No, I didn’t go back to the Torah to look for loopholes. I simply googled footballs and pigskin and I find that footballs haven’t been made out of pigskin for many years so enjoy the game. Just make sure the hot dogs you’re eating while you watch are Kosher. Or you might want to skip the hot dogs and look in Leviticus a few verses before that one about the pigs. There you will find a list of which flying insects you can eat and which are forbidden. You’ll be glad to know that locusts, crickets and grasshoppers are all on the ok list.

“For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.” These are some of the most troublesome words in the gospels. They are problematic for many reasons.

First, no one follows them. No one even tries. Once in a while some preacher or debater will haul these words out to support the importance of one of the Levitical laws they like, but Jesus’ words about not one letter of the law passing away are always used selectively by such folk. The laws don’t allow any work on Saturday or the wearing of clothes made of two different fabrics. We too often debate which of the laws Jesus must have been talking about while we stand there in our hush puppies wearing cotton, wool and polyester. We don’t live these words. We really couldn’t.

They are also problematic because they are a part of scripture and we are supposed to take scripture seriously. How can we just dismiss such unambiguous teaching?

And maybe most confusing aspect of these words is that while Jesus seems to be saying here that all the old rules still apply, he will, in next week’s reading and the next, cite one of the old laws and then go on to say that there is a better way. “You have read in the law, you shall give an eye for an eye, but I tell you to love your enemies.” Today’s lines are a problem because they don’t seem to fit what we will hear Jesus say next. Some commentators think the lines we hear today are offered to help us know that Jesus is not just tossing out the ancient laws when he starts saying “you have heard this, but I tell you this.” But there seems to be more going on here.

Jesus and his followers were a problem for the Jewish community. They were seen as violating the sabbath since their day of worship was not the last but the first day of the week. They were accused of being lax about keeping fasts and rituals--the kind of accusations we hear in the story about the disciples picking corn on the sabbath. And they associated with the ritually unclean, and with outcasts. Jesus answers these concerns by saying he has not come to set the law aside, but to live it, to accomplish it. And then he goes on to say that he expects an even greater adherence to the law than that expected by the pharisees and the scribes, those who were most concerned with conscientious observance of the law. Jesus, like the prophets before him, like Moses who gave the law, was not calling for anything new, but for the a return to the foundation of the law, a covenant of love and respect for God and neighbor.

The first law in Moses was just that. I will be your God and you will be my people. We will walk together. In the lesson from Isaiah today we hear that the fast God requires is not sack cloth and ashes but justice and deeply held and acted-upon concern for the needy. Jesus speaks of those who follow the letter of the law when he calls for a righteousness that exceeds that of the pharisees. As always, Jesus calls for changed hearts that live out love of God and neighbor without having to focus so much on the rules, and that sometimes trumps the rules.

Learning to love our neighbors is like learning to ride a bike, or to paint or play an instrument. There are all kinds of rules and principles and good advice on how to do those things. There are scales to learn, music theory, color principles, keeping your feet on the pedals, looking down the road and not at your feet. Behind all of those simple-yet-complex activities are deeper principles of physics, logic, science. And yet doing any of those things well means at the moment they are happening, all the details are forgotten. Fingers fly over strings, colors fill canvas, spokes sing as we fly down the hill.

Jesus does not discount the principles by which we are shaped into people of God. He affirms today the importance of those laws. But Jesus won’t stop there. He brings us to the place where we have to forget about our feet and about pedaling and just trust centrifugal force and our sense of balance and go.

This week in the class on Marcus Borg’s Embracing an Adult Faith, Borg said at one point he didn’t have to believe in God he said he knew God. As he said that, heads nodded around the room. He spoke of having come to know God through experiences of God. I am pretty sure Jesus is suggesting not just in today’s lesson , but throughout the gospels, a new way of coming to that kind of knowing.

At some point we are just supposed to know what it is to love God and neighbor. To know. Not necessarily to understand, but to know. To have it just flow from us because it is in us. Jesus seems to be saying again and again that learning love…..that coming to know God living in us around us and working through us...is something we must come to through experience.

And what kind of experience will bring us this kind of knowing?

Practice, says Jesus. Feed the hungry, house the homeless, free the prisoners, forgive each other, heal the sick, help your neighbor carry their load, turn the other cheek…...the list goes on.

It is clear from the gospels themselves that Jesus’ was passionate about opening up his audience to a new level of participation in the God life, the life for which we were born. Amen

2011-02-01T10:29:00.000-08:00

Sermon for the Third Sunday in Epiphany

January 23, 2011

Matthew 4:12-23

I just attended my 17th annual diocesan convention, which in VA is called the annual council. Whatever you call it, a convention is a convention.

Lots of friendly conversation in the corridors outside the main assembly hall, and usually at least some grinding and gnashing of teeth on the inside.

Council is a chance to meet and greet friends from the far corners of the diocese, and to network, to speak in this web-lived age face to face with people you may have known for some time but never met. I think I enjoyed the company of my colleagues in ministry this year more than ever as we made our way through annual council. That may have been because I have gained some understanding at long last about that grinding and gnashing of teeth part of council I just mentioned. There was a lot less heated debate about issues this year than most other years, and the debate has shifted a bit so that this year the debates were at least on new topics.

All in all it was a good event, and before it was over, I found myself remembering my very first diocesan council and something that happened there that I had completely forgotten about. It comes back to me now as a sign whose meaning and gift I may at last be ready to comprehend. I think it came to me during bishop Gulick’s sermon at the eucharist on Friday. He said something about having to give up our nostalgic view of the past as we move into the future and it kind of set me to thinking. He sent me off as preachers sometimes will into a whole line of thought that may or may not have had anything to do with what he was preaching about. Before I knew I had gone back 17 years and there I was, watching Marie’s long walk to the microphone that fateful morning.

Now before I explain to you what happened, let me just say that I do have some appreciation for the pitfalls of wearing a skirt. It’s the sort of thing you just kind of discover, even if you are a guy, when you go to seminary. At some point you begin to wear a long flowing robe and to discover what kinds of things can happen if you aren’t careful. Many a seminarian has stepped on his skirt and stumbled headlong up the steps and into the pulpit at VTS. I had a friend whose beautiful, long, billowy English surplice inflated one day while he was leading prayers in front of two hundred students. He was kneeling at the prayer desk at the front of the chapel when the heat cycled on. Somehow his robe had positioned itself right over the vent, and when it filled with air he looked kind of like a large black and white bowling ball with a tiny head reading suffrages A from morning prayer. It was a memorable moment. Kind of surreal. These sorts of robing pitfalls I know, but what happened to poor Marie that day just seemed very unfair.

Marie and Edgar had been fixtures in the diocese as long as anyone could remember. Edgar was a vocational deacon, and Marie was very involved in diocesan business. Marie had gotten to the point where she moved kind of slowly, but slow or fast she was still a moving force in that little diocese and she didn’t mind speaking her mind. So no one was surprised when Marie got up to move to the microphone to weigh in on whatever resolution was being debated that morning. What did surprise pretty much everyone as she made her way to the front of that auditorium was that somehow--maybe she had just returned from a needed break, who knows, but somehow, the bottom back edge of her billowy, flowing skirt had ended up tucked into the waistband and the view from behind as she walked down the aisle drew the attention of everyone in the room. That may have been the quietest moments of the convention.

In those days the women at convention were badly outnumbered by the men, and the men were cowards. Not one of them was about to tackle the problem of Marie’s skirt. She made it all the way to the front before a couple of her friends managed to fall in behind her and deliver the necessary tug. Marie, thank goodness was a class act. She bore the story well, though it did linger for a while.

So there I was yesterday, taking in the proceedings of this latest convention wondering why that image had popped into my head. I was wondering too what I would preach about today. (There is often time for some personal reflection during committee reports.) I thought about the gospel for today and wondered if I still wanted to preach about the Zebedee boys and the others leaving everything behind to follow Jesus. I had been thinking about that all week. I had been thinking about asking you folks what you had left behind to follow Jesus, but I wasn’t real sure what my answer to that question would be, so I didn’t know if I wanted to go there. I thought about the business and the debates at every one of the church conventions I have attended, and about how those debates always involve leaving something behind and taking on something new. I thought about how when we debate which relationships we should bless, we are standing at a crossroads where we are being asked to head off in a new direction we don’t know much about. That seems to be true for other debates too, like how to fund the diocese, or whether to take a stand on some social issue. There always seems to be a tension between what has been and what might be. I used to wish we would come to the end of those debates, but I have come to understand that that will never happen.

Those of us who have chosen to walk with Jesus will always have to struggle with what we are called to leave behind. When Jesus calls us a part of answering that call involves figuring out what we can’t take with us.

I was struck in today’s gospel by the leaving behind. The disciples left nets, boats, even their father. This leaving an old life behind in order to take up a new one is a theme running through all of scripture. Adam and Eve, Abraham, Israel, The prophets, Jesus, Peter, James and John, all of them took to the road with God, leaving behind everything they had known. They all set out to follow the one who would lead them to a place they had never been before. With few exceptions there was no looking back. Israel in the desert complained about the good old days in Egypt, which, if you remember the story, were not good old days at all. The message of all the great stories in our tradition is that we are called to take up the path and move forward with no thought for what is behind us. ……….which of course, brings me back to Marie. Called forth into the debate, she pressed forward with no thought about what was behind her. If only we could all be so single-minded in our discipleship.

I think what changed for me in council this year is that I came to understand that we will never finish the work of learning how to leave some things behind in order to take up the new path. We are, I think, called to live in the tension between the call and our desire to hold on to what we have. It is in that tension that Jesus speaks to us, works with us, helps us learn what really matters.

I think we are probably called daily to leave something behind, and maybe part of being on the road with Jesus is learning to recognize that ongoing call in our lives. Maybe you can name some of the thing you have left behind to follow Jesus. Maybe you have a sense of what you will have to leave behind if you want to travel farther. Anger, resentment, love of comfort, the need for control, security, fear of not having enough, the need for approval, the belief that maybe we aren’t really worthy of Jesus’ companionship, the fear of discovering our true selves, those are just a few of the possibilities that come to mind. We may have to wrestle with some of those all our lives. We may also be able to look back from time to time and realize that some things have been left behind and forgotten. There is a joy and freedom that comes from realizing we have forgotten about some things we didn’t think we could get along without. In those moments we can give thanks to our companion in the way whose call has set us free. In those moments we find hope that on this path we will learn to lay down even more of our burden.

This leaving something behind to take up the new path isn’t only for individuals. Bishop Gulick was talking in his sermon about congregations. He said one of the things congregations often struggle with as they try to move forward is a nostalgic memory of the good old days. The call, even for congregations is to go toward a place we have never been. The workshops I attended this weekend had to do with meeting people where they live, with taking the church into the world, into arenas like facebook and twitter. This cradle Episcopalian is being called to leave behind some perfectly good, but outdated ideas about what church should look like. Maybe that’s my answer to the question I was going to ask you. I am called to leave behind at least some of what I have held sacred about church and worship over the years. And now that I have an answer I don’t feel so bad about asking you. You can take the question home with you. Think of it as homework, or even your life’s work. Put simply, the question is this. What do you have to leave behind in order to follow Jesus?

2011-01-03T10:22:00.001-08:00

Christmas Eve 2010

Isaiah 9:2-7

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light;

those who lived in a land of deep darkness--on them light has shined.

I am remembering tonight another night, one that seemed to me longer than this night will, even to all the seven-year-olds in the world who think having to wait for morning is a kind of torture. I’m thinking of a long night spent in the woods, camping by a river, a night when the moon and stars disappeared only a little while before the rains came. The night filled quickly with thunder and lightning and the threat of rising water. The tent I was in offered only protection from the rain. It would be worth nothing if lightning found a nearby tree or the river came up as it was know to do. It was a long night of blackness, loud noises and dark fear. I bristled in that night, waiting for terrible news and knowing it could come. The dark of that night was met by a darkness in me. It was a long night. I don’t remember if I slept at all, but I remember mists on the water the the next morning, a gentle rain, and and a similarly gentle light. Light.

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. This is the night of impossible light, breaking, dawning. The story of Jesus’ birth resonates with the poem from Isaiah about the new light. That is the theme for this evening. Light breaking in and dispelling even the worst darkness. This theme of Jesus being the light of the world is an old one, older even than the creeds or the theological constructs about who Jesus is. This theme was known before we even talked about Trinity, or tried to explain how Jesus and God fit together. It is ancient.

On the Diane Rehm show this week, I heard an interview with a fellow who had written a dissertation on an obscure document from the Vatican’s vaults called the Revelation of the Magi. It was an account, claiming to have been written by the Magi who traveled to Bethlehem and found Jesus. It was written in the first person by one of them, and though there are problems with the authenticity of it’s authorship, it does seem to have been written within a hundred years of the event and it tells an interesting story of those wise men and what they experienced. It says, for one thing, that there were at least ten Magi. Ten names are listed. There may have been more because some of the language used indicates numbers approaching those of a small army. But the most interesting part of the story for me was the part about the star they followed. According to the wise man writing the story, they followed the star until it fell from the sky and became the baby in the manger. Long before the councils of Nicea or Constantinople, here was a story of Jesus being the light of the world.

From the beginning it seems, the faithful made the connection between Jesus and the poem from the prophet Isaiah. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness--on them light has shined. …..For a child has been born for us, a son given to us…...he is named wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, prince of peace….. The light is not just light it is more. We hear of joy, exhultation, freedom-- the yoke across our shoulders you have broken. We hear of peace, justice and righteousness. Scholars think Isaiah may have been writing about a new prince born in his own time, one who was a sign of God’s favor and continuing care. The people who first associated this poem with Jesus had this poem in their memory. It was a part of the story they had grown up with, it was a part of their story. And what is always amazing to me and what provides for me a powerful witness to Jesus effect on his world, is that those folks went looking for a way to grasp their experience of Jesus and fixed on this poem about light. When Jesus was born, a new light was breaking into the world, a light that would put and end to darkness.

