A God Thing

Grace Epsicopal Church, Monroe, La.

A few weeks ago, I introduced you to Eric Law, an Episcopal priest and author of several books, including “Holy Currencies: 6 Blessings for Sustainable Missional Ministries.” A few years ago, Fr. Law was the keynote speaker and workshop leader for the triennial assembly of the Association for Episcopal Deacons, which I attended.

To kick off his workshop, Law had the assembled deacons—as I recall, approximately a hundred of us—play a silly little game that ended up making a big point. We were handed bookmarks printed with the Holy Currencies logo. Some people got none, some got 2 or 3 and a few got 5 or 6.

Then, Law said, this game has just two rules. 1) If someone gives you a bookmark, you must take it, and 2) the person who ends up with none.. is the winner. When I give the signal, Law said, you will have 10 minutes to give away all of your bookmarks.

Well, I don’t remember if anyone won that game. And I don’t remember how many bookmarks I ended up with, but I’m pretty sure it was more than I started with. I got down to zero a couple times, but no sooner had I done so than someone would come along and thrust a bunch into my hand.

Now, you might be thinking, “Well, duh! The rules of the game were set up to make sure that happens!” And, indeed, they were. The value of the game was not that it was a “fair” or “objective” test of anything. The value of the game.. was in what it revealed about how humans think!

The first few minutes of the game, I was being totally rational and measured. My plan was to give one bookmark to each of however many people I needed to, to get rid of them all. That way I could spread my generosity over the maximum number of people. And if anyone gave me a bookmark—“a” bookmark; I was assuming everyone else would be as rational as I—I would find one more person to give it to.

There was a moment in Eric Law’s silly little game when I was flooded with two thoughts: 1) The enormity of what Jesus asks of us, namely that we be ready to give it all away—to sell all we have and give to the poor; and 2) the powerful human tendency to gather, to collect, to keep, to secure our future, indeed, to hoard.

Today's Gospel lesson is about exactly that. Perhaps today’s miracle of the feeding of the 5,000 is the greatest miracle Jesus performs. Greater than bringing dead things to life because that happens all the time. That’s a pattern of the universe. We see it happen before our eyes every spring.

I imagine many people think the feeding of the 5,000 is about Jesus multiplying molecules of bread and fish such that 5 loaves and 2 fishes magically turned into hundreds of loaves and fishes. That’s what I was raised to think it was about.

But.. how’s that even a miracle? That wouldn’t be a miracle. That would be God showing off! Surely the creator of the universe can multiply molecules of bread and fish without breaking a sweat!

It is certainly an appealing idea. God has superhero powers; God made the rules of the universe, therefore God can break them any time God wants to.

The problem with that, of course, is we’re left to struggle with the question: Since God can do that without breaking a sweat, why doesn’t God do it more often?

Why do people go hungry in a world of plenty? If God is good and loves us all, why doesn’t God fix the Middle East, or the refugee crisis? For that matter, why must children on the south side of Monroe play in dirty, trash-littered streets among burned out and boarded up houses?

The answer is pretty clear: Our God chooses to work through humans—US—in all of our misbegotten glory. We are beautifully and wondrously made…, and yet fearful. We see scarcity instead of God's abundance. We are insecure; we worry. And, yes, sometimes we are judgmental, afraid of helping the "wrong person," someone we deem unworthy of our help.

You see, I think the real appeal of the notion of God as multiplier of molecules of bread and fish is that it leaves humans completely off the hook. Oh, that we had a show-off God! Would that not make life a whole lot easier for us?

We could use our prayers to direct God to where a miracle is needed, then wait for God to fix whatever needs fixing: the violent Middle East, the children collecting on our southern border fleeing violence and starvation in their own countries, the  gap between the rich and the poor in the U.S. economy, sick people who have neither money nor medical insurance.

But that's not how God works. It IS up to us. And the problem almost never is an absolute shortage of molecules of anything. The problem is maldistribution. Whether we’re talking food or cash or health care or relative freedom from violence, the problem is not shortage, it’s maldistribution: some have and protect, others don’t and suffer.

Here’s a story that was told to me by a woman who volunteers at the Shepherd’s Center, a joint outreach ministry of the churches in St. Joseph, La. The Shepherd’s Center is a store that offers used clothing, household goods and so forth at very low prices—nickels, quarters, dollars—to the many residents of St. Joseph who live in poverty.

