Stirring it up

A sermon preached on December 16, 2007 at Faith Episcopal Church.

This third Sunday of Advent is often referred to as stir it up Sunday because of the collect that we heard earlier. “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us.” So, as the obedient little vicar that I am, let me see what I can do to stir things up.

We’re in the middle of Advent and it might be a good time to ask the question, what are we waiting for? One more performance of Handel’s Messiah? One more excellent Christmas Eve sermon? Or the most excellent holiday party? According to everything we read and proclaim, we are awaiting the birth of the Savior – again. That means that we are waiting to be saved. Christianity has organized itself around the idea that Jesus came to save us from our sins. We talk more about baptism as cleansing us from sins than about initiation.

Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible tells the story of a Baptist preacher who moved his wife and four daughters to the Congo to save the heathens. He thundered Bible verses at them in English which of course, they couldn’t understand. The local young man who translated was at a loss to help them make sense out of being called sinners when there was nothing in their existence that supported it. The thing the preacher wanted more than anything was to baptize the village children, to save their souls. He saw that he had children that had been born into sin and there was a river. Who could refuse such an offer? Well actually, the entire community refused. He couldn’t understand how they could pass up the chance to save their children’s souls. Try as he might, they didn’t seem to be as concerned about ut sin as they were the crocodiles in the river. Nothing this crazy man said made any sense to them. How could their beautiful children have sinned any way?

Kingsolver’s book describes well the culture clash that often exists because of language in the Christian faith that comes from a time and situation that no longer exists. Our faith vocabulary is drawn from Israel’s political reality as a country occupied by a powerful nation and its Temple worship that included animal sacrifice. Sacrifice, with all of its regulations had several purposes, the primary being to please God through an offering of grain or animal. This is a tradition that predates Judaism. Among the types of sacrifices was something called a “sin offering.” A sin offering was used to cleanse the sanctuary of impurity and it involved a lot of blood. We just had this place cleaned on Thursday and I really glad they decided to use Lysol.

Within the temple system, the priestly understanding of sin was like a tear in the fabric of creation. The purity laws that were designed to maintain the integrity of that fabric were things like the dietary laws, laws against mingling crops or fibers, rules about contagion and how to be cleansed from it. The rules that governed women’s lives and those who came into contact with them all come from this priestly body of regulations. The only way to make something pure again was the application of the most holy substance – blood. Blood is the stuff of life therefore it is the only thing that can restore the order of life.

This is the language that was used by the earliest voices to explain the phenomenon of Jesus and his death and resurrection – in particular Paul, a well educated Pharisee. This was the way he would understand sin and sacrifice. Paul and the author of the Letter to the Hebrews both talk about Jesus as the sin offering for humanity. We say it in our Eucharistic prayer. “By his blood he reconciled us; by his wounds we are healed.” This theology claims that Jesus blood mended the tear in the fabric of creation that was caused by human sin.

Interestingly, it does not appear to be how Jesus spoke about himself. I’m getting a double dose of Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan right now. Along with their The First Christmas I have recently finished their other collaboration The Last Week; What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem. Their project was to take a close look at the Gospel of Mark, as the oldest of the four Gospels, and hold up the story known as the passion story for comparison to the religion that has evolved. Their conclusion is likely to stir things up. No where in this earliest Gospel does Jesus claim to be the kind of messiah or savior that his community awaited. Never does he claim divinity. He calls God “Father” but does not call himself the Son of God. He does not talk about saving people from their sins. His message, first and foremost, is the Kingdom of God. “Jesus passion was the kingdom of God, what life would be like on earth if God were king, and the rulers, and empires of this world were not. It was the world that the prophets dreamed of – a world of distributive justice in which everybody has enough and systems are fair.”

The problem for Jesus and his followers was that to talk about the kingdom of God when you lived under the thumb of the Roman Empire was to invite trouble. Borg and Crossan reframe Jesus’ death from “Jesus died for our sins” to “Jesus passion for the Kingdom of God got him killed.”

