No Limits

a Sermon for Proper 19A
Text: Matthew 18:21-35

Where we've been
Ten years ago today, about this time, 4 hijacked airplanes were used as projectile missiles to cause dramatic and traumatic devastation. Three of them reached their targets and one was sent into the countryside. Many, including those aiding the victims of violence, died. Nearly 3,000 in all.

One of our favorite ways to pay homage to this tragedy is to play the “where were you” game. At approximately 10:50, we were no doubt still scrambling for information; still looking to make sense out of what seemed so senseless. I was working in a bookstore. One of our managers sat all morning in his office, coming out onto the book floor to give us updates. I remember the confusion, the fear, the corporate anxiety. We didn’t know anything.

So what did we do? We responded. Actually, we went hunting—to use former President Bush’s language. We went hunting with guns and dogs. We invaded two countries, rounded up and imprisoned thousands. Death tolls at the conservative end count well more than 100,000 Iraqis killed in the last decade.

We changed the way we treat each other, becoming a culture of suspicion. We changed our expectations for air travel, of what we can expect of one another, what we will consent to, even what we expect will bring us security. 

All of this, the past 10 years has been motivated by that moment, that fear, and those accusations. Those suspicions, that willingness to enter into the human desire for revenge.

It's about forgiveness
If you doubt the place of providence—the place of God’s interaction with us—then look at our readings. Look at our gospel. A gospel about forgiveness and torture on this auspicious anniversary. Perfect isn’t it? Notice that Peter’s question of Jesus that kicks off this gospel passage isn’t truly elementary. He isn’t asking whether or not to forgive a transgression—a personal transgression no less—but something more. For those new to faith, this is the starting place. His teaching has gone out elsewhere in this way:

If I’m hurt by someone, do I forgive them or kick them out? Do I retaliate? 

Jesus says

forgive. 

The next question becomes more specific:

Who must I forgive? 

And Jesus elaborates:

Forgive. Not just your friends, but your enemies also. 

So now we get to that graduate level question. The one that is for all followers that get that this is all about forgiveness; that the entire deal of following Christ, of loving God is about forgiveness. Peter asks

"Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" 

Peter’s question may as well be

When is enough enough? Where do we draw the line?

Jesus’s response, a reference to Lamech in Genesis (4:23-24) is to say

Draw it out here—where you will never reach it.

Then he tells Peter this parable about a slave who owes a debt that is impossible to pay off. The slave, looking for some small mercy, hopes to be given an opportunity to give it a shot anyway. Instead, the debt is completely forgiven. Now the slave turns around and abuses another slave indebted to him. The first slave locks him away with no hope of repaying his debt.

At this point, the other slaves sell the first slave out to the lord who turns around and punishes that slave who was once shown incredible mercy, torturing him and putting that impossible debt back onto him.

Forgiveness is not just about GOD.
This gospel is really troubling because Jesus even connects the dots at the end saying

This is what God will do to all of you if you don’t forgive.

Full stop.  Forgive, period.

Remember that this parable deals with Peter’s question: what are the limits of our forgiveness? And Jesus tells him there aren’t any. This whole deal is about forgiveness because the world around us wants retaliation and revenge. Jesus says to forgive without limits.

 Many Christians can connect these dots easily: the lord in the parable forgives an unpayable debt, so the Great Mystery we call God forgives us of our indebtedness through sin. I’m pretty cool with that reading, except Jesus is much more concerned with what we do with that forgiveness. That we don’t indebt others, that we forgive, and that our forgiveness knows no limits. It isn’t just about being forgiven, but also forgiving others. Jesus knows this is hard. He knows that his hearers were raised in a world of retaliation and evil. And He knows that many will hate to hear this because the human mind lusts after revenge.

And yet, the heart loves love.

This message of forgiveness isn’t about a program like paying it forward or random acts of kindness, though these methods are good. It is about recalibrating our hearts to forgiveness. Rejecting our brains’ meticulous revenge fantasies and focusing on our broad, forgiving hearts.

Sharing forgiveness
So here we are on September 11, 2011, ten years later, and we have a gospel message of forgiveness. I’m reminded of the hymn:

There's a wideness in God's mercy
like the wideness of the sea;
there's a kindness in his justice,
which is more than liberty. 

We’re being called to this radical forgiveness like a conviction. We haven’t been in a forgiving mood. As a country, we haven’t had one day in 10 years in which our operating mood was forgiveness. But anniversaries give us the chance to get rid of all that. To exercise old demons; to let go of our own blood lust and forgive from our hearts.

 Don’t we feel it? That corporate and personal need to forgive? Don’t we feel the need to seek forgiveness? To ask God to forgive us? Hasn’t the last 10 years been Hell? The anger, the infighting, the bitterness. That is the stuff of Hell. But we can be forgiven. If we ask for it, God will forgive us.

 Right now, in this assembly, we can ask God and our neighbors for forgiveness. So are we up to it? We can forgive and be forgiven. We can wipe the slate clean and begin to heal this broken world with our no limits forgiveness.

So in a moment we will pray, confess, and receive God’s absolution. And as we do so, I ask that we offer up all the grudges and evil we carry and ask for our own forgiveness—that the grace of God will make it possible for us to forgive—so that when we share the peace, we do so with the wideness of God’s mercy. We’ll prepare the table eat together as one. Then we will throw open the doors to love everyone and let our forgiveness pour out from this place.

The well of vibrant life

a Sermon for Lent 3A
Text: John 4:5-42

 
Jesus walks
Through the eyes of others, we see our Lord walking
on water, through deserts, in our minds.
We focus on photographs left to time
by those that saw something in Him, something different,
maybe even dangerous. But compelling.
In this picture, a woman stands before Him,
and he sits, relaxed and confident and
when they speak, you can see the magic flowing
between their lips, more intimate than a kiss,
more close than their bodies clutched together.
What we see is love. A dangerous love.

This talk is different. It is a linguistic dance between Jesus and this Samaritan woman. It begins with her self-consciousness; she knows that her people are outcasts and aren’t the right kind of Jews. That they are lesser. But Jesus doesn’t treat her that way. He treats her differently: not like a princess: elevated: but as an equal and participant. That they are the same. And in the end, she is changed. Remember last week’s reading about Nicodemus? Jesus asks if he is willing to undergo a life-long transformation: of being re-created. No. This woman gets the same question and she says yes.

Living Waters
When Jesus says that this living water
gushes up to eternal life, we scratch our heads,
confused: is He talking about heaven?
We focus on the physicality of the water
and permanence of time; but just as John invites us
to see Jesus as offering constant transformation
he offers this woman eternal life—a life

a now
a being
a way

a vibrant life that radiates love
that exemplifies Jesus like a mirror
reflecting life and love onto everything.

The conversation that Jesus and the woman have starts out talking about water, H2O and turns metaphorical, poetic. We often forget that John isn’t writing a biography, but a poetic form that we might today call creative nonfiction. Jesus sees in this well the opportunity to reveal a message about love and about being re-created.

Jacob’s Well
Jacob came across a well with sheep around it.
And a man was there, waiting for more to arrive,
when Rachel comes with her sheep. He refuses
to move the stone from the well, for not all
of the sheep have come. Jacob shoves the rock
so that these sheep may drink now.
This well becomes the people’s well.

Jesus uses Jacob’s well to speak about the power of the Living Water and Eternal Life—this vibrant life of being re-created. That Jesus, like Jacob shoves the rock away. Jesus brings that vibrant spirit to us immediately—we don’t have to wait for everybody to get there. And when this woman hears this, she runs into town to tell everybody.

The Disciples
They don’t get it.
They never do.
Following their master
like puppies, devoted,
always hungry, and
marking their territory.

Jesus gives them this living picture,
our photograph of a woman
transformed into vibrant life
and he tells them
`One sows and another reaps.'
Because she is off to sow and
the bountiful harvest will need reapers.

The woman is filled with the Spirit, and yet the disciples still aren’t sure of their jobs—their place in the story. Jesus has to put the tools in their hands and say “Look! The people will be here soon! Get ready to help them find the vibrant life of being re-created.”

Being Re-Created
I know I’m wrong from time to time.
I know I don’t live the life I should
or follow Jesus’s teachings closely enough
and I certainly don’t pray enough,
so why am I afraid of being re-created?
Why do I fear the vibrant life Jesus promises all of us?
Is it because he promises it to us all?
It certainly isn’t because I think that highly of myself
and this life. But I am. Being re-created means
things have to change and I have to change.
The Pious Young Man was asked to change
and he ran away. Is that what I’m doing?

This is a gospel of transformation. The woman goes from being a nobody and becomes a catalyst for the Kingdom. She isn’t convinced by Jesus’s arguments, nor is she magically given confidence because Jesus is a wizard or a shaman. She is filled with the Spirit because she realizes that she needs it. She realizes that her previous life was not a vibrant life and she was transformed. And was moved to bring others to the well to drink the Living Water offered not just by Jesus, but by his disciples. As Jesus says, we don’t have to drink from His well again—but we must be ready to act, to reap what others sow. May we be so ready and so moved.

Trust in GOD

a Sermon for Lent 1A
Text: Matthew 4:1-11


Matthew 4:1-11

After Jesus was baptized, he was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread."

