Practice Blessing: A Sermon for 28 August 2011

Christ Episcopal Church, St. Joseph, La.

In today’s lessons, people who are trying to serve God engage in intense struggles with the world. First is Moses, called by God from the burning bush that is not consumed to lead the Hebrew people out of bondage in Egypt (Exodus 3:1-15, NRSV). 

Moses struggles throughout this story with his fears. First he fears God and hides his face. Then he fears Pharaoh. After all, he is in the wilderness precisely because he is a fugitive from Pharaoh’s justice, having slain an Egyptian who had been beating a Hebrew slave.

Moses and the Burning Bush

When God reassures him on that point, Moses struggles further with his fears, this time in relationship to the Isrealites themselves. He needs a credential, and God provides it: Say that “I AM,” the God of your ancestors, has sent you.

This is a “good news, bad news” story. The good news, or "gospel" message, is that the Lord God has seen the affliction of God's people and has come to deliver them from slavery and oppression. The bad news, for Moses, is that responding to the good news requires him to go way out of his comfort zone.

The story from Matthew’s Gospel (16: 21-28, NRSV) is a prediction of the suffering and death of Jesus. We know, of course, that it was written well after those events had taken place. Thus the vantage point is post-resurrection and the writer believes that Jesus’ death and resurrection had been necessary to his salvation, just as we believe today they were necessary to our salvation.

In that light, Peter seems rather clueless, if not an outright obstacle to what Jesus needed to accomplish. At the same time, who among us, not yet comprehending God’s plan for our salvation, would not have acted as Peter did? Would we not also have said, No, Lord, that can’t be. That you should suffer so is unacceptable.

Jesus rebukes Peter sharply. Wasn’t it just last Sunday and a couple of chapters ago that he was saying to Peter, You are the rock on which I will build my church? Yet today he says to Peter, Get thee behind me Satan.
                           

The sharpness of Jesus’ rebuke suggests two things: First, he did have a clue to what was coming, and, second, he was struggling with that awareness. How could he go through with such a horrendous reality if his own closest friends and followers were going to try to talk him out of it? Indeed, were not prepared to go through it with him?

In other words, the story both suggests what God was to accomplish with that cruel death—namely our ultimate deliverance from death—even as it makes clear that the price of deliverance is affliction and suffering. If any want to become my followers, Jesus says, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

In today’s Epistle, the Apostle Paul provides guidelines for how we should live in response to the gospel proclaimed by these stories (Romans 12:9-21). And just as Jesus’ statement suggest, Paul’s guidelines reveal that it will be a struggle and it will take us out of our comfort zone.

Much has been made over the centuries of the supposed conflict between a good, omnipotent God and the persistence of evil in the world. Underlying that debate is the notion that it’s God’s responsibility to fix evil in the world.

But Paul makes it perfectly clear that countering evil is our job, and in the passage from Romans just read, Paul focuses on how we are to counter evil. He provides us with an impressive list, the bottom line being quite simple and succinct: We are to overcome evil with good.

Our human tendency is to think that we must overcome evil with much more aggressive strategies than those listed here. I suppose that is, at least in part, because we fear evil and when we are afraid, a peaceful counter to the threat is about the last thing that occurs to us. We want to “fight fire with fire.” We believe that “the best defense is a good offense,” and so forth.

But that is hardly what Paul commands and that is precisely why his instructions take us out of our comfort zone. We are to hate evil but respond to it with love and nobility and leave vengeance to God.

One of the strategies Paul suggests for countering evil in this familiar passage strikes me today in a way it never has before. It comes about a third of the way in: Bless those who persecute you, Paul says, bless and do not curse them.

Wow. What a thought. And it strikes me today because I just finished reading a book that I think I mentioned to you a few weeks ago. The book is An Altar in the World by Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor.

The book is about how to draw closer to God through the demands, struggles and pleasures of everyday life. Spirituality is not just for formal worship experiences, Taylor argues. Rather, we can turn many aspects of our daily life into spiritual practices.

She begins with a chapter called “The Practice of Waking Up to God,” followed by chapters called “The Practice of Paying Attention,” “The Practice of Getting Lost,” and more. The last chapter of the book is “The Practice of Pronouncing Blessings.”

Bar Mitzvah Blessing

                                  
Now we Episcopalians are very big on blessing things, but we have rules about who can bless what and when. Bishops must always bless churches, communion vessels and those who are being ordained deacon or priest. Priests can bless many things: bread, wine, marriages, babies just baptized, houses, vestments, jewelry, and all of us at the end of every worship service.

But as Taylor notes, that leaves lots and lots of things that all of us can bless: Our food before we eat. Our children when putting them to bed at night. A perfect stranger who happens to sneeze in a public place.

Blessing is everyone’s job and surely the world would be a better place if we all spent more time pronouncing blessings and less blaming, criticizing and cursing!

