Touch of Faith

Christ Church, St. Joseph, 1 July 2012

This is really not the sermon I wanted to write and preach today!

And that’s because I have to begin with suffering—acute suffering. Human anguish of body and spirit.

We in this room are all old enough to have been there. We’ve been through deaths and some of us divorces, jobs that ended, businesses that failed, economic crises.

A couple who are friends of mine both used to have their own businesses, and they made decent money for many years. They own a nice, middle class home. Then suddenly a few years ago, both businesses failed at the same time. They discovered that their pockets weren’t as deep as they had thought.

The older we get, the more suffering we have seen and survived. Like David, we have lost and grieved beloved family and friends (2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27, NRSV). Having suffered is one of the defining differences between “young” and “old.” 
                                  

King David mourning Saul and Jonathan.

Of course, sometimes children suffer too. And those who care for critically ill children often comment on how wise beyond their years those children become.

Suffering is part of the human condition, in our day just as in Jesus’ day, and every day in between. One of my spiritual mentors, a Franciscan monk, priest and writer by the name of Fr. Richard Rohr, defines human suffering as loss of control.

We humans strive to control our lives. We in this individualistic society especially take seriously the cultural value that each and every one of us is responsible for our own lives and those of our families.

But we lose control a lot.

We lose control when people we love change in ways that fundamentally change their relationship to us, and sometimes take them out of our lives.

We might be able to influence the aging process by making healthy choices, but we ultimately cannot control it.

We lose control when illness takes over our bodies at any age.

We lose control when a huge, complex economic system, dependent on activities of many people with many motives, some good, some not so good, deals a blow to our own economic security.

And we suffer. And then comes the question, what do we do with our suffering? And the answer to that is the measure of us as people of faith.

If we do not deal with our suffering creatively.., if we do not embrace it and seek the lessons it has to teach us, we will merely pass it on to others.

Suffering is isolating. We feel alone in our suffering! Like no one else really, fully understands. Why me? we ask—and it’s God we are asking!

But you know what? God can handle that question. God can handle our crying out. God can handle our lamentations. Our anger. Our accusations. Go ahead! The Psalms model exactly how to do it!!

But know that God is not necessarily going to give us an explanation. I believe explanations and “reasons” for things are human needs and behaviors. WE are accountable to each other. God is not required to give an account to us.

But God is with us. That’s what we were given in the person of Jesus the Christ! God with us. That’s what we are continuously given in the Holy Spirit! A bit of God within us.

And somehow knowing that, and even in the midst of desperation and despair and feelings of utter alone-ness, reaching for God’s healing—like the woman in today’s Gospel story—is the very definition of faith.

How do we do that? How do we reach for God when Jesus is not walking among us? Maybe just by being still and open, both to our suffering and God’s response to our suffering.

Episcopal priest Suzanne Guthrie wrote this about it:

When despair has obliterated ordinary prayer; when the psalms fail and all words are stupid and meaningless, the mantle of loneliness surrounding me becomes a mantle of dark and wordless love. This darkness reveals the paradox of prayer: in the absence of God, all there is.. is God. (from Grace's Window: Entering the Seasons of Prayer)

The great value of suffering is that it strips us of all illusions of self-sufficiency. And for some of us who really, really believe we are self-made people, it can take a lot of suffering to get our ego out of the way. It feels like dying.

It IS dying. That lesson is in the Biblical account over and over again. Saul had to die for David to become king. A seed must die for a new plant to grow. Jesus had to die so that we may live. Our own Gospel story (Mark 5:21-43, NRSV).

I wonder how you imagine this story? How do you see it in your mind’s eye? 

If you do a Google images search using a phrase like "woman touching hem of Jesus," you'll find lots of artistic interpretations of the scene. Virtually every one features a woman on her hands and knees--no pride, no self-sufficiency, no ego—arm outstretched, fingers splayed. I urge you to try on that posture!

A woman touches the hem of Jesus' garment.

