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

God's Economy: A Sermon for 18 September 2011

Christ Church, St. Joseph, La.

We really don’t like this story, do we?

I mean, listen to this! Here’s Jesus once again teaching his disciples using his favorite method: a parable (Matthew 20:1-16, NRSV). The characters in the parable are easily recognized by us. The Master of the Vineyard is, of course, God.

Because Jesus is speaking, I’m guessing many of us immediately think “God the Father.” But the Master of the Vineyard could also be Jesus the Christ, who was, after all, frequently called “Master” by his disciples, and did, after all, sometimes refer to himself in the third person.

Either way, the Master of the Vineyard is clearly a personification of the one and only God we worship.

The workers are, of course, us. And we recognize each type. Being good church people, we are probably the ones ready and eager to go into the vineyard at the break of day, and stay at it all day.

We do it, at least in part, because we are good church people. We’re loyal and committed. We believe in our work, that it is a good thing to do. We have a strong work ethic. We’re not slackers!

We look with disdain on those we perceive to be slackers. And we are pretty sure those who show up to be hired late in the day, and who therefore put in only an hour of work, are slackers. 

Parable of the Workers of the Vineyard, by Rembrandt

                                       
It goes without saying that we expect to be rewarded for our hard work, and we expect those we have judged to be slackers to at least earn less, if not be outright penalized for their lesser effort.

Sound familiar? It should, because it is a system devised by humans for the purpose of regulating human behavior. It’s called the merit system, and we are quite devoted to it. 

And I will certainly grant you that it makes a certain kind of sense and accomplishes certain things in the world of human endeavor. One of the hats I wear is that of a member of the Board of Control of the Ouachita Parish Public Library system. Just this past week, we decided, in these days of economic constraint, that the only raises the library system will give this year will be merit raises.

Last year we gave an across-the-board, cost-of-living raise to everyone. But we agreed that we could only do that occasionally. We agreed that merit raises hold people accountable and are an incentive to work harder and better.

So, yes, the merit system has value in the quid pro quo world of human endeavor.

But we get confused. As with so many things that seem necessary to make human societies function, we imbue the merit system with moral virtue. We even come to think it so wonderful that we are quite sure God must have invented it.

The story of creation in Genesis says that God made us in his image. But we humans put the cart in front of the horse all the time. We think that because we are made in God’s image, therefore God must think like us.

We would be wrong.

And as people of the Good News, who purport to not only believe in but follow Jesus, we really should know better.

Jesus tells us and shows us, over and over again, in myriad ways, that the human economy of merit falls short. He teaches it through his criticism of the scribes and Pharisees—the good church people of his day—who believe they are earning their way to heaven by following the letter of the law.

He teaches it with parables like the one about the treasures accumulated on earth through our economy of merit, treasures that will rot and rust and be stolen by thieves.

He shows it by insisting upon associating with, even eating with, all those people who don’t measure up according to the economy of merit: prostitutes, poor people, even tax collectors.

He preaches it in the Sermon on the Mount with its series of inversions: The meek shall inherit the earth! Really, now? Not in the economy of merit, they won’t!

He teaches it in today’s lesson: The last shall be first and the first shall be last. And who are any of you, you good church people, to say I can’t do what I want with what belongs to me?

Fr. Richard Rohr is a Franciscan monk and Roman Catholic priest. He writes prolifically and publishes both books and an online daily meditation. He is another of my favorite spiritual mentors.

Fr. Richard says that the gospel—the good news taught by Jesus—won’t make much sense to those who are committed to worthiness, competition and rewards—in other words, to the economy of merit.

That’s because the very heart of the Gospel is that God’s economy is one of grace, radical grace, offered to us as unconditional love—a wedding feast of God’s love.

Sounds fabulous, right? So why do we have such a hard time accepting it? Why do we cling so tightly to our economy of merit?

Well, for one thing, we really aren’t sure we want to rub elbows with all the folks who are invited to God’s feast of unconditional love. The economy of merit feeds our pride in accomplishment, our pride in being the ones who show up for work at the break of day. The economy of merit allows us to think we are better than the ones who show up at noon, or late afternoon, for heaven’s sake.

But Paul, in the passage read today from his letter to the Philippians (1:21-30, NRSV), gives us a glimpse of what happens when we accept God’s unconditional love and embrace God’s economy of grace. Remember that Paul wrote this letter from a Roman jail under threat of execution. Yet he is free, free even from fear of death. Living is Christ and dying is gain, he rejoices, and I do not know which I prefer.

Then Paul admonishes us to live a life worthy of the Gospel of Christ. But note that the purpose is not to merit God’s love. Rather, following Jesus the Christ serves as evidence of our salvation in the face of a hurting and sometimes evil world.

Or, as Fr. Richard puts it, God does not love us because we are good. We are good because God loves us.

