Christ Blind

Wednesday Evening Lenten Series, St. Patrick's Episcopal Church, West Monroe, La., 26 March 2014

As a deacon who does not preach all that often, I have become convinced that a small band of mischievous angels rigs the preaching-text lottery so that I am sure to draw the shortest straw—the most challenging text—every single time.

Or so it seems! I am quite certain that band of angels is sitting on the edge of a cloud dangling their feet and waiting gleefully for the deacon to paint herself into a corner tonight.

You are familiar with the concept, “the letter of the law.” It refers to the exact and literal interpretation and application of the law, as it is written, down to the last letter.

It is often contrasted with “the spirit of the law,” which means to privilege the general intent of the law, thereby allowing for a more open, less strict interpretation and application of it.

Tonight, speaking to us through Matthew, Jesus seems to be upping the ante. He’s not content with insisting on merely the letter of the law. He wants to invoke and impose on us the separate strokes that make up each and every letter of the law! 

I have come not to abolish but to fulfill, he says. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter will pass from the law… 

Yikes! This sounds like Jesus with a big ole Sheriff’s badge pinned to his chest!

One of my first thoughts on reading it is, “Boy, are we ever behind on stonings!” I mean, I’m sure I’m not the only person in the room who divorced and re-married. And Jesus himself said that’s adultery, and we all know what the law says is the penalty for adultery!

So.. we’re way behind on stonings.

And yet….  ridiculous as that sounds, and as much as this passage makes me squirm, I am astounded over and over again at how useful it can be.., how readily we humans—indeed, we Christians—invoke it…. for the purpose of applying the letter of the law… to someone else.

You see, that’s the key. We are much more likely to invoke this passage to justify using the law.. to beat up… somebody else.

Not so very long ago, a prominent member of our community gave an interview to a prominent national publication, in which he said some things that quickly became prominently controversial. So controversial that it appeared, for a time, that he was going to lose his job as star of a huge hit TV show.
              

Arizona law legalizes discrimination against LGBT people.

Phil Robertson’s comments bothered me. Quite a lot, actually, because in my day job, I see and deal with the consequences of young gay people who have been told they are sinful by nature.., more sinful by nature than the rest of us, and that they cannot inherit the kingdom of God.. if they dare to be--fully--who they know themselves to be.

I was even more troubled by the movement that quickly broke out on Facebook to make Robertson a folk hero, and to cheer him on in his use of the law to judge homosexual people. Not to mention adulterers like me, although most people didn’t seem to notice that.

And in the sound and fury that broke out between Robertson’s defenders and his critics, the law—God’s law, or some interpretation thereof—got used as a club by both groups.

“He’s a hypocrite,” cries a critic, “how can he say he loves Jesus after dehumanizing people.” 

“But he’s quoting the Bible,” protests a defender. And on it raged.

As the saying goes, There’s nobody quite as mean as people being mean for Jesus. 

When we read about Moses demanding obedience to the law, or when we approach a passage like this one in Matthew, we are all too easily hooked by our human tendency to really, really want to make all the world behave according to our standards and our moral code.

After all, we’re good church people! We work hard at being obedient. Here we are in church on a lovely Wednesday evening because it’s Lent!

And so we encounter a passage like this…. and we go straight to the letter of the law… brushing past, scarcely noticing that here—right here—Jesus lays claim to his role as fulfiller of the law.

He wraps himself in it like a politician wrapping him/herself in the flag. He claims, absorbs and thereby transforms the law.

So if you want to know the shape of the law, look at Jesus. If you want to know what the law requires, look at what Jesus did. If you want to know how the law treats people, look at how Jesus treated people.

How could we have missed that for so long! It’s really pretty simple. But we want to turn it into a matter of what we believe, a matter of having the right values, or subscribing to the right doctrine or reading the right Bible the right way.

Our Bishop—who has a way with words—gave us a new way of talking about this when he was here three weeks ago for our first Wednesday Lenten service. He spoke of going “Christ blind” three times in response to the behavior of other drivers on his trip from Alexandria to Monroe.

When we use the law to cudgel other people into being who we think they should be and behaving the way we think they should behave, we are Christ blind.                       

