Reconciling the worlds

A sermon for June 21, 2009.

I was a bank teller in a busy downtown branch of City National Bank in Columbus Ohio in my early twenties. It was a really fun job, most of the time. We got to know the regulars, the local businesses, the State Agencies from across the street, the young lawyers in the firms upstairs in the office tower – it was really good for my social life. Most people were very professionaland pleasant. We also cashed a lot of what were known as “blood checks.” The twelve dollars that people got from the nearby lab for selling their blood, fifteen if they had a rare type. We were the nearest bank to that lab and so we were the first stop for these folks in such desperate need of cash. They were a living counter weight to the affluence of the usual clientele.

The part of the day that was the bane of my existence was the final tally - reconciling the drawer. We had to account for the cash in and out and total every check on a big hundred key adding machine all to zero out the drawer. My problem was that I was always out of balance by a factor of nine – evidence that I had transposed number somewhere. Some times it was 45 cents, $81, $720 and even more shocking amounts. I had to spend all kinds of time discovering which transaction was wrongly entered and put it right. It was what I was known for. I was reconciliation challenged.

Then, in my first year in seminary many years, Ron Allen, my professor of New Testament, assigned, as he does every year, for the biggest research paper for his New Testament survey course, today’s passage from II Corinthians – the reconciliation passage. He says that it is the most important passage of the New Testament. Imagine how I felt, reconciliation challenged person that I am! I dutifully camped out at the seminary library, researched, drafted, wrote and rewrote about reconciliation and in the process began to understand why Professor Allen assigned it. “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them…” I grasped it intellectually and academically, earning a perfect grade for my paper. But it still didn’t have that compelling spark of an ‘aha’ moment until Richard Wilbur’s poem set to music as the Christmas hymn A stable lamp is lighted caught my attention. The last verse goes like this…”But now, as at the ending, the low is lifted high; The stars shall bend their voices, and every stone shall cry. And every stone shall cry, in praises of the child by whose descent among us the worlds are reconciled.” The poetry and the tune that first brought it to me lit the spark of understanding. But it truly wasn’t until two weeks ago when I preached about Jesus’ understanding of living in the two worlds at once, this world and the divine world, that a full understanding of II Corinthians finally broke in on me. Fixing this world so it is in balance with the priorities in God’s kingdom is the ministry of reconciliation. Understanding that the world knows us by one set of criteria, the world treats people by one set of priorities, the world chases goals that are its own and none of this matches up to the criteria, the priorities or the purpose of the kingdom of God. Jesus came and showed what a human being that lived the values of the kingdom looks like.

Jesus began his ministry of reconciliation by announcing that this kingdom is here, and then he described it in his stories and his actions. First and foremost, the kingdom is known by its compassion. The Hebrew word for what Jesus was describing is translated often as mercy but it has the heart connection of compassion which means “to suffer with.” Here we understand that God is not indifferent to human suffering. Over and over again the Gospels tell us that Jesus had compassion on those who came to him blind, lame, outcast and afraid and as he healed them he made the kingdom present. He brought the characteristics of the kingdom into this world, through them – in other words, he reconciled the worlds.

The character of the kingdom is peace. The Old Testament prophets provided the descriptions, the peaceable kingdom in which the lion and the lamb sit together, the strong do not prey on the weak, swords are turned into farming implements. So Jesus set about to teach us how to create the peaceable kingdom here. He did it by teaching non-violent resistance which is the powerful way of exposing evil and confronting it without resorting to the violence that only begets more violence. He showed his people how to bring God’s peace through justice into a world that only knew peace through armed oppression. And then he made himself a living example, he didn’t allow his followers to take up arms in his defense and in the story of his arrest in Luke when somebody cuts off a soldier’s ear, he heals it. Jesus made real the God’s compassion, giving hope to the oppressed but also trying to free the oppressors from their bondage to evil. It is God’s will that evil be overcome and those who are its instruments redeemed.

