Let Go and Love: A Sermon for 16 May 2010

Last Sunday at St. Luke’s in Grambling, I preached a sermon called “Love and Let Go.” Today, my sermon is called “Let Go and Love.”

You might be tempted to think that I just can’t get enough of my own clever alliterations with words! But in fact those titles help me focus on a truth brought home by this moment in the church year. (And, by the way, this is a continuation of that sermon, not a repeat.)

The truth those titles focus on flies in the face of conventional wisdom, as God’s truths often do. We say, “You can’t eat your cake and have it too!” And if it is cake we’re really talking about, that’s fine and good.

But if it is God’s love we’re talking about, then that saying can lead us down the wrong path. The truth about God’s love is we can only have it by giving it away.

This is in rather stark contrast to many of the good things the world has to offer. We work hard to earn the money to have a good life, from chocolate and ice cream, to a nice dinner at a restaurant from time to time, to retirement and travel.

Especially in a society such as ours, in which economic growth depends on our purchasing goods and services, we learn to understand “good things” as things we can possess. And then something happens that drives home the illusory nature of possession. The economy nosedives. Hurricanes, tornadoes and floods demonstrate their power.

We get so confused 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. Children grow up and leave. Friends and family die. We must let go. 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.

“To love” is a verb! It is a way of being in the world that is a lot like breathing: half taking in and half letting go, taking in, letting go. We breathe in God’s love for us, and breathe it out in our love for one another. We breathe in our love for one another, and breathe it back to God.

This truth, that we must give away God’s love in order to have it, is brought home by this last Sunday of Easter. Throughout Eastertide, we have heard Jesus over and over attempt to prepare his disciples for the fact that he must soon leave them… again.

Remember, he left them seemingly for good on Good Friday, only to return in resurrected body three days later. But even as they were struggling to adjust to his appearing and disappearing at will, entering and leaving rooms without using the doors, popping up to cook breakfast on the beach, looking not quite like the Jesus they knew… yet undeniably him…

Even as they were struggling to grasp this new reality, he was preparing them for something else. Two Sundays ago, he reminded them that he was going where they could not go, at least not yet. Last Sunday he said, “I am going away, and I am coming to you.” What a contradiction in terms!

And then, he goes. Just like that—and seemingly without warning—he lifts up his hands, prays for them and blesses them, and rises into the clouds.

How mystified they must have been! The Gospel accounts say they “gazed” into heaven. Older translations say, “Their eyes were fixed.” In other words, they stared after him.

And now here we are in that same pregnant pause. Jesus of the resurrected body is gone. The words of his magnificent prayer for us ring in our ears. We are those who “believe…through their word,” that is the word preached and written first by those disciples, the word that has continued to be spoken down through the centuries.

We are those who have received his glory, so that we may be completely one as he and the Father are one. So that we may know the Father’s love as Jesus the Christ knew the Father’s love, and so that we may share that love with the world, which does not know the Father’s love.

How mystified we still are at this good thing from God that can only be had by giving it away.  Love in relationship with God and the people of our lives has its being in moment by moment and day by day interactions. We must live it rather than try to possess it.

But we have an advantage the disciples did not have at that moment of watching Jesus leave them--again. We know about Pentecost; they had yet to experience it.

We know that by letting go of Jesus the resurrected body, they—and we—receive him in a whole knew way. They did not yet know.

Yes, Jesus had tried to tell them that too. “I will go away, and I will come to you,” he had said. The Father will send a comforter, he had said. And he had breathed on them. Yet they did not know.

They had to let him go, to watch him go. And then, when they began to share the love he had for them and the Father had for them through him, he came again on that glorious Pentecost day

And he comes again, over and over, whenever and wherever believers invite him.

