A Mindset of Love

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal Church on May 2, 2010

We continue our skipping around in time courtesy of the Gospel of John. Today we revisit the Gospel reading heard every Maundy Thursday – Jesus has washed the feet of his disciples, much to their discomfort – it is so unseemly and humble a task for someone they look up to. I’ll bet that there were some thought along the line of – do I want to be known as a follower someone who does the menial work of a servant? The reason that Jesus did the work of a servant was, of course, to teach them something new. “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” I doubt that that helped them to feel any more comfortable – after all, he equated washing someone’s feet to love. How would they do that?

Oddly enough, it was the voice of Clint Eastwood, in one of his most iconic roles that clarified things for me. And no, Jesus didn’t say “Go ahead, make my day.” I was thinking of him as the man with no name in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. As he and Eli Wallach, who played the Ugly, reached the place where gold they were seeking had been buried Clint, in his usual sardonic style said, “There are two kinds of people in the world, those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.”
It’s surprising true how often things are neatly put into one of two categories. I even found a website dedicated to cataloging such pithy observations. There are two kinds of people in the world: Pessimists and Optimists; those who make things complicated, and those who make things simple.
“There are two kinds of people in the world – those who walk into a room and say, ‘There you are!’ – and those who say, ‘Here I am!’ ”
There are two types of vessels on the sea - submarines and targets.
There are three kinds of people in the world, those who are good at math and those who aren’t.

Dr. Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford has a really important addition to these categories. In her book Mindset; The New Psychology of Success she describes the two basic mindsets that appear to be fairly universal. She came to identify these as mindsets after an experiment involving children and some challenging puzzles. Some of the kids were excited when they had to work to figure things out, and getting it wrong was just part of the learning process. Her first thought was, “What’s wrong with them?” It appeared that these kids “knew that human qualities such as intellectual skills, could be cultivated through effort. And that’s what they were doing – getting smarter. Nor only weren’t they discouraged by failure, they didn’t even think they were failing. They thought they were learning.
I (meaning Dr. Dweck), on the other hand, thought human qualities were carved in stone. You were smart or you weren’t and failure meant you weren’t. It was that simple. If you could arrange successes and avoid failures (at all costs), you could stay smart. Struggles, mistakes and perseverance were just not part of this picture.”

Dr. Dweck has taken this observation and identified it all in areas of life. She calls them the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. Children, who are constantly told that they are smart and that things come to them naturally, tend to be of the fixed mindset. Those who are praised for the effort that they put into something develop the growth mindset and the implications are huge. The naturally gifted (and so repeatedly identified as such) children tend not do well when they come up against something that they have trouble with. They often give up or cheat when they might fail at something. She gives the examples of a couple of young Pulitzer Prize winning journalists. Very early in their careers they produces their winning stories which later turned out to have been made up – they could not give themselves time to learn on the job – they had to prove that they perfect or they were nothing.
This phenomenon shows up clearly with athletes. John McEnroe was naturally gifted – he was the best because he had the best skills – he didn’t have to work at it. The problems came when he wasn’t doing well – he turned into John McEnroe – throwing tantrums, blaming everyone and everything – mostly being terrified and unhappy. He thought that his talent was a fixed thing – it was what it was and nothing could change it. Michael Jordan on the other hand – equally gifted physically rose to the top and stayed there because he believed that he could always be getting better. No one worked harder than he did. The older and slower he got, the harder he worked on other aspects of his game and remained great. Losing a game was simply something that showed him what he needed to work on.

These mindsets are present in our ideas about love. Dr. Dweck did a lot of interviewing of people about relationships and everyone had a story about having been dumped. The follow up questions gave evidence of how people approached such a painful experience. As with sports, some folks believed that love was a fixed thing and if it was real, it should never need to be work on. She said, “When people had the fixed mindset, they felt judged and labeled by the rejections. Permanently labeled. It was as though a verdict had been handed down and branded on their foreheads: UNLOBABLE! And they lashed out.” Dr. Dweck noted, however, that people with a growth mindset have little taste for vengeance. For them such experiences are about understanding, forgiving, and moving on. “Although they were often deeply hurt by what happened, they wanted to learn from it.

