Amazing Grace: A sermon for 21 March 2010

So here we are, rounding the bend and heading down the home stretch of Lent. Today begins the fifth week of our annual journey into the wilderness, following the example of our Lord.

This week culminates with Palm Sunday, a moment of celebration that kicks off the somber events of Holy Week, leading up to the ultimate joy of Easter. Thus today’s lessons not only help us to look back at our Lenten journey, but also offer us a glimmer of what is to come, both the somber and the celebratory aspects.

The prophet Isaiah (43:16-21) is quite explicit in bridging past and future, and placing the emphasis on hope. The context of this poem or hymn is that the Israelites have been exiles in Babylon for nearly 50 years. By the 43rd chapter of Isaiah, they have heard that they will be allowed to go home.

But Babylon and Jerusalem are a long ways apart when travel is by foot and camel. The way is rough. It goes through wilderness, where food and water is scarce and animals of prey do their thing.

And so Isaiah begins by reminding the Israelites that the Lord has seen them through danger before. He made a way for them through the sea, the same sea that then “extinguished” the Egyptian chariots and warriors that pursued them.

But then Isaiah makes an about face. Don’t dwell on that, he says. The Lord is “about to do a new thing.” Notice how the poetry switches into future tense: The Lord will make a way in the wilderness. The Lord will provide water. The wild animals will honor the Lord their God.

Had I begun preparing this sermon a little earlier last week, I might have e-mailed Ed and asked that we sing “Amazing Grace” today. For the most significant, unifying factor that ties together all of our lessons this morning is the good news of the amazing grace of our God.

My study Bible suggests that Psalm 126 was most likely written after the Israelites have returned from Babylon to Jerusalem. It is a hymn of thanksgiving that also begins in the past tense, but on an even more upbeat note: “[T]he Lord restored the fortunes of Zion” and we were so happy we had to pinch ourselves to make sure we weren’t dreaming. We laughed and shouted for joy, and bragged about our Lord to anyone who would listen.

Then the psalmist too turns to the future. This will happen again, he says. We can count on the Lord our God. Tears and weeping are part of the human condition, but with God’s help we will “come again with joy.”

The apostle Paul’s testimony in his letter to the Philippians (3:4b-14) is a very personal variation on the theme of God’s amazing grace. Paul’s look backward is at his own life and accomplishments. He enumerates them: circumcised on the 8th day, an Israelite of the esteemed tribe of Benjamin, not just a Jew but a Hebrew, a Pharisee who knew and followed the law flawlessly, a zealous protector of the faith as he understood it, even to the point of persecuting the church of Jesus Christ.

But now, Paul says, all of that is worthless. It is rubbish. Again, my study Bible says that the Greek word Paul used here actually has a stronger connotation, the connotation of “excrement.”

Having come to know God in the risen Christ, Paul turns his back on such egoistic claims and attempts to earn righteousness through the human worthiness competition. Instead, he says, righteousness is a gift made possible by the amazing grace of God. It is given and accepted through faith by all who have been made God’s own, through Christ Jesus.

Notice two things about this passage. First, suffering itself is transformed. It is no longer something to beg God to relieve us of at the first possible moment. Rather, it is precisely that which draws us closer to Christ. “I want to know Christ,” Paul says, “and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death.”

Second, human striving is no longer a worthiness competition. It is no longer directed at being more religious or more pious or more moral or better behaved or whatever… in relation to other people. Rather, Paul says, let us keep our focus on the only worthy goal, which is the heavenly call of relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Thereby we will receive the only gift worth having, which is the righteousness of God.

And so we come to today’s Gospel lesson (John 12:1-8), and it is here we find most explicitly the foreshadowing of the somber events of Holy Week.

Jesus sits at table in the home of his friends, Mary, Martha and Lazarus. We have met these people before. The presence of Lazarus, who was dead and now lives, foreshadows what is to come for Jesus, although none of those at dinner save Jesus have an inkling of what is to come.

Martha serves, as usual. Mary expresses her extravagant love and devotion to Jesus, as usual. She takes a pound of costly perfume, anoints Jesus’ feet and dries them with her hair. For this she is criticized by Judas Iscariot. Why wasn’t that perfume sold and the money given to the poor? he asks.

But John makes sure we see the falseness of Judas’ piety. Of the four Gospel accounts, John’s is the one most preoccupied with making a case against Judas by seeing signs that lead up to his betrayal of Jesus.