But he answered, "It is written,
'One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'"

Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written,
'He will command his angels concerning you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'"

Jesus said to him, "Again it is written, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'"

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, "All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me."

Jesus said to him, "Away with you, Satan! for it is written,
'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'"

Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

This morning we have a different sort of gospel. We get awfully used to coming in to church for a lesson or a teaching from Jesus. A parable or story that can get us to see something in ourselves or the world that we couldn’t see or give us an action that we could do that week. Then we go home and work on it, only to find ourselves coming to church the next week, hoping for a new teaching. It’s a little like shampoo: lather, rinse, repeat. Each week we show up, get our teaching, and go home.

This one is different. The temptation isn’t a teaching—not like that anyway.

The Temptation
Jesus isn’t tempted with chocolate cake or ice cream: he isn’t being pulled to do something simple and relatively harmless. The temptations are all about power: naked power. The tempter gives him three different options:

1. To make a miracle
2. Test GOD’s power
3. Take control of the world

And Jesus rejects all of it. He says no because his is a way without power; a way of humility. We know this because of what comes after this. He calls some humble people to be his disciples. Remember, these aren’t star students, but simple people. Then he climes a mountain with them and preaches a sermon about humility: the Sermon on the Mount.

Our Temptation
It’s a good thing that we weren’t tempted this way. Because we love power. Our real temptation isn’t chocolate cake, either; it’s power. I know it isn’t en vogue to want power, and hasn’t been since the 1980s. So let’s call it what we normally do: influence and control.

Let’s be honest, we love having the ear of the powerful, being sought for advice, or being seen as someone who is smart or wise. We love being praised for our beauty or grace, because we know that it gets us something. We want control over all the people out there on the road: the people who drive too slow and the ones that drive too fast. We know better than all of those people, don’t we? We just want everything to go our way. We love power.

And we know this about ourselves. We know that this is part of who we are—that it is part of the human condition. We even have an old adage about it: “power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

Jesus Rejects Power
And yet Jesus rejects the power, not with willpower, but with trust in GOD. Jesus doesn’t overcome temptation; he rejects it right out. Let’s look at how the interaction plays out:
Satan:

I know you are hungry. You’ve been out here for 40 days, and you must be starving. I get the feeling that you are waiting for GOD. You are, aren’t you? But it is taking him so very long to feed you. I know you Jesus. I know who you really are. I know that you could just make some food. So just feed yourself. What do you say?

And when Jesus doesn’t go along with it…

OK, I hear you. But I’ve read Scripture too, and I know that GOD has promised to protect you. See, I know who you are to become, and GOD won’t jeopardize that, so why don’t you let GOD protect you. You know that he will; you trust him don’t you?

And when Jesus refuses him again…

Well, Jesus, why should you wait for what GOD has promised? If He is so powerful, why doesn’t he give it to you. I can give it all to you right now! All this can be yours! Even Rome! I know how they hurt your friends. You can fix that. You can make them do what you want today! You can end their suffering. Just bow before me and I can make it happen.

See, Jesus isn’t just rejecting power for humility, he is rejecting the Tempter for what he is asking him to do: to reject GOD. And Jesus won’t have anything to do with that. That is why it doesn’t seem like Jesus is really even tempted by any of this. Not because he is stronger than humans or that he is divinely perfect or anything, but because if Jesus were tempted, it would mean that he could be someone that does reject GOD. And Jesus isn’t about to do that; he doesn't want that. He knows that he is nothing without GOD. That the power all comes from GOD and that it isn’t something for him to possess. Therefore, if he were to engage the Tempter, he would be giving up on his own fundamental principle—that you never reject GOD —under any circumstance.

So we see how Jesus does it: he doesn’t argue with the Tempter, or even use his own words. He simply says “for it is written” and then quotes Deuteronomy: the Word of GOD. This isn’t prooftexting or using Scripture to make your point: this is Jesus demonstrating to the Tempter, that it is GOD that speaks for Jesus, that it is GOD that is provider and liberator, not the other way around.

This image is powerful for us. Take a minute to visualize it with me. There are two men in this Gospel, right? Picture them for a moment:

• One smells of tea tree oil, has a $200 haircut, $600 sunglasses, and a $1000 watch. He is wearing a tailored suit, and his shoes are as shiny as his teeth. He is absolutely gorgeous. That is the devil.
• One just smells. His hair is long and scraggely, matted together. His clothes haven't been changed in 6 weeks, and he is covered in sand and dust. He is absolutely disgusting. That is Jesus.

Trust in GOD
We are given the opportunity in this season of Lent to reject the temptation of power through our own trust in GOD. That GOD is the origin of our sustenance and the bringer of all good things.

For us, Lent isn’t a time to torture ourselves or make ourselves miserable or put ourselves in a position to feel temptation just so we can avoid it. It isn’t a time of misery in which we simply deprive ourselves of a little chocolate cake to prove something to somebody that might want us to be deprived. It is a time to trust GOD, and help bring others to trust GOD.

This is the beauty of our faith—that GOD trusts us enough to trust GOD.

It is remarkable that GOD would trust us! To trust us because of all of our faults and all of our ambitions. But GOD trusts us to trust GOD. And what joy that can bring, even in Lent. That is why I wish each of us, without the least sarcasm, to have a truly happy Lent.

No Retaliation

a Sermon for Epiphany 7A
Text: Matthew 5:38-48

GOD of Hope and Wonder, you give us the tools of great change and the opportunity to make the choice. Help us to see your ways for us as the right choice. Amen.

Retaliation and escalation
Jesus begins the gospel with a familiar phrase: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.'” Now, I know that you know where this comes from and what it is about; I am just reminding you. To do that, we’ll have to go back thousands of years, long before Jesus and even the Torah (from where this phrase comes). Long before all of this, there was a different law of the land. A law, unwritten, but understood universally:

If you do something to me, I do something to you.

It is as simple as that. OK, not just as simple as that, because we didn’t just retaliate, we had to do more: we had to teach them a lesson. They had to know that they shouldn’t have done it, and won’t do it again. So if they hit you, you maimed them.

If you do something to me, I do something bigger to you.

Sometimes that lesson wasn’t actually for them, but for other people. So if someone stole your goat from you, you would kill them. You had to show what happens when someone messes with you. If they insulted your wife, you killed them, and their wife. If they went after your kids, you killed them, their wife, and their kids: you wiped the whole family from the face of the earth. That was just what you did.

Besides, they were clearly evil people, anyway.

You can see how this thinking has persisted throughout history. Look at mafia movies:

“Eh! He disrespected me, so I shot him in the head!”

And every week (I guarantee it) there is at least one movie at the theater that encourages over-retaliation. At least one movie that glorifies vengeance. The first one that came to my mind was from a few years ago: Taken with Liam Neeson; a movie in which a man’s daughter is kidnapped, and he proceeds to kill all the people involved in the kidnapping. And we want him to! We watch him get his bloody vengeance and we don’t want to see him show any mercy! He has a movie out this week, Unknown, which appears to have a similar vengeance plot.

Enshrining Evil
There seems to be something in us: something that wants to seek vengeance, to retaliate violently. Something that is in us at a truly base level. Which is why it was so remarkable that GOD would instruct the people with this teaching: “An eye for an eye,” because he tells them not to over-retaliate, to not teach people lessons. If someone steals your goat, you steal it back—you don’t burn his house down or anything else.

But, Jesus recognizes the problem: it actually enshrines violence. It makes retaliation OK, and He isn’t OK with that. Because we love vengeance, so we seek out the most “appropriate” retaliations. If someone messes with us a certain way, we desire to mess with them back—to hurt them in the very way they hurt us.

In the immediately preceding passage, Jesus makes a similar claim about oaths. He says that when you swear an oath, when you pinkie-swear with someone, you are saying that you will be honest and not steal or you will do what you say you will do. At the same time, you also communicate that the rest of the time, you don’t have to be honest. You communicate that it is OK to lie and cheat and steal all the rest of the time. So don’t swear any oath. GOD sees you—even inside your head—and knows when you lie or cheat or steal, so be a person who never lies and cheats and steals and you will never need an oath.

Oaths enshrine evil just as “an eye for an eye” enshrines violence.

Jesus’s way: The Love Revolution
Jesus offers us a different way. But for some reason, we don’t understand it. It has to do with our reptilian brains—the oldest part of our brain—that is hardwired with two options in response to adversity: fight or flight. Either we retaliate, or we run away. This is also the way of the world. The part we’ve inherited from thousands of years ago that yearns for violence. The part that says that the most preferable option is to fight back. That good people fight and cowards run away.

So when we hear Jesus say “But I say to you Do not resist an evildoer,” we hear that as cowardly—as encouraging us to run away. We have to make it fit in that ancient paradigm: it is either one or the other: we have two square pegs and two square holes. And the peg Jesus hands us is round.

To make sense of this, Jesus gives us these three, very visual examples of this third way; and we might mistake them because they are so different from the world:

In the first he says, If somebody hits you on the cheek, offer him the other. Look at this: this is what turning your cheek looks like. You are giving them another shot. That is not running away and that is not retaliating.