So what does this have to do with Jesus commandment to love one another as he loved us? We have to ask ourselves some questions here – first, do we think that love is something that is it either there or not? Do we automatically know how to do or can we learn it, can we get better at it? No surprise here, I believe that it is the latter. In fact there may be few things for which we all have to put effort in like this one. It is hard; it seems contrary to all of our survival impulses. In a culture that describes success as being better than someone or everyone else this will not be natural to most of us. It was hard for Jesus’ disciples to see nobility in a task consigned to society’s losers.

This love as Jesus described it is not an emotion it’s a mindset, it’s a decision with follow through that we can learn. To do so will take as much practice as learning any new skill. The important thing will be the mindset that we have about this Christian love. I invite you to see it as an adventure in growing spiritually that will bring you to places of unimagined peace and satisfaction. We can all become better Christians – the Kingdom of Love is certainly worth the effort.

Telling it in six words

A sermon preached on April 11, 2010.

Smith Magazine is the on-line home of the ‘six word memoir’ project. A couple of years ago, I pulled an article out of the LATimes about it and stuck it in my “sermon idea” folder. The article said that legend has it Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write a novel in six words. What he came up with was, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Inspired, Larry Smith decided to challenge people to write their own story in six words and he was bowled over by the response. So he decided to start the online magazine and primed the pump with a couple celebrity offerings: Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love wrote “Me see world! Me write stories!”, and celebrity chef Mario Batali submitted “Brought to a boil, often!” I was hooked, so I read more of the entries from ordinary folk like you and me.

Here are a few I particularly liked. “Wasn’t born a redhead; fixed that.” “Became my mother. Please shoot me.” There were a few off beat, funny ones, too, like: “One tooth, one cavity, life’s cruel.” “Put whole self in, shoot about.” “It’s pretty high. You go first.” “Should not have eaten those mushrooms.”
Still others were more existential; “My second grade teacher was right.” “Took scenic route, got in late.” Finally, there were some that were very poignant and Hemingwayesque, “Was father, boys died, still sad.”

Of course, today we are talking about Thomas, so in the spirit of Smith Magazine, I decided to think of what his six word saga might be. Here is what I came up with: “Must see to believe. My God!”

I found myself thinking about Thomas for a couple of weeks leading up to Easter. Every preacher knows he’s coming on this Sunday and after a while, it’s hard to find anything new to say about him. But interestingly, this little Hemingway exercise did get me focused on a new thought, and I began to wonder if Thomas really doubted Jesus. Perhaps he was not responding at all to the notion that Jesus might have risen from the dead but was merely reacting to the messengers themselves, whose credibility he might have found suspect. After all, it could be argued that they all shared the same six word biography, “I’ll follow you, till it’s hard”.

That got me to thinking about the larger question of just who all Jesus’ disciples were and the roles they played in his story. First there is his mother Mary, about whom we might write, “Curtain torn made mother to all”. And Peter, who was “Impetuous and afraid, forgiven, a Rock”. But there is also Mary Magdalen, “Cured and accepted, loved and devoted.” Are these not our stories too?