Because we are doing Morning Prayer today, we skipped the Epistle reading. It is the closing verses of the Revelation to John, and I want to read it now because it ends with a prayer. Most obviously, this prayer is for the final coming of Jesus the Christ. But it is a prayer we can pray at any time, and it is perfectly suited to this breathless moment between the Ascension of our Lord and the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Here's the reading:

“At the end of the visions I, John, heard these words:
    ‘See, I am coming soon; my reward is with me, to repay according to everyone's work. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.’
    Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by the gates.
    It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star." (Revelation 22: 12-14, NRSV)

And now here is the prayer:
    "The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’
    And let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’
    And let everyone who is thirsty come.
    Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.
    The one who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’
    Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!
    The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints.” (Revelation 22: 16-17, NRSV)

AMEN.

Love and Let Go: A Sermon for May 9, 2010

Lydia, the seller of purple cloth, is one of my favorite Bible characters. Perhaps that’s because purple is my favorite color. Or, perhaps it’s because I was once a seamstress, and couldn’t manage to pass through a dry goods store without lingering long over the many colors and textures. All too often, I went home with yardage that was already fashioned into something wonderful in my mind, but that ended up in a drawer, one of many unrealized projects.

I imagine Lydia, her colorful goods spread around her, leaning forward to listen eagerly to Paul preaching the Good News (Acts 16:9-15, NRSV). The workings of the Holy Spirit often seem hidden from human eyes. But the power of the risen Lord was quick to show itself through Lydia. Her heart was opened; she and her household were baptized. Then, having brought her household into the faith, she brought Paul and his mission team into her household.
                                                                                                                                                                  

I don’t know if the designers of the lectionary predicted the possibility of the 6^th Sunday of Easter falling on Mother’s Day, but they couldn’t have made a better choice. Lydia was a mother of the church in more ways than one.

She Worketh Willingly With Her Hands by Elspeth Young

Some sources say she was Paul’s first convert in Europe. As a merchant, she was no doubt a woman of some influence in the community. She not only brought her own family into the faith, but also turned her home into the beginnings of the church in Philippi.

Today’s lessons are full of “good things,” of which the work of the Holy Spirit in leading Paul to Philippi and in opening Lydia’s heart and mind are but two. “Good things” is even the theme of today’s collect. It begins, “O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding...” (BCP, p. 225)

For the writer of today’s Psalm (67, BCP p. 675), the good things include God as equitable judge of all peoples and guide of the nations. They include a good harvest. These verses are all about interactions between a loving Creator who sheds light and generous blessings on those who love and praise God.

Light is also a big part of “the good life” in the new Jerusalem of John’s vision in Revelation (21:10,22-22:5). This holy city, which descends from heaven, needs no sun or moon because “the glory of God IS its light and its lamp is the Lamb.”

The gates of this wonderful place are never closed. The river of the tree of life runs through it, and the tree of life feeds the peoples and heals the nations. And all the people will bask in the light and worship the Lamb.

“O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things!”

In today’s Gospel lesson (John 14:23-29), Jesus is also in the business of handing out good things. The first is a promise: “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them,” he says, “and we will come to them and make our home with them.”

The second good thing Jesus hands out in this passage is an outright gift: “Peace I leave with you,” he says, “my peace I give to you.”

Wow! The peace of the risen Christ freely given! And in return for our love, God the Father and God the Son in the person of the Holy Spirit take up residence in our lives.

What more could we ask? Yet so often, our lives do not seem the least bit peaceful. They are too full of unreasonable demands and unfair situations, death and destruction, and conflicts of all sizes and shapes, from road rage to the news of yet another oil spill and yet another suicide bombing in the Middle East.

Who could ask for a better deal than God-With-Us, in exchange for nothing more than our love? Yet so often, we can’t love God for all the unlovable people in the way! From the guy who curses our hesitation in traffic to the suicide bomber, from the slow cashier determined to test our patience to the teenager whose appearance and mannerisms are designed solely to shock our sensibilities—the children of God come to us disguised as the unlovely.

 “O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things… as surpass our understanding.”

Hmmm. We are accustomed to not understanding evil things. But good things? What’s to not understand?

I love chocolate and ice cream. I love cool mornings to work in my yard. I love my son. These are good things. What’s to not understand?

Perhaps what is difficult about good things from God is that we can only have them by giving them away.