Now here’s the clincher. What I really, really want to say right now is, “Phil Robertson, and those who agree with him, make me Christ blind.” That would make a nice Lenten confession, don’t you think?

And that’s how we talk. So and so makes me angry, we say. That behavior drives me crazy, we say. That belief system pushes me right over the edge, we say.

But the moment we do that, we paint ourselves right into a corner. We make the other person.. or the behavior.. or the belief system.. responsible for our Christ blindness.

We pin the letter of the law on someone else.

Please pray with me.

Lord, forgive our Christ blindness. And teach us to follow you, the embodiment of the law.

AMEN

      

Grace, All the Way Down

Lenten Lunch Series, Grace Episcopal Church, Monroe

Lake Bordelon, Camp Hardtner by Bette J. Kauffman

Fr. Richard Rohr says, Religion has tended to produce people who think they have God in their pockets, people with quick, easy answers about who God is, what God requires, and how to live a Godly life.

But the Apostle Paul understood that nothing is more dangerous, or more likely to get between us and God, than righteousness. God can most easily be lost, precisely by being thought found.

These words from First Corinthians are hard for us to hear. 

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? (1:20-25, NRSV) 

Let us not be distracted by old-world titles and language. St. Paul might just as well have asked, “Where are the teachers? Where are the pious ones who study the Bible daily? The ones who can call up a Bible verse at a moment’s notice, especially when needed to make someone else behave!”

Some translations of the Bible use the word “preacher” in place of “debater” in that third question. Where indeed are the preachers of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 

It’s enough to make one regret having accepted an invitation like the one to speak to you today!

And let us not be distracted by Paul’s reference to the Jews and the Greeks! WE are seekers of wisdom. WE are impatient demanders of signs! We are sometimes so impatient for signs that we see them everywhere.

I had a conversation with a very smart, devout young man in my office just a few days ago. It was a conversation triggered by the fact that he is in danger of failing a course I teach. And every reason he gave for not having done his coursework was a good one: I’m a youth minister at my church, I play music every Sunday morning, I lead a Bible study… and on and on it went.

And I finally had to say to him, “You know, I don’t think God is calling you to flunk out of college to do church.”

I did not say this to him—he’s such a sincere young man—so I did not say to him that what can get mixed up in our most pious motives at times… is our dedication to a merit system.

And we U.S. Americans come by our dedication to a merit system pretty honestly. It is part of our national story. We pulled ourselves up as a country by our bootstraps…

Or so we believe. I’ve always wondered how we’d have done without the leg up provided by indentured servitude, child labor and slavery.

But that’s another meditation. My point today is that this society teaches the merit system in every way possible, by incentives and sanctions, with As and Fs, through defining ourselves as the land of opportunity and making heroes of those who achieve against the odds.

It’s the wisdom of our age! And we have the best of intentions and at times some success in using our merit system well.

But our merit system has a dark side. Making winners almost always makes losers, too. Our merit system contaminates our faith and causes us to lose sight of Christ crucified.

Well, we’re happy to claim Christ crucified—for us. We’re just.. not so sure about the whole world.

Our merit system leaks into our religion and turns it into a moral code… a moral code that we use to divide poor people into “deserving”—the ones we should help—and not so deserving—those who make bad decisions, aren’t trying hard enough, live immoral lives by our standards—the ones who haven’t earned our help.

In his book, “The Prodigal God,” Timothy Heller compares the good church people of today with the elder brother of the one we call “the prodigal son.” He points out that we are too often that older brother, standing outside the tent displaying our piety, insisting that we have been faithful and true and devoted to the father all these years, yet hurt and angry that the father is squandering… the feast and the ring and the robe… on the unfaithful, undeserving younger brother.

I think I spent my childhood and youth hoping for someone to interpret that story for me in a way that made the elder son the hero!

We really have trouble accepting the absolute grace of Christ crucified. We desperately want to earn just a little bit of something from God!

But that’s ultimately an ego thing. And as Heller states, when we go down that path, Jesus might be our best friend. He might be our model of good behavior. But he is not our savior. We’re trying to save ourselves. 