Jesus, on the other hand, is rather gentle in his rebuke. He reminds Judas that the poor aren’t going away. They will always be here.

I have actually heard this passage used by people to excuse not helping the poor and to justify opposing social safety nets for the poor. “Jesus said the poor will always be with us,” they say. And their piety is as false as that of Judas.

It is always possible for the self-righteous to take something out of context and make it mean whatever serves the selfish interests of the moment. Jesus’ teaching about how we are to love and care for the poor, as recorded over and over again throughout the Gospels, is eminently clear.

In this story, what Jesus most likely means is that the apostles can take care of the poor tomorrow and the next day and the next, but at this very moment, what they need to do most is begin to come to terms with what will soon happen. And what will soon happen are the somber events of Holy Week.

I like to think that somehow, through her devotion to Jesus, Mary intuitively collaborates with him in this scene by anointing his feet with burial perfume.

The Lord is indeed about to do a new thing. That new thing is, by the grace of God, the most amazing gift of all time. It is no less than the salvation and reconciliation of the world to its Maker. But it comes through the suffering, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

AMEN.

I Want You: A sermon for 18 March 2010*

Last week when asked if I was interested in preaching tonight, I was fresh from consecutive Sundays of what had seemed to be reasonably successful sermons, here at St. Alban’s two weeks ago and last Sunday at St. Thomas’. And so I didn’t hesitate to say yes.

It was not until two days ago that I realized the readings I would be preaching from are in celebration of a saint—Cyril of Jerusalem—whose feast day is March 18 on Roman Catholic and Episcopal church calendars, but who does not even appear on the Lutheran church calendar, which doesn’t recognize anyone outside of the Bible as a saint with a capital S in any case!

I’m sure Garrison Keilor could do something really creative and funny with this situation. For me it’s a lesson: Beware of becoming proud of preaching. You will live to regret it!

Fortunately, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is an equal opportunity message. It is no respecter of denominations. This evening’s lesson from Luke is an excellent “unity” passage.

But before I go into that, I do want to say a few words about Cyril of Jerusalem. He is an important figure in the history of all Christians, and he is especially important to those of us who have similar liturgical traditions.

Cyril was Bishop of Jerusalem for most of the second half of the 4th Century. He is credited with developing liturgies we still use today during Holy Week. We know this not only from his own writing, but also because of a Spanish nun by the name of Egeria (i-JEER-ee-uh). Egeria made a late 4th-Century pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and, to our great benefit, she kept an account of her travels in the form of a long letter to her sisters back home.

She was in Jerusalem at a time when the church year we are so familiar with today, with its seasons of Advent and Lent, and principal feasts like Christmas and Easter, was still in formation and becoming widely adopted. In fact, she helped with the dissemination of those early church practices, such as Bishop Cyril’s liturgies for Holy Week, by her detailed descriptions in an eyewitness account. In fact, she’s still doing it due to the wonders of modern technology. You can buy her account in book form today on amazon.com, complete with many annotations that demonstrate how historians have pored over it.

It’s also important that when Cyril was Bishop of Jerusalem, the early church was in great turmoil. The divisive issue of that day was how to understand Jesus, specifically how to understand the divinity of Jesus.

To put it as simply as possible, one pole of the debate is expressed in the Nicene Creed we still use today: Jesus the Christ is “eternally begotten of the Father” and “of one Being with the Father.”

The folks at the opposite pole of the debate in the 4th Century believed that the Son was divine but lesser than the Father and not eternal. In their words, “there was a time when the Son was not.”

I daresay most of us don’t debate that issue much anymore. It seems pretty well settled to us. But in the time of Cyril, it was not. In his 36 years as a bishop, Cyril was exiled three times by superiors from opposite poles of the debate. Ultimately he spent nearly half his years as Bishop in exile.

In other words, Cyril, being a moderate, managed to rile both extremes of the debate. So I admire Cyril. I have often thought that people who provoke both sides of a polarized debate must be doing something right.

Every time I look at church history, I am struck anew by two things. On the one hand is a history of divisive issues, issues that caused blood to be shed in many cases, and in others, the splits and splintering into the many denominations we know today.

On the other hand I also see an extraordinary continuity in such things as the worship practices many of us share. And not just those denominations represented in this worship space this evening.

A few years ago I was privileged to go to the Dominican Republic on a mission trip along with a handful of folks from St. Thomas’. One of my lasting memories of that trip is worshiping with brothers and sisters in the faith, each of us speaking in our own language but united by the familiarity of our common liturgy.