Maybe you have a story about light. Maybe you have stories like mine about light dispelling fear, or maybe you remember looking into clouds after a storm and seeing those brightly lit holes that look little kingdoms in the sky. Maybe you have wondered irf you could walk in such places. Maybe you know a cat that loves a piece of sun on the floor on a cold day, or you remember lying in the grass in April after a long winter, soaking in the first new warmth of the new year. Maybe your light memory is purely metaphorical. Maybe you know about the light that is the long awaited phone call saying all is well, someone has arrived safely, the wait is over. Somewhere in your story, I hope there is a moment in which you not only saw a great light, but felt it, knew its power, were warmed in some way that you still recall. This night the theme is very simply that a great light has broken upon our lives. This is the night when all we need to do is bask in that light, enjoy its glow, feel its warmth.

Don’t get me wrong. Jesus coming into our world makes a big difference in all areas of our lives. There is much we need to consider in response to the incarnation. There is work to do, theology to consider, things to change, mostly ourselves. The implications of the incarnation have been reverberating through the universe for two thousand years. There is much to do. But all that will keep. Tonight it is enough to stop for a while and take in once again the beginning of the Jesus story. Tonight it is enough to remember that as soon as Jesus had gone, people began to think of stories about light. Stories about promise and God’s faithfulness, as sure as the sunrise. JB

2010-11-03T10:37:00.000-07:00

I am posting this letter from the House of Bishops here so it can be accessed from the St. Aidan's newsletter, The Epistle

A Pastoral Letter from the House of Bishops

Phoenix, Arizona, September 21, 2010

There shall be for you and the resident alien a single statute, a perpetual statute throughout your

generations; you and the alien shall be alike before the Lord. You and the alien who resides with

you shall have the same law and the same ordinance (Numbers 15:15-16).

So [Christ] came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were

near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no

longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the

household of God (Ephesians 2:17-19).

Dear People of God,

Throughout our meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, we have reflected on the immigration crisis facing

our host state, the United States, and all nations globally. A number of us visited the United

States-Mexico border and saw first hand the many troubling and complex issues that face

migrants, immigrants, the border patrol, local ranchers, and Christian communities seeking to

minister to all of these groups. We are also mindful that similar border issues confront other

nations represented in The Episcopal Church, especially countries in Europe, the Dominican

Republic and Haiti, and Colombia and Ecuador.

Holy Scripture teaches us that all human beings are made in the image of God, and that Jesus

Christ gave his life for all people. Furthermore, both the Old and New Testaments declare the

importance of hospitality to resident alien and strangers, a hospitality that rests on our common

humanity. All human beings are therefore deserving of dignity and respect, as we affirm in our

Baptismal Covenant (Book of Common Prayer, p.305). So our gracious welcome of immigrants,

documented or undocumented, is a reflection of God’s grace poured out on us and on all. In this

light:

(1) Ours is a migratory world in which many people move across borders to escape poverty,

hunger, injustice and violence. We categorically reject efforts to criminalize undocumented

migrants and immigrants, and deplore the separation of families and the unnecessary

incarceration of undocumented workers. Since, as we are convinced, it is natural to seek gainful

employment to sustain oneself and one’s family, we cannot agree that the efforts of

undocumented workers to feed and shelter their households through honest labor are criminal.

(2) We profess that inhumane policies directed against undocumented persons (raids, separation

of families, denial of health services) are intolerable on religious and humanitarian grounds, as is

attested by the consensus of a wide range of religious bodies on this matter.

(3) We call on the government of the United States and all governments to create fair and

humane immigration policies that honor the dignity of people on all sides of this issue. In the

United States, we seek a reasonable path to citizenship for undocumented workers; a plan to

reunite families; and a viable system for receiving temporary or seasonal guest-workers, with

clearly identified points of entry. These measures would free the United States border patrol to

concentrate its efforts on the apprehension of drug traffickers, terrorists, and other criminals, and

not on ordinary people who are simply seeking a better life for themselves and their children.

(4) We acknowledge the duty of governments to protect their people, including the securing of

borders. The church has always respected this duty, which is grounded in government’s God-

given duty to protect innocent people and punish wrongdoers (Romans 13:1-7; 1 Peter 2:13-17).

(5) We recognize that racism and bigotry impact debates over migration and immigration. The

Episcopal Church is committed to the eradication of all forms of racism, and decries the use of

racial profiling in the arrest of persons suspected of being undocumented.

(6) We confess our own complicit sinfulness as people who benefit from the labor of

undocumented workers without recognizing our responsibility to them. We passively tolerate an

economic and political system that accepts this labor from millions of undocumented workers,

and which has received approximately $520 billion in social security revenue from them--

revenue from which they will never benefit. Yet at the same time we treat them as a threat.

(7) We do not discount the concerns of our fellow citizens regarding the danger uncontrolled

immigration poses to our safety and economic well-being. We insist, however, that these

concerns be approached within the broader context of a national commitment and covenant to

inclusion and fellowship across all lines for the sake of the common good.

(8) We take seriously our commitment to and responsibility for our fellow citizens, as we strive

to face the spiritual, moral and economic challenges of life in all sixteen nations represented in

The Episcopal Church. We call on our fellow citizens to remember that the good of a nation lies

beyond its own self-interest, toward a vision of a humanity restored in Jesus Christ, for in him

“you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13).

(9) We offer for additional study a theological resource, “The Nation and the Common Good:

Reflections on Immigration Reform.”

God’s grace be with us all.

2010-10-24T03:29:00.001-07:00

Sermon for the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost

October 24, 2010

Luke 18:9-14

A few weeks ago the adult ed. class heard Marcus Borg, in the video for the morning, offer a definition of religion. He said, “religion is about ultimate transformation.” I have always liked Borg for his ability to pack much wisdom and what feels like deep truth into a few well chosen words. “Religion is about ultimate transformation.” As soon as I heard him say the words I began to wonder why they sounded so solid, and I began to wonder what I might have said religion was about before I heard them. I came up with quite a list, and what I find about Borg’s definition is that if I lay his definition and all the others I can think of before me, his is the only one that can contain all the others. My list included the message of religion, its attempt to teach us how to live, teaching us about our place in the universe, about relationship with God and neighbor and about getting to heaven. At different times in my life I have thought religion had to do with all of those things. What I hadn’t noticed was that all of those aspects of religion have to do with being transformed.

The christian message is that God has acted in a new way in the world in order to be related to us in a new way. The message and new relationship have to do with a new chance for all of us to continue the journey with God upon which Abram set out so long ago. That journey was one in which God promised to transform the lives of Abram and his descendants. It was a journey of leaving behind trust in our their resources in order to learn utter reliance upon God. The Christian message is that that same journey which was abandoned in principle when Israel built its kingdom is still available to anyone who wishes to walk with God. The message is also about Jesus, the one who walked well with God. Who kept walking, even into a painful death, and discovered in the process that God is faithful.

If religion has to do with the question, how should I live? it is worth noting that the question assumes we need to ask it--that we still have something to learn about how to live, how to love, how to be faithful. When Jesus appeared on the scene, there was a struggle going on as there is in every age about who is doing a better job of keeping the rules, or whose life is more pleasing to God, or whose ideas are closer to those of the nation’s founders. (That is exactly the kind of thing we hear from this proud man in Luke’s gospel this morning.) Jesus said to the people he met that the goal was to let our hearts be changed into hearts that would know the best way and want to keep to that path. ‘The Spirit when it comes will teach you what you need to know,’ he said. For Jesus, learning how to live involves not just knowing the law, but it involves becoming people who don’t really need the law anymore. Learning how to live involves transformation.

Religion is also about knowing our place in the universe, and for Christians the teaching about our place in the universe is good news--it is that we are far more important than we might have thought. We are worth quite a bit of effort on God’s part. We are sought by God who would have us realize our potential as creatures created in the image of God. We each have a role to live into, and that role is different for every one of us. God’s creation is wildly diverse, from gnats to elephants, from goose down to mountains, there is no end to what is possible in creation and that applies to each of us. Some of us spend our whole lives learning who we are to be in this world. All of scripture either suggests or says very explicitly that we are to grow into what we are to be. It is a process that takes time. “We are being changed,” says Paul--not have been changed but are being changed--”from glory to glory.” Religion teaches us who and whose we are like schools teach us to read. See Spot run is fine for a while, but from there we move on to Mark Twain and Shakespeare. Learning our place in the universe involves our being transformed over and over again.

And of course, religion, especially for Jews and Christians and Muslims, is about relationship with God. And the Lord told Moses to say to the people, “You will be my people and I will be your God.” Protestant Christians often speak easily about relationship with God whereas those with more Catholic roots might speak more easily of sacramental connections to the creator. For a long time I wasn’t very comfortable with talk about relationship with God. It seemed kind of strange, foreign to my experience, and I wasn’t sure I liked or could trust a lot of the people who talked so easily about their relationship with Jesus. I understood something about having been joined to the family of God in baptism, and I would have told you easily as a young child even that Jesus shares food with us at his table every Sunday. I said some prayers most days and when life began to get complicated I said even more. It just took me a lot of years to realize that all that eating and talking together over a lifetime constituted a relationship. I think if you’ve showed up in this place more than a couple of Sundays, you have a relationship with God. Doesn’t most of the transformation we experience in our lives come about through relationship?

Jesus talked as much about loving our neighbor, especially those in need, as he did about loving God. Christians have known for two thousand years that caring for the poor and those at the margins of society involves partnering with God in a way that makes God present in the world through our actions. As our concern for our neighbor grows so does our reliance on God. You can’t work alongside someone for very long without developing a relationship with them.

Whether you connect through a strong sense of personal friendship with Jesus or through the sacramental mystery of water, wine and bread, this religion of ours is about being transformed over time in the close company of the source of all that is. Again, Borg’s definition holds. Religion is about transformation.

And finally, though it is not true about all religions it is certainly true about Christianity, religion for most of us has had a lot to do with getting into heaven. We believe there is more than just this life, that there are qualities of our lives, our relationships and loves that must continue beyond this life. Jesus passed through death and came to life in a new way and so shall we. I can’t think of a more ultimate sort of transformation.

And if religion is about ultimate transformation, then what do we have to do to experience that transformation? What is the plan?

All we have to do, pretty much the whole program, as best I can tell, is to be aware that we still have a lot of growing to do and be open to the process of transformation. In all the ways Christianity might be seen to work in our lives, what is required of us is that we be able to look at our lives and know that we still have a long way to go. If our lives are about transformation, about becoming, then we need to be aware of what we like to call our “growing edges.” We don’t have to be anxious or fearful about the growing we still have before us, though sometimes anxiety or fear or regret will move us to embrace the next bit of transformation that is being invited. Maybe the best way is to be able to apply some humor to ourselves and the process of becoming. We can be gentle with ourselves and our need for transformation the way God is gentle with us. In his fantasy about heaven, The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis is told by a citizen of heaven that all it really takes to get into heaven is the ability to laugh at ourselves.

Maybe the only real barrier to getting where we need to go is thinking we have already arrived.

The parable we heard a little while ago is so short I’d like to read it again.

Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded other with contempt. “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God I thanks you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner!’ I tell you this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

2010-09-15T11:02:00.000-07:00

Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday in Pentecost

September 12, 2010

Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28

Luke 15:1-10

I will have to paraphrase the sermon, or give my best recollection of it since I was working without a net on Sunday. I hadn’t pulled out my guitar in a while at the late service, and I figured we’d have a bunch of folks back from vacations so I thought we should have some fun.

I began by having them sing the first three verses of Lord of the Dance. Dance then wherever you may be. I am the Lord of the dance said he, and I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be for I am the Lord of the dance said he.

From there I went into a John-can’t-dance routine……

When I went in last month to have my foot surgery, I was waiting in the pre-op room, you know, where they put lines into your arms and monitors on you. They give you a shot that will “take the edge off.” Anyway, I’m lying there thinking that when I see the doctor I’ll pull the old will-I-be-able-to-dance gag, the one that goes will I be able to dance after the surgery? Great, I’ve always wished I could dance. Right. Well I thought about it and then decided not to do it. But when I saw the doctor the next week in his office, I saw my chance. I asked him if I’d be able to dance when everything healed and he said, “you already did that to me in the operating room.” I don’t want to know what else I might have said as I was zoning out before surgery.

I have always made jokes about not being much of a dancer. During my teen years I was staring at lava lamps and contemplating with Maharishi, and I never really got around to dancing. I do, however, remember those first junior high dances where you kind of had to go but didn’t really want to have to dance. Those things were usually put on by grown ups. They sometimes even chose the music. Not good. Anyway, most of us--guys, that is-- would stand around the edges of the dance floor trying to avoid going out there. There were two things that might get one out on the floor in such situations.

One way was that your friends, who really didn’t have your best interest at heart, would goad you into dancing. They just wanted you out there so they could laugh at you. They’d tell you you were chicken, or just push you out into the action. Their basic approach was to push you in a direction and make you feel bad if you tried to resist.

The other thing that could get you out onto the floor worked from the other direction. Somewhere out there, maybe hugging the wall on the other side of the room, was a girl. She would look at you with eyes that said, “I hope you’ll ask me to dance.” Those eyes and a smile would suggest that even if you didn’t think you could dance, you might be able to in her presence. She would be like Charlie Brown’s “little red-haired girl,” the one who makes him all goofy and a believer in the impossible. That girl inviting me out onto the floor was the other thing that could pull me into the dance.

That was the difference. The guys were pushing and she was inviting. I have always liked the invitation better than the shove. You probably do too.

I thought of this dance thing when I saw the lessons for tis morning. Here we have Jeremiah talking about foolish children, stupid people, filled with evil. Jeremiah is trying to get his people to do the right thing. You’re a bunch of jerks, he seems to be saying. Get your act together and get out there and do what you’re supposed to. Jeremiah is pushing and shaming his hearers into compliance.

Jesus, on the other hand, is in trouble today for being willing to hang out with anyone. Everyone is welcome--invited by Jesus into the dance. Jeremiah would push us into the dance, but Jesus searches us, looking for some opening where the invitation can take hold. He doesn’t push people away or begin by telling them what is wrong with them. He begins by telling them they are wanted. Come out onto the floor, says Jesus, and you may be surprised at what we can do together. I don’t care what you have thought about yourself or what others have told you you can’t do. I want you out here in the dance. Come on. Give me a try.

