Christ Blind

Wednesday Evening Lenten Series, St. Patrick's Episcopal Church, West Monroe, La., 26 March 2014

As a deacon who does not preach all that often, I have become convinced that a small band of mischievous angels rigs the preaching-text lottery so that I am sure to draw the shortest straw—the most challenging text—every single time.

Or so it seems! I am quite certain that band of angels is sitting on the edge of a cloud dangling their feet and waiting gleefully for the deacon to paint herself into a corner tonight.

You are familiar with the concept, “the letter of the law.” It refers to the exact and literal interpretation and application of the law, as it is written, down to the last letter.

It is often contrasted with “the spirit of the law,” which means to privilege the general intent of the law, thereby allowing for a more open, less strict interpretation and application of it.

Tonight, speaking to us through Matthew, Jesus seems to be upping the ante. He’s not content with insisting on merely the letter of the law. He wants to invoke and impose on us the separate strokes that make up each and every letter of the law! 

I have come not to abolish but to fulfill, he says. 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… 

Yikes! This sounds like Jesus with a big ole Sheriff’s badge pinned to his chest!

One of my first thoughts on reading it is, “Boy, are we ever behind on stonings!” I mean, I’m sure I’m not the only person in the room who divorced and re-married. And Jesus himself said that’s adultery, and we all know what the law says is the penalty for adultery!

So.. we’re way behind on stonings.

And yet….  ridiculous as that sounds, and as much as this passage makes me squirm, I am astounded over and over again at how useful it can be.., how readily we humans—indeed, we Christians—invoke it…. for the purpose of applying the letter of the law… to someone else.

You see, that’s the key. We are much more likely to invoke this passage to justify using the law.. to beat up… somebody else.

Not so very long ago, a prominent member of our community gave an interview to a prominent national publication, in which he said some things that quickly became prominently controversial. So controversial that it appeared, for a time, that he was going to lose his job as star of a huge hit TV show.
              

Arizona law legalizes discrimination against LGBT people.

Phil Robertson’s comments bothered me. Quite a lot, actually, because in my day job, I see and deal with the consequences of young gay people who have been told they are sinful by nature.., more sinful by nature than the rest of us, and that they cannot inherit the kingdom of God.. if they dare to be--fully--who they know themselves to be.

I was even more troubled by the movement that quickly broke out on Facebook to make Robertson a folk hero, and to cheer him on in his use of the law to judge homosexual people. Not to mention adulterers like me, although most people didn’t seem to notice that.

And in the sound and fury that broke out between Robertson’s defenders and his critics, the law—God’s law, or some interpretation thereof—got used as a club by both groups.

“He’s a hypocrite,” cries a critic, “how can he say he loves Jesus after dehumanizing people.” 

“But he’s quoting the Bible,” protests a defender. And on it raged.

As the saying goes, There’s nobody quite as mean as people being mean for Jesus. 

When we read about Moses demanding obedience to the law, or when we approach a passage like this one in Matthew, we are all too easily hooked by our human tendency to really, really want to make all the world behave according to our standards and our moral code.

After all, we’re good church people! We work hard at being obedient. Here we are in church on a lovely Wednesday evening because it’s Lent!

And so we encounter a passage like this…. and we go straight to the letter of the law… brushing past, scarcely noticing that here—right here—Jesus lays claim to his role as fulfiller of the law.

He wraps himself in it like a politician wrapping him/herself in the flag. He claims, absorbs and thereby transforms the law.

So if you want to know the shape of the law, look at Jesus. If you want to know what the law requires, look at what Jesus did. If you want to know how the law treats people, look at how Jesus treated people.

How could we have missed that for so long! It’s really pretty simple. But we want to turn it into a matter of what we believe, a matter of having the right values, or subscribing to the right doctrine or reading the right Bible the right way.

Our Bishop—who has a way with words—gave us a new way of talking about this when he was here three weeks ago for our first Wednesday Lenten service. He spoke of going “Christ blind” three times in response to the behavior of other drivers on his trip from Alexandria to Monroe.

When we use the law to cudgel other people into being who we think they should be and behaving the way we think they should behave, we are Christ blind.                       

Now here’s the clincher. What I really, really want to say right now is, “Phil Robertson, and those who agree with him, make me Christ blind.” That would make a nice Lenten confession, don’t you think?

And that’s how we talk. So and so makes me angry, we say. That behavior drives me crazy, we say. That belief system pushes me right over the edge, we say.