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 

One last story: A seeker went to a wise person to ask, “What keeps the earth from falling down?”

The wise person answered, “The earth is resting on a lion.”

“On what, then, is the lion resting?” asked the seeker.

“The lion is resting on an elephant,” said the wise person.

“On what is the elephant resting?”

“The elephant is resting on a turtle.”

“And on what is the….”

“You can stop right there,” said the wise person. “After that, it’s turtles, all the way down.”

Friends, our world rests on Christ crucified. And after that, it’s Grace…, just Grace, all the way down.

AMEN

Face Time

Christ Church, St. Joseph, La.

My son has a girl friend. Like an amazing number of young couples today, they met online—on Twitter, to be precise. She lives two states away. But that does not prevent them from “hanging out,” watching television together, even playing video games together.

How do they do that? It’s called “face time.” And it’s possible because phones today have video cameras built into them. And it helps that “long distance” calling is now no different than calling the house next door.

I imagine most of us have had at least one experience something like those described in today’s lessons—a mountaintop experience, a vision or dream that changed our life (Exodus 24:12-18 & Matthew 17:1-9, NRSV).  “Face time” with God, if you will, and you don’t have to go to a geographic mountain to experience it.

Of course, there are those among us who scoff at such things. Those who take pride in being realists. Those who believe that dreams are just dreams and visions always frauds, and nothing is real save what we apprehend with our human senses and rational minds.

The human intellect is a wonderful thing and a great gift from God that we should use to its fullest capacity. But in comparison to the mind of God, human intellect is profoundly limited.

I am sorry for those who live so thoroughly inside their own cranium that they cannot find meaning in dreams, visions and mountaintop experiences. Their world is small. They are not available to be transformed by face time with God!

We are about to enter Lent, a time of reflection and listening for the voice of God. That requires an open mind. It requires letting go. It requires loosening our grip on the comfort and security of reality as we think we know it.

And that takes courage. If we enter into the presence of God with an open mind, we indeed put ourselves in the way of transformation, God’s transformation. Who knows what shifting of the tectonic plates of our world that might produce!

The disciples were so rattled by their experience that they couldn’t think straight. Peter suggests that they build shelters and stay inside the vision forever. I can identify with that. Who wants so glorious an experience to end? Don’t we all want to stay on the mountaintop!

But moments later, they must head back down the mountain, back to reality. I’ve always believed that Jesus tells Peter, James and John to keep the vision secret because he knew people—maybe even the other nine disciples—would think the three who had shared the vision were crazy!

In other words, reality has not changed. The world has not changed. Other people have not changed.

Now, Jesus and his disciples must head for Jerusalem, and we all know what happens there. Jesus still must die. The world is still hurting. Still full of sick people, poor people, lonely people, desperate people.

And what does Jesus do when he comes down off the mountain fresh from his transfiguration experience? He goes right back to work. The first thing he does is heal a sick child.

Our passage today ends with verse nine, but in verse 14 of the same chapter, Jesus has reached the foot of the mountain where the crowd awaits. He is immediately confronted with a man whose son is an epileptic with uncontrolled seizures that cause him to fall into fires and water. And Jesus heals the boy.

You see, close encounters with God are NOT for the purpose of making the world a rosy place for us. They are not designed to transform the world. They are designed to transform us.

Not long ago, I was perusing the stream of photos I access daily through the online social network called Google+. I happened across an image someone had found online and re-shared. It was a photograph of a small, dark-skinned boy drinking water from a muddy, foul-looking drainage ditch.

Someone had posed a question below the photo: Why does God allow this?

I was quick to respond: God doesn’t allow this, I wrote. We do.

Why do we keep expecting God to take care of what we’ve been put in charge of? How much of our prayer life do we spend asking God to fix the world, rather than inviting and being open to God transforming us… so that we go about fixing the world?

Every Sunday morning is not a mountaintop experience like the transfiguration. But it is a bit of face time with God!

We come into this beautiful space to sing, pray, see the powerful symbols of our faith in brass and stained glass. We come expecting God to be here.