One evening two volunteers had just closed shop after a long day, but just as they were about to slip out the back door and home to their families, they heard a knock on the front door. One of the volunteers said to the other, “You go on. I’ll go tell them we’re closed for the day and to come back tomorrow.”

The other volunteer said, “Oh, no, you go ahead. I’ll go find out what they want.” So she did, and at the front door she found a woman standing there wearing the most tattered, broken down, worn out shoes she had ever seen.

The woman explained that she had no other shoes; this was her only footwear and they were so worn she could barely keep them on her feet. Could the Shepherd Center help her?

The volunteer said, “I’m sure we have something here that will fit you,” and the search commenced. Some time later, the volunteer had gone through all of the shoes on display in the store, and then had gone back to the staging area and was in the process of going through boxes of donated stuff that had not yet been unpacked… but had come up empty-handed.

By this time the woman who needed shoes was apologizing and saying, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be okay.” But the volunteer looked around and spied one more box in the corner that had not yet been searched. “Hold on,” she said. “Let me check that one.”

She grabbed the box and dumped its contents onto the floor, and lo and behold, out tumbled a brand new pair of sneakers. And they fit!

In telling me this story, the volunteer concluded, “It was a God thing.” And I agree. It was a God thing.

But I don’t believe for one moment that "the God thing" in this instance was God creating sneaker molecules out of nothing and hiding them inside that box of stuff for the volunteer to find. What God did is transform the heart of a woman, such that when she was confronted with another human being in need, she saw Jesus. And Jesus needed shoes. 

And so she set aside her own tiredness, family time and convenience, and persisted.

She did not need to know if the other woman was deserving or not, had no money through bad decision-making or not, was in need because she was lazy… or not. She saw Jesus, and Jesus needed shoes.

Brothers and sisters, the world does not need more molecules of anything. The world needs human hearts that have fallen into the hands of God and been transformed. That’s the miracle looking for a place to happen… Every. Single. Time. 

 In the name of God, father, son and holy spirit, AMEN.

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Rock with a Heart

Grace Episcopal Church, Monroe, La.

My house is full of treasure. NOT the kind of treasure any treasure hunter worth his or her salt would want! But treasure, nonetheless.

For example, on the window sill in my bedroom is a reddish, grayish rock from Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. That rock was lugged all the way home to me by Joe and Cathi Roberts… just because I asked for it when I learned they were going there a few years ago. A treasure for sure.

Another treasure in my house is a section of armadillo tail from a road kill, picked clean by an army of ants and other tiny critters… such that the extraordinary underlying boney architecture is fully revealed. What in the world is up with that?! Treasure!

I picked up one of my treasures and brought it with me this morning. I know it is too small for you to see, but I’ll have it in my pocket at the back of the church should you want a close look. 

 

It’s a small, lumpy, rather modest looking little rock.. about the size of a meatball. What makes this rock treasure—as if being small, brown and lumpy weren’t enough… What makes this rock treasure is that it has a heart-shaped hole in the side. It’s a rock with a heart*. 

This little treasure has appeared in more than one sermon over the years. And that is because I have come to see it as an apt metaphor for the relationship between we humans and God.

We too are small—in comparison to God. We’re kind of lumpy, each having our own annoying bad habits and character flaws that irritate the dickens out of our family and friends. And we can be pretty hard hearted! Or, as God was inclined to say throughout the Hebrew Scriptures whenever the Israelites got on his last nerve: You are a stiff-necked people!

We are. But not because we are evil, or a mistake of creation, or—as my late husband used to say—a “waste of skin.” Far from it. God made us and we are good.

But we are also often painfully aware of our smallness and ultimate powerlessness. We cannot stop bad things from happening, and we know it. We are wounded by the inevitable challenges and suffering of human life. We are hurt by others who betray our friendship, who hurt us with their words that seem to deny our point of view or what we hold dear. And we harden our hearts.

But like this rock, we have a God-shaped hole in the side of our tiny, frightened, lumpy human hearts. Nothing can fill that hole except God… because God put it there with great love and tenderness as a homing device, to help us remember to whom we belong.

Oh, we do try to fill it with other things! Possessions. Money. That ideal job, the perfect spouse—who always turns out to be not quite perfect, just like us. A magnificent house, a political party or ideology, loyalty to our nation, even our beautiful church building or our liturgy—all of these can become idolatries, which is to say things we try to use to make life meaningful, satisfying, less frightening, more predictable, safe and secure.

And none of them will ever work for very long. Because the hole in our heart is God-shaped and can never be filled with anything other than God.

