Looking for God in All the Wrong Places

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Mer Rouge

So.. what do a Baptist church in Pollock, La., and the Washington Monument have in common?

The Baptist church in Pollock sits on the west side of Highway 165. You pass it every time you go to Alexandria. Like most Baptist churches, it has a steeple. But unlike most churches with steeples, it does NOT have a cross on top.

Anyone happen to know what is on top of the steeple? It’s a hand with one finger pointing heavenward.                                              

Now the Washington Monument does not have a hand on the top! It has a 4-sided aluminum cap, each side containing an inscription. Three of the inscriptions have to do entirely with the building of the monument: names, dates, etc.

The fourth inscription says what? It says, “LAUS DEO,” which is Latin for “Praise be to God.”

Now, a quick side story. The inscriptions on the cap of the Washington Monument are not visible from inside the monument. They are visible only to those who might be hovering in mid-air over the peak of the monument, in other words, people in helicopters and, presumably, God.

So the National Park Service created a replica of the cap that is on display inside the museum at the base of the monument. A few years ago, in the mid-2000s, the replica cap was moved to a tent on the grounds while the museum was renovated. When it was moved back indoors, instead of being placed catty-corner to the wall so that all four sides could be read, as it had been before, it was placed with the LAUS DEO side against the wall, which prevented visitors from seeing it.

An uproar ensued. The Park Service was accused of being ashamed of the Christian foundations of our nation. On snopes.com you can find a letter from the head of the Park Service stating that it was an accident, they had meant no offense and that it would be fixed. Since the letter is dated 2007, I assume the problem has long been corrected.

One interesting thing to me about that story, however, is that no one seems to notice or mention that “Praise be to God” is much more common as an expression of Muslim piety than it is as an expression of Christian piety.

Of course, Muslims typically say “Praise be to Allah,” and they routinely say it often: in times of gratitude and in times of distress, before beginning an important task and at the end, and on and on.

But if you accept that the God of all three of the Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Islam and Christianity—is one and the same God, then “Praise be to God” sounds much more Islamic than Christian. Christians are more likely to be heard saying, “Praise the Lord,” or “Thank you, Jesus!”

But whatever the builders of the Washington Monument had in mind when they inscribed “LAUS DEO” on the top of the monument, they, like the builders of a Baptist church in Pollock, La., were looking for God in all the wrong places.

What these two structures have in common is that they propose a god who is up there, way up there in heaven.., hovering above us.., looking down on us. The Baptist church points to this remote god and the Washington Monument launches praise into the heavens in hope that this god is not too far away to read it.

And that is not what Jesus taught. Somewhere off up in the sky is not the imagery Jesus uses.

Dirt, he says in today’s Gospel. Down in the dirt is where Jesus directs us to look for God. Down in the dirt where we put a seed to die and then be born again. Down in the dirt where we human’s might hide our treasure.

Or in the belly of the homely oyster, attached to the bottom of the sea. That’s where we’ll find God, Jesus says.

And some remote, uninvolved god is not what Jesus himself represents. Indeed, Jesus himself was and is first and last proof that it ain’t so.

Indeed, of the three Abrahamic faiths, Christianity is the only one that professes God Incarnate. At least we SAY we believe in Incarnation. The evidence of our lives and behavior is not always so clear.

My favorite of the images Jesus uses in today’s lesson is the yeast in the bread. I have made bread. I have taken yeast, dissolved it in warm water, stirred it into the dough and then kneaded that dough until the yeast is evenly and thoroughly distributed throughout the bread.

And then you put the dough in a lightly greased bowl, set it in slightly warm place—like a sunny window—that’s what my mother and I always did. And you cover it with a cloth so the surface doesn’t dry out and then you wait.

And when you return a couple hours later? Miracle! The dough has magically expanded to double its original size!

My friends. Can you wrap your mind around the possibility that we are the dough and God is the yeast? That we participate in Incarnation? That the indwelling Holy Spirit can no more be separated from our being than you can remove the yeast after kneading the dough!

Or, if you prefer, consider that we are God’s mud pies, and that God’s DNA got mixed with dirt in the act of creation.