Most Sunday mornings, we come to share in Christ’s body and blood, for he is known to us in the breaking of the bread.

All too often, I fear, we try to leave God here. Our face time with God feeds only us, and not the world through us.

But our very theology of Holy Eucharist is that we are fed so that we may feed the world. In general, I am not a fan of Rite I. But the Rite I post-communion prayer is the best statement of our Eucharistic theology that I know of.

So grab a prayer book and turn to p. 339 (BCP, 1979). We begin by giving thanks:

Almighty and everliving God, we most heartily thank thee that thou dost feed us…with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood….

And now skip down to the petition:

And we humbly beseech thee…so to assist us with thy grace, that we may…do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in…

Please note, this is not about throwing a few extra alms in a basket. It’s not about spending an hour or two a week of spare time volunteering at the Shepherd Center.

It is about living our life as a way God has prepared for us to walk in. It is as if God says, “Walk this way,” and shows us how through Jesus the Christ. And that way is the way of being God’s love in the world.

May we be transformed by our face time with God, today and every day. May we discern the way God calls us to walk in, in our own time and place.

AMEN

The Right Fight

Homily for Northern & Central Louisiana Interfaith's accountabilty session, "The Right Fight," 7 November 2013

Reading from the Hebrew Scripture, Nehemiah, Chapter 2, verses 17 & 18 (NRSV):

Then I, Nehemiah, said to them, "You see the trouble we are in, how Jerusalem lies in ruins with its gates burned. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, so that we may no longer suffer disgrace." I told them that the hand of my God had been gracious upon me, and also the words that the king had spoken to me. Then they said, "Let us start building!" So they committed themselves to the common good. 

Rebuilding the Walls of Jerusalem by C.F. Vos

Ladies and Gentlemen, member institutions of Northern & Central Louisiana Interfaith and guest institutions, elected officials and citizen leaders in our communities… 

Today you see the trouble we are in! Unlike Jerusalem of Nehemiah’s time, the trouble we are in.. is not wild animals entering the city through burned gates. It is NOT a lack of walls to protect us from marauding enemy tribes.

Rather, today the trouble we are in.. is threats to the availability of affordable health care for all.

Today the trouble we are in is public education that does not prepare too many of our children for college or the workforce—even when they finish high school.

Today the trouble we are in is rising college tuition rates, even as our institutions of higher education struggle to survive deep and devastating budget cuts by cutting middle class jobs, and courses and programs our city and state need to produce the workforce of the future.

Today, the trouble we are in is more and more of our youth stagnating in jail instead of contributing to the common good.

But, my friends, TODAY Northern and Central Louisiana Interfaith says, Let us start building!

And let us do it in much the same way Nehemiah did. Do you remember how that went?

Nehemiah did not go off and hire or enslave a huge labor force to do the job for the Israelites. He didn’t use the power and wealth of the king to force a solution or throw money at the problems.

Rather, Nehemiah organized. He understood the Interfaith ironclad rule: Never do for others what those others are able to do themselves. He knew that the people and the clergy and the elected officials were able—and therefore needed—to do it themselves.

And so he showed them that the self-interest of each of them was interconnected to the self-interest of everyone else. That’s what he meant by “the common good.”

“The common good” happens when people recognize that whatever their differences in background and style of worship and vocations and interests, some things are too big for individuals and families to accomplish on their own.

Things like building walls and educating children, making sure that none of them fall through the cracks and that all of them get what they need to achieve their potential—that’s a job that requires everyone working together.

So Nehemiah set the Isrealites to building the wall, each person and group contributing as able. Chapter 3 begins with the high priest and his fellow priests rebuilding the Sheep Gate. And next to them, the men of Jericho. And next to them a family….

And on and on it goes for 30+ verses—Nehemiah naming the groups of clergy and the elected officials and the tradesmen and families and ethnic groups—all working together to rebuild the wall, “each opposite his own house” Nehemiah tells us in Chapter 3 verse 29.

And they had to have been talking and listening to each other all the while they were building because—lo and behold—they didn’t end up a bunch of wall fragments, a tower here and a gate over there, scattered across the landscape.