This is in rather stark contrast to many of the good things the world has to offer. We work hard to earn the money to have a good life: the chocolate and ice cream, a yard to work in, Mother’s Day dinner at a nice restaurant with our children.

Especially in a society such as ours, in which economic growth depends on our purchasing of goods and services, we learn to understand “good things” as things we can possess.

We get so confused at times that we think we possess the lovable people God has put in our lives: our children, our spouses, our friends. And then something happens that drives home our utter lack of possession of the people in our lives. Children grow up and leave, and we must let them go. 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.

 “To love” is a verb! It is a way of being in the world that is a lot like breathing: half taking in and half letting go, taking in, letting go. We breathe in God’s love for us, and breathe it out in our love for one another. We breathe in our love for one another, and breathe it back to God.

During this Eastertide, we have heard Jesus over and over attempt to prepare his disciples for the fact that he must soon leave them… again. Last Sunday he reminded them that he was going where they could not go, at least not yet. This Sunday he says, “I am going away, and I am coming to you.” How mystified they must have been!

How mystified we still are at this good thing from God that can only be had by giving it away.  Love in relationship with God and the people of our lives—the lovable and the unlovely—has its being in moment by moment and day by day interactions. We must live it rather than try to possess it.

AMEN.

Practice Resurrection: A sermon for Easter, 2010

Just three months ago, we gazed in awe at God come to earth some 2000 years ago in the form of a babe in a manger. The Incarnation isn’t a stretch for Christians. We’ve believed that for a very long time. Not quite 2000 years, but getting there.

A bit more of a stretch was considering the possibility that incarnation happens on a daily basis. That God has been in the business of coming to earth for a very long time, and comes again, every time people of God rise up and go out to do God’s work in the world.

Today, we consider a similar thing: Resurrection did indeed happen some 2000 years ago, in a burial garden near a place of death in the ancient Middle East. Again, believing that is not much of a stretch for Christians. We are pretty comfortable with understanding our faith in historical terms.

The challenge is to know our faith as a living thing. It is to get over the notion that Christianity is about a promise of future glory… based on events that happened centuries ago. It is to see that the Kingdom of God permeates “now” and that we along with Christ our brother are it. The challenge is to live our faith, rather than to merely believe in it.

Like incarnation, resurrection happens on a daily basis. God has also been in the business of breathing new life into mere mortals throughout human history. Indeed, it would be fair to say that human history is a history of God breathing life into mortal flesh, from Adam forward.

Look at the disciples in the Gospel accounts of the hours after Jesus died on the cross! They aren’t physically dead, but they just about as well be. The eleven and others huddle together behind locked doors. Some have scattered, heading home to Emmaus and, no doubt, other communities surrounding Jerusalem to try to disappear into the woodwork.

They are a classic example of troops in full retreat after the death of their leader. Clearly, they had understood little of what Jesus had told them. It was over.

The women go to the tomb to do the last thing they can do for their Master: Prepare his body for eternal death. When they come back with the story of the empty tomb, the reaction of the disciples is disbelief. They thought it “an idle tale.”

Then comes this comical Keystone Cops routine of men running to the tomb. First they run together. Then one surges ahead, but loses heart at the last moment and stops at the entrance. He who lags behind rushes in with last-minute bravado.

But, John says, the empty tomb is not enough. At least one of the disciples “saw and believed,” John says, but “as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” I imagine them shaking their heads as they walk away.

What an odd contradiction. They saw but did not understand. They believed but headed back to the safety and security and comfort of home.

It is only later on, when Jesus appears in their midst and breathes on them, that they are resurrected.

And, as we are fond of saying, the rest is history! That little band of folks—eleven and a handful of others, we know not exactly how many—goes out and changes the world. Forever.

Resurrected people do amazing things.

Nora Gallagher is a journalist 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 concludes that “experiences of resurrection" really aren't about "believing six impossible things before breakfast.” Rather, she proposes, “Maybe resurrection, like everything else, needs to be practiced.”