Emily Dickinson is one of my favorite poets--a woman of few but perfectly chosen words. Here’s her poem titled “To Fill a Gap”:

To fill a Gap
Insert the Thing that caused it—
Block it up
With Other—and 'twill yawn the more—
You cannot solder an Abyss
With Air.

Human life separate from God is an abyss, and no matter how hard and fast we seek to stuff that abyss with all those things other than God, the more hollow and empty we will be. And I do believe idolatry—putting nation or political party or social status or financial security—at the center of our lives and priorities and aspirations is The Major Sickness of our society today. It is surely a large part of the hurtful divisions that afflict us.., the difficulty we have finding common ground with those with whom we disagree.

Estranged from God, we are sheep without a shepherd. That’s why we are driven to seek God. That’s why the people in today’s Gospel story hounded Jesus, chased after him such that he couldn’t even stop and enjoy a mean. They literally ran around the Sea to meet his boat on the other side.

And he had compassion on them. We—the people within the fold of the Episcopal Branch of God’s Church—WE are among the truly blessed because we know that in searching for and seeking God, we will find unconditional love and mercy and forgiveness.

Not everyone knows that! Not even all Christians know that! Some branches of the Christian faith teach a God of wrath, a judgmental God who is just waiting for us to do something wrong in order to smite us.

A few years ago when we consecrated Jake Owensby to be the 4^th Bishop of Western Louisiana, I had the exquisite privilege of serving Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori as her chaplain for the several days she was in Louisiana. Imagine that! Hanging out with the PB for two and a half days!

And she told me this story: She was walking through an airport one day, making a short connection between flights on one of the many trips a presiding bishop must make around the country. And a man, a complete stranger to her, came alongside as she was walking and asked if she was a “pastor.”

She said, “yes,” but explained that she really had to keep walking or she would miss her flight. So the man walked alongside her and she did pastoral counseling as they strode through the airport.

The man’s problem was that he had cheated on his wife. And he wanted to know, “Will God ever forgive me?”

I didn’t ask Bishop Katherine what she said to him. It would not have been appropriate to ask. But I think I know.

I’m pretty sure she said something along the lines of this: “God has already forgiven you. Our God of compassion is waiting with open arms for you to turn and accept.. love, mercy and forgiveness.

Your wife, on the other hand, might need some persuasion.” Or words to that effect!

The whole point of Jesus’ life and death is to teach us compassion, and not just for our own families, friends, neighbors who look and think like us. That’s the easy part. That’s practice for the hard stuff.

 

We followers of Jesus are called specifically to love our enemies and pray for those who hurt us. We are called to welcome the stranger, to treat those from other lands as if they are one of us, to care for the poor, the sick, and the prisoner.

We have a God-shaped hole in the side of our heart that compels us to seek the compassion and healing love of God for ourselves. But then a mysterious and wonderful thing happens. When we allow God to fill that hole, our hard little hearts soften, expand, open up.. to people of all sorts and Creation—all of it.

Jesus said, “Love one another as I have loved you.” And then he added, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses …to the ends of the earth.”

Imagine that: Love to the ends of the earth! Love from our God-filled hearts to the world. So be it. Come Lord Jesus.

AMEN

(The video above is from the website of Doctors without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres, a charity I support as often as I can. It needs no translation so far as I can tell.)

*My book of sermons published in 2016 is titled "A Rock with a Heart: Finding Heaven on Earth." I have copies available for $20, of which $3 goes to my ministry fund.

Lifeline

Grace Episcopal Church, Monroe, La.

I don’t turn on the television much at my house. In fact, I do it so rarely that it usually has to spend up to 30 minutes cycling through the universe of channels to re-establish connection to the ones I can watch if I want to!

But for a time not so long ago, a teenager lived with me, and that was a whole different story. The television was on ALL THE TIME. I’m sure many of you share that parental experience!

The consequence is that I have fragments of dozens of television shows cluttering up my brain! In many cases, I know very little about the show they came from because I rarely sat down and watched television. Rather, I gathered the fragments moving about the house doing my own thing while my son watched.

The fragment that is coming in handy this morning has to do with “lifelines.” My recollection is that there was a game show where people answered questions to win prizes, and they were allowed a couple of “lifelines,” that is people they could call when they needed help.*

And I think that is a great concept for approaching today’s Gospel stories. The leader of the synagogue named Jairus and the woman suffering from hemorrhage needed lifelines.