Then he says, If somebody sues you for your coat, give them your cloak as well. Imagine the courtroom scene. You are the defendant and the charges are being read and you stand up, and start taking your clothes off. You just take them all off, including your shoes, and you ball them up and walk them to the other desk and you hand them over. Then you walk back and sit down. That is not running away and that is not retaliating.

The third one is awesome—but we screw it up so badly. We misunderstand it. Jesus says, If someone forces you to walk a mile, walk a second one. We hear that phrase, go the extra mile as if it were the ultimate do-gooderism. Good job! You did a little extra! That Protestant Work Ethic thing really suits you! But here is what Jesus is really saying. A Roman soldier would come across a Jewish peasant force him to carry something like 120 pounds of gear. And if the peasant valued his life, he would do it. Now, the image hits home at the important juncture at the end of that mile. Imagine the soldier, chuckling with his buddies about this guy carrying his stuff. He turns to the peasant and says:

“We’re here. I’ll take my stuff back.”

And the peasant responds:

“Actually, I want to keep walking. I’m good.”

This isn’t weak-kneed flubberings and it isn’t work a little harder, either. It is a different kind of option.

Jesus wants us to get that this is a love revolution.

We’ve been reading The Secret Message of Jesus each Sunday, and last week we covered the idea that violent revolution is not revolutionary. That overthrowing a violent regime with a violent revolution is just perpetuating a cycle of violence: it is replacing violence with violence. And more, it enshrines a cycle of violence. Our own revolution enshrined a culture of violence for us. It told us that it is acceptable and there are times to fight fire with fire.

That is the way of the world. Not the way of Jesus.

Jesus encourages us to fight fire with water. To violence, love is the water.

It Begins Here
This whole arc, Matthew 5, the first third of the Sermon on the Mount builds from the Beatitudes to this moment. We learn that we are to be and live a certain way, not act a certain way. We are to love. When Jesus says to love your enemies, I think he really intends to say that when we have a love revolution, there are no enemies. Everyone gets loved.

In the last year, we’ve seen bitterness and anger at St. Paul’s.
That is the way of the world, not the way of Jesus.
Anonymous letters, backbiting, potshots from the peanut gallery, back room conversations about people and their families.
That is the way of the world, not the way of Jesus.
People have even used our youth as weapons.
That is the way of the world, not the way of Jesus.

This ends today.

When St. Paul’s is on track, it is the epicenter of the love revolution. We might track evil in, like mud on our shoes. Just tap your shoe, and knock it off. This is a new place, not of this world. Something new.

Here and now—we love. We are a new creation built on love.

Destroying Dogma

a Sermon for Epiphany 5A
Text: Matthew 5:13-20

GOD of Hope and Wonder, we think we’re doing your will when we create an ethical framework for our lives, for our church, and for our society. Help us to overcome our hubris . Amen.

Liberty and Freedom
This morning’s collect used two words we love deeply: liberty and freedom. There’s something about those words, isn’t there? Liberty. Freedom. Ooh! It’s in our bones—our ethnic heritage, our social groupings, our society at-large. It’s everywhere. Maybe our brains like liberty and hearts like freedom. It does something to us. We’re seeing a living example right now in Egypt and Tunisia. We can only hope and pray that they continue to seek liberty and freedom, and avoid the comfort of authoritarianism.

But the point is that we love these words: liberty and freedom. Let’s say them together. Out loud. If you are reading this in a Barnes & Noble Café, just say it out loud, anyway! Liberty. Freedom. Liberty! Freedom! Liberty!!! Freedom!!!!

Ah! Don’t you feel better?

Our gospel, on the other hand, uses a word that doesn’t excite us the same way: Law. Well, maybe the lawyers in the room (and the Pharisees) are allowed to get excited about the word. It is their vocation, after all.

Law.

It just doesn’t have the same feel, does it? Freedom is, well, freeing…while Law feels more restrictive. In fact, we often talk about it as the opposite of freedom and liberty, but we know, deep-down, that it is essential to liberty. Our country was founded on laws; laws that enshrined and created freedom. And yet, we feel restricted by them anyway.

This gospel has Jesus answer an unspoken question about the Law: “Jesus, why do you hate it?” A more charitable and authentic question might be better phrased “Jesus, why do you keep breaking the Law? Aren’t you supposed to uphold it?” Jesus’s response is actually quite surprising. He says “I don’t hate it: I love it! I love every letter of it.”

The Law
This is an important statement because we need to step back from our 21st Century American understanding of the word "law". The Hebrew word we translate as The Law is Torah. We know this word, because it is also the name of the first five books of the Hebrew Scripture. When Jesus or the Pharisees talk about The Law, they aren’t simply talking about a legal code established centuries earlier, they are talking about these books of the Bible. They are speaking about the story of GOD’s relationship with humanity. Some Hebrew scholars encourage us to speak not of TL: The Law, but of The Way. Sound familiar?

And what Jesus seems to be dealing with are two groupings or understandings of ethical behavior:

1. Torah: The overarching sense of community and connectedness and relationship with GOD. This means the truths found in Scripture, the story, relationship, and agreed upon authority.
2. Pharisaic Law: The ethical framework that expounds on Torah. This is about relating the truth of Torah to the world and present conditions.

• Example: The Torah speaks of keeping the Sabbath day and making it Holy.
• The Pharisees began listing all of the types of things that constituted work on the Sabbath:

The Pharisees know that Jim Bob is kind of an idiot, so they believe he needs things spelled out for him. So they take the teaching and they say we need to make sure Jim Bob doesn’t do anything like “work” on the Sabbath. It talks about not going into the field, but Jim Bob makes stuff, so he shouldn't do that. He also shouldn’t cook or clean or go shopping or sell stuff or…on and on.

Jesus goes and stomps all over the Pharisaic Law, essentially saying “That isn’t Torah, that’s man’s law.”

We have a similar structure today, in the church:

1. Doctrine: The overarching law is called doctrine: This is made up of scriptural-based faith statements and mutually agreed principals.
2. Dogma: The ethical framework that is based on doctrine is called dogma. These are the localized ethics created by humans.

• Example: One doctrine is that Jesus was a human for a prescribed time in history.
• One dogma is the Roman Catholic’s ruling against the use of birth control.

We see Jesus trample on the dogmas of his day, and I think, would encourage us to do the same. But the point isn’t to be obstinate: but to direct our attention to the doctrine, The Law, The Way, Torah.

The Point
By now, you are no doubt wondering what the point is.

You are all very smart and astutely noticed that this is still Matthew 5, and comes immediately after the Beatitudes; that this is still the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount.

Now notice that Jesus is talking about “entering the Kingdom of Heaven” in last verse. This is the fourth mentioning of the Kingdom of Heaven in just 20 verses. Last week we learned that the poor of spirit and the persecuted will possess the kingdom: “Blessed are the poor of spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” And we also learned that the Kingdom is in the present—that the Children of God are blessed peacemakers.

The reason Jesus doesn’t create an ethical framework or subset of laws like the Pharisees, or give us a laundry list of dogma to obey is because we are called to live and be a certain way, not behave a certain way. We are called to love generously and indiscriminately, not prescribe who gets love. We are called to single out who needs our love most and give it to them instead of punishing them further. We are called to live in the Kingdom now, forgiving each other, loving each other.

Jesus names the least in the kingdom: the scribes and the Pharisees. When we obsess about each other's behavior—we are the least. When we demand adherence to laws we’ve made—we are the least. When we hold grudges and insult one another in the name of Jesus—we are the least in the Kingdom.

I don’t know about you, but I refuse to strive for least.

Blessed

a Sermon for Epiphany 4A
Text: Matthew 5:1-12

[Note: the original sermon was preached from sparse notes. What follows is a fleshing out of those notes as best as I can.]

GOD of Hope and Wonder, you gave us Jesus as Messiah and Lord. Open our hearts to love as he loves, our imaginations to dream as he dreams, and our eyes to see the world as he sees it. Amen.

The first five words of the gospel give us an interesting way to see this very familiar gospel of the Beatitudes:

“When Jesus saw the crowds.”

We don’t know what he sees, or what he makes of it, but this symbol is very powerful; Jesus saw them.

Who we are not talking about
Jesus gives us a pretty good description throughout each of the gospels of the people to whom we are to minister. In many places, it is the outsider, such as…

1. People from another tribe—like the Samaritans,
2. Traitors to the tribe—tax collectors were seen as traitors because they were Jews that taxed other Jews on behalf of Rome, and of course,
3. The ritually impure within the tribe—prostitutes and other “sinners” whose very livelihood kept them from being considered one of the “normal” people.

In other places we get a glimpse of those that fall through the cracks: the destitute and the desperate—the poor, the sick, the disabled.

Through all of these stories of Jesus talking to, eating with, advocating for these groups, we start to harmonize them and see any of Jesus’s teachings about others as being about this faceless group of outsiders, condemned by Jewish society. We make the relevant translation to our own world and see the homeless we’ve met or the people we’ve helped in the words of the gospel. But today, let’s not do that. These might be the people Jesus really is talking about in this gospel, but for today, let’s not think about them. Let’s say that this has nothing to do with others. In fact, this has to do with us.