The other thing we read in this bit from Luke today goes right along with this theme of welcome in the way Jesus invites us to participate with him. Jesus tells two stories about seeking the lost--stories about every last one of us being worth whatever effort it might take to find us and include us. Every one of us has something to contribute to the dance, every one of us is important. Even if we’ve believed at times that we were flawed or unneeded or not valuable, Jesus tells us today that we count, we are important, we are worth a celebration. Not only are we invited to come and dance with Jesus. we’d be missed if we didn’t show up. Even I’ll try dancing if that’s the deal.

……….I stopped talking somewhere around there, and we sang the last two verses of the song.

I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black…….they bruied my body and they thought I’d gone, but I am the dance and I still go on.

They cut me down and I leapt up high. I am the life that’ll never never die. I’ll live in you if you’ll live in me. I am the Lord of the dance said he.

2010-09-09T07:09:00.001-07:00

Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

September 5, 2010

Luke 14:25-33

There has been a lot in the news this past week about Christianity, what is it, whose version is right or whose version is a little twisted. It has been an interesting conversation, and one that I find kind of hopeful. I find it refreshing that these questions are being addressed out loud because I think we usually try not to get into such debates in public. I am pleased at the number of folks who are weighing in to broaden the public message of what Christianity is about. Too often, in the vacuum left by not discussing or debating our faith differences, what is represented as Christianity in the media is something that seems far removed from the gospel as I understand it. I cringe sometimes when I hear pollsters or reporters covering an election talk about the “Christian” vote. I wonder if those reporters have any idea how many of us voted against what they have dubbed the “Christian” agenda precisely because we are Christian. Christianity has always been messy, has always involved different points of view and strong feelings about what constitutes the center of our faith. These debates signal that we are discussing something important, something real and worth some struggle, so I was glad to see letters to the editor this week and editorials seeking clarity about faith.

Someone caught me as we were leaving the early service last week wanting to talk about the debate opening up in the public square about Christianity. She was greatly distressed over an article in which someone had been quoted as saying Jesus would never be in favor of redistributing wealth in this country. “Haven’t they read the gospels?” she asked. She went on to talk in more detail about her faith and what she believes and how strongly she holds those beliefs. The public conversation opens up possibilities for personal reflection and exploration of our beliefs.

I wonder how many people--how many Christians--heard about Liberation theology for the first time this week as Glen Beck told his supporters that president Obama believed in Liberation Theology which, Beck said, was a perversion of Christianity. I wonder how many of those people went on to try and learn more about what Liberation Theology is really about and where it finds its authority. If they did, they may have read about how often in the gospels Jesus calls for sharing with the poor, giving to the poor, letting go of possessions, as in today’s gospel. The center of Liberation Theology says simply that if you read the gospels with the poor in mind, you will begin to notice that Jesus always--always favors the poor when it comes to issues of money and justice. It says also that the work of Christians is to bring our lives into synch as much as possible with what we read in the gospels.

The problem is that most of us were taught to read the Bible or listen to it for what we must do to be saved. We were taught that the Bible is mainly a book for individuals. Seeing scripture through that lens, we often focus on verses and passages and we can easily miss the message of what was important to Jesus throughout the story. Liberation theology began in the early sixties when some people began to read the Bible to see what it had to say specifically about their situation and their group. Those people happened to be poor. What they found surprised them and shook the Church. Liberation theology taught many of us how to read scripture--how to let scripture speak to us and it taught us that there will always be more to discover in those living words. Soon people were taking their questions to the Bible asking ‘what do these words mean for our lives in our situation?’ Women began to read the Bible to see what it had to say about them and they noticed that Jesus was a radical in his time in the way he traveled with, spoke to and taught women. People living at the margins of society began to realize that Jesus always expanded the margins to include outsiders. Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians--Popes and pastors, Christians all over the world have celebrated the gifts that Liberation theologians have contributed to the Church.

But all that really isn’t what I wanted to talk about today. Well, apparently it was. Where I had planned to go was to this line we hear his morning where Jesus says in distressingly unambiguous language, “none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions." I claim to be a believer in this theology that favors the poor and calls us to turn away from seeking riches. I find this call hard., but not as hard as what we hear in the beginning of today’s reading, the part about hating our families. That is even worse. But there it is in black and white. One of the teachings of Liberation theology is that we have to be very careful about saying the words of our faith and not living them. How in the world do we live these words?

I found some help in the word that is translated as “hate” in the first part of this passage. I am assured by the experts that it is a semitic way of expressing detachment, not the emotion that we think of when we hear the word, “hate.” Maybe in the same way, Jesus is calling us to be detached from our possessions. I can’t imagine how we would all get along, or how society would function if we all gave away all our possessions. Detachment is better than actually giving it all away, but even detachment is not easy. How do we bring ourselves to live into the difficult call of discipleship set forth this morning?

Maybe the Liberation theology folks can help. One of the great gifts of Liberation Bible reading is the understanding that we have to approach scripture with the right questions in order to find what we are seeking, and that sometimes we have to read between the lines. Sometimes we have to ask what is not being said? What is being assumed? What must be behind Jesus’ question?

Jesus talks a lot today about the cost of discipleship. “Count the cost,” he says. “Make sure you are really ready to come along with me.” Reading these words this week I realized that I have always heard Jesus talking about the cost of discipleship and that is really all I have heard. The “cost” language sometimes seems to bear down, feel heavy. Somehow it has never occurred to me to ask in those times when the cost sounds too high what the promise or reward might be. Cost is what we pay for something. What is the something we are being asked to pay for here? On the surface of today’s passage the only answer available seems equally hard. What our turning from what we have held most important in our lives buys us is a cross. It is, as Paul say, a stumbling block to the wise. What we know about the cross is, now, for us, thank God, a part of the answer. We know the cross to be the way, a portal to new life. What we buy with our following--this market language sounds crass here, but it will have to do--what we buy is a new life that we will want even more than the old one. That is the promise.

We don’t get to know what that new life will look like in our particular case. We don’t get to know how it will come to us or what we will have to leave behind in order to arrive in that new place. The promise is that as we let go of what we think we can’t get along without, we receive something better.

I can’t tell anyone what the cost of discipleship will buy them. Ask anyone in recovery if they would trade the new life for the old one. Find a doctor who has given up a lucrative practice to open a free clinic or fly around the world repairing people who can’t afford it. Ask the folks who have left Wall Street to teach in poor neighborhoods. The will tell you they wouldn’t trade their new life for the old one. They will tell you have found meaning and grounding for their lives in a way they had never imagined. Ask them about what they had to give up and they may laugh. Silly question. Ask them about what they have found and you may hear about community and a relationship with people who need what they have to offer. You will hear about their lives being bound up in the lives of others. You may hear them tell how God set them free by binding them into a community of mutual need. You might even hear them talk about how liberating their new life is.

2010-08-31T10:23:00.000-07:00

Sermon The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 29, 2010

Luke 14:1, 7-14

I want to call you attention to what has happened so far this morning and to what will happen in the next few minutes. Let’s take a look. We arrived. We gathered our intentions for the day in a prayer. We have heard the ancient stories; readings, a psalm. Now you are being encouraged to consider some part of the message of the story or stories of the day. In a few minutes we will remember the tradition of belief that developed after Jesus as we recite the creed shaped by the early community of believers. Then we will pray for the church and for the world. We will confess our sins and receive forgiveness.

All of that can and regularly does happen in the part of the service we call the liturgy of the word. That is everything that takes place before the offertory sentence, you know, the one that says, “walk in love as Christ loved us….. or let us offer our life and labor to the Lord”….something like that. What follows that sentence is the liturgy of the table and we’ll get there in a minute, but for now I want to focus on the first part of the service.

We arrive. We come here from all the different corners of our neighborhoods, from the individual arenas of our homes, our families, our work, all of the parts of our lives that define us, that tell us who we are. We greet each other coming in the door as people arriving to share a part of our individual lives that happen to overlap. We all go to the same church.

We sing and say a prayer or two and then we hear the stories held sacred by those who have been gathering for “church” for three thousand years. That’s how long ago our Hebrew scriptures were written. Maybe as we hear these stories we begin to get the sense that they are our stories too in a way, that they have something to do with us. The liturgy of the word focuses our attention on the fact that we are part of a community. We are people who belong to the stories about Israel, to the stories about Jesus, Paul and the others may even be writing for us.

After the readings the preacher calls us to consider some message that might be taken from what we have heard. The sermon is usually an attempt to help us take the stories very personally. The stories of the faith community are our stories. Something we have just hear has to do with us.

We move on from there usually to the Creed………We are part of a particular community that wrestled in its early years with how to understand and speak about its belief. Some of us may still struggle with some of the ideas in the Creed, but it is the family document going way back and it has helped define the community called Christians since the fourth century.

So far, the liturgy of the word brought us together, reminded us of our common interest in an ancient story and suggested that the tradition has something to say about our lives--about our goals and how to live. Hopefully the liturgy has led us to reflect on who we are and how we want to be in the world.

Having recalled who and whose we are in the sacred stories of the community, we take on a bit of the work of Christ as we look on the world with compassion. We lift up in prayer our neighbors, our leaders and all who are ill or are in any kind of trouble. Just as Christ did for all of us, we ask God to be present in their lives in ways that will transform them, make them whole and serve the good purposes of creation.

So far, we have arrived from our separate little worlds. We have heard the stories of a great community. We have been reminded that their stories are ours also. And then in our prayers we participate in the work of that community.

Having done all of those things we may be aware of some part of the work we still need to do in ourselves to be able to serve and live faithfully in this community. We may be ready to note some of our own failings and ask for healing and forgiveness in our own lives. So we ask in our confession to be made new, to be set right once again. In response, we are told that our sins are indeed forgiven. We then as equals, as common beneficiaries of the grace of God, we greet each other in the name of the Lord as we exchange the peace.

I wanted to highlight what goes on in the liturgy of the word for a couple of reasons. First, in two weeks you will see a few changes in the service designed to help mark the transition from the liturgy of the word to the liturgy of the table. I wanted to speak about the two parts of the service in anticipation of those changes.

The other reason is that as I hear Jesus talking about the liturgy of the table today….surely that is what all that banquet etiquette talk is about. As I hear Jesus talking, I understand better and give thanks for the shape of our worship. I give thanks in particular for the liturgy of the word. I don’t know how I would get near the table without this great liturgy of ours.

I hear Jesus saying that we are to arrive at the banquet--the one that will begin in a few minutes with the offertory sentence--that we are to arrive with a realistic understanding of who we are. And I hear him saying that if we come with a proper sense of who we are that we will not really be thinking much at all about ourselves, about how worthy OR unworthy we might be. We are encouraged to approach the table with humility and gratitude, not focusing on any aspect of ourselves, but on the generosity of our host. The liturgy of the word that locates us in the vast community of humanity and believers and helps us take stock of our lives and sets us to work praying for and caring about others--that liturgy prepares us to approach the liturgy of the table with the kind of attitudes Jesus calls for this morning.

I am particularly glad that we circle the table here at St. Aidan’s. That means that as we arrive at this weekly banquet, any and all of us might well hear our host saying, “Friend move up higher.” and as we look around the circle we might understand every possible place in the circle to be the place of honor. And…..if we can find ourselves hoping that is true for everyone we see, then we will certainly have arrived well prepared for the banquet. JB

2010-08-31T07:53:00.001-07:00

Sermon

Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 22, 2010

Luke 13:10-17

A funny thing has happened in my life in the last year or so. And in a nice turn of events, the same thing has happened in Mary’s life as well. We have, here in the somewhat advanced middle part of our lives, discovered baseball. Of course we’ve always known about baseball, but these days we keep up with the scores, we know who the home team is playing and where, we watch games on TV and we get out to the park from time to time to eat junk food, drink a beer and cheer for the team. And the team isn’t just the team, but a a bunch of players whose quirks and talents and foibles make the game interesting. Part of the joy of an Adam Dunn home run is watching him blow bubbles with his gum as he runs the bases. You gotta love the way Nyjer comes up all smiles out of the cloud of dust that represents yet another stolen base, and you have to wonder how some crazy ump in Atlanta can throw an all American nice guy like Ryan Zimmerman out of a game. I’m even a fan of Ian Desmond who’s got more errors to his credit than just about anyone in the game. I think he’s gonna be remembered as a great player. I’m pulling for him. How can I not have known the joys and pains of baseball before now.

Oh, it isn’t that I never knew about baseball or that I never paid any attention to game. I had a glove, I played sand lot ball as a kid. I had a transistor radio in my pocket and was listening at my post as a crossing guard in the sixth grade when Tim McCarver’s grand slam won the Cards the fifth game of the World Series in 64. I was listening to the game that day because I lived in a family where the Cardinals were the law. St. Louis, just 250 miles from Memphis was the closest major league team so they were pretty popular in my town, and my father’s home was in Missouri so the Cards being our team always made sense. Dad would watch the game on Saturday and yell at the players as if he was at the park. He was et up with em, and I never questioned they were THE team to pull for.

Since those days though, I haven’t paid much attention to baseball. Maybe it had to do with the way sons sometimes pull away from their fathers, which I know I certainly did. Anyway, I haven’t been serious about baseball in all the years since then until now. My faithfulness to the sport has been sort of a Christmas and Easter kind of participation. If the Cards have a shot at the pennant or are in the series, I might look at the sports page to see how they’re doing, but that’s been about it. Until now. Now I have gotten caught up in the doings of the Nationals and I have become a fan, which brings me to the point if all this baseball talk. Next Thursday evening, I expect to find myself right in the middle of some serious tension between ancient teaching and current practice. I’m sure I will feel pulled in one direction by the law with which I was raised and in another by a deepening understanding of the good that law was meant to serve. Mary and I have tickets to see the Nationals play the Cards. It should be an interesting evening. I’ll try not to picture my father, sitting there, staring aghast in open mouthed disbelief that I could be cheering about Pudge getting another RBI.

“Don’t you know, Jesus…..don’t you know,” ask the leaders of the synagogue, “that you aren’t supposed to do any work on the sabbath? Healing this woman looks like work to us. The people are coming to you for spiritual guidance and here you are breaking the law.” I wonder if Jesus every got really disheartened--frustrated sometimes at how difficult it could be to teach his simple lesson. How often in the story do we hear Jesus trying to open and soften the hearts of those around him only to run into the stone wall of law. “Imagine what is possible,” Jesus seems to say. “That’s not the way we’ve always done.” it comes the answer.