To a great extent, whether we see division or unity depends on where we focus our attention . The church as a whole and every denomination has plenty of divisive issues facing it today. It also has plenty of unifying beliefs and practices. What you see depends on what you focus on.

Looking at the history of the church helps keep these things in perspective. But an even better way to keep things in perspective is to focus on the Gospel message. In tonight’s passage from Luke, Jesus is speaking to some of his disciples. We do not know how many or which ones in particular.

Earlier in this last chapter of Luke, Jesus appears to two men on the road to Emmaus. After he leaves them, they rush back to Jerusalem to join “the eleven and their companions,” we are told in verse 33. I’m guessing the women who went to the tomb and are named at the beginning of the chapter are among them, but we just don’t know. Luke has a much more important story to tell.

Suddenly Jesus appears. He once again explains the scriptures to them and this time, because he has opened their minds, they get it. He establishes a context, reminding them that what has happened is not an accident of history but fulfillment of the Divine plan. He repeats the essential elements of the Good News: Christ has died, Christ is risen, repentance and forgiveness of sins must be preached to all nations.

And then he puts it to them: “YOU are witnesses,” he says. “You are witnesses of these things.”

Occasionally I wish we liturgical denominations weren’t quite so traditional in our worship liturgies. This evening, for example, it would be kind of fun to have the advantage of gigantic screens here at the front of the church, high on the wall on both sides of the pulpit.

If I had such a resource, I know exactly what I would put up there tonight. It would be that much-published poster of Uncle Sam, with his white curly locks and goatee, his stovepipe hat bedecked with stars, his red and white striped trousers and blue tailcoat. He leans toward the viewer making stern eye contact. He points his finger right in our face. “I WANT YOU,” he declares, in all capital letters across the bottom of the poster. And we all know that he isn't addressing us as southerners, or from Iowa. "I want you" means every one of us.

Jesus does not address us as Episcopalians or Lutherans or Roman Catholics or Baptists or whatever. He does not address us as black or white or Hispanic. He does not address us as U.S. Americans or Africans or Europeans.

He addresses us as believers, as a community of faith in all of our diversity. “You are witnesses,” he says. Go. Tell the good news.

AMEN

*This sermon was preached to a congregation of several denominations participating in a Unity in the Spirit ecumenical Lenten series.

This fellow, Jesus: A sermon for 14 March 1020

“This fellow welcomes sinners and he even eats with them.” (Luke 15:2, NRSV)

The “fellow” is, of course, Jesus, who is once again in today’s Gospel demonstrating his refusal to conform to the norms and standards of polite society.

Today we think little about who is partaking of food with us. We go to dinner parties where we don’t necessarily know the name of the person seated to our right, much less whether they live a moral life. We go to receptions and buffets, take food from a common table, and eat while sitting or mingling with people we’ve never met before. We eat in restaurants and fast food joints within earshot and arm’s length of complete strangers.

It was not so in the time of Jesus. The rules for meals, food and what is called “table fellowship” were detailed and complex. They had to do with “purity” as the Jews understood God to have demanded it. But they also had to do with social identity, social boundaries and social conflict.

And the Pharisees were quite right to have been scandalized by Jesus’ behavior, because he rejected those rules over and over again. Whenever Jesus was at the table, regardless of whose house he was in, all who had come to hear him preach and teach—tax collectors and sinners, truly immoral people—ALL were welcome.

Moreover, Jesus not only modeled radically inclusive behavior, he taught it. The parable of the prodigal son is one such teaching, and I daresay its message is difficult for us to swallow.

We certainly like parts of it: The father’s compassion warms our hearts, and we pray that we might be similarly compassionate. Most likely each of us has gone astray at some point in our lives, in a way that helps us identify with the wayward son, and we repent and pray for forgiveness.

And if the story stopped there, we’d most likely be fine with it. After all, it’s a pretty familiar and reassuring picture of the Christian faith. We have a loving and compassionate father who gives us good things, and even though we fall short and go astray, again and again, we’re pretty good at repentance. We confess our sins most every Sunday, with confidence that we will be forgiven once again. And we go to sleep at night trusting that we will be welcomed to that grand and glorious feast our father has prepared for us—the feast we call “the Kingdom of God.”