Dough or dirt, God’s DNA is in us. It’s the yeast or the tiny seed we call love. God’s love for us, which we yearningly return. Our love for each other, a fragile moment of God’s love for us.

Does your heart expand at the thought? Mine does. I become bigger. I become bigger than my pill of a dog, who drives me nuts with her pestering. I become bigger than the jerk who kept me waiting at the intersection because he didn’t use his turn signal.

My heart expands so much I think it is going to burst out of my chest. And the only possible response is an outpouring of love for all of humankind and creation.

At least until ego and fear and self-doubt rear their ugly heads and tell me that such a total and gratuitous gift is not possible.

Do you not know, Jesus says in Luke 17:21, the kingdom of God is within you. 

If that is so, brothers and sisters, we are bigger than the worst this world has to offer. We are bigger than national borders. We are bigger than political parties. We are bigger than race, and social class, and even religion. We are big enough for all people to find rest in the shade of our branches.

Can we… dare we… live with that kind of dignity, responsibility, and freedom?

AMEN 

Who's in charge?

Christ Episcopal Church, St. Joseph, La., June 1, 2014 

You’re driving through town, probably in a hurry to get somewhere. There’s a roadblock ahead. One lane is closed and traffic slows to a crawl as cars trickle through one at a time.

As you take your turn going through the bottleneck, you notice workers… standing around. They might be taking their only 15-minute break of the day. Or, they might be conferring about some important aspect of their work. But at the moment you lay eyes on them, they are standing there, doing nothing so far as you can see. 

And I think our reactions at that moment are pretty universal. We want to roll down our car window and yell, “Why are you standing there? Can’t you see you have work to do? Who’s in charge around here anyway?”

Just a few days ago—Thursday, May 29, the 40^th day of Eastertide, to be exact—we celebrated the ascension of Jesus the Christ into heaven. A few of us celebrated by actually going to church! But the church wisely dedicates the 7^th Sunday of Easter to The Ascension, just to make sure everyone is reminded of this crucial moment in our history and in our life as a church.

And why is it crucial? Because it is the moment when the body of Christ, the Church, is left in charge.

And all too often, we are much too much like the disciples in our story from Acts (1:6-14, NRSV). We are much too much like the road workers who frustrate us so.

We go to church, we gaze piously upward like the disciples, we come to the Holy Table.. not to fortify us for the work we are called to do as Christ’s body in the world.., but instead of.. digging in, getting our hands dirty and our backs sore.. doing the work we have been left in charge of.

It’s much easier to talk about the missional church, to read books about the missional church, to listen to the Bishop preach about the missional church, than to actually DO missional church.

Living in this part of the country, another thing we are treated to as we drive from place to place, is church signs everywhere that seek to reprimand, teach or inspire us with clever sayings.

In fact, I often do not find them so very clever or inspiring (although the one above is both!), and I am grateful that we of the Episcopal tradition do not engage in that particular conceit!

One I’ve seen with some regularity is this: “If God is your co-pilot, switch seats!”

Wrong! We have been left in charge. God left humankind in charge of creation, and Jesus left us in charge when he ascended into heaven.

Of course, I know what is intended by that saying. The intention is that we should prayerfully and constantly seek God’s guidance in all that we do. And I agree.

But all too often, the notion of God as pilot and us as mere co-pilot gets turned into a helpless piety. I see that in people who don’t think we need to engage in environmentally sound practices because, after all, God is in charge and nothing humans do can cause permanent damage to God’s creation.

Nonsense! We have been left in charge of God’s creation and of caring for it, preserving and protecting it, even as we enjoy its bounty and beauty.

I see it also in people who piously proclaim, “the poor will always be with us,” to excuse themselves from doing anything about it—in spite of the fact that Jesus commanded us to care for the poor and seek justice for all, over and over again.

Yes, we are disciples, which translates, “followers of Jesus.” But we are also apostles. We have been commissioned to go out, to lead the way, to take the Good News into the world, to seek and find Jesus everywhere and in everyone.

And we can’t do that by standing around and gazing piously into heaven! We need angels to come along on a regular basis to jar us out of our reverie by asking, “Why do you stand there looking up?”
    

