What's good about this news?

Christ Church, St. Joseph, La.

Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! (Luke 12:49, NRSV)

Whoa, Jesus! Aren’t you the great peacemaker!

And what’s all this stuff about fathers against sons and daughters against mothers? Where are your “family values,” Jesus? Shouldn’t we stick with our families, regardless?

A few years ago I attended a workshop at Columbia Theological Seminary. One of our speakers that weekend was David Barnett who has written a book about the Gospel according to Mark. The title of the book is “What’s good about this news?” His point is that Mark’s Gospel has a kind of dark foreboding about it. It often seems that Mark is writing about bad news, not good news.

In other words, “Gospel” means “good news.” And we are fond of saying, “the good news of Jesus the Christ.” But if we read carefully what Jesus said—and did—throughout his earthly ministry, and don’t leave out the uncomfortable parts, and are completely honest with ourselves… we must acknowledge that the news he taught and acted… is often not so good… at least not by normal human standards.

Here’s the punch line of this sermon: The Gospel of Jesus the Christ is not an endorsement of nice, moral, upstanding middle class, family values.

In contrast, the Gospel of Jesus the Christ is the way of the cross. And the cross takes us, by necessity, through places we would rather not go.

The peace offered by Jesus the Christ through the cross is NOT the peace of “no conflict.” It’s not the peace of “aren’t we all one big happy family.” It’s not the peace of agreement on the hot-button issues of the day. It’s not the peace of military might! It’s not the peace of financial security.

Indeed, the peace offered by Jesus the Christ through the cross is pretty much the opposite of all those things. The peace of Jesus the Christ by way of the cross is the peace of having lost—or given up!—all of those things. It’s the peace... of having nothing left to lose.

I have heard preachers and teachers of the Christian faith say, “Jesus died so that we don’t have to.” Or, a variation, “Jesus died so that we can live.”

I completely disagree with the first. Consider the possibility that Jesus died to show us how! And that we too must die, not just once—the big kahuna at the end of physical life—but many times over throughout life.

The way of the cross is not just about physical death. It’s about how we live our lives. It’s about relaxing our death grip on our tidy middle class comforts and securities and following Jesus where he leads.

The second of those, “Jesus died so we can live,” indeed holds a kernel of truth… as long as we are clear about what it means to live in Christ. Too many Christians have fallen for the notion that “to live in Christ” means they are entitled to a comfortable, secure middle class lifestyle. That they have somehow “earned” it with their own cleverness, labor, morality and piety.

And along with that sense of having earned a lifestyle often comes a tendency to judge others. I earned my middle class lifestyle, therefore those who are poor must be less clever, less hard-working, less moral and pious than I. That’s a pretty common line of thinking.

Rather, to live in Christ is to let go of all that. It’s to recognize, as the Apostle Paul did, that all of that is rubbish.

The true “life in Christ” is knowing and accepting God’s unearned mercy, forgiveness and love for us just as we are. To live in Christ is to quit putting on airs, and to stand before God naked, vulnerable, stripped bare of pride and pretense. It’s to let go of being right, and being better than someone else. And it feels like dying.

To live in Christ is to recognize that we humans are all on equal footing in God’s eyes—equally sinners, equally loved.

You have heard me mention Fr. Richard Rohr, one of my favorite writers about the Christian faith. He recommends one humiliation a day. He says it takes on average one humiliation a day, one experience of being wrong, of discovering that you don’t have it all together, to keep a human being living in Christ.

At this point I want to be really clear that I am not against middle class lifestyles and values.  I love being middle class and I’ll fight to remain middle class!  Indeed, I am in the business of helping people into the middle class.

See, deacons in the Episcopal Church are expected to have a ministry in the world. Many choose ministries of mercy. They feed the hungry, give blankets and coats to the homeless, help deliver medical care to those who can’t afford it, visit the sick and dying, and so forth.

Those are good ministries and we need people to do them, both deacons and lay people. Deacons also should be the catalysts or agents who help lay people find their ministries in the world.

But a few deacons and lay people choose ministries of change. Mine is an organization called Northern & Central Louisiana Interfaith, and we don’t feed the poor. Rather, we ask questions like this: Why are there so many poor people? How can we help people who are poor move into the middle class and become self-sufficient? How do our systems need to change so that poverty levels in this country and state and community actually go down for a change? Where and how can we apply leverage to level the playing field?

And you know what? Those are controversial questions! Many people, many good Christians don’t want to discuss those questions. They don’t even want Interfaith, or anyone else, to ask those questions.

Many good people of all faiths are perfectly willing to do charity. They are quite okay with helping to feed the poor. But they are not much interested in change.

But the way of the cross is not just change, it’s transformation. Jesus became a peacemaker by first ripping the status quo to pieces. The Kingdom of God he preached and modeled is a reversal of everyday, dare I say middle class, human values and expectations.

Here’s the real punch line: The peace of the cross is the peace of letting go, of loosening our death grip on the people and things and ideologies that we think are what make life worthwhile. It's the peace of a thousand little deaths along the way, knowing that God is in the midst of it and with us every step of the way, and that ultimately, God-With-Us is quite enough. 

AMEN

Stuff & Treasure

St. Alban's & St. Thomas', Monroe, La.

On the window sill over the sink in my kitchen is a treasure. It’s a little brown rock, about the size of a meatball—you know, the kind you see in chafing dishes at receptions. It’s a pretty ordinary looking rock, except…  It has a heart! 

Rock with a Heart

I don’t know how it came to be, but this plain brown rock has one kind of flat side and there on the flat side, if you tilt it at just the perfect angle, is a perfectly heart-shaped opening. A friend who knows that I collect treasures gave me “Rock with a Heart.” She found it lying on the ground, “in plain sight,” she said.