The long Gospel reading from Mark today illustrates these points. These two stories, the calming of the sea and the demons exorcised and sent into the pigs come right after last week’s parables. Many scholars assume that we are to read these as parables also, they have much more meaning if read symbolically rather than stopping at the miraculous event level. The calming of the sea is like God in creation, controlling the waters and separating them to make the earth. The water, particularly stormy water, was known as a place of chaos and in God’s kingdom, there is no chaos so Jesus made the stormy sea into still waters. The demons named Legion that occupied the unfortunate Gentile were the same ones that occupied Israel. They are the demonic power of domination, the kind that Rome and all unjust systems exert on those without power. By casting the demons into the sea, the world is rid of them and the worlds are reconciled, at least in that place for the moment.
There is a real little gem in the reconciliation passage that can flit by unnoticed and that is that when we are reconciled to God, all is forgiven. What does that mean? I don’t think it’s as simple as saying, “Yes, I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and it’s all done for me.” It means being like him and accepting that the kingdom is real and in our midst. Once you have been opened to the kingdom of compassion and peace, you are changed, you can no longer be an instrument of indifference or oppression. God’s compassion lives through you as it did through Jesus. You become the prayer of St. Francis. The prayer evolves from “Lord, make an instrument of your peace” to “I am an instrument of your peace, where there is hatred, I sow love, where there is injury, I forgive, where there is despair I bring hope.” When you live that, nothing you have done before matters for you are reconciled to God. As in Christ, in you the worlds are reconciled.

Parables - standing in both worlds

The first sermon for Ordinary Time, 2009 (June 14th)

God was perplexed. He had made such a beautiful universe and that little gem of a planet, that blue and green marble, was a particularly fine piece of work. It all said something about what and why God is. It was such a special place that it needed watching over and so God had created that human vessel to be the ones he could count on. He had even breathed something extra into them. On some days he worried that that experiment wasn’t going as well as he had intended. Humans were proving to be a head-strong lot but once having given them the freedom of their own minds, what could he do?

After much thought and a good night’s sleep, God had a plan – an Outreach Plan. He would select a group of them and make a real effort to be closer to them. Maybe when they got to know him a little bit better and see what he was trying to accomplish, they would work better together and as the word would spread, eventually others would want to join in.. But which people to pick? He sent out a memo.
The first people to present themselves to God were fierce warriors. They said, “We are the strongest and fastest people on earth. No one can withstand our might. We can win your battles for you.” God raised the divine eyebrows and said, “Thank you, I think.”

The next people to come brought drawings and said, “We are the best builders on earth. Our cities are without equal; look at these urban layout concepts. As a builder yourself, you can see that we already think alike. We’re the right choice for you.” God said, “Interesting.”

Another group came in and brought examples of their produce, grains and fruits and vegetables. “We are the best farmers on earth, we can make things grow in places even you didn’t think of. If you want to reach a big audience, we’re your best bet because, well, you know, people gotta eat!” God said, “I’ll get back to you.”

Finally, all of the peoples of the world had made their cases to God, but one, a small raggedy group of people still waited. They came in, somewhat hesitantly, for they had heard all of those before them. They said, “We are a small people, we are not warriors, we live in our tents and wander around so we’ve never built anything. We’ve never grown anything because we don’t stay long in one place so we have nothing to show you. But what we do have is our stories, lots of them, and they are good stories.” At that God sat up straight and looked over this small ratty, bare footed, band of wanderers and said, “You will be my people and I will be your God, because I love stories. Let’s get to know each other.”

What makes a good story? In his book Storytelling; Imagination and Faith, William Bauch says there are four characteristics of a good story. First, stories provoke curiosity and compel repetition. You know that when you hear a good story, you cannot help but turn around and tell it to someone else. Bauch says that a good story is like a secret, a secret that is impossible to keep to oneself.

Second, stories unite us in a holistic way to nature, our common stuff of existence. From American Indian lore to Tolkein to George Lucas, good stories connect us in some way to our elemental beginning. The stories of our faith in the book of Genesis are perfect examples.

The third characteristic of a good story is that it provides a bridge to one’s culture, one’s roots. George Washington probably didn’t fess up to cutting down a cherry tree, but it’s a good story about the ideal of honesty and integrity in leadership. Paul Bunyan probably didn’t really have a blue ox for a friend, but his story is about the strength it took to settle a wild country. These stories give us our identity as Americans.