But the moment we do that, we paint ourselves right into a corner. We make the other person.. or the behavior.. or the belief system.. responsible for our Christ blindness.

We pin the letter of the law on someone else.

Please pray with me.

Lord, forgive our Christ blindness. And teach us to follow you, the embodiment of the law.

AMEN

      

Grace, All the Way Down

Lenten Lunch Series, Grace Episcopal Church, Monroe

Lake Bordelon, Camp Hardtner by Bette J. Kauffman

Fr. Richard Rohr says, Religion has tended to produce people who think they have God in their pockets, people with quick, easy answers about who God is, what God requires, and how to live a Godly life.

But the Apostle Paul understood that nothing is more dangerous, or more likely to get between us and God, than righteousness. God can most easily be lost, precisely by being thought found.

These words from First Corinthians are hard for us to hear. 

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? (1:20-25, NRSV) 

Let us not be distracted by old-world titles and language. St. Paul might just as well have asked, “Where are the teachers? Where are the pious ones who study the Bible daily? The ones who can call up a Bible verse at a moment’s notice, especially when needed to make someone else behave!”

Some translations of the Bible use the word “preacher” in place of “debater” in that third question. Where indeed are the preachers of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 

It’s enough to make one regret having accepted an invitation like the one to speak to you today!

And let us not be distracted by Paul’s reference to the Jews and the Greeks! WE are seekers of wisdom. WE are impatient demanders of signs! We are sometimes so impatient for signs that we see them everywhere.

I had a conversation with a very smart, devout young man in my office just a few days ago. It was a conversation triggered by the fact that he is in danger of failing a course I teach. And every reason he gave for not having done his coursework was a good one: I’m a youth minister at my church, I play music every Sunday morning, I lead a Bible study… and on and on it went.

And I finally had to say to him, “You know, I don’t think God is calling you to flunk out of college to do church.”

I did not say this to him—he’s such a sincere young man—so I did not say to him that what can get mixed up in our most pious motives at times… is our dedication to a merit system.

And we U.S. Americans come by our dedication to a merit system pretty honestly. It is part of our national story. We pulled ourselves up as a country by our bootstraps…

Or so we believe. I’ve always wondered how we’d have done without the leg up provided by indentured servitude, child labor and slavery.

But that’s another meditation. My point today is that this society teaches the merit system in every way possible, by incentives and sanctions, with As and Fs, through defining ourselves as the land of opportunity and making heroes of those who achieve against the odds.

It’s the wisdom of our age! And we have the best of intentions and at times some success in using our merit system well.

But our merit system has a dark side. Making winners almost always makes losers, too. Our merit system contaminates our faith and causes us to lose sight of Christ crucified.

Well, we’re happy to claim Christ crucified—for us. We’re just.. not so sure about the whole world.

Our merit system leaks into our religion and turns it into a moral code… a moral code that we use to divide poor people into “deserving”—the ones we should help—and not so deserving—those who make bad decisions, aren’t trying hard enough, live immoral lives by our standards—the ones who haven’t earned our help.

In his book, “The Prodigal God,” Timothy Heller compares the good church people of today with the elder brother of the one we call “the prodigal son.” He points out that we are too often that older brother, standing outside the tent displaying our piety, insisting that we have been faithful and true and devoted to the father all these years, yet hurt and angry that the father is squandering… the feast and the ring and the robe… on the unfaithful, undeserving younger brother.

I think I spent my childhood and youth hoping for someone to interpret that story for me in a way that made the elder son the hero!

We really have trouble accepting the absolute grace of Christ crucified. We desperately want to earn just a little bit of something from God!

But that’s ultimately an ego thing. And as Heller states, when we go down that path, Jesus might be our best friend. He might be our model of good behavior. But he is not our savior. We’re trying to save ourselves. 

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 

One last story: A seeker went to a wise person to ask, “What keeps the earth from falling down?”

The wise person answered, “The earth is resting on a lion.”

“On what, then, is the lion resting?” asked the seeker.

“The lion is resting on an elephant,” said the wise person.

“On what is the elephant resting?”

“The elephant is resting on a turtle.”

“And on what is the….”

“You can stop right there,” said the wise person. “After that, it’s turtles, all the way down.”

Friends, our world rests on Christ crucified. And after that, it’s Grace…, just Grace, all the way down.

AMEN

Face Time

Christ Church, St. Joseph, La.