Perhaps by the end of the sermon, you will have thought what your own six word biography might be, but whatever it is, I venture it will contain at least one of the aforementioned elements. I strongly suspect, for example, that each one of us has a major event wherein we struggled mightily about whether to believe something that someone important had told us. Perhaps it was a parent, whose admonition you naturally took to heart, even as a part of you was not convinced you should believe what you were being told. Or perhaps it was a priest, or a teacher, or a mentor. We are called by God to be people of great discernment, to be loving, caring, and moral, and that requires that sometimes we question what we are being told, we wonder about someone’s credibility, we search in earnest for what we believe to be the truth. And as always, I encourage you to do that with anything I say as well!!
What about Mother Mary, Peter, and Mary Magdalene? Surely, in some way, at some time, each of us has the fabric of our lives torn, as Mary did sitting at the foot of the Cross. Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell of the curtain in the Temple being torn from top to bottom at the moment of Jesus’ death. This curtain is described in the 1st Book of Kings as this mighty linen panel that closed off the Holy of Holies – the inner sanctuary that only the high priest could enter, once a year. God dwelt in the Holy of Holies. The Roman historian Josephus noted that it was four inches thick and could not be pulled apart by horses attached to each corner. Josephus also described is having the image of the heavens on it. For this curtain to be torn by the death of Jesus frames that moment as a cosmic upheaval. The heavens were torn as they were at his baptism – something new was beginning. Obi Wan would have called it a huge disturbance in the force.

These are the moments that define our lives. When the fabric of our being is ripped in two, to the point that we thought it could not be repaired, and yet, as symbolized by Christ’s resurrection, do we not all see that the curtain is restored, not only restored but remade, re-imagined in such a way as to make it more than it was. Mary the Mother and Mary the friend were both remade at Easter.

And Peter, good old Peter, I know he resides in all of us. We know we are afraid, we know we are all forgiven for the times we allow our fear to govern our behavior, but I suspect we are not all equally convinced that we are “the Rock”. Yet this is precisely what I think Jesus was trying to tell us in his response to Peter. In Peter, the prototype of the fallible human, all of us are the Rock upon which the Church, that colony of Heaven, is built. It is only when we forget that and think we are human beings that we allow fear to control us, and for that we are forgiven, even as we are forever encouraged to remember our spiritual heritage.

And last but not least, we are Mary Magdalene, cured and accepted, devoted, and loved. We don’t speak of Grace too often in the Episcopal Church, but occasionally it is good to be reminded of God’s Grace. There is nothing we can do that can separate us from God, and if we ask forgiveness for having wandered away, we are given it. Above all, we are loved unconditionally.

So back to our good friend Thomas and the good news of the day. This is not about some fallen down skeptic, another case of a disciple we hoped might have done better failing to live up to our expectations. This is about each one of us and our responsibility to live in discernment, knowing that we will encounter gut wrenching loss in our lives, knowing we will sometimes let fear get the better of us, and knowing that we have done things we are not proud of but for which we have been forgiven. This is about becoming the Rock upon which Christ builds his Church, every day, because we know we are made of the same stuff he is. This is about questioning what others tell us, or what we even think ourselves sometimes, that does not jive with who Christ calls us to be, capable of great things.

Bare feet on holy ground

A sermon preached at Faith on March 7, 2010.

This morning’s reading from Exodus is one of the most thematically rich passages in the Bible. I could probably preach a different sermon from it every Sunday for about three months. When I first read it this week, the thing that jumped out at me was “take off your shoes, you’re on holy ground.” In an instant a whole tapestry images and song lyrics swirled around me. Two of my favorite women singer-song writers, Carrie Newcomer and Mary Black have songs called Holy Ground. So I hummed for a while and enjoyed their take on holy ground. But in the middle of my musical reverie I realized that the soles of my feet were tingling and I knew why the voice from the burning bush said, “remove the sandals from your feet.” When we find holy ground, we need to get everything else out of the way – anything that comes between that thin place and our skin. We are invited to step onto those places in which the divine shines through with nothing to interrupt or muffle the experience. Moses did it and his life was changed. Once his feet came into contact with that holiness he communed with God. He learned what God wanted of him, how he was to do it and apprehended, in a somewhat cryptic way, what God is. Holy ground is the place of heightened awareness and knowing.