Like Paul, Taylor says we need especially to bless that which at first repels us or seems unworthy of blessing: the fat man spilling into your space from the airplane seat next to you, the sullen cashier, the neighbor who has already put the wrong political sign in his front yard, even the mosquito intent on supper at your expense. God made these beings, Taylor says, they share in God’s…holiness, whether or not they meet your minimum requirements for a blessing. And to bless is to recognize that holiness. It is to defer judgment, and to see God in every aspect of life.

And watch what happens inside when you do this. The recipient of the blessing might never know or notice. Transformation of the blessee is not required, but the heart and mind of the pronouncer of blessings will be changed.

Let us pray: Blessed are you, Lord of the Universe, and blessed is your creation now and forever,

AMEN.

Where is God when evil happens?*

One of the great conundrums of Christianity is the presence of evil in a world created by a good God. Indeed, we believe not only that a good God created a good world, as told in the Genesis accounts, but we believe also that the same one and only God is all powerful and could stop or prevent evil in the world at any time.

Of course, we have the story of the fall of Adam and Eve to explain how evil came into the world. As a woman, I am all too aware that much of humankind throughout history would really like to blame it all on Eve!

But Bishop N.T. Wright points out in his book, Evil and the Justice of God, that all of our discussions that begin with Adam and Eve as the ones who introduce evil into the world really ignore an important question: What was a snake with evil intentions doing in Paradise anyway?

Adam and Eve sure didn’t put it there. I am reminded of a Far Side cartoon that depicted God--as an old white man with long white hair and beard, of course--rolling clay into snakes, and saying to himself, "Boy, these things are a cinch!" Perhaps that's why he made so many of them!

The Far Side, by Gary Larse

How evil came into the world is a subject worthy of consideration; it might be less simple than we tend to think. But  I want to turn our meditations in a different direction.

Nine years ago today, a great evil happened here in these United States. Airplanes crashed into buildings in New York City and Washington D.C. Another plowed a furrow into a field in rural Pennsylvania. Several thousand lives were snuffed out—some instantly, others horribly, by being forced to jump to their deaths from the Twin Towers.

Several thousand families lost loved ones, and thousands more lost friends, co-workers and neighbors. We all lost our sense of security, a certain feeling of invulnerability, and of control of our own destiny, as the wealthiest, strongest nation on the planet.

The horror of those events continues to haunt us today. Their repercussions continue to strain social and cultural relationships and to distort our politics.

Today’s meditations are offered to the glory of God, and with special intention for helping us re-think the questions we ask about evil and how we respond to evil.

When Christians turn their attention to the conundrum of evil co-existing in the world with a good, all-powerful God, it is often with a question that implicitly blames God. “Why did God ‘allow’ that to happen?” we ask. And our answer: “God must have had a reason."

It is almost as if we have to give God an “out,” as if the possibility that evil just happens... is too terrifying for words. Or, perhaps we’re thinking, if God doesn’t have a reason, then God must not be so good after all. And that too is terrifying.

Fr. Richard Rohr is a Franciscan friar and Roman Catholic priest who publishes a daily online meditation. He says that “loss of control” is the very definition of human suffering.

I think “reasons” are the product of human attempts to control suffering by explaining it. Who are we to say that God must have a reason? WE need reasons. God does not.

Rationalizing evil typically involves both fixing blame and figuring out “what God wants us to do,” given that God must have had a reason for the evil happening in the first place. I suggest that it is precisely this kind of reasoning that leads to all kinds of problematic responses, from using God to justify one country invading another to a pastor in Florida thinking he is called by God to burn the Koran in protest against an Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York City.

Let us ask a different question: Where is God when we suffer? Where is God when evil happens?

For a period of several days after the Twin Towers fell in NYC, I was profoundly troubled by the nightmarish TV images I could not get out of my head. Then one night I had a dream. I was on the top floor of one of the Twin Towers. I and a bunch of people were standing in the elevator lobby. We were waiting for an elevator that, at some level, we knew would not be coming. We could smell the smoke and hear the roar of the fire below us. We were terrified. Then suddenly, miraculously, the elevator doors opened. We stepped forward. And just as we crossed the threshold into the elevator, the building, the elevator, the elevator shaft, the smoke and the fire... all fell away beneath us. We were instantly lighter than air. We looked at each other and laughed as we soared off into the heavens.

I rarely claim to receive messages directly from God. I don’t hear God’s voice in my ears or head. I question the source of every thought. But that dream was from God and the message was simple and clear. God said, “I was there. I was there when the Twin Towers fell. I was there in the Pentagon. I was there in rural Pennsylvania.”

AMEN.

For this first period of quiet, you might want to read Psalm 73, for it expresses both our lack of understanding of evil and the faith that, indeed, God is with us when evil happens.

*September 11, 2010, I led a Quiet Day at St. Patrick's Episcopal Church in West Monroe. Here is the first of three meditations, each guided by a question that will serve as title for these postings. I will post the other two meditations over the next few days.