But the story doesn’t end there. Jesus just couldn’t leave well enough alone. He had to introduce the troubling matter of the elder son, the one who was faithful, who tended the flocks and worked the fields and did all he was supposed to do… while the younger son squandered his inheritance.

Here’s the picture: We are standing outside a huge tent in the ancient Middle East. A fabulous party is going on inside. We can hear musicians playing and people laughing. The smell of roasted calf wafts on the evening breeze. A steady stream of servants carrying trays piled with fruit, baskets of bread and jars of wine enter the tent.

The elder son stands outside, refusing to go in. He is indignant, and who can blame him? Even though he has been faithful, good and hard working, the father has never thrown a feast in his honor! He feels cheated, disgraced, angry, resentful.

The father comes out and pleads with the son. I really do love you, he says. In fact, everything I have is yours. But that’s your brother in there! He was dead and now he’s alive again. Come, celebrate with us!

Who does each of us identify with in this picture? Or, perhaps the better question is when has each of us been in each of those positions?

I doubt any of us has any trouble remembering when we have been the younger son who has sinned and needs forgiveness. I’m sure each of us has also been the one to forgive and to invite someone who has sinned against us back into fellowship.

But the position of the older son is a good bit harder for us to deal with. After all, he is in the right! He earned his self-righteousness! He shouldn’t even be expected to share the same tent with his unworthy brother, much less a feast celebrating that brother’s return.

In fact, it’s not the older son and his behavior that makes us uncomfortable. What makes us uncomfortable is that Jesus didn’t make him the hero of the story!

In truth, even though our rules for sharing food have relaxed, we have invented all kinds of ways of separating ourselves from those we deem less worthy, and of drawing a wall of exclusivity around our precious righteousness. That’s self-righteousness. We take righteousness, a gift from God to be expressed in our love for each other, and turn it into self-righteousness, a thing of our own ego created by our uncanny ability to divide the world into us vs. them, good people vs. bad people, saved vs. sinner, right vs. wrong.

And we, dog gone it, are right! So.., we’re not going to give our money to that organization because it serves people who make irresponsible decisions. We’re not going to support that legislation because, no matter how many people it might help, it just might help someone whose manner of life we deem wrong. Or, we’re going to go over there and form our own church or order or club or whatever, because this church or order or club just insists on admitting unworthy people or just won’t behave the way we think it should.

A Presbyterian pastor and teacher by the name of David Bales summarizes the challenge Jesus poses to that way of thinking. He says:

Jesus is simply indiscriminate about whom he spends time with, and whom he even eats with. His fellowship isn't closed around the "good" or even those attempting to be good. Jesus accepts people before they're good. By word and deed Jesus undermines social boundaries. He challenges religious exclusiveness. His table fellowship is non-hiearchical [and] radically inclusive, and [it] demonstrates what he believes about the kingdom of God.

It seems to me that the main agenda of most Christians most of the time has been, and is, to tame the Gospel message. I think we really, really, really want Jesus to be middle class. We really, really wish we knew if he was Democrat or Republican! We are sure he is “on our side” in international conflicts.

And then we are confronted with teachings like this one, which portray the Kingdom of God as radically non-hierarchical and radically inclusive. The question is, what will we do?

Will we stand outside the tent, pouting and petulant, reassuring ourselves that we stand on principal and that we have earned our right to be offended? Or will we accept the forgiving love of the father, lay down our self-righteousness, and enter into the feast with all of the other sinners?

AMEN.

One More Year: A sermon for 7 March 2010

Manure is an amazing thing. And I know whereof I speak. I was raised on a small Iowa farm, a farm my family did not own. We were “share croppers.” We tilled someone else’s land and shared a significant proportion of what we earned with the landowner.

It’s a difficult way to support a family, and so we didn’t get our fertilizer from a nice, shiny tank truck or in tidy plastic bags at the garden center like I do now. Instead, we—my brothers and I—shoveled it out of the barn and out of the hog lot.

So the parable Jesus tells in today’s Gospel lesson (Luke 13:1-9) is for me like one of those Disney World 3D, surround-sound cinematic experiences. I know about working manure into soil. I even have the smells to go with it!

But you don’t have to have been raised on a farm to get the point. In fact, the Saints winning the Super Bowl after 40 years of rarely making it into the playoffs is also to the point: We all need a 2nd chance, a 3rd chance, a 4th or a 40th chance.., or more.