No! They ended up with a perfectly interconnected, seamless wall, each piece joining with the next piece. And in celebration, the Israelites broke into two groups, walked in opposite directions along the top of the wall—all the way around the city, until they met again over the sheep gate, and there they sang and worshiped and dedicated their wall.

Friends, tonight let us set ourselves to the common good. Let us suspend judgment about the past and the things that have divided us—from race and social class to political party—and turn our attention to those objectives we share and must work together to accomplish.

Let us get our kids out of jail and off the street and into a classroom or a living wage job so they can become citizens and tax payers!

Healthy children do better in school. Let us make sure that families—all of our families—can get the health care they need without financial ruin.

This city and region needs nurses, accountants, teachers, communicators, artists, musicians, entrepreneurs. Let us make sure our institutions of higher learning have the resources they need to educate our people for the jobs and the economy of the 21^st Century!

And the people all said… AMEN!

What's good about this news?

Christ Church, St. Joseph, La.

Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! (Luke 12:49, NRSV)

Whoa, Jesus! Aren’t you the great peacemaker!

And what’s all this stuff about fathers against sons and daughters against mothers? Where are your “family values,” Jesus? Shouldn’t we stick with our families, regardless?

A few years ago I attended a workshop at Columbia Theological Seminary. One of our speakers that weekend was David Barnett who has written a book about the Gospel according to Mark. The title of the book is “What’s good about this news?” His point is that Mark’s Gospel has a kind of dark foreboding about it. It often seems that Mark is writing about bad news, not good news.

In other words, “Gospel” means “good news.” And we are fond of saying, “the good news of Jesus the Christ.” But if we read carefully what Jesus said—and did—throughout his earthly ministry, and don’t leave out the uncomfortable parts, and are completely honest with ourselves… we must acknowledge that the news he taught and acted… is often not so good… at least not by normal human standards.

Here’s the punch line of this sermon: The Gospel of Jesus the Christ is not an endorsement of nice, moral, upstanding middle class, family values.

In contrast, the Gospel of Jesus the Christ is the way of the cross. And the cross takes us, by necessity, through places we would rather not go.

The peace offered by Jesus the Christ through the cross is NOT the peace of “no conflict.” It’s not the peace of “aren’t we all one big happy family.” It’s not the peace of agreement on the hot-button issues of the day. It’s not the peace of military might! It’s not the peace of financial security.

Indeed, the peace offered by Jesus the Christ through the cross is pretty much the opposite of all those things. The peace of Jesus the Christ by way of the cross is the peace of having lost—or given up!—all of those things. It’s the peace... of having nothing left to lose.

I have heard preachers and teachers of the Christian faith say, “Jesus died so that we don’t have to.” Or, a variation, “Jesus died so that we can live.”

I completely disagree with the first. Consider the possibility that Jesus died to show us how! And that we too must die, not just once—the big kahuna at the end of physical life—but many times over throughout life.

The way of the cross is not just about physical death. It’s about how we live our lives. It’s about relaxing our death grip on our tidy middle class comforts and securities and following Jesus where he leads.

The second of those, “Jesus died so we can live,” indeed holds a kernel of truth… as long as we are clear about what it means to live in Christ. Too many Christians have fallen for the notion that “to live in Christ” means they are entitled to a comfortable, secure middle class lifestyle. That they have somehow “earned” it with their own cleverness, labor, morality and piety.

And along with that sense of having earned a lifestyle often comes a tendency to judge others. I earned my middle class lifestyle, therefore those who are poor must be less clever, less hard-working, less moral and pious than I. That’s a pretty common line of thinking.

Rather, to live in Christ is to let go of all that. It’s to recognize, as the Apostle Paul did, that all of that is rubbish.

The true “life in Christ” is knowing and accepting God’s unearned mercy, forgiveness and love for us just as we are. To live in Christ is to quit putting on airs, and to stand before God naked, vulnerable, stripped bare of pride and pretense. It’s to let go of being right, and being better than someone else. And it feels like dying.

To live in Christ is to recognize that we humans are all on equal footing in God’s eyes—equally sinners, equally loved.