Clearly, Jairus was desperate. His daughter was near death. He hunts down Jesus, who has just crossed the Sea of Galilee, and falls at his feet begging for healing for his daughter. Parents of children everywhere surely can identify.

Jesus turns to go with him, but is interrupted by a woman who is at the end of her rope dealing with chronic illness. She had “endured much,” had “spent all she had,” yet grew worse. I can hear her exhaustion and desperation in those few but eloquent words.

The author of Mark does not say this, but artists throughout the centuries have depicted her on her knees, crouched on the floor, reaching with her last ounce of strength to touch—not Jesus himself—but merely his cloak, believing fervently that doing so will make her well.

Jairus and the woman need a lifeline.., and they do whatever it takes to find Jesus and put themselves in his hands.

I am always struck by the imagery used to describe what happens when the woman with hemorrhage touches Jesus’ cloak.

Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?”

Now, electricity as we know it—a stream of colliding molecules—was unknown in the time of Jesus. But that is always what I think of when I read this story. “Current,” we call it, and it powers our world.

And, of course, it is not a coincidence that we use a related term­—“currency”—for money, that other powerful mover of our world. OR that we speak of water moving between the banks of a river as “current.”

And we know that if, in the case of water, something happens to stop the flow, if a pool of water gets separated from the flow, what can happen is stagnation. Nasty stuff, like disease-bearing mosquitos, can multiply.

Or if, in the case of electricity, something disrupts the chain of colliding molecules; we’re left sitting in the dark, sweating or shivering, with food rotting in the frig.

Current requires a source or origin, a conduit and somewhere to go. Jesus could be a lifeline to Jairus and the woman because his source was God and he responded to the needs of those around him. The love of God flowed through him into the world.

Brothers and sisters, we here at Grace Church are in a bit of a difficult time. We went from two priests to no priests in a matter of weeks. We feel a bit abandoned and forlorn.

Certainly I do not need to point out that we are nowhere near as desperate as the people in today’s Gospel stories. Yet our tendency to turn inward, to sort of curl up and hope the storm passes quickly, or to huddle inside our beautiful stained glass fortress.. is real and natural.

But we must not succumb. We must not do it. Because that is the path of stagnation and death.

Priests are not our lifeline. Bishops and Deacons are not our lifeline. Jesus is our lifeline.

Don’t get me wrong. Priests are vital. They gather us around the holy table where we connect with our true lifeline, Jesus, by feasting on “spiritual food in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood,” as our prayer book puts it.

That is as essential to my well-being as it is to yours! But at this moment, let us remember that we have many ways to connect with our Lifeline. The Holy Eucharist is one.

The daily office, this Morning Prayer we are doing right now, is another. Our own personal devotions are another. Living our lives as an ongoing and constant prayer of service to others is yet another.

Last week, Fr. Michael preached his farewell sermon and one of the many wonderful things he said was, “You don’t need a priest to share God’s love in the world.” I wanted to shout “AMEN!”

Unlike Jairus, we cannot chase Jesus himself across the sea and fall at his feet. Unlike the woman with hemorrhage, we cannot use our last ounce of strength to crawl across the floor and grab the hem of his cloak.

But friends, we have something that much of the world is literally dying for. Our Bishop has famously said, “People turn to the church looking for Jesus, and all they get is us.”

There’s proper humility in that statement. We aren’t Jesus. BUT… we do have connections—to Jesus, to God the source of all life, through the indwelling Holy Spirit.

More. As Christ’s body in the world, WE are part of the Lifeline. The current of God’s love, and healing, and peace, and joy, must flow through us into the world. How else can it flow?

Eric Law is an Episcopal priest who has dedicated his career to helping churches live out their baptismal covenant. In his book, Holy Currencies: 6 Blessings for Sustainable Missional Ministries, he talks about the fact that in times of travail, churches tend to turn inward, and to think that their life depends on conserving and focusing on themselves and not trying anything new.

And, Law argues, that kind of response to travail is deadly. It shuts off the flow. It doesn’t change God. God remains the gracious, indeed eager, source of all life and hope.

But it does change us. When we turn inward, when we start telling ourselves negative stories about how we can’t do ministry because we’re too small or too poor or don’t have a priest or whatever, we stagnate.

BTW, of Law’s six sustainable missional ministries, exactly one involves money.

However tempting it might be for us to just hunker down, now is the time to be bold, to turn outward, to become more purposeful than ever before in living into our role as part of the lifeline between God and the world.

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, AMEN.

*The show was "Who wants to be a millionaire?"