Yes, we have been given the message, and yes, we seek guidance from above, but we are in charge. Many details of how, precisely, Bette Kauffman or Christ Church, St. Joseph, is to execute our charge are up to us.

In other words, we have to make some decisions, whether we are sure about the rightness of them or not. Sitting around endlessly waiting for God to present us with a detailed plan we need merely execute will never get the job done!

The prophet Isaiah sums up nicely how I experience this business of following Jesus yet being in charge. In chapter 30, verse 21 Isaiah says, 

And when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it.’ (NRSV)

In other words, our ministry on this earth is often a matter of picking a direction, doing something, and having God bless our efforts! It looks like “a plan” only in retrospect.

Indeed, when I hear people say things like, “God has a plan for your life” or “Everything happens according to God’s plan,” then look at my own life, I have to wonder if God flunked Planning 101! 

And that suggests a really important question: Why in heaven’s name would God leave such a ragtag bunch in charge? Why, pray tell, would Jesus leave his church in the hands of creatures of such limited vision, so ethnocentric in orientation, so easily frightened by change and difference… So unqualified for building the Kingdom of God… Why would Jesus leave US in charge?

Well, the answer is in our Gospel reading today (John 17:1-11, NRSV). The answer is that he did not leave us alone in charge. The answer is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

Today’s Gospel reading is the first part of what is called “the priestly prayer.” It continues all the way through v. 26 of John 17. Jesus prays for himself, then he prays for his disciples, and finally for the unity of all believers. Our lectionary divides it into three parts—one for each year of the church cycle. But also to accommodate our limited patience with “long” readings in church, I’m sure!

But I urge you to go home and read the whole thing. I urge you to dwell on the words and phrases, to bask in the love for us they reveal.

And most of all, to do your best to wrap your mind around what it means to say that God dwells within us. We have been left in charge—a scary thought. But WE are the new temple of the Holy Spirit, whose coming we celebrate next Sunday.

AMEN

Jesus, The Way

Christ Church, St. Joseph, La., 18 May 2014 

My late husband and I were hunting buddies. After he died, I mostly quit hunting because, as I’m sure many of you know, it’s way more fun to hunt with a buddy.

But that’s not the story for this morning. The story for this morning is how we got lost, more specifically, how the one who was always certain she knew where we were, and which way to go, got turned around and got us completely lost.. because he trusted and followed her. 

See, he was born and grew up in a city.., and he had a lousy sense of direction. You could never have told him, “Go east on I-20, then south on Highway 65 to reach St. Joseph,” because he never knew which way was east and which way south. 

I, on the other hand, grew up in the country, and had and still have a good sense of direction. Tell me that St. Joseph is southeast of Monroe about an hour and a half’s drive, and I’ll immediately have a mental map of going east on I-20 a ways and then south on some state highway, the name of which I might need to look up.

Give me a map, I have often bragged, and I can get anywhere I want to go, and home again! It got a little harder when we moved to Louisiana, where everything this side of the Ouachita is flat and covered with palmettos and… to people from Pennsylvania, looks exactly alike, indeed, seems to have no distinguishing features to help you find your way.

Nevertheless, a few basic maps and my good sense of direction got us in and out of a number of hunting areas.

Then one day we decided to go to the Tensas Refuge. I had a rather rudimentary map, but I knew exactly where we were when we parked the truck on an east-west road, and I knew that we walked into the woods going straight south.

After we had walked awhile, we came upon a stream—a stream of significant width and depth that I couldn’t see on the map. Well, maybe that little line was it. But we followed it, even though I had no idea where it had come from or where it was going.

Then suddenly the sun had disappeared, and the trees were dense enough that I could no longer see where it had gone down. We decided we’d better head back while we had a little light left, so I pointed us in what I thought was north, and we walked, and we walked, and we walked.

My husband kept saying, I think we need to cross the stream, and I kept saying, no, that makes no sense. And he trusted me enough to keep going. And then finally we began to hear the sound of major water up ahead, the gurgling of what I later figured out was the Tensas River.