But… on the window sill, right next to Rock with a Heart, is… well, a bunch of stuff: A pill bottle with one or two expired pills in it. One of those joke half-mugs that cleverly declares, “You asked for half a cup of coffee.” That was a treasure—briefly. Now it’s a dust collector.

On a shelf above the TV is a couple of inches of armadillo tail, picked clean of tissue such that its intricate bony architecture is clearly revealed. Why so homely a critter requires such an extraordinary tail structure I don’t know. To me it’s an exuberant, over-the-top expression of its Creator—here just for the glory of it. A treasure.

But right next to it? More dust collectors: Things you thought you couldn’t live without.. for some brief moment in the distant past. Today? Meh.

We could continue. My house is strewn with treasures. Among the rocks, bones and shells, you will also find human-made treasures, like the glass ibis figurine my sister gave me when I admired it in her home.

But for every treasure... an equal or larger portion of stuff. How did I come to have… All. This. Stuff? Lately, my house full of stuff has come to feel burdensome, stifling, a huge distraction from the things that really matter. I took a stab at getting rid of stuff this summer, but, alas, I have far to go….

One of the things that struck me about the many people from New Orleans I spoke with post-Katrina is how losing everything made them leery of collecting stuff. One woman I interviewed told me that before the storm she had every kitchen device you could imagine. She loved to cook, and she had all the equipment and gadgets the world had to offer.

But she lived in the Upper 9^th Ward, and it allll ended up in a huge, smelly pile at the curb. Now, she said, I have one saucepan and one skillet and I don’t want any more. Now, she takes pleasure in figuring out to cook whatever she wants with one skillet and one saucepan.

Many people take today’s Gospel lesson to be about long-term planning. There’s that reference to “laying up treasures in heaven,” and so we want to make this teaching an evacuation plan for that next place we’ll go to someday after we die. ‘Be good now—moral, pious—and go to heaven later.’

I beg to disagree. Jesus tells us over and over throughout his ministry on earth: The kingdom is at hand. The kingdom is within and among you.

And today’s lesson: Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. (Luke 12:32-40, NRSV) 

That’s all present tense! I’m reminded of how my sister gave me that figurine. I was visiting her and noticed it sitting on her windowsill. And I told her the story of waking up one morning to a flock of ibises in my back yard feasting on crawfish brought up by a heavy rain.

The Glass Ibis

And my sister insisted on giving me the figurine. Right then. On the spot. She didn’t put it in her will, she picked it up and put it in my hands. And when I protested she said much the same thing Jesus says on this occasion: It is my pleasure to give it to you.

But here’s the tricky part. Yes, the glass ibis is a sort of treasure. But it’s not.. the real.. treasure. The glass ibis could get knocked off my windowsill to shatter on the floor today, and I’d still have the real treasure—my relationship with my sister and an act of solidarity between us that carried that relationship forward.

We humans easily confuse things, mementos, STUFF… with the real treasure—namely our relationships with each other, and with the natural world, and thereby.. with God.

That’s what I think today’s lesson is all about: Recognizing and cultivating the real treasure, our relationship with God manifested in the here and now in our relationships with people and God’s creation.

How, indeed, would we treat people if, at every moment, we were awake to the presence of God in them and viewed them as the Master coming to fasten his belt and have [us] sit down to eat? And, indeed, to serve us?

How’s that for a reversal! Let me say it again in a slightly different way. Our relationships with people are the real treasures. Our relationships are the Kingdom here and now, the gift of our God who is dying… well, already died! …to give it to us. Relationships with each other are the purses that will last. They are the medium of our relationship with God!

Now that is somewhat easy to see when it comes to family, as the story about the glass ibis and my sister illustrates. But we don’t need to be admonished to be ready and awake to accept the gift of family relationships. That kind of comes naturally.

Other folks, not so much. Other folks often appear to us as one more burdensome issue or problem we must deal with. And the more different from us they are, in terms of skin color, religion, social class, work ethic, values, ways of being in the world… the less likely we are to be ready and open to the fact that a relationship with them just might be a feast served by the Master himself.

But Jesus told us, you might have to leave your family behind. Jesus modeled for us a different way, a way contrary to our instincts, a reversal of our “natural attitude,” by inviting relationships with everyone he encountered.

And that is why Northern & Central Louisiana Interfaith organizes around relationships—not issues, not “problems,” not ideologies, and especially not political parties! We organize around relationships. Building relationships across the boundaries that historically divide—like race, class, geography, religion—that is the most radical thing we do.

Amongst all the stuff I have to do this coming week, the faculty meetings I must go to, the state-mandated ethics training (Go figure!), the hobnobbing with other Episcopal clergy at our monthly clericus…

Amongst all that stuff is a treasure: I have an appointment with a young man who came to his first Interfaith meeting Friday. He found us and we him through Interfaith’s relationship with the Southside Community Involvement Association. He and I will talk one on one about what drives us and compels us to this work. We’ll develop a relationship.

And I already know, we’re going to do some Kingdom work together in this community. It’s going to be a feast served by the Master himself, because he and I were awake and ready when the opportunity came knocking.

So... what’s in your house this morning? Can you sort the treasure from the “stuff”? What’s on your calendar for the coming week? Of all the stuff you must do, which matters? Who will you encounter this week? Which person will be your opportunity for a life- and world-changing relationship? Are you open to the possibility that it might be the one who looks the least likely…?

My friends, God wants to give you the Kingdom. Here. Now. Are you ready?

AMEN