Again today we find Jesus at odds with those who are responsible for teaching the faithful how to behave. For those leaders, the answer is simple. Our calling is to observe the law. That is how we will know we are in right relationship with our God. God gave the laws. We follow the laws. What could be more clear? For Jesus too the answer is simple. Love God and love your neighbor. Strive to make sure that everything in your life, even the laws you cherish, serve that end. What could be more clear? Today the question is raised as to the intention of not only the law about keeping the sabbath, but all the laws by which the people of God are guided.

I speak sometimes about Christianity being not so much about following the rules as it is about being in relationship with Jesus. I have long been drawn to that message when I hear it in the gospel story. I admit that in part, some of my agenda in that discussion has been to separate myself from the parts of the faith that I found troubling. I resonate at times with Jesus’ challenge to the institution of religion and to the authorities. Yet even as I recognize my desire to pull back from some of the rigid-seeming teachings, I know at the same time that I want something more substantial in their place. Rules can seem cold and hollow unless they are grounded in the warmth of love and community. All laws worth following are created to serve the cause of love. I hear Jesus saying as much today as he asks those leaders, “how could I not free this woman on this day or any other?” Jesus’ standard of love trumps the law about the sabbath.

There are times when we have to choose between the law and love. We see it in civil law: civil disobedience, revolution, writers protecting a source, whole villages that broke laws, lied, stole and more as they hid Jews from the Nazis, times when the Church has provided sanctuary to those outside the civil laws. But what about the laws given us by our ancestors in faith. They came to understand in their early experience of God that some lessons are so important they should be carved in stone and passed on from one generation to the next forever. Should we ever question those laws? Jesus did.

Honor your father and mother, we are told. In the service of love--that is in the service of spreading the news that God has entered the world in a new way to bring new life--Jesus calls poor old Zebedee’s boys to leave their father and follow him. Seems like a poor way to honor one’s father. I wonder if Zebedee ever understood.

And today’s story is not the only one about Jesus upsetting the righteous by doing good works for others on the sabbath. And his breaking the rules about the Sabbath isn’t always in the service of others. When his disciples are caught picking corn on the sabbath because they are hungry, Jesus basically tells his detractors that the question is a no-brainer. The sabbath, says Jesus, was created to enhance human life. What then could possibly be wrong with feeding oneself on the sabbath?

And then there are those long lists of laws from Moses. Jesus sometimes tumbles those like the tables of those money-changers outside the temple. “You have heard it said you shall give and eye for an eye, says Jesus, but I tell you love those who hurt you and treat them well.

Living well into the relationships the rules were meant to serve is much more difficult--and much more rewarding--than simply following the rules. It would be much easier for me to be a Cards fan. I wouldn’t have to spend money on games, I enjoy cheering from the comfort of my easy chair. Being a Nats fan is messy--crowded trains, eight dollar beer. For forty five years I told people I was a Cards fan. What that really meant was, “in my family, growing up, I was taught that we were Cards fans.” What I’m learning is that being a fan involves cheering for the team even when they are down ten to nothing. Sometimes it means sitting in the sun on the first base side in July. It means believing in the hitter and hoping for a run even though he has been in a dry spell for weeks.

We’ve all hear that keeping the sabbath is a good thing, the law, even. But we don’t keep the sabbath. We are all busy on Saturdays, cutting the grass, shopping, driving kids around. We do show up here fairly often on Sunday--which is not the sabbath or seventh day, but the first day of the week--we do try to remember God mark a few moments in our week as holy. But the good that the law about sabbath was meant to serve too often gets lost in our busy-ness. Maybe real sabbath happens for us in many little ways throughout our week, not on any particular day. Sabbath is about restoration and family and grounding, and being renewed. Those good causes may be served in a few moments of quiet at the end of the day, or maybe listening to music in our car while stuck in traffic or texting a child who is away at school. Maybe you find sabbath during an exercise class, or a meal, or a conversation in which you remember that our life is part of something much larger.

Maybe in this way at least, sabbath is a bit like baseball . For me, these days, the joy of baseball lies in what I am discovering and what I have yet to discover, not in staying with what I was taught about the sport as a kid.

2010-07-06T07:22:00.000-07:00

Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Pentecost

July 4, 2010

Readings

Well, here we are in church, not just on the fourth of July weekend, but on the fourth of July, and though your bulletin for today says clearly that we are celebrating the sixth Sunday after Pentecost, you will hear in a few minutes that that is only partly true. First some background.

One of the trickiest paths for church folks--and by that I mean all of us, clergy lay, everybody--to negotiate is the path running between the two entities of church and state. The historical line between the two is marked by areas of friction in which church and government rankle each other by claiming authority in the same area, and by times of such complete cooperation that the lines between church and government seem to disappear. In our own generation, we have seen people of faith marching in the streets to challenge laws that clash with basic tenets of their religious tradition and we have seen politicians rise or fall on their record of response to faith based causes like outlawing abortion or ending a war. People of faith do not tend to agree on what they would have their government do because people of faith, often reading the same scriptures, come up with different interpretations. The ability to hold those different opinions is part of what the fireworks will be about when they burst over the city tonight. But those different opinions about what faith should ask of government are a part of what makes the intersection of government and religion so fraught.

One of the debates church folks can get into has to do with whether the American flag should be displayed in church. I googled the subject a while back and came up with some interesting history. It seems we Americans are unique in displaying the national flag in church sanctuaries. The practice began about a hundred and fifty years ago in Catholic churches when Catholics were suspected of serving a foreign ruler, the pope. The pope was, until the 1870s the leader of a group of states that included most of Italy and his power outweighed that of the local national leaders. The flag stood in the sanctuary to show that American Catholics’ first loyalty was indeed to the U.S. The question of loyalty being cleared up by the presence of the flag was between pope and nation. The question was still alive in 1960 when John Kennedy became the first Catholic U.S. president. In 1978 the Catholic church issued a ruling that the flag should be removed from all churches because nothing in the sanctuary should distract worshippers from the central purpose of worship, which is to draw closer to Jesus. I ran across one posting in my flags-in-church search that started out, “if you want to get fired all you have to do is…” I had to open that one. It was by a pastor somewhere in Georgia who had tried to remove the flag from a church where it had been part of the service for a hundred years.

Over the years, in different times and places around the U.S. the line between loyalty to God and loyalty to country have often become blurred. They are seen as being similar, if not the same. The Boy Scout God and Country award seems to sum up the equality of these two components; that is until you do a little scratching and find that the award emphasizes loyalty to God first and country second and that all of the work done to achieve the award centers on God and faith, not country. The name is a bit of a misnomer. It makes me wonder if they had to attach the word “country” to the award to get people interested in it.

The line between church and state can get messy. Some people just avoid the problem by declaring politics and religion to be oil and water. They don’t mix, end of subject. Others see implications in the gospel that require some kind of engagement with the secular powers that be. There are strong feelings on both sides.

The subject of how to manage God and National issues is so challenging that it was one of the questions on the General Ordination Exams in my senior year at seminary. We had three hours to write a Fourth of July sermon that we knew would be read by graders who either had very strong opinions of how such things should be handled or who were looking for ideas in dealing with the question in their parishes. I told a story about some people in a small rural town setting up early in the morning for the day’s celebration. I don’t remember how or if I tied that story into the story of the Church.

So when Barbara contacted me about which readings we should use today, I realized that it was time once again to try bringing together the celebration of our nation’s birth and the primacy of our life in God. The task seemed to involve calling us to give thanks for this nation, its pioneers, it defenders of freedom, its dreamers, its great possibilities and potential--to give thanks for all of those and at the same time to do that with humility, a humility that we won’t see on the mall tonight or hear in the celebratory speeches on the steps of the capitol. It seemed to me that we needed to focus on some part of this nation’s heritage that won’t be addressed by fireworks and bands, by candidates and drums. I wondered for a while what “other” side of this great day I might find to hold up for you this morning, and the answer was sitting right there on my desk all the time in the lectionary readings for Independence Day.

I told you in the beginning that we were only kind of celebrating the sixth Sunday of Pentecost. Even though today is the fourth, the church calendar of seasons takes precedence over a national holiday, but we are allowed to transfer some of the readings for another day into the Sunday service. So, all the readings today are those appointed for the fourth of July. And the readings appointed for the fourth may just be worth posting on your refrigerator, or folding up and taking into the city tonight. They speak of why and how great nations are built and they point not to what we have become, which will always be a work in progress, but what was being sought by those who established this land we celebrate today. They speak of what it takes to create such a land. They speak, not about country, but about seeking a country. Listen.

The Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords. the great God mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the stranger, providing for them food and clothing. You also shall love the stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

They confessed that they were strangers, foreigners on the earth, for people who speak this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.

And about Abraham…..he looked forward to a city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

And this one, maybe most important of all in these times…..“You have heard it said,” says Jesus, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy, “but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, for if you only love those who love you, what good is that?”

Today, on the day we celebrate our nation’s independence, the church would remind us that our ancestors--that some of us here today-- once sought a homeland. We are reminded of the hopes that all humans have, the hopes that bring people together. We are reminded that our dream has always been to live in justice and that the way to that better place involves caring for and even forgiving others. The national anthem you will hear today speaks of our persevering and triumphing through battle and that is certainly a part of what has brought us to the place we are today. The church reminds us today that the road ahead involves learning to love our enemies. Church is probably the only place you will hear that message on this day. We are still strangers in search of that better homeland.

Maybe one reason why celebrating our nation and worshipping on Sunday are not an easy fit is that on the fourth we celebrate having arrived at a kind of promised land. In the Church, we understand ourselves to still be on the way to such a place. Our ancestors made it clear that they were strangers and foreigners seeking a homeland. The trick for us on this fine day is to not let our celebration of what we have received quench our fierce longing for that better homeland.

2010-06-07T07:27:00.000-07:00

Sermon for the Second Sunday after Pentecost

June 6, 2010

Readings

Last weekend, Mary and I went to the American art gallery. We hadn’t been in a few months and it is one of the places we try to visit often so we hopped on the metro and spent a couple hours looking at art. In the hall of presidents, I noticed for the first time a quote from Martin Luther King written large above the portraits of some of our recent leaders. It said, “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, it comes through continuous struggle.” That seemed apropos for most of our nation’s history, and certainly for the times I can remember, but the quote kind of struck me and I ended up writing it down because I thought it might have something to say about the healing stories we have heard this morning. Does change come quickly, or does it come through the kind of struggle that can take a lifetime? That seems to be a worthwhile question to ask about the kind of miracle stories we have in the readings from Kings and Luke.

Does new life--rebirth--come upon us all of a sudden or might we have to struggle for it. The question is important because if we hear in these stories that divine restoration and healing are characterized by happening quickly, then we may not enter into the kind of collaborative, life-long work of being made new to which Jesus calls us. We may not recognize that slower, more complicated process as resurrection or even as divine. If we think being raised from death into new life happens in a flash or not at all then we may discount or dismiss all the little ways in which we are invited daily to become new people, more alive than the day before.

I am asked sometimes if one has to believe the miracle stories in our tradition in order to be a good Christian. My answer is always, “no,” of course. I hear religion’s detractors go on about miracle stories, wondering how anyone could believe such things. I read such stories and I wonder what to make of them, how to take them and where they came from. How did these stories begin? Did such things really happen in those earlier times? I generally deal with my own questions about the miracle stories by choosing not to spend much time trying to come up with the answers. I don’t think we have to be able to believe them literally; we may someday, but we don’t have to begin there. In fact, I think we are in greater danger of missing the point when we treat such stories literally than when we take them metaphorically. Literally, they seem to function as signs of the greatness and power of God, but they also leave us with the problem that such signs are not present, or at least not common in our time. Metaphorically, these stories speak of the nature of God and of the relationship between God and creation. God creates life, restores life, raises us up into the life for which we were created. That is taking place even now. Literally, these stories are about a few particular individuals. Metaphorically, they are about all of us. Literally, the miracle stories are about fixed moments in time. Metaphorically, they speak of what is happening throughout our lives, and about what has been taking place since the beginning of creation.

So what does it mean then to be brought back from the dead? What does it mean to be alive? What might it mean for a community, a nation, a culture, humanity itself to be raised into life from the way of death? The questions go way beyond the stories of a couple of people who lived in another time?

Last week, as we celebrated Trinity Sunday, we heard God described as “Wisdom.” In his book, Original Blessing, Matthew Fox writes about a Native American understanding of wisdom. He says wisdom means: that the people may live. He goes on to say, “Wisdom wants the people to live. What does that mean? Obviously to not die before their time, yes, but to live is not merely to survive. Living implies beauty, freedom of choice, giving birth, discipline, celebration. Living is not just shopping. Living is not building a nest to protect us from the suffering of others.”

Fox’s words startle me in their truth. They stop me with their truth and sadden me because, like Ezekiel in that great story about the valley of the dry bones, I find myself looking around at so much of what is taught and valued in our time and in our culture and I ask, how can these bones live? Our marketplace and economy are based on making people want to shop, on making us want to have whatever is bigger and better and easier. The voices of those who have been telling us for the last forty years that we have to end our dependence on oil, those voices have too often fallen on dead ears and now that oil has come back to haunt us. As a culture we celebrate the accumulation of wealth as if there will always be more of everything for the taking and as if wealth for one doesn’t mean poverty for another. I know that I am, in some respects, preaching to the choir. Some of us are struggling with these issues and trying to turn things around in our little corner of the world.

Foxes words about life being more than shopping and insulating ourselves from the need of others startle me and they give me a glimmer of hope. They speak on the one hand of what is wrong in our world while at the same time holding out the promise of something else…..a new way of living. The place to begin that new way of living would seem to involve taking stock of what really is important. It must involve asking, what does it mean to live? Besides breathing and being above ground, what does it really mean to be alive. Fox offers a partial list--beauty, freedom of choice, giving birth, discipline, celebration--but that is only a beginning. Each of us can assess what it would mean for us to be truly alive and to struggle in whatever way we have to live the life to which we are called. Yes, I am speaking of call. I don’t think we can make our lists--describe what it means to be alive--in isolation. If being alive is living out the possibilities that our creator has imagined for us, then deciding what our lives can still be about must involve listening and interacting with our creator. As we meet God in prayer, in the community, in the ancient stories, in nature, in family, who knows? We may discover what really constitutes life.