And at about that moment, we came upon a nice, big fat tree that had fallen and formed a perfect bridge over what was now, clearly, a tributary into the Tensas River. And I said, “Honey, I’m lost and we’re going to trust your instinct.”

So we crossed the stream and headed the direction his instinct said we should go. I walked behind him with my hand on his shoulder and sighted a distinctive star pattern so we wouldn’t walk in circles, and sure enough, after some walking we began to hear traffic and finally we walked out to a road. A couple of fellow hunters in a pickup truck let us sit on their tailgate and took us back to our vehicle, which was a couple miles away on a road perpendicular to the road we walked out to.

Following someone is not wrong, and it’s not a sign of weakness. The question is, How do you choose whom to follow?

My husband was willing to follow me because he trusted my sense of direction. I knew the way. I was certain I knew the way. In fact, I acted more certain than I was because I was accustomed to being—and I’m sure had some ego invested in being—the one who always knew the way.

Today it is not hard to find Christians of various denominations, including ours, who are quite certain they know the way. They know who’s on the right path and who’s on the road to perdition, and they don’t hesitate to tell you if you are one of the latter. They often base that judgment on very little information about you.

Not only are they on the right path, but they know exactly where the edges of the path are. They can describe the edges in detail. They know the rules. Think like this, believe these things, and end up in heaven with me, they say. Don’t think or do or be or believe that because that’s over the edge and you’ll end up in hell!

Indeed, these folks tend to use this very passage in John (and similar ones) to bolster their claim to have the answers. But in that regard, they are amazingly like the pharisees, who also knew the rules according to scripture and used them to badger Jesus for joining hands with people who were supposedly off the path.

In contrast, Jesus offers none of the comfort and security of detailed knowledge of the path. He spends no time describing the edges of the path. He gives us no categories of people to avoid. Indeed, he did make a habit of reaching out to people who seem to be, even to the most open-minded of us, OFF the path. (John 14:1-14, NRSV) 

I’m the way, he said. If you want to get to God, follow me. You don’t have to know the way… so long as you know that I know the way. Just follow me, he says. Even if you don’t know where I am going, if you follow me you will end up where I am going. But you’ve got to trust me enough to follow.

Fortunately for all of us, Jesus is a much more trustworthy guide than I was that night in Tensas! Fortunately for my husband and I, it finally penetrated my confidence and ego that I was lost and needed to trust his instinct for a change!

Now here’s the hard part. Trusting Jesus sounds good. After all, he loved and healed everybody. He was compassionate and generous. He brought us the good news that God is love and that we are God’s beloved. He gave his life for us.

But we know with the clarity of hindsight what the disciples were trying to grasp in today’s Gospel story. The way of Jesus is not a waltz in the park. For him, it led to the cross. For us, it will lead into dark valleys. Life often will make no sense. We will feel insecure, and be tempted to follow the siren call of those who claim to have all the answers.

We will look at fellow travelers on the way and think, “What is that sinner or illegal immigrant or gay person or pharisee doing here? Surely I don’t have to share the way with them!”

And all the while, Jesus is up front saying, follow me. You don’t need to know the way, you don’t need to see the edges of the path, you certainly don’t need to worry about who is on it with you—that’s way over your pay grade. Just follow me. I cannot or will not prevent hard times, grief and death, but I will lead you through it and out into the sunshine of Easter.

Today I pray we will have the wits and faith to follow the one who knows the way.

AMEN

Wounded Healer

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Mer Rouge, La. 

I have a scar on my knee. It’s not actually a very impressive scar. You probably wouldn’t notice it even if I were wearing shorts this morning!

But I enjoy telling the story of getting it anyway. I even think of the story in church sometimes because it involves sheep. In fact, I can’t NOT think of it when scripture reminds us, “all we are like sheep who have gone astray”!

You see, sheep are not very smart. One day on a small farm in Iowa, I and my brothers were helping my father in the barn when suddenly the skies opened and the rains came down—huge, drenching, rains.

Our small flock of ewes and newborn lambs was grazing in a pasture nearby. “Quick,” my father said, “get the lambs.”

And we all rushed into the pasture, took a soaking wet lamb into our arms and ran into the barn—the mother following us, of course—then back for another and another until all had been saved.