9 that are blessed
The way the Beatitudes are set up is as nine blessings. The first is telling: “Blessed are the poor in spirit”. We often jump to the other with this one. We think of the depressed, or the doubter, or the one unhappy in church. If we were Evangelicals, we call these “the unchurched.” Instead, let’s see this as people that look out the window and see the trouble in the world. People that are hurt by the pain they see through that window, and are made sad by destruction and evil.

The next is “Blessed are those who mourn”. This isn’t simply widows, but all of those who grieve what they or others have lost: all people that know loss and are pained by what is gone.

“Blessed are the meek” isn’t just talking about the weak or the timid, but all those who refuse to watch one more person get hurt or abused—and we also refuse to be the one who does it.

These first three are more or less passive, or receptive. What is seen affects their outlook and begins to affect their action. The next three are increasingly active.

The fourth, and I love the way this is described, is “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”. Think about those descriptors: how do we feel hunger, but as the very seizing of our stomachs—a pain that rises from our bellies. Thirst is similar: our throats get itchy and irritated, our tongues and mouths get dry and scratchy; our entire neck and heads scream out for relief. For those that hunger and thirst for righteousness, it is the very body that feels and reflects the pain of injustice—compelling us to relieve that pain.

The fifth, “Blessed are the merciful” are those who reject vengeance and hatred, because there is already too much of that, and instead respond to everything with compassion and love.

The sixth, “Blessed are the pure in heart” are those who do not respond out of intellect or tradition, but out of GOD’s righteousness.

Each of these “blesseds” builds up to the seventh; the crux of the whole thing, and the most active: “blessed are the peacemakers”.

And the last two are what happens in response to how we act, seemingly bringing us back to the receptive beginning:

8. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake
9. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

Christ is the Beatitudes
This entire conversation isn’t a list of tasks for Christians. It isn’t simply an ethic.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:

“Action in accord with Christ does not originate in some ethical principle, but in the very person of Jesus Christ.” (Ethics 2005, 231)

Jesus is the center of the Beatitudes.

Notice that the gospel’s description is not simply what would be if we did this, but the future that will be when we are this.

Remember? “Blessed are the meek”—not “you will be blessed when you choose to be meek”.

The Two Most Important Words
This gospel uses two really important words that we should look at.

1. Blessed: We take the word blessed to mean blessings in life—some of you (not me) have been blessed with good looks or wealth or talents. In other words, the stuff we get from GOD. A more ancient and appropriate understanding would be sanctified or consecrated or holy. ‘Holy are the meek’.
2. Peace: The 21st Century American English word is so inadequate to describe Jesus’s intentions for us. All we know about peace is the absence of war or conflict. Jesus meant, and would have used the Hebrew word Shalom. Shalom doesn’t simply mean the absence of war or conflict, but

Safety…
happiness…
justice & truth…
Wholeness, completeness…
The well-being of others.

This is why the seventh Beatitude is so important to the whole gospel: “Holy are the Shalom-makers, for they will be called children of God.” We know that it is our job to bring wholeness and completeness to the world. That we are the ones that transform this gospel about other people into a gospel about us in this world. That these Beatitudes are, in fact, about us.

The Jesus at the center of this gospel, longs for us to make this world complete in the hear and now. He has given us a vision of the Kingdom and about who we are to be. We are invited to be reconciled and to reconcile, to love and to be loved. To share in the sanctified as poor in spirit, mourners, the meek, righteousness seers, mercy bestowers, lovers, and shalommakers.

May we be receptive to the world, moved and inspired by righteousness and love, that we seek mercy instead of vengeance, hope in the face of despair, and justice when we feel pain; and may the world be so transformed that we see one another as blessed. Amen.

Born

a Sermon for Christmas Day A
Text: Luke 2:1-20

[Note: the original sermon was preached from sparse notes. What follows is a reinvisioning based on those notes.]

GOD of Hope and Wonder, you gave us the greatest gift of the season: yourself. Be with us as a parent and child, that we might love you and one another so unconditionally. Amen.

Origins
We love origin stories. We love to know where things come from, and what in our past drives us today. Comics shoot up in price when a character’s origin is featured. The most popular episodes of TV shows are the ones that flashback to a poignant moment in a character’s life.

Jesus’s origin story is no different. We love responding to the question of where Jesus came from. What is interesting is that the four canonical gospels give us very different options.

1. Mark has no origin story, beginning with Jesus as an adult.
2. John begins with the creation of the world and speaks about the origin of Jesus’s ministry.
3. Matthew gives the birth story and then speaks of the wisemen and the flight into Egypt.
4. Luke offers the birth story (this time with shepherds) as well as a later trip to Jerusalem for the 12 year-old Jesus and his parents.

Because of this devotion to origin stories, we might give more interest to the beginnings of things, than where they actually go.

The Reason
I’m sure you’ve seen this cliché somewhere or heard someone say it. I saw this week on the sign outside of a real estate office. It says “Jesus is the reason for the season”. Reason for the season? What does Jesus really have to do with Santa Clause and mistletoe and gift giving? This season in which we storm the stores and gobble up ridiculous stuff and then give it to people who don’t need one more thing cluttering their lives: Jesus is the reason for that? Really?

Okay, that may be a bit cheeky, but so is a little rhyme that is supposed to remind us, not of our faith, but of that pastoral image of a little baby born. But this story isn’t supposed to be the beginning—the origin story—but the middle chapter. The story is a story of relationship between GOD and the people, and the introduction of Jesus serves as an important moment in the midst of that relationship.

The Event
So let’s put on our thinking caps for a moment. Let’s all pretend to be world-class theologians and think about this actual event. And ponder what it really means. We might drift a little close to heresy, but what fun would it be if we didn’t?

Let’s think about what the second person of the trinity is doing with these observant Jews that accept GOD’s call for them, to bring the king into this world.

1. GOD chose to give up omnipotence to be human
2. GOD didn’t become an adult, but a small, vulnerable child

GOD accepted the human process, of growing in the womb, coming through the birth canal, and facing the cold, bright, frightening reality of birth. The divine deity accepted complete and total vulnerability and utter dependence on its chosen parents. Part of me believes we don’t have stories of Jesus’s early life in the canonical gospels because we don’t want to envision our GOD as helpless, swaddled, and crying for milk or attention.

And just as profound, GOD chose to be a child to Mary, not just a parent to her.

Our Event
We celebrate this day a GOD who loves us enough to share in our experience.
Who came to us 2000 years ago and still comes to us today.
Who invites us to love each other with familial love.
Who loves the poor and unlovable—and yet still has room to love us.

May GOD’s peace be with you this day and always.

Where's the Fire?

a Sermon for Advent 3A
Text: Matthew 11:2-11

[Note: the original sermon was preached from sparse notes. What follows is a reinvisioning based on those notes.]

GOD of Hope and Wonder, you invite us into waiting and watching. Help us to see in our expectations true joy and new understanding. Amen.

John
Where’s the fire? Where’s the fire, Jesus? You promised me a fire and a cleansing of the world. You said it! So where’s the fire, Jesus?

John speaks from anger, hurt, anxiety, fear—has he wasted all this time? Has his ministry of preparing the way for this Messiah, this liberator and conqueror been in vain? Because…well…look at this guy. Jesus sure wasn’t matching John’s expectations of a liberator and a conqueror. The very word

Messiah=military leader.

And let’s speak plainly here: John is a man of action. He most certainly would do the work of GOD himself—not send his disciples instead. What kind of Messiah is this Jesus, that lets the disciples do the dirty work?

The Baby
In this season of expectation, we have the opposite expectation. Who are we expecting? A fragile baby. An innocent, innocuous baby that can’t threaten us or frighten us or challenge us or transform us. We expect the innocent pastoral image of a baby welcomed into the world by loving parents.

So John expected a powerful conqueror and received a healer.
We expect a healer and forget about the conqueror.

Jesus
After John’s people leave, Jesus turns to the crowd and asks them about John. He asks three times: “What did you go out [into the wilderness] to see?”
A prophet!
And what did you find?
A prophet!

Jesus isn’t just messing with our expectations, he is inviting us to deal with them. Because, once we see something, we are changed by it. He says that what they found was more than a prophet—a way prepared for them to follow. A road is being paved for us.

Advent is a season of waiting and watching, of expecting and seeing.

The opportunity to watch something is the opportunity to process something. To prepare ourselves for that road. It is the opportunity to be changed—and transformed forever.

Mark Bozzuti-Jones, in his Advent devotional, compares Advent to an expectant mother. That this season of waiting and anticipation is also a season of planning and dreaming and hoping; a season of cleaning and building and gathering. We are changed in the waiting.

For many of us that have had the fortune of being part of a child’s birth, it isn’t in the birth where the real transformation occurs, it is in the expectation.

Be Perfect

We celebrated Veteran's Day this week, so we used the readings for the Independence Day liturgy. As you will notice in the homily, the text comes from Matthew (not Luke) and is in the midst of the Sermon on the Mount. I chose to focus on an aspect of the reading, recognizing what we were lifting up in the context of the service.

a Sermon for Proper 28C
Text: Matthew 5:43-48

GOD of Hope and Wonder, you reveal your dreams and desires to us and invite us to take them up and make them real. Please continue to trust in us. Amen.