My son has a girl friend. Like an amazing number of young couples today, they met online—on Twitter, to be precise. She lives two states away. But that does not prevent them from “hanging out,” watching television together, even playing video games together.

How do they do that? It’s called “face time.” And it’s possible because phones today have video cameras built into them. And it helps that “long distance” calling is now no different than calling the house next door.

I imagine most of us have had at least one experience something like those described in today’s lessons—a mountaintop experience, a vision or dream that changed our life (Exodus 24:12-18 & Matthew 17:1-9, NRSV).  “Face time” with God, if you will, and you don’t have to go to a geographic mountain to experience it.

Of course, there are those among us who scoff at such things. Those who take pride in being realists. Those who believe that dreams are just dreams and visions always frauds, and nothing is real save what we apprehend with our human senses and rational minds.

The human intellect is a wonderful thing and a great gift from God that we should use to its fullest capacity. But in comparison to the mind of God, human intellect is profoundly limited.

I am sorry for those who live so thoroughly inside their own cranium that they cannot find meaning in dreams, visions and mountaintop experiences. Their world is small. They are not available to be transformed by face time with God!

We are about to enter Lent, a time of reflection and listening for the voice of God. That requires an open mind. It requires letting go. It requires loosening our grip on the comfort and security of reality as we think we know it.

And that takes courage. If we enter into the presence of God with an open mind, we indeed put ourselves in the way of transformation, God’s transformation. Who knows what shifting of the tectonic plates of our world that might produce!

The disciples were so rattled by their experience that they couldn’t think straight. Peter suggests that they build shelters and stay inside the vision forever. I can identify with that. Who wants so glorious an experience to end? Don’t we all want to stay on the mountaintop!

But moments later, they must head back down the mountain, back to reality. I’ve always believed that Jesus tells Peter, James and John to keep the vision secret because he knew people—maybe even the other nine disciples—would think the three who had shared the vision were crazy!

In other words, reality has not changed. The world has not changed. Other people have not changed.

Now, Jesus and his disciples must head for Jerusalem, and we all know what happens there. Jesus still must die. The world is still hurting. Still full of sick people, poor people, lonely people, desperate people.

And what does Jesus do when he comes down off the mountain fresh from his transfiguration experience? He goes right back to work. The first thing he does is heal a sick child.

Our passage today ends with verse nine, but in verse 14 of the same chapter, Jesus has reached the foot of the mountain where the crowd awaits. He is immediately confronted with a man whose son is an epileptic with uncontrolled seizures that cause him to fall into fires and water. And Jesus heals the boy.

You see, close encounters with God are NOT for the purpose of making the world a rosy place for us. They are not designed to transform the world. They are designed to transform us.

Not long ago, I was perusing the stream of photos I access daily through the online social network called Google+. I happened across an image someone had found online and re-shared. It was a photograph of a small, dark-skinned boy drinking water from a muddy, foul-looking drainage ditch.

Someone had posed a question below the photo: Why does God allow this?

I was quick to respond: God doesn’t allow this, I wrote. We do.

Why do we keep expecting God to take care of what we’ve been put in charge of? How much of our prayer life do we spend asking God to fix the world, rather than inviting and being open to God transforming us… so that we go about fixing the world?

Every Sunday morning is not a mountaintop experience like the transfiguration. But it is a bit of face time with God!

We come into this beautiful space to sing, pray, see the powerful symbols of our faith in brass and stained glass. We come expecting God to be here.

Most Sunday mornings, we come to share in Christ’s body and blood, for he is known to us in the breaking of the bread.

All too often, I fear, we try to leave God here. Our face time with God feeds only us, and not the world through us.

But our very theology of Holy Eucharist is that we are fed so that we may feed the world. In general, I am not a fan of Rite I. But the Rite I post-communion prayer is the best statement of our Eucharistic theology that I know of.

So grab a prayer book and turn to p. 339 (BCP, 1979). We begin by giving thanks:

Almighty and everliving God, we most heartily thank thee that thou dost feed us…with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood….

And now skip down to the petition:

And we humbly beseech thee…so to assist us with thy grace, that we may…do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in…

Please note, this is not about throwing a few extra alms in a basket. It’s not about spending an hour or two a week of spare time volunteering at the Shepherd Center.

It is about living our life as a way God has prepared for us to walk in. It is as if God says, “Walk this way,” and shows us how through Jesus the Christ. And that way is the way of being God’s love in the world.

May we be transformed by our face time with God, today and every day. May we discern the way God calls us to walk in, in our own time and place.

AMEN