 The central story and mystery of our faith is that something must die in order for something new to be born. And when, in our desperation and despair, we reach for God’s healing, it will be there. Some how, some way.

It might come to us in a private moment of utter stillness before God. It might come to us through the beauty of the sky or a leaf or a rock or the smell of rain or the sound of kids playing. It might come to us through the touch of another person.

It might NOT take the form we hoped for—like physical healing, restored wealth, reconciliation and renewed relationship. But God’s healing will come, some how, some way, in some form.

And then the greatest miracle of all happens: We become God’s healing touch in a hurting world. We become what the Native Americans called the wounded healer, the one who can heal precisely because of our own wounds and the grace of God we know because of them.

Mother Teresa said, Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.  

AMEN

Of One Heart and Soul

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, 15 April 2012

“Oh, how good and pleasant it is,” the psalmist says (Psalm 133:1, NRSV), “when brethren live together in unity!”

Today we are not so likely to follow that proclamation with a metaphor of oil on our heads and running down onto the collars of our robes! I’m not sure what our equivalent image of well-being and contentment might be. Perhaps merely an easily tapped supply of clean water for our morning shower—a blessing much of the world does not, in fact, enjoy.

Moving from the Psalm to this morning’s scene from the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 4:32-35, NRSV), we find another image of peace and harmony. The Lukan playwright describes the community of early Christians as being “of one heart and soul.”

What is interesting to me about this story is what the author focuses on as evidence and illustration of the early church’s unity. Notice that it has little to do with doctrine or beliefs—other than that the apostles were testifying to the resurrection.

We know, historically speaking, that many great controversies about doctrine were yet to come. We know that the councils of the church that resolved those controversies did not happen until many years after this scene from Acts.

Rather, the evidence and illustration of unity among early believers laid out in this story is that they had eliminated economic inequality—at least within the Christian community—by sharing everything they had.

This is surely a more startling image for us today than oil running down our chin onto our shirt collar!

The online publication “Business Insider” recently published charts illustrating what they label “15 mind-blowing facts” about economic inequality in the U.S. But the data that stuck with me comes from a couple of economists, one at Harvard Business School and the other at Duke University, who studied what people think the wealth gap in the U.S. is, what they think it should be, and what it actually is.

I was not surprised to learn that we think the gap should be smaller than it actually is. What was rather surprising is that people in general apparently are pretty ignorant of how big the wealth gap in the U.S. is.

In other words, a large random sample of people from a wide spectrum of demographic groups estimated the wealth gap in the U.S. to be 25% narrower than it actually is. That’s a hugely significant error in perception according to all statistical measures of significance.

And the gap between what people hold as ideal versus what actually is? A little over 50%. In other words, to achieve the wealth distribution we say we hold ideal according to this study, a bit more than half of the wealth of our society needs to shift from the top 20% of people to the bottom 60% of people.

Stunning indeed. But I don’t think this story from the Acts of the Apostles is meant to endorse any one economic system over another. I don’t think Holy Scripture in general should be taken as endorsing particular political or economic systems.

Rather, I believe the stories of Jesus and his early followers teach us what to value. They teach us how we ought to relate to God and each other. They teach us what our priorities ought to be. And they leave the details of how up to us.

Maybe that’s where the expression, “the devil is in the details” comes from, because we humans sure know how to fight and fuss over the details of how to get something done!

But you know what? I’m okay with that. I’m okay that we humans must debate and disagree and question politicians and question each other and accept some plans and reject others and change our minds… and all of that.  I’m okay with it because it is how we learn and grow and overcome our own inherent self-centeredness.

Show me a person who cannot change his mind, a person who cannot modify her position in light of new data, a person who cannot even hear and consider an alternative point of view, and I’ll show you a small, anxious mind trapped in its own fears and limitations.

I have a friend who decided a few years ago that her inherited religion was not serving her contemporary needs. And so she did what so many do today, she went “church shopping.”