The problem for us is that this is Moses, star of Cecil B DeMille and Disney blockbusters and his encounter with God was way beyond the normal so how can we relate to it. Well, I want to share my holy ground/burning bush experience. It’s much more mundane. Some of you have probably heard this before, but it’s a good story. It begins in November 1992. On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, a tornado ripped through northeastern Indianapolis and the neighborhood of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church where my family and I had been active members for about fifteen years. I had just rotated off of the Vestry on which I had served as the first woman Junior Warden, which meant that I had been responsible for the building and knew how it responded to storms. I had also just completed the installation of new stained glass windows. The next morning, when I couldn’t get anyone on the phone, I decided to go and see what was going on for myself. What I saw as I drove down Emerson Avenue was shocking; it looked like the disaster it was, although mercifully contained. I would learn later that 200 homes had been damaged, 50 completely destroyed and those were mostly within a three block radius of the church. I was worried until I saw the familiar A frame structure of the church I loved so well. When I went into the church I saw that St. Alban’s had indeed escaped wrath of the tornado; the power was even back on. Fr. David Musgrave was there but was heading out to drive to Illinois to bring his daughter home for Thanksgiving. He had told the church secretary not to come in so after he left, I was there by myself checking the windows and the usual places that the roof leaked. Everything was ok, although the phone was ringing off the hook. I answered a few calls and was ready to continue on with my plans for the day. I was just about to lock the door when Dave Carlson, a volunteer fireman and member of the congregation walked up and said “Sharon, if you lock this church, there are no working bathrooms in the neighborhood.” Believe it or not, that was my “take off your shoes, you’re on holy ground” moment. And that’s not something that I know in hindsight – I knew it in that instant because I felt it. I literally felt a shimmer of energy run through my body, my arms were tingling, all the way down to my hand that held the key. All I could do was say, “OK, I’ll stay and keep the church open.” Soon, there was a steady stream of workmen in muddy boots tracking across the carpeting of the narthex on the way to bathroom. The phone continued to ring off the hook. By the end of the day, the Mayor was involved and with the help of his Assistant for Public Safety, the neighborhood was invited to the church for dinner. I had mentioned in a conversational kind of way as Mayor Goldsmith and I were standing across the street in the mud looking at the mess created by Mother Nature that the neighborhood was going to need a good clean up. When he showed up at the church for dinner that night, the first thing he said to me was, “so, how are plans going for the clean up?” I looked at him and said “Great!”
The Holy Spirit is often depicted as strong wind. First we had the real tornado and then I was caught up in a spirit whirlwind. By the end of week, a massive clean up took place, and one of the people who showed up to help was Bishop Ted Jones and as he signed in to work, I realized, “Ooo, he’s knows who I am now, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.” Sure enough, soon I had been appointed to chair the diocesan Social Concerns Commission and one thing led to another and here I am, Lord! Holy Ground is not just on a mountaintop with a burning bush; it is wherever and whenever the divine shines through the haze of daily living. It does require something of us – it requires that we stop what we are doing and pay attention. We must allow it to touch us by taking off our shoes or our blinders or how we’ve always thought of something and be ready for something different. Now what’s different doesn’t necessarily mean that you head off to Egypt to free the slaves or end up going to seminary. Once touch by holiness you might simply find yourselves less anxious, more loving, more able to forgive, more interested in what you can do for others and if you say yes to that and give it your attention holy ground will be wherever you step.

I’ve been reading one of Peter’s books – this one is about what makes our genes work and as I’m reading this book, I frequently let out an “Oh wow!” Here’s a simple yet profound finding that is such a holy ground moment; AIDS patients that believe in a loving God as opposed to an angry punishing God, have lower levels of the virus in their blood and higher T-cell counts. Apparently, encountering a loving holy ground brings you health. The electro-magnetic field of love grows healthy things in you and can even undo chronic, incurable disease.

The implications for this and what we think and do are like standing in the presence of that burning bush. In an instant we know how important teaching God’s true nature of love is, not just for us but for those in need of the good news. There is such meanness done in the name of God and some supposed morality that many people are permanently damaged by it. There are those connected to this congregation yet not fully engaged in it because of the echoes of what was drummed into them as children – you are a sinner and God will judge you harshly for any number of things and where is the good news in that.