Sheep will stand in a heavy rain until the lambs get cold and water-logged, fall to the ground and die. 

The scar happened because, running to the barn with an armful of wet lamb in a downpour, I failed to see a hunk of barbed wire on the ground and ran into it, ripping open my knee.

No big deal, really. Didn’t even go to the doctor. With no medical insurance, it had to be a lot worse than that to merit a trip to the doctor!

But I enjoy telling the story. It tells you something about me. It gives me a bit of “street cred,” if you will, or I guess “farm cred” would be a better term.

Today’s Gospel story often gets used to talk about things like Thomas’ doubting, his need to get visual confirmation of the resurrection of Jesus, and his ultimate, powerful statement of faith.

I, myself, have used this story to preach about how it is okay to be a bit skeptical, to ask questions and to wait and see. After all, the other 11 also didn’t believe the women when they first burst into the room claiming they had seen Jesus! So Thomas certainly should not take the rap alone!

And the story is about those things..., but I think that focus passes over something very, very important—namely, Jesus showing the disciples his scars, and then breathing the Holy Spirit into them.

See, he doesn’t just show his scars to Thomas! Why do we overlook that?  Look again at these opening verses (John 20:19-31, NRSV).

First, Jesus comes and stands among them and says, Peace be with you. Then he shows them his scars. Then, John says, the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.

In other words, he was there, he spoke, but they did not ‘see him’ and rejoice until after he had shown them his scars. And now that he has their full attention and recognition, he repeats his offering of peace, and then he breathes the Holy Spirit into them.

So, you see, Thomas, a week later, is merely a repeat performance. How interesting that we focus on him. I suspect it is because we identify with his expressed need to see for himself.

And what do we miss when we do that? We miss what Jesus is telling us about scars, and the beauty and power of scars.

Those disciples were a pretty hurting bunch, don’t you think? Their charismatic leader had been struck down! Their hopes and dreams shattered! The one who was to deliver all of Isreal from oppression was dead!

His followers scattered; some headed home to Emmaus. The disciples hid in locked houses for fear that they would be next. And when Jesus appears to them, they hang back. They’re not sure. They’re anxious. “Peace,” he says, and they’re still not sure.

And then he shows them his scars! And they rejoice. They are healed from their own woundedness. They are ready to receive from him the breath of life once again. And they go out and change the world.

A Roman Catholic priest, Henri Nouwen, wrote a highly acclaimed book about ministry in contemporary society called “The Wounded Healer.” It is just a thin little 100 pages, but if you read online reviews of this book, you will find that it has changed people’s lives.

Jesus is, of course, the original wounded healer. His scars healed his disciples and they heal us today. They are not merely physical proof that, yeah, this is the same guy we saw hanging on the cross three days ago! That is the least of their value! 

Rather, Jesus' scars say, this man loved, and suffered—even death on the cross—and he’s back… loving us again!

He was betrayed—not only by The Betrayer, but by every one of us who runs away when the going gets tough or fails to acknowledge that we know him. Yet here he is… loving us still!

We have all been wounded. We all have scars.

Our deepest scars are NOT those we get carrying rain-soaked lambs into a barn! 

Our deepest scars are those we get loving and losing. We love and lose jobs, dreams, identities that we are deeply invested in, our health.. and hardest of all, people.

We lose friends, relatives and lovers, colleagues, people we minister to, heroes and villains—you know, the ones we love to hate. And every loss, whether by distance, neglect, estrangement, rejection, betrayal or death, wounds us.

Our natural human tendency is to protect our selves, to curl up somewhere and lick our wounds. And to swear we will never allow ourselves to be hurt like that again. We might even engage in compensatory behaviors to hide our scars from others.

And no one is more dangerous to self and others.. than the one who is hiding scars. Fr. Richard Rohr says, If we cannot embrace our own suffering, we will inflict it on others.

On the other hand, to know and accept ourselves as God’s beloved is to embrace our woundedness, to see our scars as beautiful and to follow Jesus the Christ in daring to love again.

That is the way of the cross, and it is the only way… to be God’s love in the world.

AMEN

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