By going beyond the literal story of Jesus raising the dead and asking what that would involve in our lives we can begin to see ourselves as part of the ongoing work of creation. We have a role to play--a witness to provide to the world around us. You may recall that Jesus said his friends would do the kinds of amazing things that he did and more. In the literal version of today’s story from Luke, we might expect to have to come up some kind of quick fix for the problems we se around us. In the version where transformation and the call to life is an ongoing work, maybe our most powerful response to the world’s pains can be our lives. We can live lives that are unexpected, lives that are a little out of synch with the general movement of our culture. We can witness by living lives that make others want to know something about their source. JB

2010-05-30T17:12:00.000-07:00

Sermon for Trinity Sunday

May 30, 2010

Readings

So, you may have noticed that we have the flags up front this Sunday. A parishioner wrote and asked if we couldn’t have them up front on this Memorial Day weekend to honor those who gave their lives in the service of their country. Seemed like a good idea, so here they are. There are a lot of good reasons why the national flag is being moved away from the altar in churches. The Catholic church called for their removal over thirty years ago, but it still seems very appropriate that we show these colors on this weekend, so I was glad someone made the request.

My father piloted a flying boat in world war two picking up downed pilots in the Pacific. I’m guessing he had lots of stories about friends who didn’t make it back from that war, I just never heard them. He didn’t tell stories about the war. Sometimes he’d catch a battle scene in some movie on tv and either say, “it wasn’t like that,” or just get quiet. I learned more about his service in the war from commendations and letters I found among his papers after he died than he ever told me in all the time I knew him. What he did talk about though, what did kind of light him up as a he spoke were stories about being a cadet in flying school. He talked about his friends in the good times, the “safe” times right before the war. He occasionally told a story of something that happened to a friend during the war, but only if that friend made it back. My Godfather flew with my dad as a tail gunner, and it amused me as a little kid more than it should have that he had gotten hit in the backside on one of their runs. I didn’t get any real sense from my father of what the war and being in it was like. What I did get was the idea that in those awful times and in some pretty terrible situations a community formed and life-long friendships were created. At the end of the day, what my dad wanted to remember was his connection to the people who had been there with him, a community that in hard times sustained and gave courage to its members. And it is that community message I got from him that now turns me back toward the message of this Trinity Sunday in which we celebrate the God who begins as community.

Some of you may know that I joke at times about this Sunday. I joke about trying to get out of preaching the deep and unfathomable concept of the triune God. I have had seminarians preach on Trinity Sunday, I have been on vacation or sabbatical on this Sunday. Two years ago I even managed to get the bishop to visit on Trinity Sunday. I suppose I could just stick with Memorial Day and skip the Trinity this morning but the truth is, I like the richness of Christianity’s understanding of God. So I am glad that every few years I am pushed to spend some time thinking about this three-in-one God of ours.

That really is the way to approach thinking about the Trinity. Come back year after year and see what you notice, see what new vision of God is visible at this point in your journey, what new understanding of God might be possible because of recent experiences in your life. The three readings today each emphasize a different person of the Trinity but they do it in a messy kind of way that sort of mixes the three up. The Proverbs reading speaks about creation. The Creator, the first person of the Trinity is brought to mind in this reading, but is named Wisdom, a name more commonly associated with the Spirit of God. Then Paul in his letter to the Romans points to Christ, the second person of the Trinity as the one through whom we receive access to grace. He then goes on to say that he can boast about his hope in Christ only because the Spirit has been poured into him. Finally, today, we hear Jesus in John’s gospel telling his disciples about the Spirit, who will guide them in all things.

Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit. They are all here, and in the readings they seem a bit scrambled. Anyone familiar with the beginning of John’s gospel, you know--in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God and everything was created through the Word--anyone who has heard that will here hear the voice of that creating Word in Proverbs today. For Paul, Christ and the Spirit are a party of the same answer. In John, Jesus speaks of the Father and the Spirit. What stands out for me this year as I approach the Trinity is not the distinction between these three faces of the one God, but their connection, interrelatedness and interaction with each other. I am reminded that very early on in its life the Church began to speak about the God who is community, the God who begins as community and would draw us into the community that already exists between Creator, Christ and Spirit.

Everything we really need, the good for which we were created comes to us through our association with others. Community is where we learn and grow and discover our true selves. Looking at any part of our own stories, life is what happens between us; it is what takes place between people. In relationship with others we learn who we can be, we find ourselves wanting to be more, to give more, to care more deeply, to be more courageous, to be better parents, spouses, children, friends. Who doesn’t have memories of long conversations in which the world outside the words falls away leaving only the reality and solidity of another? Who hasn’t been changed and discovered hidden resources because of the needs of another? Who hasn’t wanted to change in order to be more accessible to another? Community calls to us, draws us in. I read somewhere recently the statement, “love is community.” I’m pretty sure it would work the other way too, to say community is love. It forms us and creates us.

I’ve enjoyed live music for many years, and I am still surprised and delighted when I find myself listening to a musician whose music is fueled by a palpable connection with the audience. Who hasn’t left a concert knowing that something tangible existed for a time in the space between stage and the crowd assembled? Physicists tell us that the smallest particles of matter are held in their orbits of relationship with each other by something that is simply referred to as the “strong force.” The connections between us are so important that we organize our lives and our governments to protect the space in which those interactions take place. All of our structures, our laws, our institutions exist to support what happens between people, in community, whether we are talking a community of two or thousands. Today we celebrate the God who calls us into relationship. We remember that God is relationship. We remember today the God who invites us to join the dance that has always been going on, a dance that requires our presence if it is to be complete. Creator, Christ, Spirit and all creation. The dance was written with us in mind. For this, we were invited into being.

It really does seem to be the case that whatever is good, whatever is real, whatever is lasting and important takes place between individuals and among individuals in community. Maybe that’s why I never heard the kind of stories from my dad that a kid expects to hear about war. Maybe, in those long silences, he was still pondering lessons about what lasts and what doesn’t. Maybe he was remembering long conversations in the cockpit, friends gone but not gone, truths told, memories sealed and saved. Some stories can’t be told. Community can’t really be explained. You can write about it, talk about it, I can preach about it, but we can’t know about what happens in community until we have been in it. Whatever is good, whatever is real takes place between us and among us. And any time that kind of “real” is taking happening, you can be sure that somewhere in the mix, somewhere in the conversations and exchanges, is the God who is the life that binds us together. Amen

2010-05-26T03:30:00.000-07:00

Sermon for the Day of Pentecost

May 23, 2010

Growing up in the deep South, I pretty much got used to hearing people ask me if I’d been saved. I took some comfort in the fact that it wasn’t just me. The saved would ask anyone they thought might still need redeeming, and they would ask pretty boldly. I heard the question in all kinds of settings, and even though the question always made me a bit uncomfortable, I had to admire the tactics of some of those weekday preachers who seemed able to slip an inquiry as to the condition of one’s soul into any conversation.

Part of my problem with the question about being saved had to do with my being an Episcopalian. Episcopalians, at least the ones I knew, didn’t go around asking such questions. And, to complicate maters, some of the signs of un-savedness cited by those concerned preachers, drinking, cussing, dancing and lusting, just to name a few, were all practiced by good upstanding Episcopalians I knew and liked and trusted. I was an accepted member of one Christian community being preached at by members of another Christian community who seemed to be trying to pull me over to their side. Those preachers seemed a bit scary. But my friends, the Christians I was familiar with, never expressed any concern about my soul so I wondered. I was, for a time, pulled in two directions. I was caught in the kind of tension that can only be understood through theological reflection, so in my teenage years, before I had any idea what theology was I became a theologian. That is to say, I came to understand that there were differing ideas about God and church and I was going to have to think about it all for a while.

One of the notions that helped me remain an Episcopalian, aside from that list of Episcopalian benefits I mentioned earlier, was a question that began to explain my discomfort with those soul-saving zealots. I wondered, isn’t there more to all this than saving souls? If you get everyone to accept Jesus, then what? What would it all be about if everyone said, “ok. I’m in.” It just seemed to me that the focus for a lot of those other folks was so much on who’s in and who’s out that there wasn’t much discussion of what it would mean to be in, what life would be about, what difference one would make in the world after they were saved. Except, of course, going out and asking other folks if they were saved, and I didn’t feel cut out for that work so I stayed with what I had.

And through these last forty or so years since that time, I have come to believe more and more that the faith we claim, the faith Jesus commended to us isn’t about who’s in with God and who’s out. It isn’t about being saved. It is about what kind of difference we will make in the world because we are a part of God , a part of God’s creative work in the world. I think that is what Jesus came to tell us, but we miss it so easily because we humans just seem to be hard wired for “us versus them.” Jesus showed up in the midst of a people who had, as one of the central organizing principals of their faith, the idea that they were special. That they were different from everyone else around them. In story after story, Jesus tried to break open that idea and break down the strong sense of “us and them” that ran through the faith of his people, but it was a hard message and we are still struggling with it. If we hear it and grapple with it this message of inclusion will make theologians out of all of us and that’s not a bad thing.

Jesus came when he did because the time was right for this new message of inclusion. We hear that in the stories for this Day of Pentecost.

First we have a story from Israel’s mythology explaining why God might have created diversity. That story is followed by one about God deciding that the time was right for us to know our common relationship with the creator.

The story of the Church after Pentecost is not about salvation, about who is in and who is out, but about community and about growing into a new understanding and a new role in the universe. After all those years of seeing themselves set apart, the only ones privileged enough to hear the voice of God, the time now comes when everyone hears the same voice in their own language. Being saved, being part of the inside group, is no longer the agenda. The agenda now has something to do with living in community with people whose ways and languages and understandings are different from our own. “In the last days,” says God, “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.” All flesh. The who’s in and who’s out question has been settled. We’re all in. Everybody.

That question being settled, we are ready, or at least Jesus seems to think we are ready for the real question. The real question, the one for our time, can be summed up in two words. Now what? We never again have to worry about being separated from God. God is as close as our breath, our flesh, our thoughts. Now what? What difference will the knowledge that God is with us make in our lives? What difference will it make in the world in which we live and work and make choices every day that affect the people around us?

From very early in the Christian story, the message turned back from what Jesus taught about inclusion and acceptance and began to focus once again on who’s in and who’s out. We Christians have struggled with the pull of that simpler, more comfortable message since the beginning. It is easy to be in. We have rituals, our names go on lists, and if who’s in and who’s out is the question we are finished when we cross the line. We Christians have always been tempted to focus our attention there.

What is harder and what we have to keep coming back to is the work for which we were empowered in that Pentecost story, the work of being God’s hands and hearts in the world. This way of understanding what it means to be a Christian is more difficult because we can never finish its work. We can never reach a place where we can say, we’ve arrived.

This week you may go out and work in the local soup kitchen. Eventually you realize that the soup kitchen exists because of other problems that require your attention. Soon you are attending the local town hall meeting, and maybe in another year or two or twenty, you have the names and contact information for all your elected representatives stuck on the refrigerator. This year you buy a Prius because you begin to see that even though you can afford a gas guzzeling car you have an obligation to future generations to protect the environment they will inherit. In a few years you may be riding a bicycle. Living out the “what now” question involves an ever deepening understanding that we must let go of some of what we might claim as “our rights” so that others can have better lives.

As we approach this Pentecost life of giving and sacrifice and growing concern for the welfare of others--the life Jesus taught--it looks hard. There is much I am not ready to give up. Much I hope I will never have to give up, but I know there is still much I could give up, and that doing so would make a difference to others. The Pentecost life involves treating everyone as neighbor--everyone as someone who is in--a part of the group we are so glad to be a part of. It involves living our lives with their best interests at heart. That life doesn’t come easily to us, but it is the life to which the new church was called, the life to which we are still called.

The call is not easy, so thank God for the rest of today’s message. The part about how that new fledgling little group, people trying, hoping to be faithful, found within them on that day resources they had not expected. We will go out into the world today--we will leave this place in a little while-- reminded, trusting, I hope, maybe even rejoicing in the power of the Spirit that draws us all together and empowers us for the work of community. Amen

2010-04-26T08:40:00.000-07:00

April 25, 2010

A Sermon for Easter 4, Good Shepherd Sunday

Psalm 23

So when you and god woke up this morning what was it like? Do you remember dreaming together, lying next to each other? Do you and god ever sleep together like spoons? I knew a woman once who would tell me stories about her husband, Ramone--long dead--she told me one time about how they slept like spoons. When you and god woke up this morning could you feel each other’s presence like spoons laid neatly in the silverware drawer? Was there a conscious greeting or maybe just the peaceful, easy company of the other’s presence? When you and god slipped on a robe, put on your pants, felt around with your foot for a shoe--a slipper, were you still shaking off sleep or had the business of the day already called you into action? Did you have the luxury of waking without an alarm or were you summoned into consciousness by a baby’s crying or the sound of children or maybe a dog sniffing politely at the edge of your bed?

When you and god woke up this morning, after you’d been to the bathroom, after you’d shaved, fixed your hair, brushed your teeth, as you started this day together what plans did you make? Were your plans grand and hopeful? tentative? ambitious? Did you speak about the day to come or did you both just know its expectations and step into it? Sometimes companionship needs words but at other times knowing comes easier than speaking. When you and god woke up this morning did you share a glance, a conspiratorial smile maybe as you set out into your day.

When you and god woke up this morning, what was it like?

I have spent the last two days at a workshop listening to Matthew Fox, theologian, mystic, friend of the earth, teacher. I came away with a renewed sense that god is everywhere, that god is in us and with us and that there is no part of our lives or our world or any world we can imagine that is not contained within god. god is everywhere, in everything, permeating our lives. It is a simple message, but one that I easily forget. Our spiritual ancestors knew it. “Where can I run from your love,” asks the psalmist. “If I climb to the mountains you are there.” god is always near, as close as our breath, but it is so easy to begin believe that we are separated from god.

