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

Practicing Resurrection: A Sermon for the Great Vigil of Easter, 23 April 2011

Note: This sermon was preached at Trinity Episcopal Church, Natchitoches, La. To listen to a digital recording of the sermon, visit the church's website.

When it comes to resurrection scenarios, Matthew (28:1-10 NRSV) seems to have taken a page out of the book of epic filmmaker Cecile B. DeMille.

You might recall that in Mark’s resurrection story, the stone is already out of the way when the women arrive. A young man in white seated quietly inside the tomb tells them Jesus is not there. The scene ends in dumbstruck silence with the women running away, afraid to tell anyone what they had seen.

But Matthew is all high drama. An angel in blazing white descends from heaven before their very eyes, single-handedly rolls a mighty stone out of the way… and triumphantly sits on it. The men—not the women—the men on guard duty swoon at the sight.

Then the angel makes his magnificent proclamation, the women turn to go—according to Matthew, in fear and great joy, and suddenly Jesus himself stands before them. And the women fall at his feet and worship him.
                    

                
But I left out a very important detail. Matthew puts his high drama in motion with nothing less than.. an earthquake.

Can it escape our notice that just yesterday, at high noon, an earthquake punctuated the last breath of Jesus the Christ.. on a cross.. in a place of death called Golgotha?

Can it escape our notice that just a few weeks ago, an earthquake rocked Japan, then sent a giant tsunami wave of destruction crashing into the same shores, killing thousands and leaving utter devastation in its wake?

Can it escape our notice that just over a year ago, an earthquake leveled the capital city of Haiti, killing thousands and leaving millions homeless?

We are all too familiar with earthquakes, and the human tragedy they cause. So what in heaven’s name is one doing, here, right in the middle of our resurrection story?

Nora Gallagher is a novelist who has also written several books about her own spiritual journey. One of them is called Practicing Resurrection. It is an account of how the loss of a beloved brother throws her life into a tailspin, and of her return from walking straight down a wrong vocational path, dragging a failing marriage.

Gallagher’s struggle back requires her to re-examine everything: her call, her work, her marriage. It leads her finally to an exploration of nothing less than life after death. She finds that “experiences of resurrection are not believing six impossible things before breakfast.” Rather, she proposes, “Maybe resurrection, like everything else, needs to be practiced.”

We have all been there, in one way or another. Human existence is a series of earthquakes, large and small. Some are beyond our control. I have never experienced an earthquake of the natural kind, but I imagine that little can be more terrifying than to feel the very earth move under our feet. It is the ultimate loss of control.

Other earthquakes are of our very own making. We march resolutely into dead ends and struggle to find a way back out again.

And as Matthew illustrates by putting an earthquake smack dab in the middle of the resurrection story, joyful events can also create upheaval in our lives. A baby is born, and mom and dad must create a new marriage out of the ashes of the honeymoon, a marriage in which gazing into each others’ eyes is replaced by advanced skill in “keeping an eye on” 16 different things at once, from the shrinking pile of disposable diapers to the toddler about to stick its finger in the puppy’s eye.

We don’t have to be control freaks to long for some control, some ability to maintain our balance as we face big challenges and small ones of daily life. But we have so very little. Fr. Richard Rohr defines human suffering precisely in these terms. “When are humans suffering?” he asks. “When they have no control.”

It often seems to me that it is precisely when we think we finally have it together, that we are finally on top of our game, that life hands us the most deadly, life-destroying blows. And we suffer.

Someone we love dies. A spouse or lover leaves us. A friend betrays us. We are downsized by our employer. Our company fails. An economic downturn takes most of our nest egg. Our politics turn nasty. Our children and grandchildren are sent half way around the world to fight a war that we are just not sure is worth the sacrifice of young, beautiful lives.

We aren’t in control, and much of the time it looks like God isn’t either.

But God chose to become human, to suffer and die on a cross in order to rise again in power over death. How do we understand that? As a one-time event? An economic transaction in which Jesus "paid a price” to God--or, was it to the devil?--so that we can live happily ever after, some day in some glorious future?

That kind of thinking certainly creeps into our religion through the words of hymns, sermons, meditation guides, and so forth. But it is wrong-headed. It diminishes the meaning of resurrection by making it a mechanical transaction trapped in history, and our lives something to be “gotten through” for some period of time while we await the coming of Glory.

As Fr. Richard observes, it makes our religion a mere “evacuation plan for the next world.”

The fundamental story of our faith is that something always must die before something new, bigger, better can be born. And the thing that must die is our own beloved ego.

Earthquakes are destructive, but the human ego even more so. It is the human ego that leads us to destroy others in myriad ways, physically and emotionally, individually and as nations. The human ego destroys others with its need to be right, to save face, to feel secure, to judge, to divide the world into black vs. white, good and evil, us vs. them. The human ego is destructive in its need to take sides and to believe that God is on ours.

In Matthew’s resurrection story, the women fall down and worship Jesus. But in fact Jesus never once asked us to worship him. What he asks is that we follow him. And to follow Jesus the Christ, rather than merely believe in him or worship him, although those are good things, we must practice dying so that we can practice resurrection. Might this be what Paul means when he says we must consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ?

To let go of our prideful clinging to being right, being in control, being safe and secure… feels like dying. But if we can do that, and if we can follow Christ through the suffering and through the ashes of our hurts and losses and failures, the earthquakes of our lives become the very path to living our faith and sharing God’s love with a hurting world, which is to say, the very path to practicing resurrection.

AMEN.