We have all been there, in some way or another. Human existence is a process of marching resolutely into dead ends and struggling to find a way back out again.

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

Evil abounds. 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 makes this glorious gift of life in the midst of this glorious creation something to merely “get through” for whatever period of time.

We cannot control all of our circumstances or other people. We can choose how we respond. And we can choose, not merely to believe and huddle together in the safety and security of church, but to live our faith in the world.

Fr. Richard says to follow Christ, we must practice dying. The thing that must die is our own beloved ego, because it is human ego that leads us to destroy others in myriad ways, in order to preserve our own illusions, pretenses and sense of control.

And if we practice dying, if we let go of our prideful clinging to being right, being in control, being safe and secure… If we can empty ourselves of all the false selves the world presses upon us, then we can hear God speak our name, as Mary did in the garden.

Like Mary in the garden, and like Mary the mother of the babe in the manger, we will be filled with new life. We will rise up from the ashes of our hurts and losses and failures. We will run to tell the world, “I have seen the Lord!” We will practice 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.

I Want You: A sermon for 18 March 2010*

Last week when asked if I was interested in preaching tonight, I was fresh from consecutive Sundays of what had seemed to be reasonably successful sermons, here at St. Alban’s two weeks ago and last Sunday at St. Thomas’. And so I didn’t hesitate to say yes.

It was not until two days ago that I realized the readings I would be preaching from are in celebration of a saint—Cyril of Jerusalem—whose feast day is March 18 on Roman Catholic and Episcopal church calendars, but who does not even appear on the Lutheran church calendar, which doesn’t recognize anyone outside of the Bible as a saint with a capital S in any case!

I’m sure Garrison Keilor could do something really creative and funny with this situation. For me it’s a lesson: Beware of becoming proud of preaching. You will live to regret it!

Fortunately, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is an equal opportunity message. It is no respecter of denominations. This evening’s lesson from Luke is an excellent “unity” passage.

But before I go into that, I do want to say a few words about Cyril of Jerusalem. He is an important figure in the history of all Christians, and he is especially important to those of us who have similar liturgical traditions.

Cyril was Bishop of Jerusalem for most of the second half of the 4th Century. He is credited with developing liturgies we still use today during Holy Week. We know this not only from his own writing, but also because of a Spanish nun by the name of Egeria (i-JEER-ee-uh). Egeria made a late 4th-Century pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and, to our great benefit, she kept an account of her travels in the form of a long letter to her sisters back home.

She was in Jerusalem at a time when the church year we are so familiar with today, with its seasons of Advent and Lent, and principal feasts like Christmas and Easter, was still in formation and becoming widely adopted. In fact, she helped with the dissemination of those early church practices, such as Bishop Cyril’s liturgies for Holy Week, by her detailed descriptions in an eyewitness account. In fact, she’s still doing it due to the wonders of modern technology. You can buy her account in book form today on amazon.com, complete with many annotations that demonstrate how historians have pored over it.

It’s also important that when Cyril was Bishop of Jerusalem, the early church was in great turmoil. The divisive issue of that day was how to understand Jesus, specifically how to understand the divinity of Jesus.

To put it as simply as possible, one pole of the debate is expressed in the Nicene Creed we still use today: Jesus the Christ is “eternally begotten of the Father” and “of one Being with the Father.”

The folks at the opposite pole of the debate in the 4th Century believed that the Son was divine but lesser than the Father and not eternal. In their words, “there was a time when the Son was not.”

I daresay most of us don’t debate that issue much anymore. It seems pretty well settled to us. But in the time of Cyril, it was not. In his 36 years as a bishop, Cyril was exiled three times by superiors from opposite poles of the debate. Ultimately he spent nearly half his years as Bishop in exile.

In other words, Cyril, being a moderate, managed to rile both extremes of the debate. So I admire Cyril. I have often thought that people who provoke both sides of a polarized debate must be doing something right.

Every time I look at church history, I am struck anew by two things. On the one hand is a history of divisive issues, issues that caused blood to be shed in many cases, and in others, the splits and splintering into the many denominations we know today.