You have heard me mention Fr. Richard Rohr, one of my favorite writers about the Christian faith. He recommends one humiliation a day. He says it takes on average one humiliation a day, one experience of being wrong, of discovering that you don’t have it all together, to keep a human being living in Christ.

At this point I want to be really clear that I am not against middle class lifestyles and values.  I love being middle class and I’ll fight to remain middle class!  Indeed, I am in the business of helping people into the middle class.

See, deacons in the Episcopal Church are expected to have a ministry in the world. Many choose ministries of mercy. They feed the hungry, give blankets and coats to the homeless, help deliver medical care to those who can’t afford it, visit the sick and dying, and so forth.

Those are good ministries and we need people to do them, both deacons and lay people. Deacons also should be the catalysts or agents who help lay people find their ministries in the world.

But a few deacons and lay people choose ministries of change. Mine is an organization called Northern & Central Louisiana Interfaith, and we don’t feed the poor. Rather, we ask questions like this: Why are there so many poor people? How can we help people who are poor move into the middle class and become self-sufficient? How do our systems need to change so that poverty levels in this country and state and community actually go down for a change? Where and how can we apply leverage to level the playing field?

And you know what? Those are controversial questions! Many people, many good Christians don’t want to discuss those questions. They don’t even want Interfaith, or anyone else, to ask those questions.

Many good people of all faiths are perfectly willing to do charity. They are quite okay with helping to feed the poor. But they are not much interested in change.

But the way of the cross is not just change, it’s transformation. Jesus became a peacemaker by first ripping the status quo to pieces. The Kingdom of God he preached and modeled is a reversal of everyday, dare I say middle class, human values and expectations.

Here’s the real punch line: The peace of the cross is the peace of letting go, of loosening our death grip on the people and things and ideologies that we think are what make life worthwhile. It's the peace of a thousand little deaths along the way, knowing that God is in the midst of it and with us every step of the way, and that ultimately, God-With-Us is quite enough. 

AMEN

Stuff & Treasure

St. Alban's & St. Thomas', Monroe, La.

On the window sill over the sink in my kitchen is a treasure. It’s a little brown rock, about the size of a meatball—you know, the kind you see in chafing dishes at receptions. It’s a pretty ordinary looking rock, except…  It has a heart! 

Rock with a Heart

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, if you tilt it 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,” she said.

But… on the window sill, right next to Rock with a Heart, is… well, a bunch of stuff: A pill bottle with one or two expired pills in it. One of those joke half-mugs that cleverly declares, “You asked for half a cup of coffee.” That was a treasure—briefly. Now it’s a dust collector.

On a shelf above the TV is a couple of inches of armadillo tail, picked clean of tissue such that its intricate bony architecture is clearly revealed. Why so homely a critter requires such an extraordinary tail structure I don’t know. To me it’s an exuberant, over-the-top expression of its Creator—here just for the glory of it. A treasure.

But right next to it? More dust collectors: Things you thought you couldn’t live without.. for some brief moment in the distant past. Today? Meh.

We could continue. My house is strewn with treasures. Among the rocks, bones and shells, you will also find human-made treasures, like the glass ibis figurine my sister gave me when I admired it in her home.

But for every treasure... an equal or larger portion of stuff. How did I come to have… All. This. Stuff? Lately, my house full of stuff has come to feel burdensome, stifling, a huge distraction from the things that really matter. I took a stab at getting rid of stuff this summer, but, alas, I have far to go….

One of the things that struck me about the many people from New Orleans I spoke with post-Katrina is how losing everything made them leery of collecting stuff. One woman I interviewed told me that before the storm she had every kitchen device you could imagine. She loved to cook, and she had all the equipment and gadgets the world had to offer.

But she lived in the Upper 9^th Ward, and it allll ended up in a huge, smelly pile at the curb. Now, she said, I have one saucepan and one skillet and I don’t want any more. Now, she takes pleasure in figuring out to cook whatever she wants with one skillet and one saucepan.

Many people take today’s Gospel lesson to be about long-term planning. There’s that reference to “laying up treasures in heaven,” and so we want to make this teaching an evacuation plan for that next place we’ll go to someday after we die. ‘Be good now—moral, pious—and go to heaven later.’