                                                

Amazing Grace: A sermon for 21 March 2010

So here we are, rounding the bend and heading down the home stretch of Lent. Today begins the fifth week of our annual journey into the wilderness, following the example of our Lord.

This week culminates with Palm Sunday, a moment of celebration that kicks off the somber events of Holy Week, leading up to the ultimate joy of Easter. Thus today’s lessons not only help us to look back at our Lenten journey, but also offer us a glimmer of what is to come, both the somber and the celebratory aspects.

The prophet Isaiah (43:16-21) is quite explicit in bridging past and future, and placing the emphasis on hope. The context of this poem or hymn is that the Israelites have been exiles in Babylon for nearly 50 years. By the 43rd chapter of Isaiah, they have heard that they will be allowed to go home.

But Babylon and Jerusalem are a long ways apart when travel is by foot and camel. The way is rough. It goes through wilderness, where food and water is scarce and animals of prey do their thing.

And so Isaiah begins by reminding the Israelites that the Lord has seen them through danger before. He made a way for them through the sea, the same sea that then “extinguished” the Egyptian chariots and warriors that pursued them.

But then Isaiah makes an about face. Don’t dwell on that, he says. The Lord is “about to do a new thing.” Notice how the poetry switches into future tense: The Lord will make a way in the wilderness. The Lord will provide water. The wild animals will honor the Lord their God.

Had I begun preparing this sermon a little earlier last week, I might have e-mailed Ed and asked that we sing “Amazing Grace” today. For the most significant, unifying factor that ties together all of our lessons this morning is the good news of the amazing grace of our God.

My study Bible suggests that Psalm 126 was most likely written after the Israelites have returned from Babylon to Jerusalem. It is a hymn of thanksgiving that also begins in the past tense, but on an even more upbeat note: “[T]he Lord restored the fortunes of Zion” and we were so happy we had to pinch ourselves to make sure we weren’t dreaming. We laughed and shouted for joy, and bragged about our Lord to anyone who would listen.

Then the psalmist too turns to the future. This will happen again, he says. We can count on the Lord our God. Tears and weeping are part of the human condition, but with God’s help we will “come again with joy.”

The apostle Paul’s testimony in his letter to the Philippians (3:4b-14) is a very personal variation on the theme of God’s amazing grace. Paul’s look backward is at his own life and accomplishments. He enumerates them: circumcised on the 8th day, an Israelite of the esteemed tribe of Benjamin, not just a Jew but a Hebrew, a Pharisee who knew and followed the law flawlessly, a zealous protector of the faith as he understood it, even to the point of persecuting the church of Jesus Christ.

But now, Paul says, all of that is worthless. It is rubbish. Again, my study Bible says that the Greek word Paul used here actually has a stronger connotation, the connotation of “excrement.”

Having come to know God in the risen Christ, Paul turns his back on such egoistic claims and attempts to earn righteousness through the human worthiness competition. Instead, he says, righteousness is a gift made possible by the amazing grace of God. It is given and accepted through faith by all who have been made God’s own, through Christ Jesus.

Notice two things about this passage. First, suffering itself is transformed. It is no longer something to beg God to relieve us of at the first possible moment. Rather, it is precisely that which draws us closer to Christ. “I want to know Christ,” Paul says, “and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death.”

Second, human striving is no longer a worthiness competition. It is no longer directed at being more religious or more pious or more moral or better behaved or whatever… in relation to other people. Rather, Paul says, let us keep our focus on the only worthy goal, which is the heavenly call of relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Thereby we will receive the only gift worth having, which is the righteousness of God.

And so we come to today’s Gospel lesson (John 12:1-8), and it is here we find most explicitly the foreshadowing of the somber events of Holy Week.

Jesus sits at table in the home of his friends, Mary, Martha and Lazarus. We have met these people before. The presence of Lazarus, who was dead and now lives, foreshadows what is to come for Jesus, although none of those at dinner save Jesus have an inkling of what is to come.

Martha serves, as usual. Mary expresses her extravagant love and devotion to Jesus, as usual. She takes a pound of costly perfume, anoints Jesus’ feet and dries them with her hair. For this she is criticized by Judas Iscariot. Why wasn’t that perfume sold and the money given to the poor? he asks.

But John makes sure we see the falseness of Judas’ piety. Of the four Gospel accounts, John’s is the one most preoccupied with making a case against Judas by seeing signs that lead up to his betrayal of Jesus.

Jesus, on the other hand, is rather gentle in his rebuke. He reminds Judas that the poor aren’t going away. They will always be here.

I have actually heard this passage used by people to excuse not helping the poor and to justify opposing social safety nets for the poor. “Jesus said the poor will always be with us,” they say. And their piety is as false as that of Judas.

It is always possible for the self-righteous to take something out of context and make it mean whatever serves the selfish interests of the moment. Jesus’ teaching about how we are to love and care for the poor, as recorded over and over again throughout the Gospels, is eminently clear.

In this story, what Jesus most likely means is that the apostles can take care of the poor tomorrow and the next day and the next, but at this very moment, what they need to do most is begin to come to terms with what will soon happen. And what will soon happen are the somber events of Holy Week.

I like to think that somehow, through her devotion to Jesus, Mary intuitively collaborates with him in this scene by anointing his feet with burial perfume.

The Lord is indeed about to do a new thing. That new thing is, by the grace of God, the most amazing gift of all time. It is no less than the salvation and reconciliation of the world to its Maker. But it comes through the suffering, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

AMEN.