On the other hand I also see an extraordinary continuity in such things as the worship practices many of us share. And not just those denominations represented in this worship space this evening.

A few years ago I was privileged to go to the Dominican Republic on a mission trip along with a handful of folks from St. Thomas’. One of my lasting memories of that trip is worshiping with brothers and sisters in the faith, each of us speaking in our own language but united by the familiarity of our common liturgy.

To a great extent, whether we see division or unity depends on where we focus our attention . The church as a whole and every denomination has plenty of divisive issues facing it today. It also has plenty of unifying beliefs and practices. What you see depends on what you focus on.

Looking at the history of the church helps keep these things in perspective. But an even better way to keep things in perspective is to focus on the Gospel message. In tonight’s passage from Luke, Jesus is speaking to some of his disciples. We do not know how many or which ones in particular.

Earlier in this last chapter of Luke, Jesus appears to two men on the road to Emmaus. After he leaves them, they rush back to Jerusalem to join “the eleven and their companions,” we are told in verse 33. I’m guessing the women who went to the tomb and are named at the beginning of the chapter are among them, but we just don’t know. Luke has a much more important story to tell.

Suddenly Jesus appears. He once again explains the scriptures to them and this time, because he has opened their minds, they get it. He establishes a context, reminding them that what has happened is not an accident of history but fulfillment of the Divine plan. He repeats the essential elements of the Good News: Christ has died, Christ is risen, repentance and forgiveness of sins must be preached to all nations.

And then he puts it to them: “YOU are witnesses,” he says. “You are witnesses of these things.”

Occasionally I wish we liturgical denominations weren’t quite so traditional in our worship liturgies. This evening, for example, it would be kind of fun to have the advantage of gigantic screens here at the front of the church, high on the wall on both sides of the pulpit.

If I had such a resource, I know exactly what I would put up there tonight. It would be that much-published poster of Uncle Sam, with his white curly locks and goatee, his stovepipe hat bedecked with stars, his red and white striped trousers and blue tailcoat. He leans toward the viewer making stern eye contact. He points his finger right in our face. “I WANT YOU,” he declares, in all capital letters across the bottom of the poster. And we all know that he isn't addressing us as southerners, or from Iowa. "I want you" means every one of us.

Jesus does not address us as Episcopalians or Lutherans or Roman Catholics or Baptists or whatever. He does not address us as black or white or Hispanic. He does not address us as U.S. Americans or Africans or Europeans.

He addresses us as believers, as a community of faith in all of our diversity. “You are witnesses,” he says. Go. Tell the good news.

AMEN

*This sermon was preached to a congregation of several denominations participating in a Unity in the Spirit ecumenical Lenten series.

This fellow, Jesus: A sermon for 14 March 1020

“This fellow welcomes sinners and he even eats with them.” (Luke 15:2, NRSV)

The “fellow” is, of course, Jesus, who is once again in today’s Gospel demonstrating his refusal to conform to the norms and standards of polite society.

Today we think little about who is partaking of food with us. We go to dinner parties where we don’t necessarily know the name of the person seated to our right, much less whether they live a moral life. We go to receptions and buffets, take food from a common table, and eat while sitting or mingling with people we’ve never met before. We eat in restaurants and fast food joints within earshot and arm’s length of complete strangers.

It was not so in the time of Jesus. The rules for meals, food and what is called “table fellowship” were detailed and complex. They had to do with “purity” as the Jews understood God to have demanded it. But they also had to do with social identity, social boundaries and social conflict.

And the Pharisees were quite right to have been scandalized by Jesus’ behavior, because he rejected those rules over and over again. Whenever Jesus was at the table, regardless of whose house he was in, all who had come to hear him preach and teach—tax collectors and sinners, truly immoral people—ALL were welcome.

Moreover, Jesus not only modeled radically inclusive behavior, he taught it. The parable of the prodigal son is one such teaching, and I daresay its message is difficult for us to swallow.