Maybe we begin by imagining that little bits of our lives are not acceptable to God, or they are not exactly what we might want for ourselves--from ourselves--so we try to hide that bit of ourselves from the one-from-whom-nothing-can-be-hidden. I hope that somewhere in your life experience you know what it is like to look back on such a time of hiding having learned that god, the universe, the people in your life are more accepting than you had expected. Wherever we are, wherever we go, whether we are laughing, crying, dancing, even when we think we’re hidden from god, god is there.

Many of us had a chance to learn this lesson early on in our life as Christians. The message of the unescapable presence and companionship of god is imbedded in one of the best known psalms from our tradition. When I was a kid, I knew two rote ways of speaking to god. One was the Lord’s prayer which pretty much everyone knew, and the other was the twenty-third psalm which I only kind of knew, often mixing up the parts about the table and the cup running over. I don’t know if I would know the twenty-third psalm--though I am sure it is the best known psalm in the book--unless I had had my tonsils out when I was twelve. In the only piece of spiritual advice I ever remember receiving from my father, he told me as I was going into the hospital that when he was about to be operated on he recited the twenty-third psalm and it helped. In what I’m sure was one of the few times I ever took his advice I did my best to learn the psalm, and sure enough; it helped me as they wheeled me into the operating room. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want……..he leads me beside still waters…..

I thought of this psalm as a call to bring god close in times of trouble or fear or danger. What I missed, what I think many of us miss, having been warned in church about the dangers of separating ourselves from god--as if that were possible--what I missed was this psalm’s message about just how deeply we are imbedded in the life of god and how close god is to us. Listen.

The Lord is my shepherd;

I shall not be in want.

Shepherds don’t leave their sheep. They sleep with them, protect them, take responsibility for their welfare. That is what we are meant to take from all the shepherd references we hear on this fourth Sunday in Easter, sometimes called Good Shepherd Sunday.

He makes me lie down in green pastures

and leads me beside still waters.

In the best times of our lives, says the psalmist, when there is no perceived danger or trouble, even when we might tend to forget our need of god, god from whom we can not be separated is not only present, but leading us.

He revives my soul

and guides me along right pathways for his Name's sake.

At the center of our being god is at work restoring, renewing us, helping us--urging us to choose well our path.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I shall fear no evil;

for you are with me;

your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

Our awareness of god’s presence doesn’t begin with being rescued in times of trouble. The god who accompanies us through the hardest parts of life--doesn’t remove us from trouble, but walks through it with us--the god who accompanies us through the hardest parts of our lives is an old friend, a companion we have known from the beginning. We don’t need to call god into the hard moments, but simply remember that we have never been nor will we ever be alone.

You spread a table before me in the presence of those who trouble me;

I don’t know about you, but most of the time when I think someone is troubling me, it is because somehow in my exchange with that person I lose my sense of grounding, I forget for a moment who I am, I lose confidence in some aspect of my being. In the presence of enemies we are told that our responses are fight or flight. I wonder this morning what it would be like, in the midst of some heated argument, to imagine, to picture god right there with us setting a table of fine food, good silver, cloth napkin….maybe the on those goofy place mats from Disney World. To imagine finding our grounding in such times in a table prepared by our absolutely unflappable companion.

you have anointed my head with oil, and my cup is running over.

Can we even stand the thought of being treated like royalty by our divine friend? Can we stand still and let ourselves be made into kings and queens in god’s presence. That is quite a challenge to the arguments we sometimes make about how unworthy we can be to have such a friend.

Surely your goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,

and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

...and I will dwell in the house of he Lord forever. I don’t know how long forever is, but I would assume it has to contain at least this moment and the next. I think maybe the psalmist is telling us that we live, even now, in this very moment, as close to god as we can get. Didn’t Jesus tell us that the kingdom of god is not out there, but all around us and within us?

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.

We can not be separated from our divine friend, the god who walks, eats, breaths, laughs, plays, cries, dreams, loves with us.

And so I ask again. When you and god woke up this morning, what was it like?

Just a note about the little g in god. When I preached this on Sunday, no one knew the g was lower case. The little g seemed right because of the familiarity of the god with whom we sleep and wake. The French Prayer Book uses the familiar form of “you” in speaking to god. I had never considered the theological implications of this simple choice. The Matthew Fox workshop put me in touch with the very familiar god, and though I am still a bit uncomfortable with the small g, it feels like a good, growing discomfort so I will leave it as it is.

2010-03-11T08:06:00.000-08:00

Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent

March 7, 2010

Luke 13:1-9

Read Lessons Here

I’m thinking of two women.

One was standing in a small hospital room staring out the window. The room was filled with monitors and cables and that all had something to do with her baby who was in a little bed at the center of it all. She acknowledged my presence as I came into the room and then turned to continue her staring. It took a little while, but eventually I learned that her child was in some danger and that there was a piece of the story the she didn’t want to have to tell. Fortunately she was in enough distress about the situation that she had to let go of her secret. I was the chaplain, so she might as well tell me what she thought was going on with her child.

She was very young, single, and when she had learned that she was pregnant she had prayed and prayed that God would fix that situation. That somehow maybe she wouldn’t really be pregnant, or …..something. That somehow God would make that baby go away. And now, here she was with the child she wanted desperately to be ok and she was afraid that old prayer had finally caught up with her. “How could I pray such a prayer?” she asked. “Maybe God is punishing me for praying that prayer or for having this baby.”

We made up a new prayer.

The other woman I have in mind had huge hair. Blonde. You may have watched her at some time. I’d give you a name, but there actually have been several big haired women who sing and cry and praise Jesus on television and who give thanks regularly and in public for all the great abundance of wealth that God has poured into their lives. They are purveyors of the prosperity gospel which holds that if you can just get right with Jesus all sort of wonderful blessings will be poured out upon you by the God who rewards the righteous. I’ll never forget hearing Tammy Faye once go on about the beautiful gold faucets God had given her in her new house.

Either of these images might be enough to give me pause about the whole idea of religion, except that I am convinced that both of these understandings of how God works in our lives are distortions of the faith that has been passed on to us. These understandings of how God works with us aren’t new, they are as old as mystery and faith and they are difficult to shake off. Today we hear Jesus weighing in on the old equation that still plagues us in our thinking about God.

Among the ideas about God and God’s relationship with humanity that Jesus challenged was this deeply ingrained idea that human suffering is a result of human sin.

Sickness, disaster, troubles are not the sent by God as punishments on bad people. Similarly, good fortune is not the blessings of God on the good. Those ideas are ancient and they have deep roots in the human mystery of why our lives are the way they are, of why happiness and good fortune seem to come easily to some and are so elusive for others.

The notion of calamity as God’s judgement on sin is explicit in the Old Testament, in the stories, the psalms, the prophets; God will punish the sinful and bless the good. In a surface reading it can appear that simple, but always, beneath the lines about judgement is the story of God’s love for even sinful humanity, God’s desire to be in relationship with even the worst of us.

Time and again Jesus highlights the separation of sin and suffering. Jesus, who in Matthew’s gospel says that God sends rain on the just and the unjust alike, tells his audience today that the disasters they are wondering about had nothing to do with who the sufferers were. Nothing to do with how sinful or righteous they might have been. He does say that actions have consequences, there is warning in today’s lesson, but he makes it clear that the terrible things that have happened were not sent by God as punishment on sinful lives.

In more than one story Jesus forgives the sins of a crippled person and then later in the story heals that person’s infirmity. The separation of those two actions in the stories marks a disconnect between sin and suffering. The people killed by Pilate, the people killed by the falling tower, says Jesus, were no more sinful than anyone else. And still, the old idea about the troubles that afflict us saying something about who we are persist. We just can’t seem to let go of them.

We are often easier on others than we are on ourselves, giving them the benefit of the doubt while still applying the old bad-things-happen-to-bad-people standard to our own lives.

Why is it so hard sometimes to tell of the troubles that keep us awake at night? We do we sometimes carry heavy burdens for great distances without telling anyone what is going on? Too often it has to do with the belief that what is happening to us is a sign of who we are, what kind of people we are. Sometimes, the pains and challenges we face in our lives are made all the more difficult to negotiate because they stir up in us old shame or fears about how we have lived our lives. I can’t tell anyone about the trouble in my marriage because it probably has a lot to do with my being such a bad husband. I can’t tell anyone about how scared I am about my kid because they will wonder about me. It sounds benign but it isn’t. Even Beaver Cleaver’s parents asked, “What would the neighbors think?” And we took it in. I do meet people, of course, who have created problems in their lives and don’t seem to recognize their role in their troubles. I am concerned today though with those who, when confronted by troubles they did not create, assume--even in some small way--that God had a hand in sending those troubles. God does not send troubles to punish us.

When trouble finds you, what does the situation you are in say about you? Maybe it says you are human, living in a world that is not yet what God or we hope it will be. And in that shared hope is our connection with the God who helps us live in the mystery of a life where sometimes things go wrong for no reason we can discern. Where sometimes things go better for us than we might think we deserve. A world where sometimes the one on the cross doesn’t deserve to be there.

2010-02-24T13:03:00.000-08:00

Wednesday Evening Short Courses

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Episcopalians, What makes us different?

February 24 & March 3 What makes the Episcopal Church different?

The question is sometimes asked, if all Christians believe in Jesus, then why does it matter what church you attend? Are there real differences in belief between Episcopalians and Catholics? Episcopalians and Baptists? What makes us different and how important are the differences, not only between the Episcopal church and other churches, but between different congregations in the Episcopal church?

In this course we will look at some of the distinguishing features of our Episcopal/Anglican heritage and discuss what it might mean to choose one path over another.

Maybe the place to begin is with the question, different from what?

What is your experience of or understanding of Christianity? As a cradle-Episcopalian, I sometimes assume the way we do things in this church is the standard, but that is not the case. We are actually different from most Christians in a number of ways.

First let’s talk about who we are. The Episcopal Church, which is the Anglican province in the United States, has about 2.3 million members. The Anglican Communion has some 82 million members, so we make up a little less than 3% of Anglicans. Anglicans are only about 4% of the worlds Christians who number around 2.2 billion. Other groups of Christians are Catholics (50%), Independents (20%), Protestants (16%), and Orthodox (10%). So the Episcopal Church constitutes about one tenth of one percent of all Christians.

Much of what makes us distinct is true also of Anglicans, so we will begin there. Some of the categories for consideration are:

Authority: What is the source of religious truth? On what do we base our actions? How do we decide what God would have us do?

For Catholics and Orthodox, 60% of Christianity, the primary answer would be “tradition.”

For most independents and many protestants the answer would be “scripture.”

For Anglicans the answer would include some combination of those first two answers and “reason.”

In the Episcopal Church, the mix varies among our members, but for much of the Episcopal Church “reason” seems to be on at least an equal footing with the other two. When questions of the relationship between cultural norms and traditional Christian practice have arisen, as in the ordination of women or the inclusion of gays, the Episcopal church has moved pretty rapidly to change its policy. That has been possible in part because of the high value put on the authority of reason in helping us find our way ahead. In changes regarding women’s ordination and inclusion of gays the scriptural support for new practices has had to be reasoned out of implications in writings that do not explicitly support the new way. There is virtually nothing in the tradition that would support the new practices, but “reason” has trumped the other two. That is fairly uncommon in other branches of Christianity.

Sacraments: To what extent are religious actions meaningful or effective in our lives? What happens when we are baptized? When we take communion? What about other sacraments like reconciliation or unction? What about priests? Are some of our contacts with God accomplished through the ministry of ordained persons? Why or why not?

The Catholic and Orthodox position would be that sacraments are real means by which God connects with humans and acts in their lives. The Catholic position remains that when the bread and wine are consecrated they become Christ’s actual blood and body. Something supernatural happens during the Eucharist to change the bread and wine. Most Christians take communion. Independents and many Protestants believe it is an important practice because Jesus started it, but they hear his words about the bread and wine being his body and blood as metaphor. It is done to commemorate the last supper and Jesus life, death and resurrection.

The Episcopal Church takes the Eucharist very seriously, making it the center of our weekly worship. The meaning of what is happening varies among Episcopalians and among areas of the country and among different area traditions. You can find Episcopalians who believe very much as Catholics do, that the bread and wine have a power and reality beyond their appearance that can affect our lives. You will also find just as many Episcopalians who would deny that the sacrament has any sort of power beyond its ability to recall Jesus’ nourishment of his disciples in faith and courage as he was leaving them.

What is unique about the Anglican/Episcopal Church is the wide variety of accepted understandings of what sacraments are. You will sometimes hear people speak of Episcopalians as being “Catholic” or “Low Church.” These terms speak to the differences among us regarding our understanding of sacraments. Some of us are taught that any crumb of consecrated bread that falls to the floor must be picked up and eaten immediately because it is no longer just bread. It has been made sacred. Others see the meaning more in the actions of blessing and gathering and receiving than in the elements themselves, and so are not as concerned about crumbs since the bread itself doesn’t carry the weight of the meaning of the communion.

Polity: Who’s in charge? Why?

Some of the possibilities here are a single leader, the Pope being the leader of half of the Christians in the world, congregations as independent bodies, which is true for many Christians, some sort of denominational body, or, as in our case, bishops elected by clergy and laity and ordained to lead in a geographic area.

Each Episcopal diocese is led by a bishop. The bishop has some absolute powers and the bishop also shares decision-making and leadership with other elected leaders in the diocese. The bishop and clergy are bound by laws called canons, which are enacted and revised by gatherings of clergy and laity who, propose them, debate and vote. As in all areas of Episcopal Church practice, our polity draws on tradition in the structure of bishops as leaders (Episcopal means having to do with bishops) and it draws from Protestant practice in the democratic process through which bishops are elected and laws are drawn.

Diversity: What are the faithful expected to believe? Where is that found? How is it learned? How well does this branch of Christianity tolerate ideas that are outside the norm?

If you want a clear statement of belief outlining what the Episcopal Church embraces in the way of belief, check the Catechism in the back of the Prayer Book. If you want to know what an Episcopalian believes, ask the Episcopalian you want to know about.