The last characteristic of a good story is that it binds us to all of humankind, to the universal, human family. With Joshua tumbling the walls of Jericho and Red Riding Hood confronting the big bad wolf, we learn how to address the fears and limitations of our human condition. From Romeo and Juliet to Jesus, the best stories tell of love so great that we will die for it.

Jesus was a storyteller, and he particularly liked to use a special kind of story known as a parable. Our reading today is from the 4th chapter of the Gospel of Mark which introduces his use of parables as his way of teaching people about God and the Kingdom of God. Marcus Borg says in his book Jesus, “..Jesus was a teacher of wisdom. Wisdom is not about knowledge or information…(but) focuses on the most central questions of life.” He taught about the character of God and what it is like in that other world that exists in the midst of our everyday life – the unseen Kingdom of God that I talked about last week. He taught people how to see and live in that unseen world.
That’s why he used parables, because they are stories that live in both worlds at once. The word parable means to “to throw along side.” So what Jesus is doing is throwing the two worlds down together for us to see and understand how they reflect two different sets of priorities.

He begins with very real images, “the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed.” That line gives us all four characteristics of a good story, but here is the twist added by the parable—for the farming community, mustard is an anathema – it is a weed that will spread faster than wildfire, and for the primarily agrarian audience Jesus was addressing, this parable must have been a little unsettling. “You’ve got to hear what Jesus said today. What on earth is he thinking?” Well, what he was thinking was that this story centered on nature, the land, and the “weeds” of Roman control that had grown up all around them. In one simple little parable, Jesus tells a story with all the four major elements William Bauch alluded too, with its connection to nature, the culture of land, the history of Jewish enslavement in Egypt, and the issue unifying all of them – how to survive on the land after having had lost control of their farms to the Romans, who were taking most of the produce. Oh the power in the little story of the little mustard seed.

What Jesus’ parables show more than anything is that in the unseen Kingdom of God that Jesus describes, things often look upside down. The farmers in his audience would immediately have recognized the mustard seed a menace, and the analogy of the weed it grows into as the evil of Roman control of their land and lives would be straightforward. But in Jesus’ parable that lowly mustard seed and its resulting voracious weed becomes a thing of wonder and beauty. If such a weed is glorified so is every discarded and dismissed oppressed person in the world, and so the parable causes us to wonder if the other things that the world hates might also be divinity in disguise. The parable not only reminds us that the Kingdom of God has different priorities than the material world of land and weeds, but it calls us to think long and hard about the things that the world does value.

I wanted to find a modern equivalent of the mustard seed that would give you the same level of discomfort as the farmers in Jesus’ audience must have experienced, so here is what I came up with…The Kingdom of Heaven is like a computer virus. Well, I bet I fit the first criterion of a good story and got your attention. And certainly, this parable breaks into the mainstream of our culture. A computer virus will break in on you despite your carefully constructed firewalls and anti-virus software programs. It can rob you of time, even take some of your work, and perhaps even cost you some money to repair the havoc it can wreak. It can even sober you to the realities of how much you rely on a machine for your well being in the world.

One of the things we know about computer viruses is that there will always be another one trying to breach our defenses and that’s the good news of the Kingdom of Heaven, which will break in and scramble your defenses and leave you vulnerable to the power of compassion and love.

Don’t you just love a good story?

Seeing Anew

A sermon for Trinity Sunday, June 7, 2009

I have never been particularly drawn to this portion of John’s Gospel (3:1-16) partly because it has been used as a kind of litmus-test, bull-horn theology that shouts “do this or don’t do that or you can’t have the goodies awaiting you in heaven”. I really dislike that kind of gospel spin and so I found myself prepared to dismiss this passage on Holy Trinity Sunday, but it just wouldn’t let me. Maybe the Holy Spirit of Pentecost was still hanging around talking to me: “Open up, it’s good for you.”

So I pulled down my commentaries on the Gospel of John and started to do my homework. Dr. D. Moody Smith from Duke University gave me a helpful piece of information on how to interpret the idea of being born again. The Greek word anothen has two meanings – being born anothen can mean either again or anew or it can mean from above. Of course, from above is a way of saying “from God.” I wish it were also translated “from within” but I’m not going to quibble because I found myself getting excited about this passage. If being born means to begin living outside of the womb and seeing beyond the small confines of your previous existence, to be reborn in spiritual terms must also be about an expanded way of living and seeing. Without this rebirth the Kingdom of Heaven in our midst remains unknown.