One of the first churches she visited piqued her interest and so she joined the adult Christian education class. The third or fourth Sunday she attended the class she was becoming comfortable enough to ask a question. The topic was something that she had often wondered about and so she posed her question. Without missing a beat, the Sunday School teacher turned to her and said, “We’re not here to argue.”

My friend shut her mouth, sat respectfully through the remainder of the class, then got up and walked out, never to return. Today she’s an Episcopalian!

Today’s Gospel lesson is offered to us as evidence of the resurrection of Jesus the Christ. The author himself is explicit about his purpose: “These [things] are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah” (John 20:19-31, NRSV).

We could talk about many aspects of this passage. Indeed, we could debate a number of things, like what kind of body Jesus had post resurrection, such that it still bore the wounds of crucifixion yet he could pass through locked doors.

Instead, let us simply observe that Thomas the questioner, Thomas who rejects the perception of the other disciples, is present the second time Jesus appears. That means he was not thrown out of the group for questioning and challenging and rejecting what had quickly become the dominant view among the disciples. 

Moreover, Jesus himself does not rebuke Thomas, but patiently invites him to check out the evidence. And not just to check it out visually.., but to touch it!

The Increduility of St. Thomas, by Caravaggio

What a totally loving and accepting invitation! We humans tend to protect our wounds, to “nurse our wounds” we say, even to hide them from each other. Yet here is Jesus saying to Thomas the doubter, “Put your finger here.. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.”

How will we define Christian unity today? Is the resurrection of Jesus the Christ still powerful enough to overcome disagreements about doctrine, and to enable us to lovingly engage each other’s questions and challenges? Will future generations see evidence of our testimony to the resurrection in our ministry to a broken society and world?

AMEN

The Shape of Light: A Homily for 3 April 2012

 St. Alban's Episcopal Church, Monroe, La.

Jesus said, The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light. (John 20:36, NRSV)

Light is a very big deal in our culture. When we have a bright idea, we think of a light bulb going on in our head. When we are puzzled or confused, we want someone to “shed light on the subject.” We refer to a person we love as “the light of my life.”

Humans need light to thrive. Some of us, like one of my graduate school friends, actually get depressed when the days grow shorter and the shadows of evening come earlier.
   

iPhone Diary: 4 April 2012 (The Shape of Light)

Many of you know that I’m a photographer. Light is one of our creative tools. Recently, I have gotten connected with an international network of photographers through the online social network called Google+. One of my new friends is Joel Tjintjelaar of The Netherlands. He is a landscape and architecture photographer, but his subject really is light itself. In fact, he has an album of photographs online called “The Shape of Light.” Joel shows the shape of light by photographing how it interacts in various ways with buildings, bridges and other structures. (You can see his work at http://www.bwvision.com/. The image above is one of my interpretations of the shape of light.)
   
The shape of our light is Jesus the Christ. In the passage from John above, Jesus invites us to become children of the light. We do this by walking with him. Of course, we cannot walk with him exactly like the disciples to whom he was speaking. We must seek the shape of Jesus the Light in the world around us.
   
Sometimes that is easy. We have no trouble seeing Jesus the Light in a beautiful sunrise or sunset, flowers, trees and other wonders of creation. We have no trouble seeing Jesus the Light in the faces of those we love.
   
But it can be hard to see the Light of Christ in some of the faces God puts in our path. Not all of the people we are called to interact with and to minister to are equally lovely and loveable. 
   
And at times of loss and disappointment, The Light seems to elude us or even to have gone out completely in our lives. We walk in darkness and cannot catch even a glimmer of light, much less see the shape of Jesus the Christ.
   
Faith is knowing that The Light is there, even when we cannot see it. Believing in The Light is knowing that God is with us in the darkest times. Holy Week is a week of growing darkness, and what sustains us is knowing that the blinding light of Easter is just around the corner.
   
As we continuously seek to walk with Jesus the Light, as we strive to be aware of his presence in our lives, we become bearers of The Light. We take on the shape of the Light of Jesus the Christ! And then we will see his face in those human faces God puts in our way to minister to. We will see the Christ-Light we bear reflected back to us!