The Episcopal Church, like all Anglican Churches, finds its worship structure, forms and practices in a version of the prayer book written by Thomas Cranmer in the 16th century after England parted ways with the Roman Church. Belief is taught in classes for children and adults, but it is mainly taught through practice. Three lessons from scripture are generally read at services, one of those being from the Gospels. The Eucharistic prayer recites the story of salvation and each week we say the Nicene Creed, a set of basic beliefs agreed upon by the early Church in the fourth century. In all of these practices the faith is communicated and taught.

What has been true of the Episcopal Church for much of its history is that there is room in the Episcopal Church for people of widely varying beliefs. Episcopal bishops have often been in the news for having expressed unorthodox beliefs and yet those bishops continue to function and serve in the Church. Episcopal congregations vary from very high-church, tightly scripted traditional liturgical practice to modern-music centered, loosely organized very open and emotional worship. Thinking “outside the theological box” starts discussions in the Episcopal Church. In the Catholic Church clergy are often prohibited from writing or teaching because their views are not in line with the teachings of the Church. Similarly, many independent churches and some Protestants will push out those whose ideas do not fall within the norms of the congregation or denomination. There are those who say ruefully, we are the church where anything goes. Others celebrate us as the church where thoughts can be spoken and new ways of understanding our relationship with God are possible.

Holding such widely diverse views and beliefs within one Church is difficult as evidenced by the recent departure of some congregations from among us, but this branch of God’s Church has held together amazingly well these last almost five hundred years, and I expect that to continue for some time to come.

2010-02-22T08:55:00.000-08:00

Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent

February, 21, 2010

Romans 10:8b-13

Luke 4: 1-13

Read Lessons Here

In the culture of the deep south where I grew up, it was not uncommon to work during the week alongside someone who, on Sundays, was the pastor of a little congregation, often out in the country or at the edge of town. I worked with two such country preachers in my years in the car business. One pastored a little Baptist congregation in Mississippi and the other a CME church in a small town north of Memphis. Working with such folks meant that workplace conversation would, from time to time, shift to theology, and in the deep south that always involved a lot of Bible-quoting. And it wasn’t just preachers and pastors who could quote the Bible. Sometimes it seemed like everybody knew two thirds of it by heart. In that part of the world there wasn’t always a huge distinction between preaching and quoting the Bible, so an awful lot of people tended to know a whole lot of Bible. Preachers and Bible quoters were quite common in my early world, and fortunately for all of us, preachers weren’t given any kind of deferential treatment when it came to story telling.

My Baptist friend told me once about the local preacher who ran a dry goods store way back when. It was the kind of store that sold everything from fish hooks to caskets. It was also the kind of place where a bunch of fellows would be sitting around telling stories watching the world go by at just about any hour of the day. The store owner had a reputation as a Bible-quoter who tossed little quotes into the mix of daily life to put things into perspective, little gems like, “store up for yourselves treasure in heaven,” or “are not sparrows two for a penny, yet the Lord takes care of them,” or “love your neighbor as yourself.” His life was brimming with Bible.

One day, while there was a fair crowd sitting around the store, a stranger came in and asked for a blanket for his horse. The preacher went into the back and took a blanket off the stack and presented it to the man telling him it would be five dollars. The man asked if maybe the merchant had something a little better, so the preacher went back and sorted through the stack to find a blanket in a different color. He came back and told the stranger, “I have this one for seven dollars.” The stranger said his was a mighty good horse and he really wanted the best for him and did the proprietor have anything else. The preacher went out back again and pulled a red blanket out of the same stack, red being the only color left that the stranger hadn’t seen. “I can sell you this one for ten,” said the preacher, and the man bought the blanket and went away happy. When it was once again just the preacher and the regulars, a silence rested on the boys for a minute until one of them spoke up an said to the merchant, “you know, you talk about Jesus and quote a lot of scripture, didn’t you just sell that fellow a five dollar blanket for ten dollars? You sure that was all right?” “It’s right there in the book,” said the preacher. “He came to me a stranger and I took him in.”

Maybe the moral is that there’s more to quoting scripture than quoting scripture.

Today, both Paul and Jesus are shown to have been formed in a culture where scripture is a part of that formation process. They are both quoting the Bible in the stories we have today. Of course, it is not quite right to say they are quoting the Bible. They were quoting the Torah. Paul reaches into the book of Deuteronomy to find words to help make sense out of his experience of Jesus, and Jesus fights off temptation by quoting from the same book in today’s gospel. What I want us to notice today is not the content of the words they choose as they reach into their tradition, just the fact that they have such words ready to apply to their lives. Paul quotes scripture when he says “no one who believes in him will be put to shame.” We know that Paul is talking about Jesus, we know he clearly applies these words and this promise to Jesus, even though the words were originally written about God. The scriptures in which he has been steeped provide a language with which Paul can make sense out of what is happening in his world.

In the story of Jesus’ temptations in the desert Jesus and the devil are both quoting scripture. The devil is working from the psalms and Jesus is coming back with words of instruction from Deuteronomy, words attributed to Moses the great teacher of the law. In this story Jesus has the words at hand for the test in which he finds himself. The words he has carried for much of his life now have a purpose, an application, that makes them a living force for him as he contends with the powers that would bring him down. Again and again in the gospels, Jesus quotes from the sacred writings and people respond as if he has said something new. Jesus lets the old words come to life in new ways in his current situation because he understands those words to contain more than thoughts and concepts about God or law. He knows they are to be applied…...used in the living of our lives. Jesus had studied the scriptures in such a way that they had become a part of him. I would commend that as the reason for spending some time with scriptures. Read them so they can become a part of your life.

All my life I have heard people talk about studying the Bible. My preacher friends were all for it. As a cradle Episcopalian, I didn’t hear much about Bible study when I was growing up. A lot of people raised in the Catholic Church tell me they didn’t learn much about the Bible either. Growing up in a tradition that didn’t push Bible study, and knowing that people in the Bible belt where I lived who did push Bible study also usually wanted me to change my ways, I kind of grew up equating Bible study with reading about what I’m doing wrong. It never sounded all that appealing. I sometimes looked for words of comfort in the Bible, but coming at that project without some idea of where to begin can be tricky. There are a lot of un-comforting words there too, and it helps if you’re in trouble, to know where to look for what you need.

So, as we head into the Lenten season, I’m going to do what any good preacher might do and recommend that you spend some time with your Bible in the weeks ahead. And I want to suggest what might be a new way of reading scripture that may feel a little different from what you have tried before.

Often, when we speak of studying the Bible, we speak of learning what God wants of us. We treat the pages as if they contain a secret that we have to work out, or extract from the words. We often treat scriptures as if they are lists of concepts that are fixed, concepts that if we could just wrap our minds around or approach from the right perspective, we could grasp and they would make our lives work. This approach to scripture can be productive, but it can also lead to long arguments and even wars as we wonder how anyone could read the same words we read and come up with different answers. In a way, we end up serving scripture by struggling to come up with the right way to understand it.

Another way to approach scripture might be to let scripture serve us by being available to us when we need its language or its promises or even its judgements in our daily lives. If we wait until we have some urgent need to approach the Bible, we may be frustrated at what we cannot find. If, on the other hand, we, like Jesus live with the stories and the teachings, immerse ourselves in them, let them become familiar to us, we will find them shaping our lives and helping us in times of need. Learning the Bible is not an end in itself. Everything there is meant to help us in our lives and in our relationship with God.

Maybe the best way to begin reading scripture is to read it as literature. It is some of the most important literature of the Western world. Take it lightly. If something doesn’t seem possible or doesn’t seem to have anything to do with you--or if you wish it didn’t--take it as literature. Hold it lightly. The words were written by folks wrestling with some pretty big situations and experiences. We don’t usually live in such times, thank goodness. But if we have heard the stories, are familiar with the teachings, then when we do find ourselves in moments of need or wonder or deep gratitude, they may come back to us, like they did for Jesus in the desert, and connect us in those moments to a great community whose experience and encouragement we may really appreciate.

2010-02-14T04:20:00.000-08:00

Sermon for The Last Sunday After Epiphany

Luke 9:28-36

February 14, 2010

The year is 1992, the Summer before seminary. Mary, Margie and I are in a little beach town in Mexico for a week’s vacation before the big move, and we have settled in. Hammocks, no glass in the windows of our room, just curtains that rise to the ceiling in a light breeze. Lazy. And Margie has been noticing the guy who sells horse rides all week. Each day he arrives with a few horses and picks up some tourists for an hour’s ride up the beach and today is her day. When the young man arrives today it’s her turn. “Wanna go for a ride.” Such a big smile.

Margie and I ride up the beach with our guide until the village is out of sight. Margie, who is 10 and has ridden a few times still needs a bit of watching. I ride enough to manage as we make our way along the edge of the surf. The young man who owns the horses is pleasant and friendly to Margie, which means a lot to me. His long hair, dark skin and silver jewelry mark him as part of an away-from-home adventure. We ride north, and he is leading another horse whose rider we will pick up in the next town.

She is fifty maybe, and waiting on the beach with a man. She gives him a little kiss and lets our guide help her onto her horse. Together the four of us continue along the scalloped edge of the Yucatan peninsula, one beach after another. Tangled trees and deep blue ocean separated by a line of sand, and we travel that line.

The woman we picked up hasn’t spoken a word. She is riding, looking ahead, sitting very straight in the saddle. She has ridden before. I am keeping an eye on Margie, whose horse occasionally develops a mind of its own. The young man sees me looking back at my daughter and says, “I will check on your daughter, you stay with her,” meaning the woman who is riding on ahead.

Having been assigned, I ride up alongside the woman and try to start a conversation. “Do you speak English?” I ask. “French,” is the one word answer to my question. That word and the fact that she never took her eyes off the way ahead, let me know that I would hear no other words, and that was true. And still, in the next moment, I caught a glimpse into her life, as through a window, and I knew I had seen something important I would never have any chance of comprehending.

She and I were well ahead of the others, she was riding a few yards ahead of me when the guide called out that it was time to return. I stopped and waited. The French woman stopped and did not turn immediately. She just sat there looking up the beach, savoring the setting, the day maybe, and then she brought her hand up in front of her, made a fist and brought it down just a bit in the kind of motion often accompanied by the word, “yes!” She paused a bit longer and owned that moment before turning her horse for the ride back.

I knew as we rode back that I had seen only a piece of a story, a story I would never know.

And so I said nothing in those days about what I had seen.

It is funny, as I was writing down this story, the images came back to me. I saw the horses and the guide and Margie at ten, and the woman’s sign of triumph--at least that is what it seemed to me--I saw all those things. One of my first reactions to the experience of that ride, even then, had been to associate it with the gospel story for this last Sunday of Epiphany. I carried for some time the feeling of having been only an observer, an incidental participant in a mystery that could not be conveyed. I tell you the story today, and in fear that it will seem thin or silly or too much about me and my projections, I was tempted to qualify the telling by saying, ‘you just had to be there,’ but I won't do that.

I tell the story, not because it is about Jesus or Elijah or Moses, but because it speaks to me of experiences, images, occurrences we are not sure what to do with--experiences whose meaning we may only be able to guess and about which we are likely to remain quiet. We often experience more than we tell. We may keep to ourselves experiences that challenge our take on reality, or that we think others will not easily understand or accept. And, if we are reluctant to tell others about such experiences, what do we end up telling ourselves? I love the line--I understand the line-- “they kept quiet, and in those days told no one anything of what they had seen.”

We all experience such moments. A sunset, the sight of a child playing, learning, discovering. We say it all the time, “you just had to be there.” We say nothing at all about other moments. We witness an act of kindness that makes us question our own compassion and we are likely to have to ponder that for a while. A kind word at just the right moment can soften our crust, change us, but only after we have carried the experience long enough to let it sink in, to let in work on us. And those are simple everyday kinds of experiences. What about the other things we aren’t eager to discuss?

A couple of Wednesdays ago in the Corinthians class, we were talking about Paul having had a vision of Jesus and referring to that vision as his experience of the risen Christ. I was intrigued by the idea that if a vision of the risen Christ counts for Paul as a resurrection experience, then maybe we could all have such experiences. Someone asked, “have you ever had a vision of Christ?” “Well, not exactly,” I said, and then proceeded to speak very carefully and a bit hesitantly of moments of intuition, and insight and connection in which I have thought Jesus to be at least somewhere nearby. I was surprised even as I was answering, at my own hesitation to speak of such things. You can guess, of course, what happened. As soon as I had told a bit of my story, someone else told a bit of their experience of similar things. Another person stayed after class to tell a story. Oh the stories we could tell if only we would. Prayers answered, conscience awakened, strength found to make it through difficult times, moments of deep peace in the middle of turmoil, the little voice inside that tells us to move, change, grow, try. We don’t often have much to say about such things, we may even dismiss them. What if they are not only real, but reality itself breaking into our lives. I believe these moments we keep to ourselves are often nothing less than the Spirit of God working on us, working in us, completing the work of creation begun so long ago.

Our bishop noted recently that while the number of parishioners on church roles is increasing, the number of people attending services each week is getting smaller. I have been thinking about the bishop’s question as to why more people don’t attend church. I have been wondering why someone would want to participate in a faith community, not because I don’t know some time-honored answers to the question, but because I am not sure my answers would mean anything to someone not already invested in the Church. One answer I might offer to someone who has never been a part of the Church is that in this place, one can ponder the experiences that are difficult to talk about. This community, with its liturgy and lore, provides a setting and a language for reflection on those moments when we have hints of a larger, unexamined reality, a reality of which we are a part and that is a part of us. I would like to tell that person approaching the Church also that in the community of faith you will sometimes hear stories from the people around you that sound familiar--that let you know you are not alone. I would have to tell them though that they would need to be present for a while and listen closely to hear such stories. I would say that here we understand that sometimes you just have to keep silent, telling no one what you have seen…….I would make sure they know that, and I would tell them what may be the best reason to be a part of this community. I would tell them that in this place we look forward to the day when all the stories will be told and to a time when the real won’t seem so strange. Amen.