AMEN

                  

Buried in Plain Sight: A Sermon for 24 July 2011

Christ Episcopal Church, St. Joseph, LA

This is my first time ever to worship with you here at Christ Church, St. Joseph. So I thought I might begin by sharing who I am by way of taking you on a “buried treasure” tour of my home.

Imagine a nice brick, 1-story home. We’ll enter through this doorway from the carport. Just a few steps inside and we’re standing in the kitchen. Right here, on the window sill over the sink is the first treasure I want to show you.

It’s a little brown rock, about the size of a meatball—you know, the kind you see in chafing dishes at parties and receptions. It’s a pretty ordinary looking rock, except… Look! It has a heart!

From My Window Sill

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, tilted 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.

On the window sill, right next to Rock with a Heart, is another smaller rock. This one I picked up on the bank of a stream. It is whitish gray in color, but what makes it treasure is that it has been polished to a lovely sheen by its rough and tumble existence at the hands of moving water.

If you’ll step into the living room, here on a shelf above the TV is a couple of inches of armadillo tail. Happily, it has been picked clean of tissue by the industrious insects that do the important clean-up work in our environment. So what we have left is the bony architecture of the armadillo tail in all its intricate, complex beauty. 

Armadillo Tail Architecture

What in the world about an armadillo’s life requires such an extraordinary tail structure? Or, might the armadillo tail be merely an exuberant, over-the-top expression of its Creator—here just for the glory of it?

We could continue. My house is strewn with treasures buried in plain sight. Among the rocks, bones and shells, you will also find human-made treasures, like a little pink satin-glass swan that I just picked up at an auction about a week ago.

But let’s turn, for a moment, to today’s Gospel lesson (Matthew 13:31-33,44-52; NRSV). Jesus has taken aside his closest disciples to teach them about finding the Kingdom of God. He does so with a series of parables. To be more precise, he does so with a pair of twin parables. Then he wraps up the lesson with one more parable that goes beyond finding and recognizing the Kingdom, to suggesting that the Kingdom is also actually looking for us.

The first set of twin parables compares the Kingdom of God to a tiny mustard seed that grows into a tree, and to a measure of yeast that leavens three measures of flour to make multiple loaves of bread. These parables tell us that the Kingdom is a living, growing thing.

They say that although the Kingdom can be found in the tiny and seemingly insignificant—a seed, a measure of yeast—it cannot be contained by such things. The Kingdom is dynamic; it has already burst its bounds, sent out its limbs, spread its life-giving influence. It is as ubiquitous as trees and birds that nest in them.

The second set of twin parables compares the Kingdom to a treasure found lying out in an apparently ordinary field, and a pearl, which we know is formed around a fragment of grit inside that ugliest of all shells, the oyster. In this part of Louisiana, we don’t have to go far to see lots of ordinary fields and ordinary broken oyster shells being used as landscaping material!

When was the last time you looked at all that ordinariness and saw the Kingdom of God lurking there, just waiting to be discovered?

I’m currently reading a book by Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest who teaches at Columbia Theological Seminary. It’s called An Altar in the World.

Taylor’s point is that if we take incarnation seriously, if we open our eyes and hearts to the world we live in, if we live fully in the present, slow down, pay attention, leave the beaten paths of our everyday routine, strike out across that open field…. we will find evidence.. of God’s presence.. everywhere.

And not just in the physical environment. Taylor takes her seminary students in search of altars in Jewish synagogues and Islamic mosques, as well as Christian churches of all denominations. She writes also about getting lost in strange neighborhoods, other countries and other cultures as another way to stumble upon altars in the world.

In today’s parables from Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus teaches us that the kingdom of heaven is indeed "at hand." He speaks in vivid word pictures to illustrate that the Kingdom is indeed among us. Referring to the ordinary and familiar, he shows us that the Kingdom is here and now, waiting for us to seek and to find.

Better yet, God does not sit passively waiting for us. Surely the fisherman casting the net is the Lord of the Kingdom looking for us.

Moreover, we don’t need a “buried treasure” map to find the Kingdom of God. Not only is the Kingdom of God out in plain sight, but incarnation also means that we have already been given what we need to see it!

Another of my favorite spiritual teachers is a Franciscan monk by the name of Richard Rohr, who publishes a daily online meditation. He says that each of us has a homing device within, a homing device that seeks its Author and Creator. Think of it as the God-shaped opening in the side of your heart.

Or, think of it as the eyes of God within us, through which we see God in the world.., in the natural environment, in other people, both stranger and friend. The eyes of God within us enable us to see the Kingdom of God everywhere, at every turn.

So watch your step! Treasure is all around you, if you will but see it. Don’t trip over that little altar, right there next to your foot! The Kingdom of God is within you and among you.

Amen.

Called to Live: A Sermon for 26 June 2011

Some passages and stories in the Bible, especially the Old Testament, seem to say that if you love God and put God first in your life, then surely you will prosper. Everything will go your way!