I beg to disagree. Jesus tells us over and over throughout his ministry on earth: The kingdom is at hand. The kingdom is within and among you.

And today’s lesson: Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. (Luke 12:32-40, NRSV) 

That’s all present tense! I’m reminded of how my sister gave me that figurine. I was visiting her and noticed it sitting on her windowsill. And I told her the story of waking up one morning to a flock of ibises in my back yard feasting on crawfish brought up by a heavy rain.

The Glass Ibis

And my sister insisted on giving me the figurine. Right then. On the spot. She didn’t put it in her will, she picked it up and put it in my hands. And when I protested she said much the same thing Jesus says on this occasion: It is my pleasure to give it to you.

But here’s the tricky part. Yes, the glass ibis is a sort of treasure. But it’s not.. the real.. treasure. The glass ibis could get knocked off my windowsill to shatter on the floor today, and I’d still have the real treasure—my relationship with my sister and an act of solidarity between us that carried that relationship forward.

We humans easily confuse things, mementos, STUFF… with the real treasure—namely our relationships with each other, and with the natural world, and thereby.. with God.

That’s what I think today’s lesson is all about: Recognizing and cultivating the real treasure, our relationship with God manifested in the here and now in our relationships with people and God’s creation.

How, indeed, would we treat people if, at every moment, we were awake to the presence of God in them and viewed them as the Master coming to fasten his belt and have [us] sit down to eat? And, indeed, to serve us?

How’s that for a reversal! Let me say it again in a slightly different way. Our relationships with people are the real treasures. Our relationships are the Kingdom here and now, the gift of our God who is dying… well, already died! …to give it to us. Relationships with each other are the purses that will last. They are the medium of our relationship with God!

Now that is somewhat easy to see when it comes to family, as the story about the glass ibis and my sister illustrates. But we don’t need to be admonished to be ready and awake to accept the gift of family relationships. That kind of comes naturally.

Other folks, not so much. Other folks often appear to us as one more burdensome issue or problem we must deal with. And the more different from us they are, in terms of skin color, religion, social class, work ethic, values, ways of being in the world… the less likely we are to be ready and open to the fact that a relationship with them just might be a feast served by the Master himself.

But Jesus told us, you might have to leave your family behind. Jesus modeled for us a different way, a way contrary to our instincts, a reversal of our “natural attitude,” by inviting relationships with everyone he encountered.

And that is why Northern & Central Louisiana Interfaith organizes around relationships—not issues, not “problems,” not ideologies, and especially not political parties! We organize around relationships. Building relationships across the boundaries that historically divide—like race, class, geography, religion—that is the most radical thing we do.

Amongst all the stuff I have to do this coming week, the faculty meetings I must go to, the state-mandated ethics training (Go figure!), the hobnobbing with other Episcopal clergy at our monthly clericus…

Amongst all that stuff is a treasure: I have an appointment with a young man who came to his first Interfaith meeting Friday. He found us and we him through Interfaith’s relationship with the Southside Community Involvement Association. He and I will talk one on one about what drives us and compels us to this work. We’ll develop a relationship.

And I already know, we’re going to do some Kingdom work together in this community. It’s going to be a feast served by the Master himself, because he and I were awake and ready when the opportunity came knocking.

So... what’s in your house this morning? Can you sort the treasure from the “stuff”? What’s on your calendar for the coming week? Of all the stuff you must do, which matters? Who will you encounter this week? Which person will be your opportunity for a life- and world-changing relationship? Are you open to the possibility that it might be the one who looks the least likely…?

My friends, God wants to give you the Kingdom. Here. Now. Are you ready?

AMEN

Practice Resurrection

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Mer Rouge, La., 9 June 2013

It appears that we are to speak of death and resurrection today, given the stories we have just heard (1 Kings 17:17-24; Luke 7:11-17, NSV). On a glorious June morning like this one, the death part seems rather incongruous. It is very tempting to speed ahead to focus on resurrection—an altogether more pleasing subject!