We know that it can be a pretty tall order to be a Christian sometimes, don’t we? Our gospel this morning is at the end of the first act of the Sermon on the Mount, a sermon in which Jesus lays out the standards pretty thoroughly: Blessed are the poor, for instance. After a few minutes, he talks about how much more he is expecting than the Law: he says that we know the Law tells us not to mess around with someone else, but Jesus argues that if you even think about messing around, you have sinned. And then he says to not only love the people you like, but the people you don’t! Well! And as if it couldn’t get any worse, he says: “Be perfect.”

Are you kidding me Jesus? Be perfect. Man, that’s just ridiculous.

So what does it mean to be perfect? Perfect is, well…perfect. We know it as something impossibly true—the pinnacle of what can be perceived. We know that it is impossible to be perfect.

Our modern understanding goes back well over 2000 years to Plato. Two of the things that drove Plato’s understanding were dualism and perfection. To him, the world was structured in pairs: you’re in or you’re out; good or bad; right or wrong. If you had one, then you must have the other. And he saw humans as representing that dualism. We are made of a body and a soul. The soul is perfect and incorruptible, so our bodies, therefore, are entirely imperfect and completely corruptible. Disgusting flesh to go along with the truly perfect soul within. You can see how this has messed with Christian understanding from the beginning!

We might be tempted, then to see Jesus’s encouragement as suggesting we strive for perfection, since Jesus would understand that being perfect would be impossible. But Jesus doesn’t say “try to be perfect” or “drive toward perfection,” but “be perfect.”

But what does Jesus actually say? “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect.” Jesus isn’t a Platonist-he sees this as relational. Our perfection is related to GOD’s.

We are made in the image of GOD and we believe that GOD is perfect. For Plato, perfect is an abstraction—separate. To be perfect or to strive to be perfect would be our confronting GOD, elevating ourselves to GOD. We know from Scripture that this practice is wrong. And yet, Jesus seems to be encouraging this.

We ignore the character of the speaker at our own peril, however. Isn’t it Jesus who is preaching? Isn’t it GOD incarnate, come down to earth? Is it not GOD accepting that evil, corrupting, imperfect human flesh? And his words ring powerfully through the imperfect mouth of the human GOD: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect.”

For Jesus, being perfect isn’t about some existential notion of who we are physically, but how we act. To be perfect is to act perfectly—and to act perfectly is to act as GOD acts—as Jesus acts among us.

Stanley Hauerwas, in a commentary discussing the Sermon on the Mount, describes it this way:

“Accordingly the sermon is not addressed to individuals but to the community that Jesus begins and portends through the calling of the disciples. The sermon is not a heroic ethic. It is the constitution of a people. You cannot live by the demands of the sermon on your own, but that is the point.” p. 61

Jesus doesn’t tell us to live as perfect copies of one another in happy harmony with Western culture. We are called to be real together and love one another, recruit weirdos to join us, and to love them too. We are called to change the world so that the sons and daughters of these veterans—and all succeeding generations don’t face the horrors of war. We are called to bring the dream of GOD to this very place at this very moment.

It is a bold GOD that shares perfection with its children.




NOTE: This homily was preached from simple notes and represents not only an approximation of what I said, but some of what I intended to say. In other words, it might sound different.

Gotta Have Faith

a Sermon for Proper 22C
Text: Luke 17:5-10

GOD of Hope and Wonder, open our minds to your generosity and love, that we may be transformed by your faith. Amen.

Our gospel contains a word that I don’t like very much: Faith. Funny, right? I don’t dislike the word itself, and I don’t have an unreasonable problem with the concept. It’s just…I don’t think we get it.

When I was younger, I hated the way some would use certain ‘churchy’ words, like faith, belief, and all that because I never felt like I really understood what they were trying to say. One particular time in college, this one woman was going on and on and I counted the number of churchy words she was using and about the time she got to 40 or so, I decided to give up. It’s why I try to push people to express their beliefs (spiritual foundation?) with non-churchy words: because we need to be adept at expressing ourselves, not parroting church words.

We also seem to have the wrong idea about faith, because we want to quantify it. Because if we quantify it, then we can compare each other. We act like we have a gauge that measures our faith: “I’m only a four today; maybe we should go to church so I can raise it to seven or eight.” Or as if we had a faith thermometer: “Hmmm. 98.6; average faith, today!” But really its that we see people using the churchy words and we think they have more faith. Rick Warren must have more faith than I since he talks about it so much! Or we look at people doing stuff that we don’t want to do and we assume it is because they have more faith: Mother Theresa amongst the people with leprosy: I certainly don’t have enough faith to do that.

Mustard Seed Extract
This is where the disciples are at: they ask Jesus to increase their faith. Jesus has given them all of this stuff to worry about and do, so they certainly don’t have enough faith to accomplish it all. And how does Jesus respond? By blowing up this notion. He teaches them this about faith: if you have the smallest speck of faith, you could throw a tree into the sea. In Matthew, it’s move a mountain, but here, it’s a tree. If we think about what the disciples were asking, Jesus’s response doesn’t make sense:

Jesus, we only have X amount of faith, but what you are asking for requires X+Y!

The system they are operating from is this: if you have a little faith, you can get a little action; middle faith—middle action; big faith—big action; but Jesus says if you have the teensiest, weensiest bit of faith, you can do the most amazing miracle: apparently a type of spiritual telekinesis.

He seems to be saying:

“It isn’t about how much, and it certainly isn’t about the quality, either. You’ve got the faith you need.”

GOD and the slaves
Then Jesus seems to shift gears and starts talking about slaves. It goes something like this: Let’s say you are a landowner and your slave comes to you after a long day to see what you want for dinner. Would you invite the slave to sit down? No! Of course not! You’ll send him into the kitchen to make dinner, serve you, clean it up, then he can eat! Do you expect a pat on the back for doing what’s told of you? Now think of it this way: GOD is the landowner and you are the slave. Would you expect any different treatment?

There is something about this that doesn’t compute. I read it over a bunch of times and I couldn’t make sense of it. That doesn’t seem like the picture of GOD that we’ve been working through in Luke. That seems like GOD, the micro-manager.

Jesus begins by saying “Would you say [this]”? As you are—in the world as it is.

How does the story Jesus tells change if we do,
not what we would normally do,
but what he hopes we will do?

Because as I was reading it, I really wanted to say “yes!” I want to be a person that does invite the slave in to sit down. So I re-imagined the story this way.

A different story
The slave comes to you to ask what you want for dinner and you say “sit, please.” And because he is a good slave, he will follow your instructions, though he is confused by your behavior. You notice right away that he is hot and sweaty and that he has been in the field all day, so you offer him a drink. You walk to the kitchen and pour two glasses and place one in front of him and one in front of you. Since he does all of the cooking, you are afraid to offer him anything to eat, but you can make a sandwich, so you go back to the kitchen, make some sandwiches and place one in front of him and one in front of yourself. And then you eat.

While you are sitting there, you ask him a question. You want to get to know him better. And you realize quickly that you don’t really know him all that well. So you keep asking questions and he begins to open up, telling you about his life and his beliefs and his dreams and his hopes for the world and as he is about to take the last bite, you run to the kitchen for some chips because you don’t want the conversation to end, so you open the bag and put it in front of him and he keeps going. And about the time that you are content and happy, he stands up and clears the table. He returns with a pitcher to fill your glass and he says this:

“Thank you. You didn’t have to do that. You are so generous. This meant a lot to me.”

And then you respond by saying “The pleasure was all mine. Let’s do this again soon.”

“OK.”

Doesn’t that feel right? Doesn’t that fit better with what Jesus has just been saying? And just as Jesus changes the characters over here, we can change these characters around. God is that landowner and we are that slave. How does this match the previous chapters of Luke? It was only a chapter ago that Jesus told the three parables of the lost things: the sheep, coin, and son(s). In that, we get a picture of GOD that comes to us in our weakness and out of ridiculous generosity. Does GOD really expect us to meet the minimum requirements to receive generously? Is GOD that obsessed with minimum standards? The GOD that runs out to greet the ungrateful and rebellious younger son and then the ungrateful dutiful one?

In fact, by giving us the question, Jesus invites us into this thinking. “Would you do [this]?” And we say “Yes!”

So what does this have to do with faith? Everything.
Because faith changes us.
Because faith makes everything new.
Faith is found in generosity and hope and love and devotion.

May we be a people of love and generosity and GOD’s transformative grace. And may we be so changed by GOD that we can move mountains and throw trees into the sea.



NOTE: The actual sermon was preached from very simple notes. This is a recreation posted on October 13th.

Risking Cooties

a Sermon for Proper 19C
Text: Luke 15:1-10


GOD of Hope and Wonder, you give and give and give to us. Help replace the jealousy we feel when you give to others with joy. Amen.


I have an irrational fear of garbage. It isn’t really compulsive or that I’m afraid that the garbage itself will do anything to me. It’s just that I’m worried about contamination. When I touch the garbage bag, I feel like my hand is contaminated. I want to clean it and I don't want to touch anything with it. So when I take the garbage out, I prefer to do it one bag at-a-time because then I don’t turn the doorknob with a contaminated hand—I keep one free. I know its irrational.

In many ways, this morning’s gospel lesson deals with that same irrational fear of contamination. Let’s call it what we have been calling that stuff since we were kids: cooties. It’s a fear of cooties. And the pious people are afraid of the cooties. So they obsess about staying clean and pure. This gospel, then, isn’t just about the cooties, but the risk: its about being pure and keeping space and sharing intimacy.