Because we continue to encounter religious language about being saved from our sins, when it is clear that we as individuals and humanity as a whole has not overcome its ability to sin on a grand scale – we are challenged to make sense of Jesus and his role in our lives. Advent is the time to ask the question, “What are we waiting for?” Are we waiting for someone to come and make it all happen? Or are we awaiting the birth of a new community within our own hearts and within the heart of the human family?

The Voice in the wilderness

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal Church on December 9, 2007

Oh good! It’s “brood of vipers” Sunday. John the Baptizer railing at the people who supported the religious and social status quo in Israel. Ordinary people were flocking to him to be dipped in the river in hopes of cleaning off some of the dust of oppression. John was fine with them – they knew that they weren’t hearing the truth from the voices that represented their faith. John also knew that all he could give them was a bath and a warning. John didn’t mince words and as a result, he is the reason we have the phrase a “head on a platter.” But John said things that needed to be said.

The corruption of a faith is an ugly thing to witness. Violent jihad is a corruption of Islam. Zionism is a corruption of Judaism. And where to start with Christianity? I have a confession to make – I am automatically suspicious when someone identifies himself as a Christian. Talk of Christian values usually sends me screaming from the room. My understanding of Christianity has been corrupted by voices that offend me. And if they offend me – imagine what they do to people who are not schooled as I have been in how to seek the truth in our texts without stopping at the surface. To my way of thinking, the voices that have co-opted Christianity are a brood of vipers.

Fortunately, a kind of John the Baptizer has come around again. His name is Brian McLaren and he has courageously stood up to warn of the wrath to come. I’d like to read some of his statement that appeared on the Talking Points Memo – a liberal blog that is under the direction of a Jew, Josh Marshall. The fact that Brian the Baptizer was invited to be a guest blogger on this very liberal site is no less than amazing. Here is the link: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/060138.php And here’s some of what he had to say.

“There’s a lot of talk nearly everywhere these days about the dangers of radical Islam. In some settings, people express similar concerns about Christianity, especially the dangers of a right-wing theocracy here in America. Whether the warnings come from “the new atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens or from secular-political voices on the left, the prospective villains are usually described as the Religious Right, Evangelicals, Christian Fundamentalists, and so on.

“But largely under the radar, there’s something else going on in the Christian community in the US and world-wide, and it’s a change worth knowing about. Many of us who are involved with this emergence of a new thing would describe it as a deep shift, even a kind of repentance. Growing numbers of us Christians are ashamed of the ways that we Christians have behaved in recent decades – from Evangelicals backing unjust and unwise wars to Catholics covering up priestly abuse, from Prosperity Gospel televangelists getting rich by ripping off the poor to institutional religious bureaucracies fiddling around in carpet-color-committee meetings while the world is burning, or at least warming dangerously.

“We have been arguing about the origin of species while an unprecedented extinction of species occurs on our watch; we’ve been fighting endlessly (and unproductively) about unborn children while achieving precious little for the already-born children in Darfur or Congo or Malawi or downtown Cincinnati. These stale expressions of bad faith have left many of us gasping for the fresh air of good faith.

“So along with facing up to our current and historic failures and atrocities, we’re engaging in a hopeful re-imagining of what Christian faith can be, become, and do in the future. My book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope is a kind of cry, a plea, a prayer reaching toward this kind of faithful re-imagination.

Brian McLaren, an Evangelical pastor himself, is telling us that there are voices within the conservative Christian community have done just what John the Baptizer said they should do. They have repented and are trying to bring their understanding of the faith back to the vision of the Kingdom of God that Jesus talked about. He has identified what he calls “four deep issues.”

"First, we have created an economic system that exceeds environmental limits, resulting in our growing, multifaceted environmental crisis. Second, this economic system is succeeding at making a minority increasingly wealthy, while simultaneously creating a global underclass whose standard of living falls farther and farther behind those who swim in luxury and excess. This growing gap between rich and poor exacerbates the third crisis: as the poor grow more desperate and the rich more frightened of their desperation, both sides arm themselves with more and more terrifying weapons.