These are indeed stories that inspire hope. Nevertheless, I think we must give death its due. I think we would cheat ourselves of the power of these lessons by fast-forwarding to the good part.

I suspect we here this morning have all been around long enough to have experienced sharp, deep, painful loss in our lives: parents, friends, perhaps a spouse, maybe even—horror of all horrors—a child or grandchild, like the women in these stories.

I’m not big on ranking human suffering. It all hurts, big time. But blogger Lisa Belkin has observed that there is no word in the English language for a parent who loses a child. Belkin says, When our parents die we are orphans. When our spouse dies, we are widowed. When a child dies, we are speechless.

She’s on to something here. It is just so…. inappropriate.

The Widow of Nain, by Corinne Peters

The plight of these women in the Bible was dire indeed. I take it as not a coincidence that both were widows. The loss of their only sons was, therefore, not merely the loss of a parent-child bond. It was a loss of economic security, the almost certain facing of hunger and survival at the mercy of others.

But… first Elijah and then Jesus come along to save the day for these grief stricken widows.

And that’s why, in fact, these are not the stories we turn to for comfort when tragedy strikes our own lives. Did any of us think of these stories when 20 children were slaughtered in Newtown, CT? I doubt it. Or, how about when tornadoes slammed through Moore, OK, and took 10 more, including two infants? Again, I doubt it. And I cannot see how these stories could be much comfort to the parents of those children.

Suzanne Guthrie is an Episcopal priest and writer of online meditations keyed to the lectionary. About today’s Gospel story, she writes,

The story offers scant comfort to the parents of children Jesus doesn't bring back from the dead. I certainly did not call the widow's son to mind when my two little grandchildren died on the day they were born last summer. My son and daughter-in-law cradled their son and daughter, comforting the children and each other during the hours the babies lived. And after they died, I didn't expect Jesus to arrive at the hospital and raise them from the dead. The surprising thing is that Christians take hope in the raising of [these widows’ sons] in spite of the deaths of our own children.

So…. are we hopeless dreamers? Crazy? Why DO we have hope even in times of death, loss and despair?

We have all been there, one way or another. Human existence is a series of tornadoes, large and small. Some are beyond our control. I have never experienced a tornado or any other of the catastrophic natural disasters: earthquake, tsunami, hurricane. But I am terrified by the thought of it. It is the ultimate loss of control.

And then there’s Newtown, and the failure of our political will to do the hard, bipartisan work of developing more sensible and sane approaches to balancing individual rights with reasonable efforts to keep lethal weapons out of the wrong hands. We can do better. I know we can.

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.

Maybe like in today’s epistle lesson, we must die to one career in order to be born to another. Saul the persecutor had to die for Paul the Apostle to be born.

Or, someone we love dies. A spouse or lover leaves us. A friend betrays us. We are downsized by our employer. 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 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, 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 Rohr observes, it makes our religion a mere “evacuation plan for the next world.”

The foundational story of our faith is that death makes way for resurrection. Something dies, but something new awaits birth.

The human condition at its most hopeless… is pregnant with a new thing that lies just beneath the surface. When we are thrown completely off our feet and have fallen as far as we can fall, we have a better chance than ever of landing on the breast of God.

For me the most compelling line in the widow of Nain’s story is this one in verse 14: And the bearers stood still.

Have you been there? Deep in the darkness before dawn with Mary Magdalene outside the tomb that holds your most cherished hopes and dreams? So deep in darkness and silence that even your heart stands still?

Can you pause there? Wait there? Embrace the darkness and silence, listen intently, because the new thing will most likely come softly, quietly…

I don’t know what that will look like, neither the many small deaths and resurrections each of us will experience in our lifetimes nor the big kahuna of death and resurrection each of us will experience only once.

I only know that death and resurrection go together. You can’t have one without the other. And since they are an inevitable part of life, better to practice! Practice letting go of things--the job that didn’t work out, the ideology we thought was the answer to everything, the relationship we thought would always be… Practice letting go, so that we can practice letting new things be born in our lives.

And the bearers show us how. We stand still in prayer, making room for the Holy to pass through the midst of death and lead us back into the light.

Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning. (Psalm 30:6)

AMEN