And the corollary that comes with that notion is that if things aren’t going your way, you must not be living a Godly life. We recognize immediately that Job’s friends, who harangued him mercilessly to repent so that God would reverse his fortunes, had bought into that equation hook, line and sinker.

From that sort of quid pro quo perspective on living a life committed to God, a literal interpretation of the story of Abraham about to sacrifice his son would lead us to ask, What in the world did Abraham do to deserve being tormented by God with such a horrendous order—an order to murder his only and beloved son?

Abrahan and Isaac on Mount Moriah

Would God really test Abraham—or any of us, heaven forbid—that way?

I have certainly heard that interpretation of bad things happening in a life. I have thought it and said it myself: Something bad is happening. What have I done to deserve this? And if I can’t think of any horrendous sin I’ve committed lately, then it’s “Why is God testing me this way?”

Reasons are really, really important—to human beings. We want to know “why?” And we want to know “why” in part because that will point us to a solution. If I know “why,” then I can figure out how to fix it!

But that’s human thinking, not necessarily God thinking. Remember that we are made in God’s image, not the reverse. Just because we think a certain way, just because reasons are important to us, does not mean God thinks that way or that “reasons” are part of God’s thinking at all!

We get so confused about that at times that we think we possess the people God has put in our lives: our children, our spouses, our friends. And then life happens. Those we love the most die. We cannot always protect our children from the bad things. Spouses or lovers leave us in the lurch.

We discover that love and relationship cannot be put in a jar and stored, like pints of mayhaw jelly lined up on the pantry shelf, to be pulled out and enjoyed during the off season. We must let go—and it does feel like dying.

But we must let go in order to go on living. And I would venture that going on living is sometimes the harder part of the bargain.

I’m not going to assume we know all the details of what actually happened so many centuries ago in a wilderness area of the Middle East. But I think it safe to conclude that God saved both Isaac’s and Abraham’s lives that day.

How, after all, would a father go on living in the knowledge that he had killed his only son—even if because God demanded it?

Yet I also must conclude that, in spite of having been saved from the unthinkable by God at the very last minute, both Isaac and Abraham went on living with huge, unanswerable questions in their minds.

What sort of God would demand such a thing anyway? What sort of father would be prepared to carry out such a demand? How does one trust God or anything else when we might, at any moment, be asked to let go of that person, that thing, that aspect of who we are… that we hold most dear?

Yes, God provided. But the entire incident can hardly be said to be a happy chapter in family life. It is hard to believe that Abraham and Isaac ever looked at each other quite the same way again.

But, of course, we Christians believe that God did precisely what this story seems to ask Abraham to do, and the passage from Romans that is our Epistle lesson today reminds us of that.

Paul wanted the followers of Jesus to consider themselves dead to sin, but alive to God through their association with Jesus' death on the cross. This text, therefore, is a vital reminder to us of the significance for us of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, and of the meaning of our baptism.

God saved our lives in a big way with the sacrifice of God’s only and beloved son and with the gift of the Holy Spirit, that kernel of God planted in each one of us.

But I find it interesting that in all of Paul’s talk in this passage of being dead to sin and free from sin, not one single particular sin is mentioned.

Of course, Paul does at times and in other passages provide us with some catalogs of bad things we shouldn’t do. But the absence of that here suggests that we need not always think of sin as specific things we should or should not do, nor of living a life for God as somehow never again doing any of those bad things.

Of course, we are not to go out and deliberately do bad things just because we live in and through God’s grace. But right there in the middle of the passage Paul explains why he says that: “I’m talking about this in these human terms because of your natural limitations.”

We will sin again; bad things will happen again. We will be asked to let go of things that have come to matter more to us than than life itself, perhaps even more than God… and yet to go on living. We are called to live... by and in and through the grace of God... after, and in spite of, all those things.

One of my favorite mentors is a Franciscan monk by the name of Richard Rohr, who publishes a daily meditation via e-mail. Just a few days ago, he wrote this: A Christian is someone who’s animated by the spirit of Christ, a person in whom the spirit of Christ can work. That doesn’t always mean that you consciously know what you are doing. …We may have no idea that we do what we do for Christ.

Note the utter absence here of any notion that we earn God’s grace by having the right answer, or by avoiding sin, or by believing or doing six impossible things before breakfast! That notion of earning our way to eternal life by good deeds, or proving ourselves through great acts of faith, is one of the things we are called to let go of—no easy task in a society dominated by concepts of merit and earning one’s own way.

Rather, we fall into God’s grace, pushed by the trials and failures and impossible choices life hands us. We can only accept God’s grace… in all of our human imperfection and limitations, and thereby become a vehicle of that grace.

And then we give a cup of cold water to a little one who needs it, not to prove we love God but because we know that God loves us, not to earn eternal life but because we already have it.

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.