Jesus was trying to give people a glimpse of what it meant to see life as he saw it. Marcus Borg, as usual, has helped clarify what that might mean. In his book Jesus, Borg refers to Jesus as a Jewish mystic and he defines a mystic as someone who has “experiential knowledge of God” and he defines a mystical experience as a “nonordinary state of consciousness marked above all by a sense of union and illumination, of reconnection and seeing anew.” The pieces were coming together with Jesus’ words from today’s Gospel.

Mystics, particularly powerful ones like Jesus, understand that we are living in two different places at the same time. He lived in Palestine, he walked on the dusty roads, got rocks in his sandals, he looked for work, he ate with his friends, he was very clear about the realities of the world around him with its hunger and misery. But he also lived in the Kingdom of Heaven in which everything around him radiated with the presence of the sacred, he heard God’s voice in the events of his life, he saw evidence of God’s desire in the love between friends, in simple act of sharing a meal, in people’s hunger for hope. In such a place, everything is holy; everything has meaning and old pain is already healed.

William James was a great student and philosopher of religion. Over 100 years ago he published his classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience – it has been continuously in print ever since. His description of the kind of experiences that Jesus had is spot on for us to understand this living in two places at once. When you suddenly see this Kingdom of Heaven, as it shines through ordinary sight, you move from secondhand religion, which is based on what you hear from someone else, to firsthand religion which comes from your own experience of what James called “more,” Jesus swam in the “more” and invites us to wade in with him.

Jesus said to Nicodemus (using The Message because it’s clearer), “I give witness to only what I have seen with my own eyes. There is nothing secondhand here, no hearsay. Yet instead of facing the evidence and accepting it, you procrastinate with questions. If I tell you things that are plain as the hand before your face and you don’t believe me, what use is there telling you of the things you can’t see, the things of God?” Hence the need to be born anew, to begin living so that you can see both worlds at the same time.

Nicodemus is like the brother-in-law in the movie Field of Dreams. Ray Kinsella (played by Kevin Costner) has built the baseball field in the middle of his corn and long gone baseball players have stepped through the veil and are playing their beloved game once again. Ray and his wife Annie and daughter Karen and their friend author Terrance Mann can see them because they believe in them. Meanwhile, the brother-in-law sits right there and can’t see them. He thinks they have lost their minds and they will soon lose the farm. It’s not until one of the players steps off the field of dreams to save Karen when she chokes on a hotdog that this parallel world breaks through to the blind brother in law. He looks around in astonishment, sees the players on the field and says “Hey, where did they come from? Do not sell this farm!” Up to that point, nothing that Ray and Annie had said could convince him, he wasn’t prepared to believe in something more.

So Jesus says, “even if you don’t see it, I do; believe in me.” This brings us back around to the difference between believing that something happened, or that someone said something and the power of believing in something or someone. When we proclaim that we believe in Jesus Christ, we are not affirming the details of his birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension. We are saying that we believe in what he helps us see. We are proclaiming that we perceive trustworthiness in him and therefore we trust him to be telling Truth when he says that God’s kingdom is already here and you can see it if you let yourself.

For those who have not been blessed with mystical experiences, those moments when religion becomes first-hand, we must take on faith and trust the one who tells us of the things that we cannot yet see. But what we can also do is to assume that this parallel world is very real indeed and keep our eyes peeled for glimmers of it. We can also absorb it in the experiences of others as they describe the different ways in which such wonders become visible.

One such experience is found in the poetry of Antonio Machado, one of Spain’s most celebrated poets. This translation by Robert Bly is found in a little book called ten poems to change your life. In it, it is said that “what mattered to Machado was the deep current that joins the human soul to the world. What mattered above all was to be awake to that deeper life.” Read Machado's poem here.

Dreams that tell you something too marvelous to be true; startling moments, when the colors of the world are so vivid that you can hear them; an unexpected sensation of being in love with everything and being loved back by it – these are the glimpses of eternal life that Jesus came to reveal. Look around in wonder and see heaven and believe in it.