"Fourth, I suggest that these first three crises, which I call the prosperity, equity, and security dysfunctions, turn like three gears, teeth in teeth with the others, and they are together driven by a central drive shaft which I call the religious dysfunction. Our world’s religions are failing to provide a story strong enough to inspire enough of us to deal effectively with the first three crises. In fact, all too often our religions provide destructive narratives…our religions can fan the flames of holy-war narratives –whether expressed in terms of terrorism or counter-terrorism, jihad or crusade. But our religions can inspire us with stories of reconciliation and peace. Our religions can foment stories of scapegoating and vilification, or they can inspire us toward compassion and understanding through stories of reconciliation and grace.

"Instead of baptizing greed and self-interest, our faith communities can teach us stories which promote the common good, inspiring us to creatively pursue sustainability both environmentally and socially. Instead of sanctifying the consumerism that reduces everything to a financial “resource,” our faith communities can teach us stories that inspire true reverence for the planet and all it contains – opening our eyes to the signature of God in the hawk soaring among the mountains, the school of minnows flashing in the shallows, the cricket singing in the back yard.

"Instead of distracting us from this-worldly injustice, our religions can embed in us a sense of stewardship and responsibility, so that we who have been given much gladly accept much responsibility for our neighbors. Instead of preoccupying us with raising our own moral score so we can consider ourselves spiritual winners at the finish line, we can live in a story of hope that turns our hearts towards our neighbor, toward the stranger, and even towards our enemies.

"Christians with this emerging sensibility seek a third option, a path beyond the bad religion of which we have a surplus, and beyond the no religion called for by the new atheists: we seek a new kind of faith that engages us with the world as it is and challenges us to become more than we have been.”

I cannot tell how long I have waited for someone from the evangelical Christian world to say this. Thank you, Brian McLaren. It makes me wonder whether John the Baptizer might say instead of “Repent” “Rejoice, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

The Peace Child

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal on December 2, 2007, First Sunday of Advent

Now that Peter and I have moved into our house in Marina Hills, I don’t have many occasions to drive all the way down Crown Valley Parkway and I miss it. So I was glad to have a reason to enjoy that nice drive the other day. As a bonus, the Christmas banners had been put up and I found their “Peace on Earth” sentiment to be thought provoking. I remember the first time I saw them, three years ago. The memory of having been confronted by someone who was angry with me for having preached about peace from this pulpit was fresh in my mind. My sermon had been perceived as an insult to those who were in Iraq fighting. It was also deemed unrealistic and very Pollyanna. War is just a fact of life and to think otherwise is to be naïve. So when I saw those banners on my way home it seemed incongruous. I wondered what my critic would think of them. Is “Peace on Earth” just something that you say at Christmas like “have a nice day?” Is it acceptable Christmas card sentiment but somehow unacceptable if you really mean to be talking about peace as opposed to war?

Other criticisms echoed in my ears as I drove under the banners hanging on lampposts on Crown Valley Parkway. Didn’t I know that this is a pretty conservative area that I was really out of touch with the mainstream? If I were going to preach about things like peace I would run the risk of alienating much of the prevailing community and stifling our growth. And yet that same community hangs banners that proclaim the same thing that I preached and it doesn’t seem to offend people. It’s kind of confusing.

I’m tired of the war in Iraq. I’m tired of reading Christmas sentiments about peace while we are in fifth year of a war with fluid justification, and no end in sight. I’m tired that our precious young people are coming home in pieces, broken in body and mind and spirit, never to be the same. I’m tired of Iraqi people having to bury women and children who were caught in a conflict that no one seems to know how to stop. I am tired of people thinking that we cannot do better.

At the Diocesan Convention this weekend we heard a very helpful dialogue between a rabbi and a Palestinian Christian priest. Everyone is pretty clear that religion has become one of the stumbling blocks to peace. Rabbi Jacobs contributed a truly important point. All religions will need to address their sacred texts and give something up. The Jews will need to give up their claim to being God’s only chosen people. The Christians will need to give up Jesus as the only way. The Muslims will need to give up the wrongness of everyone else. If that could be done, imagine what progress we could make.