Before the story begins, Jesus was walking. We know the story. He starts out in the north by himself and along the way, he collects 12 stooges: Larry, Moe, and ten Curlys. Then a bunch more stooges start following him that don't get to be counted as official stooges because Jesus wants 12 (to represent the 12 tribes, I suppose). Then people start following him that heard, saw, and met Jesus along the way and want to be a part of what He is doing. But of course, this isn’t only one type of people: Jesus is followed by all sorts: which includes the riffraff. So tax collectors, prostitutes, and other people that always have cooties come along. And of course, he also collects the pious: the Pharisees, Scribes, and Sadducees. All of these people are following Jesus: thousands following him.

So what happens from the start? Jesus “welcomes” and eats with the sinners. Now, this doesn’t sound so bad to us, but the word translated as “welcome” is more literally “to bring into one’s arms”. So Jesus is hugging and kissing these people…these people with cooties. It isn’t like he’s giving a handshake that can be easily wiped off. He’s getting them all over his arms and his chest and his face. He might even be kissing these people on the mouth, getting the cooties all over the place. And after this, he doesn’t sit with them for a couple of minutes then go take a shower—to clean all of that stuff off of him. He stays there. He lives there where they are. He lives in the dirt and impurity. This is the radical nearness that Jesus was practicing.

Now, the Pharisees, of course, get mad at him. And we know the main reason: because Jesus broke the rules. This is par for the course by now. Jesus is flaunting his rule breaking. But let’s be honest: it isn’t just that, is it? Many today would be horrified by this action, too. Because we want Jesus to remain pure. He can’t have cooties; he can’t be compromised; he must remain purely divine. So I imagine them pleading with Jesus: “let the disciples do that. Don’t get yourself dirty; we need you. Send them.” Jesus must remain untainted.

Jesus responds to this with three parables about lost things: a sheep, coin, and son(s) because he wants to talk about intimacy. Each of these parables is about separation and distance. Each is about our distance from GOD. And yet, in each, GOD comes to the lost. GOD searches for us. And isn’t that what Jesus was doing? He was going to the lost, and sharing intimacy with those that weren’t on the inside, weren’t safe at home or being responsible? He went to them and risked everything to be with them and to share in that space with us.

It seems to me that Jesus is calling on us to go to each other. He answers the question about his own intimacy by talking about GOD. He means for us to go to one another as GOD comes to us. Even though we might not want to or we’re scared or we have pious people telling us not to, we’re to go. I’m reminded of prison ministry programs or ministries amidst the diseased and dying. I’m reminded of inner city ministries and ministries with the rural poor.

Jesus encourages us to think about a dangerous concept: to put ourselves at risk for the gospel. It’s going to hurt. It isn’t going to be easy. But it’s right.

It’s about risking cooties.


NOTE: The actual sermon was preached from very simple notes. This is a recreation posted over a month later on October 13th.

The Gift

a Sermon for Proper 17C
Text: Luke 14:1, 7-14

GOD of Hope and Wonder, you have given us the most amazing gifts: in our world and in baptism. Help us to know and feel the generosity of giving that you dream for us. Amen.

We all know what it is like to give presents. Searching for the perfect gift. For me, I turn the page on the calendar to December 1st and an alarm goes off in my head: time to start looking for Christmas. Sure, 3 ½ weeks isn’t enough time to discover the perfect gift, but getting good gifts is important, too.

What’s a good gift? A gift you know they will like…because they’ve told you. You get the wishlist out and you buy from it. You’re both happy. After a couple of years, you’ll forget what you’ve given and they’ll forget that you gave it to them, but so what? In the giving, you’re both happy. That’s a good gift.

The perfect gift, on the other hand, is something you know they’ll like because you know them well. And chances are, they didn’t know that they even wanted it until you gave it to them. They can determine your love and appreciation for them through the gift. This begins to get at the perfect gift.

'The Gift'
Do you like puzzles? There is one that the French philosopher Jacques Derrida gives us called ‘The Gift’. It goes something like this:

Alex gives a gift to Bob. But as soon as Bob receives it, he receives something else: an encumbrance or a debt. He now, because of protocol, must give a gift to Alex in return. This debt is made worse by the fact that he is required to put as much into giving the return gift as Alex put into giving it: it has to cost the same in both money and effort. He also can’t give the return gift the next day—it has to be given spontaneously, so Bob must search out the day that expresses the same amount of spontaneity.

Let’s say Alex figures this out and decided to save Bob some of this headache, so he chooses to give his gift anonymously, since Scripture seems to encourage that. But that makes it even worse for Bob, since he still gains the debt, but no means of getting rid of it, and has to search for who gave him the gift. At the same time, Alex gets extra self-esteem for having done something really generous.

And what if Alex’s gift is met ungraciously by Bob, wouldn’t that fix the problem? No, because then Alex recognizes his own superiority in selflessly giving this gift—that Bob just isn’t capable of recognizing its value.

Many might think the conversation ends here. Either there is no way to solve it or Derrida is being too cynical in his description of gift-giving. But Derrida doesn’t actually end here. Derrida recognizes the problem, what he calls “the Impossibility”. That we are stuck in an arrangement that truly is unsolvable, so he gives us two important responses:

1. Give the gift anyway and accept that this is the arrangement. Strive to give without expecting anything in return, while knowing that you will. But it is the gift itself—and the circle filled with generosity and reciprocation—that begets a deep connection between people.
2. Trust in our economies. This means that we know that they system works this way, but people don’t. Alex gives a gift out of love and generosity and Bob receives it and feels it and is compelled, not out of duty, but that love and generosity, to give a beautiful gift in return.

In this morning’s gospel, Jesus reveals the very same notion about ‘The Gift’. He says to be generous and give without thinking about what you are going to get in return. Give. That’s what I’m asking you to do. Give.

Then he throws us for a loop, because he tells us what we are going to receive: grace. He says to us: here’s what you’re going to get; but don’t do it for that reason. Do it to do it. Give generously.

Baptism
What this means is symbolized in what we’ll be doing in just a few minutes: we’ll be baptizing this beautiful little girl. She will receive a gift today that comes in three parts. The first part comes from GOD and it is one that we all comprehend: she gets GOD’s grace. That’s the one we all think of first. The other two are gifts that we get to participate in. We give the gift of membership. In just a few minutes, in baptism, she gets to be one of us. She’ll get all of the rights and responsibilities that each of us has as Christians. She is a full member of the club. The third part of the gift, and perhaps the most important is what we all get to do for her. Her parents and godparents will stand up and vow to her and to GOD to raise her well to spiritual maturity. Then all of us will do the same—vowing that we will care for her spiritual well-being.

When Derrida talked about ‘The Gift’, he was speaking about relationship and obligation, but we’re giving this girl a gift she can’t repay. There is no way that she can give us all a gift in return. But in a few years, if we all do our jobs, she’ll be standing up and vowing to help another little girl grow up in the Spirit. Just as many of us have been given that opportunity.

Jesus gave us a gift that we couldn’t hope to repay in the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. We can’t hope to repay that kind of gift.

Dr. King's Gift
We received a gift 47 years ago yesterday in an event known simply as “The March” or “The March on Washington.” And at the end of the march, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave one of the most important speeches in the history of the western world; a speech that rocked the world and motivates people half a century later. A speech that is now referred to by its iconic image: “I have a dream”. There’s a lot about the speech that we remember, including the second most recognizable line; in reference to his daughter, he dreams of the day in which she will be judged “not by the color of her skin, but the content of her character.”

But this speech isn’t just a speech. It is a sermon. And we know this because Dr. King quotes the prophets Amos and Isaiah. This one I read to you this morning is from Isaiah:

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."

At the first level, Dr. King is talking about race. At the second, he’s talking about equality. But where Dr. King, in quoting the prophets, is dwelling is up here, at the third level: the Kingdom of GOD.

The Kingdom isn’t about being color-blind or post-racial; it isn’t simply about getting along well with everybody. It’s about loving and sharing with everybody regardless of what it means.

My last image, and I’m not sure where it came from, goes like this. When somebody asks us for some money, and we want to give it to them, we reach into our pockets, and we hand it over [demonstrating]. When our arm stops moving—when we’ve offered the money over to the other person—is the moment that the money is no longer ours. Even though it hasn’t left our hand yet, it is no longer ours. It’s GOD’s. If the other person takes it or not. What they do or don’t do with it. It isn’t ours. In giving generously, we give up possession and we hand it over.

The Kingdom, baptism, gifts to strangers and to friends and family are all opportunities for our generosity. For us to not only feel good for doing it and to be good in the eyes of others, but to live in the way Jesus instructs us to live. We’re asked to be generous without concern for what we get out of it.

To show generosity in spite of receiving.

Looking for the Law

a Sermon for Proper 16C
Text: Luke 13:10-17

[This is a written-out version of what I preached without notes. It is a pretty accurate recreation of the flow and wording.]


GOD of Hope and Wonder, you give us your Law and we feel the need to blind ourselves with rules. Help us to see the Law and what it truly means for us. Amen.