“Give the tree one more year,” says the gardener to the farmer. These are some of the most hopeful words in the gospel. All of us live with the frustration of things that do not work as we wish. Churches strike off in what seems to be a destructive direction; children do foolish things; after trying and trying many of us are ready to give up on someone, something.., even ourselves.

Thanks be to God… for being extremely generous with chances. This Gospel refuses to give up on us. And as Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians (10:1-13), God does not promise to spare us from trials and tribulations, hard times and difficult choices. Rather, he says, God promises to be with us and to provide the wherewithal to endure.

And that directs our attention to another theme of today’s readings. Since the book of Job, people have been in the business of blaming the victim and pointing fingers at the sufferer. The old Jewish idea said that if someone suffered, it meant they had done something wrong and were being punished.

Pat Robertson would be the modern day equivalent of Job’s friends, with his charge that the earthquake in Haiti was because the people of Haiti had made a pact with the devil.

Jesus fractured that idea by saying that suffering came to all -- the Galileans persecuted by Pilate, those 18 killed when the towers of Siloam fell, all those who were listening when he told today’s parable. “No, I tell you,” Jesus said. No need to point fingers at those experiencing hard times. God's judgment does not work that way.

Then we have the folks who work the other side of that street, the ones who promise that all good things—especially material things—will come to those who believe the right things. These would be the “prosperity gospel” preachers, and it is striking to me that God’s plan for handing out Mercedes Benzs seems to be linked to our sending money to the prosperity gospel preachers.

In other words, from ancient Israel until now, religious folk have been in the business of categorizing, dividing, and grouping people into us versus them. They are sinners and will be punished. We are righteous and will be rewarded with a good life, healthy children, and an abundance of blessings.

But Jesus erased all of those divisions. We are ALL sinners in need of repentance, he taught. This divided age of ours between Red States and Blue States, conservatives and liberals, orthodox and progressive, illegal immigrants and not-so-illegal-immigrants needs to ponder Jesus' words.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "We might have come here on different boats, but we are all now on the same ship. If we could get our hearts around this idea of our one-ness we could mend a lot of fences in our world."

I subscribe to a daily online meditation written by a Franciscan friar and Roman Catholic priest by the name of Richard Rohr. One of the themes Fr. Rohr writes about often is that even though Christians say we believe in grace, we have actually made Christianity largely into what he calls a “worthiness contest.”

This worthiness contest is all about preserving our own ego. It’s about projecting evil and sin onto other folks, those we deem less worthy, rather than confronting it within ourselves. And the more precarious our own position, the more threatened we feel by change we don’t understand and forces beyond our control, the more we look for others to identify as "the problem."

Last week’s Seattle Times published a story under the headline, “In hard times, Americans blame the poor.” The story is a response to statements made in recent months by relatively prominent politicians. The lieutenant governor of South Carolina is quoted saying that when government helps the poor it’s like people feeding stray animals that continually “breed.”

The article goes on to report research over the past few months indicating that middle class folks express less generous and more negative attitudes toward the poor when they themselves are afraid of falling during economic hard times.

To summarize, I offer excerpts from several of Fr. Richard meditations because I simply can’t say it any better than he did. He writes, “Jesus ‘took away the sin of the world’ by exposing it first of all as different than we imagined, and letting us know that our pattern of … attacking and blaming others is in fact history’s primary illusion and its primary lie.

“We Christians who dare to worship the scapegoat Jesus became many times in history the primary scapegoaters ourselves—of Jews, heretics, sinners, witches, homosexuals, the poor, the natives in the New World, slaves, other denominations, other religions. It’s rather hard to believe that we missed such a central message.

“…Through Jesus, we all have to face the embarrassing truth that we ourselves are our primary problem. …Our greatest temptation is to try to change other people instead of ourselves. Jesus allowed himself to be transformed and thus transformed others. That is the meaning of the necessary death of Jesus.”

It is especially tempting during Lent to fill any remaining nook and cranny of our lives with some new act of piety or exercise of a Lenten discipline. These too can become part of the worthiness contest.

Remember the fig tree. It can do nothing to save itself. The farmer’s judgment can only kill the tree. But the gardener loosens the soil, works in some manure and gives it another chance. And therein lies the possibility of its transformation.

We too can be transformed. But first we must die to the worthiness contest that keeps us projecting our own fears, anxieties and unworthiness onto the other, then judging and attacking them “over there.” Only when we open our hearts and minds to the mercy and forgiveness of the gardener can we access God in ourselves and then see God in the other.

AMEN.