Then let us consider the nations. Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan have an extraordinary book called The First Christmas and they bring some important scholarship to the context of Jesus’ birth and life. Israel at the time that Jesus was born knew all too well how the Roman Empire considered peace. Rome wanted peace but what that meant was an absence of revolt. Peace through victory was Roman peace. Around the time that Jesus was born, Rome proved its point. When Herod the Great died in 4 BCE there were uprisings all over Israel. Rebels hoped to replace Roman rule with a ruler the likes of which the prophets described – a messiah. Rome responded to the rebellions with two legions or 18,000 elite troops, 2000 cavalry and 1500 extra infantry. The army marched into Galilee and did what the Roman army always did. They killed the men, attacked the women and stole everything they could carry. This was the context of Jesus’ youth. When he preached and taught about peace it was because his neighbors had lived the reality of Rome’s kind of peace – peace through violence. Jesus would teach a different kind of peace – Peace through justice.

Rome was an Empire and they had no design for the kind of work that justice requires. They had one strategy – war and occupation. What do strategies for peace through justice look like? I’m fairly certain that if we have any they aren’t getting a whole lot of attention. Strategies for peace through justice include things like diplomacy and negotiation and self-evaluation of our habits and preferences that have an impact on the rest of the world. This kind of peace might require us to give up things like gas guzzling cars and suburbs in the desert. Peter and I met a Lebanese physics professor on the plane on our way to Beirut. Samir observed that if the resources were committed to the creation of a middle class through out the middle east so that people had jobs, homes and vacations they would lose their will for perpetual conflict. This new kind of peace might even require the US to give up its self-image as the world’s super-power. Could Rome have done that – probably not. Would we be willing to? That remains to be seen. What will it take for us want peace more than we’re willing to tolerate war?

One thing is certain – peace through justice requires sacrifice.

In 1955, Missionary preacher Don Richardson traveled New Guinea to live with the Sawi, a fierce and violent people who ate their enemies. Here is how their children are described…

A Sawi child is trained to get his way by sheer force of violence and temper. He is goaded constantly to take revenge for every hurt or insult. Parents give examples as they carry out violent retaliation for anything that offends them.

Don Richardson and his wife hoped to bring the Gospel, helped by practical enticements like nylon fishing line, mirrors and machetes. The Sawi were curious about them but the Richardsons witnessed fourteen bloody battles within their first two months. The only Bible story that interested the Sawi men was that of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus. Judas was considered a clever warrior and therefore worthy of honor. Eventually Richardson decided that he would have to leave or feel responsible for the continued bloodshed. The leaders of the two warring villages told him that they didn’t want him to go and to prevent his leaving; they were prepared to make peace.

The next day the two villages came together and the leaders approached one another, each carrying a child. The two men exchanged their names and their children. The peace children were then all touched by the villagers who vowed to never harm a member of the child’s village as long is he lived. The giving of a peace child was a covenant. Finally Richardson was able to explain Jesus.

The story of the peace child tells us that in order to achieve peace, we have to give something of ourselves – something that is dear and precious to us. As we wait to welcome the Prince of Peace, our peace child maybe now would be a good time to start thinking about that.

** The story of the peace child is from Dr. Jack Rogers of Fuller Theological Seminary, Gospel Light Publishing.

Leaving Ordinary Time

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal on November 25, 2007

Today we leave ordinary time. That is one way of identifying the Sundays between Pentecost, last spring, and the first Sunday of advent. The color has been green – green that takes us from planting through harvest – from the first sprigs of you life through blossom and ripening to maturity. We have not been in a season, we have been in ordinary time. Ordinary time gives us routines and consistency. But we are called now into extraordinary time.

Our church year gives us the gifts of Advent and Lent to provide times of preparation. Those seasons are set aside to make us ready for Christmas, when God becomes one of us, and Easter when we are resurrected with Christ. They are meant to be times of challenge and testing. In Advent and Lent we are invited into self-reflection. Extraordinary time invites us to, dare I say, change. Change gets you to a new place.

As odd as it seems from a calendar perspective, we have a story from Good Friday as our Gospel reading. Jesus’ short conversation with the man hanging on the cross next to him refers to an ultimate change – from death to extraordinary life. That gives us a clue about what is expected of us as we leave the safety of ordinary time.