2010-01-27T11:45:00.000-08:00

Short Course: Corinthians January 27, 2010

In his book, Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles, Jurgen Becker says that Paul wrote letters to particular churches about particular problems. He says, “Paul never took pen in hand or dictated to a scribe in order to establish matters of theological orientation that in his view should have validity for all times and all churches.” Becker says that Paul would not have considered his letters capable of influencing the whole of Christendom over the centuries.

Those of us who claim the name, “Christian” almost two thousand years after Paul know his teachings to be considered foundational to the meaning and substance of Christianity. That is because, in large part, in trying to work out the problems of local churches, Paul appealed to and in sometimes crafted theological arguments that he often had to restate or deepen as he addressed the concern at hand. Several of these can be seen in the two books (actually several letters) we call First and Second Corinthians. Here are some examples of where Paul’s thoughts in response to questions or problems reflect and/or have become basic Christian doctrine:

I Corinthians

The nature and meaning of baptism

The baptized are one church as opposed to several vying for spiritual superiority based on who baptized them or who taught them the gospel. God triumphed through weakness, that is death on a cross. Understanding the crucifixion eliminates boasting and therefore, factions

Eating of meat sacrificed to idols

Part of larger question of whether Christians had to follow Jewish rules. How is Christianity related to Judaism? Same God, same scriptures. Same rules?

Lord’s Supper

separates the sacrament from a meal simply for filling the belly. Lord’s supper is sacred--sacrament

Spiritual gifts identified by Paul as “spiritual.”

The list of “gifts” was common in other religions in the Hellenistic world. Paul tied them to the Spirit within for Christians.

The future resurrection of the dead

We see Paul having to work out the then/now ness of the Christian hope

II Corinthians

Humility of Ambassadors for Christ

Paul responds to stories about opponents wanting to be leaders in the community.

The idea of the “foolishness of Christ”

developed to counter the superlative apostles who claim greatness because of their spirituality and their works.

Some Questions for Tonight:

Where do you see these concepts in the gospels?

Is there anything here that seems out of synch with the gospel accounts?

Has Paul surprised you in any of his thinking or language? How?

What stories about Jesus do you think might have led Paul to his views?

2010-01-25T08:45:00.000-08:00

Sermon for the Third Sunday after Epiphany

Luke 4:14-21

January 24, 2010

"Then Jesus rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him."

As much as the story we just heard in Luke’s gospel is a story about Jesus, it is also a story about the people for whom he became the Messiah. In a way it is really more their story than his. In this story connecting Jesus with the promise envisioned by Isaiah, the gospel writer tells us something of the situation of the people who encountered Jesus and who gathered in the wake of his ministry. Luke wants us to understand that the people whose lives were changed by Jesus were people who had been waiting--hoping, wondering when and how an old promise, an old dream might be fulfilled. Jesus took the stage in a homeland occupied by foreigners where the people treasured a dream captured in ancient words of comfort, words offered by the prophet seven hundred years earlier in a time of great national despair and defeat. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news,” Jesus showed up at a time when many were waiting to hear some good news.

Today’s story of Jesus reading from the scroll in the synagogue continues the theme of Epiphany in which God is made manifest in our world. As in the first reading today from Nehemiah, God’s Spirit breaths through the written word. The books of the Law and the Prophets, both represented today in these readings, make God present in our lives and they prepare us to see the ways in which God is alive and at work in the world around us. The promise Jesus reads from the text is ancient. The one who steps into the roll it describes is new. Jesus appeared in a world that had been waiting for him, a world in touch with its need for some outside assistance. Had Jesus been born into a world that was not hungry for a savior, we probably wouldn’t be here in this place today. Part of what enabled people to see God’s presence in Jesus was that they had been waiting for God to act in their world and set things right. In those first few years around and after Jesus, the more they thought about it, the more they reflected on what Jesus had said and done in his ministry, the more they came to believe that he was God’s new act of redemption in the world.

Jesus was recognized by people who knew their need of his help. It is a simple formula that still works. We tend to see God, to notice God and want to form some connection in times when our own resources are shown to be inadequate. Recognizing and acknowledging our need for divine assistance doesn’t come easily to us. We usually do all in our power to avoid finding ourselves in a place of great need, open to the idea of a savior--and, paradoxically, we wonder sometimes why we don’t feel more deeply connected to God. We hear Jesus saying this morning that he has been sent to the poor, the captive, the blind and the oppressed--people who understand well that their own resources can’t bring them what they really need. The simple formula that Jesus is the answer to our need, to the world’s need has built the Church from the very beginning. And like preachers for the last two thousand years, my job today is to in some small way, help you feel your need for a savior. That too is an ancient formula. If Jesus is the answer then the preacher needs to place the congregation firmly in the middle of a problem. That shouldn’t be too hard, given the times in which we are living.

Jesus brought a light of hope into an occupied land. He referenced another prophet whose message was also for a nation struggling with forces that seemed overwhelming. If I’m to highlight problems, maybe I should start with this country of ours. Our resources certainly seem a bit stretched at the moment.

I don’t care what your politics are, if you have any political opinions these days you have had plenty of occasion to wonder lately if we don’t need a bit of divine help in figuring out the way ahead. As I understand it, in its simplest form, we have a two party political system that represents two different ideological approaches to government. The most committed on each side of the aisle are pretty sure that if the other folks would just let them run things the country would be just fine. The two ideals seem to run something like this: One group thinks that government should gather the power of the people through laws to insure that the basic needs of the many are met. That involves taking money out of the free market and creating programs to help with food, education, health care and so on. The other group believes that if the free market is just left to go about its business the people who make money will spread that money around by creating jobs and everyone will be able to afford what they need. It seems to me that either of these systems might work if it weren’t for a little problem that Isaiah’s people probably knew better than did the people Jesus encountered seven hundred years later. The people who were waiting for a savior when Jesus came on the scene mostly thought that the Romans were the problem. If they could just get rid of those pesky outsiders things would be ok. Isaiah’s audience, on the other hand, was still reeling from a long line of much-too-human leaders, some of whom are listed in the history of Israel only by name along with a note saying they did what was evil in the sight of God. Those to whom Isaiah spoke had begun to figure out the truth of what the old comic strip character Pogo used to say, we have met the enemy and he is us.

Whichever political party you might lean toward, there has been enough in the news in the last year or two to make you wonder whether we don’t all need some kind of a savior. Many of the folks who believe most strongly in free markets wince at the inclination among many financial institutions to hoard and give out huge bonuses and not share the wealth. Many of those who believe in bigger government really would rather watch sausage being made than see the torturously slow movement of the machine we call the legislature. The good intentions of people on both sides, people who dream of a better nation, are too often mired down in the basic age old human problem of too many people who ask only, what’s in it for me. We have met the problem, Jesus, and it is us.

Now I hope you don’t hear me saying that humanity, that humanness is the problem. It isn’t. All that drive to build up, the push of what seem to be great ideas, the passion of ideologies--even the what’s in-it-for-me, to some extent are all part of the human creative potential. You can find examples of all those things in Jesus’ story. They are a part of the humanity Jesus came to redeem, to make whole, to fulfill, but they are only a part of that humanity. Jesus balanced those human powers with some other human traits we don’t notice as often, like humility and a willingness to risk. Compassion costs us something, love gives other people power in our lives. Jesus gave of himself, cared about others, refused to be turned into a king. And in the end, when the story began to be told, it was of a man who chose to die so that the rest of us could have life, could live more fully, more completely.

If it is true that Jesus shows up where there is a known need for God’s help, then maybe the stories we read in the paper and see on the news are a part of the Epiphany. When we read about humanity operating at its worst, we might ask ourselves what the balance is. If we wonder how someone could accept a multi-million bonus after contributing to the bankruptcy of so many we might ask what is missing. If greed makes us wonder where the altruism and self sacrifice are in our world, maybe we will begin to see those things because we are looking for them. If we are saddened by the sense of self-righteousness we hear crafted into stinging words in the political arena, we might go looking for humility and grace, and if we do we may just begin to notice those things in more places than we might have imagined.

As I read the message this morning, part of learning to see Jesus among us involves learning to want him among us. There is so much going on these days to fuel our hunger for a savior. Maybe it will help us to remember that Jesus shows up where he is hoped for, longed for, expected. Amen.

2010-01-21T09:22:00.001-08:00

Corinthians Class: notes from last night

Small group last night. I had heard from four who could not make it but plan to be there next week. One person last night thought Paul was very cool, another had been put off in the past by Paul's repeat-it-till-they-submit logical constructs (let's see, if the dead are not raised then what was that again?)

We talked about Paul and the contrast in content between Paul's letters and the gospels. We speculated some about those first 20 years after Jesus and what must have been the thinking about him in Jerusalem and beyond, and whether there were major differences because of location. We thought that amid the local-issues business, Paul offered some amazingly complex theology as a foundation for the basis of the church's existence.

We went home to read Corinthians and will return to look at Paul's theology of Eucharist, baptism, salvation, reconciliation and more. The plan will be to focus on a few of these in the next two weeks and look at ways in which Paul may have shaped our current theology. We will also speculate about other possible non-Pauline theological positions on the same subjects that might be inferred from sayings of Jesus as recorded in the gospels. Which means, of course, that it might not be a bad idea to do a bit of reading in the gospels as well as in Corinthians.

Happy reading. Hope to see you next week or read your comments on these posts. JB

2010-01-20T16:16:00.000-08:00

Wednesday Evening Courses at St. Aidan’s

The Church at Corinth: Paul and the Shape of Christianity

January 20, 2010

So the question I am asking myself tonight is what have I gotten myself into?

I plan these Wednesday evening classes by thinking of a subject into which I would like to do a bit more digging, I put them on the calendar, and then I sit down to see what we will do when class begins. I have been reading all week and am more aware than usual that I could read for a year and still not have begun to scratch the surface of the subject. So, my plan today is to back up and try to say a few things about why I chose Corinthians and Paul.

First, I took a course on Corinthians in seminary 15 years ago and I had some books I wanted to read again.

Second, I am very much a modern in my approach to and understanding of scripture. On the clergy deployment form that sorts clergy by attitudes and preferences, there is a question in which we are asked to place our attitude on a scale that ranges between “regards the Bible literally” and “regards the Bible as am interpretation of God’s dealings with humanity.” The second one is still a bit traditional for me, but it will do. I do not feel compelled to take Christianity or its scriptures at face value, so I end up asking a lot of questions, sometimes about aspects of the faith that seem basic to it.

One of the questions asked in more modern times about Paul and his influence on Christianity has to do with whether Paul shaped the response to Jesus, which became the Christianity we are familiar with, into something Jesus never intended. The short version of that discussion notes that while Jesus spoke a lot about the kingdom of God, Paul spoke instead about Jesus. I wanted to spend some time with that question and thought revisiting Corinthians might be a way to go about it.

The other reason I thought of Corinthians is that one of the passages of scripture that has returned in my life in all its seasons is an appeal by Paul in Second Corinthians that seems, as I look at it now, to speak more in the voice attributed to Jesus in the question I just cited.

"From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God." II Cor. 16-20

In their Introduction to The New Testament, Harcourt, 1982, Perrin and Duling describe Jesus this way. "Jesus of Nazareth was an itinerant, charismatic prophet of Aramaic-speaking, rural Galilee. He was a man who proclaimed to his people that the coming Kingdom of God was already present in his ministry of preaching and healing. He was crucified by the Romans as a potentially dangerous Zealot type revolutionary. Within a short time groups of itinerant preachers were scattered about villages of Syria-Palestine perpetuating his teaching and proclaiming that the end was near. Other were soon proclaiming in cities of the Roman Empire." 71-72

Soon people all over the Greco-Roman world were hearing that Jesus was the messiah and that the way to salvation was through Jesus. Jesus was the pivotal beginning of a new era in salvation history.

The gospels telling the story of Jesus were not written until at least forty years after he was gone. It is generally accepted these days that Mark’s gospel was written first and the Matthew and Luke both used Mark’s material and added other material, much of which they shared in common. It is assumed that they had another source of sayings of Jesus known simply as Q, for the German word for source. Matthew, Mark and Luke focused primarily on what Jesus said. It must be assumed that sayings of Jesus were considered important and were preserved in memory and in oral tradition and that the earliest written lists were preserved at least with some accuracy in the gospels. The earliest Christians held the sayings of Jesus in high esteem.

Paul, on the other hand, never quotes Jesus. Paul, who speaks of other teachers and of being one of the earliest followers of Jesus, who claims to have seen the risen Lord, would have been a part of that early tradition that valued Jesus’ words, but he does not quote Jesus in his letters which were written some 10-20 year before the first gospel. Instead, Paul speaks about Jesus, about the meaning of his death and resurrection, and about the meaning of our participation in the life of Jesus.

Somewhere between that wandering, charismatic prophet and the developed theological work that is the gospel of Luke, written around the year 90 ad. or the even more theologically nuanced gospel of John written a few years later, came Paul. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians were written around 55-57 ad. and in those letters we hear the Christianity of the later gospels being considered, thought through, shaped in ways that have been with us for almost two thousand years.

Some suggestions for reading Corinthians for this course.

Paul has taken a lot of flack for some of his views, especially on women’s roles and rights. Try to remember that he was writing in another era, and ask yourself how well your opinions on some issues of the day might hold up a thousand years down the road.

Try to focus on what Paul is saying about Jesus and ask yourself how he came to such conclusions as his masterful parallel between Adam in the garden of Eden and Jesus as the second Adam who redeems us all from The Fall by living his life well. If you get tired of hearing him go on about sexual morality try hearing the difference between his words about the situation in Corinth (which was a seaport and known widely as a brothel town) and his theological views on Jesus. Granted, they are often fit together, as in his discussion of the Lord’s Supper, but as the old saying goes, don’t worry about taking what you need and leaving the rest for another time. What doesn’t speak to you now may in another time or setting.

Note also that what we now have as I and II Corinthians is at least three letters, one of which makes reference to a fourth which we do not have. Some scholars think there were several more. Most seem to think that First Corinthians hold together and mentions the earlier letter. Second Corinthians speaks of a harsh letter, which may be the last four chapters of what is now Second corinthians. If that is true, then It might help to read chapters 10-13 before 1-9.

I invite you to read, Corinthians, and return with comments and questions which we will explore together. For those of you who are joining us on line, I will try to post comments from the session tonight.

John B