We certainly like parts of it: The father’s compassion warms our hearts, and we pray that we might be similarly compassionate. Most likely each of us has gone astray at some point in our lives, in a way that helps us identify with the wayward son, and we repent and pray for forgiveness.

And if the story stopped there, we’d most likely be fine with it. After all, it’s a pretty familiar and reassuring picture of the Christian faith. We have a loving and compassionate father who gives us good things, and even though we fall short and go astray, again and again, we’re pretty good at repentance. We confess our sins most every Sunday, with confidence that we will be forgiven once again. And we go to sleep at night trusting that we will be welcomed to that grand and glorious feast our father has prepared for us—the feast we call “the Kingdom of God.”

But the story doesn’t end there. Jesus just couldn’t leave well enough alone. He had to introduce the troubling matter of the elder son, the one who was faithful, who tended the flocks and worked the fields and did all he was supposed to do… while the younger son squandered his inheritance.

Here’s the picture: We are standing outside a huge tent in the ancient Middle East. A fabulous party is going on inside. We can hear musicians playing and people laughing. The smell of roasted calf wafts on the evening breeze. A steady stream of servants carrying trays piled with fruit, baskets of bread and jars of wine enter the tent.

The elder son stands outside, refusing to go in. He is indignant, and who can blame him? Even though he has been faithful, good and hard working, the father has never thrown a feast in his honor! He feels cheated, disgraced, angry, resentful.

The father comes out and pleads with the son. I really do love you, he says. In fact, everything I have is yours. But that’s your brother in there! He was dead and now he’s alive again. Come, celebrate with us!

Who does each of us identify with in this picture? Or, perhaps the better question is when has each of us been in each of those positions?

I doubt any of us has any trouble remembering when we have been the younger son who has sinned and needs forgiveness. I’m sure each of us has also been the one to forgive and to invite someone who has sinned against us back into fellowship.

But the position of the older son is a good bit harder for us to deal with. After all, he is in the right! He earned his self-righteousness! He shouldn’t even be expected to share the same tent with his unworthy brother, much less a feast celebrating that brother’s return.

In fact, it’s not the older son and his behavior that makes us uncomfortable. What makes us uncomfortable is that Jesus didn’t make him the hero of the story!

In truth, even though our rules for sharing food have relaxed, we have invented all kinds of ways of separating ourselves from those we deem less worthy, and of drawing a wall of exclusivity around our precious righteousness. That’s self-righteousness. We take righteousness, a gift from God to be expressed in our love for each other, and turn it into self-righteousness, a thing of our own ego created by our uncanny ability to divide the world into us vs. them, good people vs. bad people, saved vs. sinner, right vs. wrong.

And we, dog gone it, are right! So.., we’re not going to give our money to that organization because it serves people who make irresponsible decisions. We’re not going to support that legislation because, no matter how many people it might help, it just might help someone whose manner of life we deem wrong. Or, we’re going to go over there and form our own church or order or club or whatever, because this church or order or club just insists on admitting unworthy people or just won’t behave the way we think it should.

A Presbyterian pastor and teacher by the name of David Bales summarizes the challenge Jesus poses to that way of thinking. He says:

Jesus is simply indiscriminate about whom he spends time with, and whom he even eats with. His fellowship isn't closed around the "good" or even those attempting to be good. Jesus accepts people before they're good. By word and deed Jesus undermines social boundaries. He challenges religious exclusiveness. His table fellowship is non-hiearchical [and] radically inclusive, and [it] demonstrates what he believes about the kingdom of God.

It seems to me that the main agenda of most Christians most of the time has been, and is, to tame the Gospel message. I think we really, really, really want Jesus to be middle class. We really, really wish we knew if he was Democrat or Republican! We are sure he is “on our side” in international conflicts.

And then we are confronted with teachings like this one, which portray the Kingdom of God as radically non-hierarchical and radically inclusive. The question is, what will we do?

Will we stand outside the tent, pouting and petulant, reassuring ourselves that we stand on principal and that we have earned our right to be offended? Or will we accept the forgiving love of the father, lay down our self-righteousness, and enter into the feast with all of the other sinners?

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.