Welcoming in a new time is one of the great human challenges. Even if we don’t like where we are, it’s better than the unknown. When the extermination camps were liberated at the end of WWII, American soldiers were stunned by those who would not leave. It was a place of hell on earth but some were incapable of moving into an uncertain world. The devil we know is better than the devil we don’t.

But isn’t it just like God to call us continually into uncertainty. We don’t like it there and find all kinds of ways to avoid it. The American culture has successfully avoided Advent by moving straight from Thanksgiving to Christmas. We would skip over the period set aside for the reflection needed for growth to get right to the party.

What is the change that Christmas need from us? Christmas assures us of the fundamental goodness of creation. As Christianity developed one of its greatest struggles was with the Gnostic belief that the world and all matter were evil and the goal was to transcend it – to find a way to escape. The idea of God coming to dwell on earth – in human form – was impossible for them to accept. They missed the point of the Nativity. They stayed in their ordinary time – unable to know themselves as a place of hospitality for the Divine. Christmas says that we are the place of miracles. But we must pass through extraordinary time to get there.

Saying goodbye to ordinary time takes practice and work. That is the gift of our yearly cycle of celebrations. We are given the recurring gift of preparing ourselves for something new. Making use of the gift is like the spiritual exercise of prayer and worship – we won’t be any good at it if we don’t practice it. The blessing of being a part of a community of faith, like Faith, is that you have the support and structure to do that.

Even our Anglican liturgy encourages us to practice consciously and intentionally the transitions, the letting go and embrace of the new. Baptism is the proclamation of a congregation that a person, whether an infant or an adult, is now an integral part of the community – to be supported and in whom we live out our promises to pass on traditions and the knowledge of being related and loved. Baptism is always new life for the whole community because you can’t help but be changed when you add something new. We are being made new all of the time around here by many new people who have been drawn to our little church. The Confession of Sins and the proclamation of forgiveness are followed by the passing of the Peace. We are taken from brokenness and separation through forgiveness and then turn to our neighbor and proclaim our restored relationships by making physical contact with another. It is so important to extend that touch to those who are not your family – it’s easy to embrace your spouse or parent – a little more challenging to break through the barriers of politeness and distance to feel the flesh of another – hand in hand and know that this is your neighbor – one given by God for you to love.

In her book Amazing Grace, A Vocabulary of Faith, Kathleen Norris identifies the Sanctus – Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might – as a moment in the liturgy of great importance and a good illustration of the movement from ordinary time to extraordinary time. She says “The Sanctus feels like a door to me, opening onto eternity, where the angels and all the saints sin “Holy, Holy, Holy.” These few simple words are used to break open our world and Christ becomes present, silent in the sacrament.” In the Eucharist we suddenly find ourselves included in the group gathered around the table with Jesus – joined in community and friendship and love with him and with one another. That moment transforms us from I and mine to we and ours.

All of these are examples of moving from ordinary time to extraordinary time. They are reminders of the constant work required of us as followers of Christ. It is called the Way which to me has a sense of movement to it. We are not allowed to stay where we are – but are always called into a deeper experience of knowing ourselves as part of the Body of Christ.

I used to study voice and was blessed with a number of wonderful teachers. One woman, in particular, Mary Hagopian, was the toughest. We would work and work on a particular technique or piece of music and a breakthrough would eventually happen – usually the result of my finally giving up the way I was used to doing something and actually trying what she suggested. As soon as she was satisfied that it wasn’t a fluke and that I had actually learned something, I was not allowed any amount of time to enjoy this accomplishment. We immediately launched into all of the other parts of my voice that would benefit from growth, improvement or exorcism. It was exhausting and I felt under-appreciated – not allowed to rest in that happy place of “Hey look at me, I did it!” Mary’s response was “so what, we’ve got work to do!”

Saying goodbye to ordinary time is to embrace the call to stay on the move. As soon as we have grasped a part of our lives as Christians, Advent comes along again and we are invited to go even deeper. So check your watches and look inside. What kind of ordinary time is God challenging you to release and what glimpse of eternity is being offered to you.