The story begins back in seminary. I had this professor named Jay that told us a story. It was a story about a new rector taking over in an Anglican church in Ontario, Canada. The names of the people were withheld, so I’m going to give some names to these characters. The previous rector we’ll call Fr. James. We’ll call the new rector Fr. Dan. Neither of these names has any theological meaning or deep importance for this story, they are simply names that came to me, except for Dan. This story isn’t the story of one my classmates (Dan), but I wanted to put him into this story in homage to him.

So, the story begins on Fr. Dan’s first Sunday. He does the service in the normal way. After Communion, he clears the table, comes out in front of the altar, blesses the people, dismisses them, and then processes out into the world. The second Sunday, he does the same thing. The third Sunday goes the same way. Only this time, as he is standing out in the narthex, shaking hands, a kind, older gentleman pats him on the shoulder and says:

“I hate to tell you this…[words which actually mean something else to us] but you are doing it wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Fr. Dan is confused.
“You are forgetting the special bow,” the man says. “C’mere. I’ll show you.” And the two walk back to the sanctuary so that the gentleman could demonstrate. “It goes like this. You do what you do from behind the altar, see? Then you turn to the back wall, and you bow.”

Dan, being a smart priest, tries to make sense of this. There is no cross on the wall, but the consecrated elements are kept off to the side so he asks if the bow is to the elements. “No—the middle of the wall,” the man says.

So Dan goes into the Parish Hall to ask the people at coffee hour about this “special bow” and person after person says “Oh yeah! The bow! You have to do it—I love the bow!” Dan, still completely clueless, decides to call Fr. James first thing, Monday morning to ask him what was going on.

“Fr. James. This is Dan from St. Paul’s. I know we have a lot to talk about, and we’ll do that soon, but I have to ask you about one thing: what is with the special bow?”
“What bow?”
“The special bow,” Dan says. “You would bless the people, turn to the back wall, and bow, and then process out.”
There is silence on the other end for a moment until Dan hears a deep laugh. “Dan, I wasn’t bowing. I was turning off the radiator.”

This old church used steam heat, of course, and there was a radiator right behind the altar. Fr. James would bend over, turn the cap, and turn off the heat to the nave.

Our professor told us this story for two reasons:

1. How quickly actions become liturgy. You do it a couple of times and it becomes “what we do here” and then do it a couple more times and it becomes “what we’ve always done”.
2. How we give importance to actions, regardless of their purpose. There were probably only a couple of people in the church that new what Fr. James was doing, but the rest of the congregation believed that he was doing something important and symbolic. They decided that it was important and each person concocted some deep, theological reason behind this bow. The truth was that Fr. James was just being lazy.

This is what our gospel is about today. But first, let me introduce you to the characters.

Again, these characters don’t have names and I just came up with them because I wanted them to have names.

The first character is Lucy. She is a beautiful, happy woman, who 18 years ago had a spirit come into her body and bend her over. She can’t look up; she can’t look into other people’s eyes. She can look at the floor and the ground. This is her life today.

The second character is Sam. Ignore for a minute what Jesus says about him. Sam is a good guy. He is pious; a rule follower. We would like him. He would no doubt be the president of Rotary and a well-liked member of the community. A good man. But he has one problem: he loves Lucy, but he sees her and thinks that there is nothing he can do. It is what it is.

The third character is a wandering preacher. Let’s call him…Jesus. And he is preaching away, and Lucy catches his eye. He sees her and stops mid-sentence. “This won’t do,” he says to himself and in moments, he puts his hands on her and tells her that today is a new day. All she needs to do is stand up.

And Lucy listens to him…and she stands up…and she praises GOD.

Now Sam sees this and he is irate. He is mad because 1) Jesus broke the rules and 2) he’ll catch the blowback for this. So he yells at Jesus, telling him to “Stop! You’ve broken the rules!” And, we know that if he were a good Episcopalian, there would be a second condemnation: “Lucy! What are you doing shouting in the middle of the service? Who said you could praise GOD in a church?”

And Jesus responds, not with the semantic argument that we think he does: but instead with a simple chastisement of his own: “you are breaking the law by following the rules.”

If we look at what GOD says about the Sabbath, we go back to Exodus and Deuteronomy: the two places Sabbath is described in the Ten Commandments. In Exodus it tells us that we are to keep the Sabbath day (sundown Friday to sundown Saturday) holy and we are not to work because GOD created the world in 6 days and on the 7th he rested.

So Sabbath is about rest.

Then in Deuteronomy 5, it says that we are to keep the Sabbath day holy and we are not to work because GOD liberated his people from Egypt and redeemed them.

So Sabbath is about redemption.

Rest and Redemption.

So, in the couple thousand years between Moses’s arrival with the Ten Commandments and the day Jesus walked into that synagogue, good, well intentioned people tried to figure out what GOD meant by having us not work. So they started with the farmers, the slaves, and the livestock (since they were specifically mentioned in the commandment). Then they added the housekeepers and the cooks and the shopkeepers and everybody else until they had created rules making it so everybody had to rest on the Sabbath. Whew! And they felt good about this until some smart aleck in the back asks the room “what about ______?” For us, that would be “what about doctors? Or police? Or firefighters? We have to work on our Sabbath day. So they started adding page after page of exemptions to the hundreds of rules. And Jesus knows these rules and picks out of the myriad choices—a really juicy one—and he throws it out into the middle of the room for everybody to see. It deals with livestock. Now, they aren’t talking about cute, cuddly sheep in the field necessarily. They’re talking about oxen that pull the plow or carts and goats that produce milk.

Now does anyone know the first two changes to your body when you fast? You lose water and muscle mass.

They knew that the livestock wouldn’t die with a fasting day, so this isn’t a life-or-death decision. But they wanted their livestock to be in tip-top shape for Sunday morning. They didn’t want their oxen weak or their goats to be dry and not producing milk. Jesus, mindful of the Law which says that the Sabbath is about rest and redemption looks at this rule and he says to himself “this exemption is about money.”

So he compares this exemption to the state of this woman. The livestock exemption isn’t life-or-death, but about health and vitality. There is no such exemption for the health and vitality of a woman. It is important for us to recognize that this is a woman—that she is imprisoned and in need of redemption. That she is symbolic of all of those people that are locked up, not by GOD’s Law, but by human rules based in prejudice and hatred. That Sam, in supporting the status quo, even telling her to come back tomorrow, is trying to refuse her rest and redemption on the Sabbath. But Jesus won’t wait—he does it the moment he sees her. He says “what better day than the Sabbath to give this woman rest and redemption? You have it, Sam. The people in this room have it. And now she has it.”

We’re given this wonderful example today to show us how we, by trying to be good people, condemn them instead. That we have a whole bunch of rules that we bring into this space with us: the special bows, the types of music we like, the times we stand and the times we kneel. These are all our rules, not GOD’s Law. It isn’t Jesus’s teaching. It isn’t the Kingdom of GOD. It’s our stuff.

Today, we can be mindful of all of our rules that blind us from GOD’s dreams for us. That our Sabbath might be truly about rest and redemption. And that we make time to ask ourselves and one another “who needs rest today? And who needs to be redeemed?”

Reflections

I didn't preach the last few weeks, but I wrote a couple of reflections on the gospels.

This one is for the Compassionate Samaritan parable.
This one is for the Martha and Mary story.

Enjoy!

Accepting vulnerability

a Sermon for Proper 9C
Text: Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

GOD of Hope and Wonder, the mission you have given us is dangerous and deeply rewarding. May we have the courage to accept the challenge you give us. Amen.

Sometimes Jesus doesn’t make it easy for us, does he? The instructions that he gives the 70 are to go out, taking nothing with them, and travel to all of the places Jesus wanted to go. These are not easy expectations. What if we left here and some headed to Peachtree City and others to Roscoe and others Fayatteville. You leave from here without stopping at home and without your cars. All right everybody, stand up and get moving! You’re not excited by this prospect? You don’t want to walk all that way without clear expectations for what you are to do when you actually do get there? And considering he also says to leave your purse at home, when you arrive there at about dinner time, you’re going to be pretty hungry and have no money…I can’t understand why you aren’t motivated by these prospects! Huh…I’m going to have to rethink my expectations.

What I was asking you to do is no more out of character for us than it would have been for them. Jesus was asking a lot of these people. He asked them to leave everything behind. Everything. One set of clothes. That’s it. He even makes it tougher on them: they’re to go barefoot. This is a high demand.

Why does he ask this of them? To remove what prevents them from relying on GOD. He is putting these people in danger, in a position of complete dependence on something other than themselves. This is what Jesus is expecting of the 70.

What does Jesus expect of the people they will meet? These 70 people will arrive in their various towns in pairs. They will be hungry, dirty, tired, and with nothing of value—no means of helping themselves. If the people the 70 meet are Jews, they are likely to take them in and offer to clean their feet, offer them food and a place to stay, and demonstrate a profound sense of welcome, that everybody that walks through their door deserves their help. This is a profound sense of hospitality that few of us could imagine happening today.

Jesus is expecting these 70 to depend on GOD to provide for them and depend on the hospitality of others. Those are some pretty lofty expectations.

Few of us are comfortable with this subject; with this part of the expectation because Jesus is asking us to be vulnerable. In a world of strength, being vulnerable puts us at the bottom.
Jesus asks us to voluntarily empty ourselves of worth and power and influence and become dependent on GOD and our neighbor for our very survival. I highly doubt that Jesus only intends for us to hear this metaphorically. I am also not saying we’re supposed to literally walk to Peachtree City shoeless to stay in a stranger’s house and hang out for a few days, but I don’t think that such a vulnerable position is only supposed to happen inside us. What would it mean in today’s terms to empty ourselves in this way: to make ourselves that vulnerable to GOD and one another? Does it mean living without a savings account to protect us? Does it mean selling a car and asking others to take us where we need to go? Does it mean giving away the excess—the stuff and the money that goes beyond putting clothes on our backs and food on our tables? Does it mean abandoning our glorious homes and living in a state of physical and economic poverty? If we are honest to Jesus’s teaching, none of these questions is ridiculous. And this puts a lot of pressure on the way we do live—on our Western obsession with personal and corporate security. We want assurance of safety in the moment and for tomorrow. And deep down, we know better. We know that no amount of border guards and no amount of weaponry can ever keep us entirely safe. No amount of “cushion” in the bank will ever bring us complete economic security. Jesus shows his followers that the only assurance of safety we have comes from being entirely dependent on GOD and one another.

These words aren’t easy to hear any more than they are easy to say. If we trust in GOD, we will receive abundantly. But that trust is shown through vulnerability.

The assurance we have comes from Jesus. This gospel comes immediately after the pericope in which Jesus “turns his face toward Jerusalem”—an act of confidence and certainty of purpose and focus in direction. These 70 followers are sent out to the places that Jesus wants to go. In this new direction for Jesus, there is urgency. And in this morning’s pericope, there is similar urgency placed, not on the disciples, but on 70 of his followers. Jesus is calling on them to “get vulnerable already! It’s time to go!”

We talked about this on Wednesday at the Bible Study, about that number, 70; that it is likely a reference to a list of nations from Genesis 10, in which the nations of the world numbered 70. So Jesus is sending out all the nations of the world, a precursor to what would happen later at Pentecost. It also helps us to see this as our call—as something that Jesus asks of each of us.

But this expectation comes with a second expectation: an expectation of what those followers will find when they reach the towns and cities. Some that the 70 will visit will show uncommon welcome, feeding and clothing and caring for their needs, while others will not, receiving the dust from the followers’ feet.

The hope is that enough places will show that welcome so that all 70 will be cared for and that their needs will be met.

The lesson that I take away from this pericope involves how like the 70 we are—called into vulnerability by GOD—and how like those townspeople St. Paul’s is. We have the opportunity to go out into the world vulnerably and the opportunity to provide for those charged to this vulnerable life. Because if Jesus expects us to be so vulnerable, doesn’t he expect everyone to do the same? And if someone comes among us who is stripped down to the metaphoric shirt on her back, are we not the householder that should invite her in? Are we not the ones that should feed her and wash her feet and give her a place to stay?

The life of the Christian is to be vulnerable and to protect others; to allow ourselves to be weak in the face of our enemies and strong in defending the poor and the abused—concepts that are so opposite our cultural priorities and alien to our usual modes of thinking. And let’s be honest, even being the protector requires vulnerability—to let someone into your house, to eat your food, to live with you—is to share in an uncommon intimacy that few of us could truly understand.

We are challenged this week by a charge that is uncomfortable and frightening: to be vulnerable to GOD, to friends, and to strangers. To show uncommon hospitality to those that need love and nourishment of all kinds: spiritual, psychological, emotional, theological, intellectual, inspirational, and on and on. To show a profound intimacy that comes from believing Jesus when he suggests we put all of our trust in GOD. To extend that invitation of profound welcome to others knowing that doing so may well change the very foundation of our faith and the very core of our being. We are those townspeople that Jesus is hoping to transform.

Sharing in the reconciliation

a Sermon for Proper 7C
Text: Luke 8:26-39

GOD of Hope and Wonder, it is often so easy for us to see the brokenness and separation—that we can’t see your work in us and for us. Help us to better see and know your dream for us. Amen.

GOD longs to reconcile the world. GOD longs to make us whole and bring us back together. Verna Dozier calls this “The Dream of God” in her book of the same name. This dream is to reunite the people in a profound new kingdom that is very different from the way the world is now. It’s a beautiful dream—a dream that GOD invites us to share in over and over…in Scripture, in revelation, in worship. We might not want to think of GOD as a used car salesman, but He keeps pitching it to us, talking it up, wanting us to want it too. And to be perfectly blunt, the Kingdom of GOD is actually a pretty good deal.

This work of reconciling has been everywhere in our Scripture readings lately, especially in the gospel lessons from Luke. Last week—the woman who cleaned Jesus’s feet with her hair and Jesus forgives her of her sins—that’s about reconciliation. Two weeks ago—Jesus raises the widow’s only son from the dead—that’s about reconciliation. Actually, that’s a double reconciliation, restoring both the son to the community, and also the mother. A reconciling two-fer. Today’s gospel about a man possessed by demons is about reconciliation: about restoring this man to his community. This is a big part of GOD’s dream: our reconciling with one another. GOD longs to reconcile the world.

We know separation, don’t we? Separation here, separation in the world, separation between one another, and separation from GOD. We know separation. We don’t like it and we don’t want it. We know Jesus doesn’t like it and doesn’t want it. We know GOD doesn’t like it and doesn’t want it. That’s where the Spirit comes in. That’s why we can trust: GOD longs to reconcile the world.

We get in this reading from Luke a picture of reconciliation. A man possessed by demons is healed and restored to community. We know this is complete because toward the end of the gospel, these people, who hear about this crazy event are brought out to see this man, who was naked and talking craziness was now “sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.” Resist the temptation to ask where the clothes come from—think about the visual here, the symbolism. The man, who was naked, is now freshly clothed and restored to humanity. He is brought back in. All that separates him from the community is gone. The very picture of reconciliation.

This man was once like everybody else. He no doubt has a family, maybe kids, maybe a good job and a home in the good part of town, but when Jesus shows up, he’s naked and living in the tombs. Could there be a more vivid image of this man’s separation from the community than his living among the dead?

For us, this naked man lives on in the lives of those victims to evil and injustice who also at one time had families and loved ones and a job and home and mattered to people until that fateful day in which they looked around and they were living in the subway tunnel and don’t remember the last time they saw their children or the last time they wore a suit or the last time someone looked at them with respect and love. Many of us have seen that person and felt pity or repulsion or perhaps both at the same time. And almost in the same way, that person remains to us as nameless as the man in the gospel lesson—but just like him, we probably still remember them—or at least our brief time together. A nameless man becomes our anecdote—the easy reference for a person that has lost everything. But GOD promises reconciliation: which may or may not be in that person’s lifetime, but is eternal and hoped for here on earth. He can be reconciled with his family and the world just as surely as we can be reconciled with one another and with GOD: right here, this morning. All it takes is a first step.

When Jesus set foot on the soil, at the beginning of this pericope, this was soon after a crazy boat ride from Capernaum that rocked the little fishing boats that they crossed in and Jesus had calmed the storms—another big miracle. But when he steps out of the boat and onto this shore, he has left the safety of his home territory and, for the first time in the gospel of Luke, walks into gentile territory. He is met by a gentile, filled to the brim with demons, naked, living in tombs, and the demons are frightened and want to make a bargain. And Jesus gives them permission to leave the man, and the demons are soon vanquished. But after saving this man and restoring him to his community and reconciling him with GOD, other gentiles come back to Jesus and tell him to get out.

It might be easy for us to see in Jesus’s ministry an obviousness that everyone would get him, and see his miraculous acts as the very works of GOD. But not necessarily to gentiles and not to all of the people that lost a bunch of pigs in a mass swine slaughter. They don’t yet see a benefit to keeping Jesus around. But the man with the new clothes does. He wants to be with Him. Makes so much sense, doesn’t it? Stick with the person that saved you. Jesus has a different idea.

Just as the man is restored to his full humanity—reconciled with the world community—he is restored to his home community. As much as he wants to travel out into the world with Jesus, he is reconciled to a specific community—to these particular people from whom he was separated. And then Jesus went home.

We are a community of reconcilers. In baptism, we are called to a ministry of reconciliation. In gathering every Sunday, hearing the word, confessing our sins, receiving absolution and then sharing in a great act of reconciliation—we greet each other with the sign of GOD’s peace. Each Sunday, we reconcile with one another and we bring the kingdom closer. This is our bold proclamation.

GOD longs to reconcile the world; all of it. The big parts and the small parts; the cities and the farming communities; the mega-churches and the people meeting in a living room; the down-and-out and the people that are just down; everyone gets to be a part of it. There is even the promise of sending someone to make it happen, even in hostile territory.

Like the man sent home to proclaim the good news of what was done to him, we are called to do that very thing—to share what GOD does for us. We all have a place in this bold and beautiful dream that is both simple and challenging: to love one another and describe what GOD has done for us. To love and to share. Remember that the man was naked? He was vulnerable. The good news requires our own vulnerability—our own metaphoric nakedness. This is the first step, our chance to get out of the boat onto foreign soil and, with GOD’s help, begin the great reconciliation of the world.