We are the stewards of holy ground. That means first, that there is something for us to learn and to integrate as a part of us. Then, as faithful, creative stewards, we live it and teach it with our lives and set others free.

So, I guess we’re all Moses after all. So take your shoes off and let the warmth of God’s love touch you and begin works of wonder.

The wine of love

A sermon preached at Faith on January 17th, 2010.

The history of Haiti is not a happy one. Western understanding of the island begins in 1492 when Columbus stumbled upon the island that he named La Isla Espanola or Hispanola. Bartolomeo Columbus, brother of Chris, was left to found a colony for Spain which led to the near extinction of the native people, through diseases for which they had no immunity and an incomplete recognition of their humanity.
Spain’s interest in the island waned as gold and other riches were discovered elsewhere in the Americas. To protect the remaining inhabitants from pirates, everyone moved close to the city of Santo Domingo on the eastern end of the island which is now the Dominican Republic. Unfortunately, that left the western side, that part which is now Haiti, available to be taken over by pirates. Not an auspicious development.

In 1664 the French West India Company took over the settlement, named it St. Dominique and began the cultivation of tobacco, indigo, cotton and cacao which was accomplished by slaves shipped in from Africa. Nearly a third of all slaves brought to the Americas were put to work in the fields of St. Dominique, eventually totaling somewhere around 780,000. The conditions were so bad that the plantations needed a constant supply of replacements, sometimes 40,000 a year.

Slave revolts were frequent. After the French Revolution, the slaves were freed, sort of. The next hundred years were filled with even more treachery and suffering for the native and black residents. An army of former slaves eventually defeated Napoleon’s forces and in 1804 independence was declared and promptly celebrated with the slaughter of the remaining 2000 French residents. There followed decades of revolts and coups but finally in 1874 a workable constitution was ratified and a period of peace and prosperity arrived. Haitian culture blossomed and thrived. But during the 20th century, coups and dictators were the norm culminating in Papa Doc Duvalier and his son Baby Doc. It seems that every time hope dares to raise its head in Haiti, it’s like a game of Whack-a-mole. Hope is beat down, if not by greedy politicians then by hurricanes and now earthquake. Recently the drug trade has taken up residence in Haiti, agriculture is no more, the people survive on foreign remittances and aid. What little progress had been made since the last coup in 2004, thanks to the focused efforts of the UN and the world’s NGOs, is now buried in the rubble.

If Haiti seems to be that place where Pandora’s box was opened and spilled all of the ills of human sin, it is also right now the place where, once again, hope is arriving on a variety of wings. The list of nations sending help is heartening, heartening in that we can put down our dukes for long enough to give a hand to a neighbor. This morning we heard the litany of the gifts of the spirit in the letter to the Corinthians. Well in Port au Prince in the last three days, we have had a different list being read. To some are given the gift of strength to lift fallen slabs of concrete, to others the keen nose of a rescue dog. To others the gift of ingenuity to overcome the obstacles of ruined roads and collapsed bridges. To others an engineer’s eye to dig in and shore up and rescue. Still to others is the skill of mending broken limbs and torn flesh. To many is given the gift of patience to sit and sing until help arrives. To many others is given the spirit of generosity by text and twitter and collection plate. And to many more is given the spirit of compassion and tears and prayer. We are all part of the body that is reaching out to help and to heal. Every American is contributing and represented by the planes and ships full of soldiers and marines and aid workers. In this moment, the world is saying to Haiti, “we are here with you and your suffering matters to us.

Port au Prince is as far from a wedding celebration as we could possibly imagine so it was hard to even contemplate today’s Gospel reading. But there are some things about this first miracle of Jesus that can help us in times like these. The wedding at Cana is a most curious story that offers as many questions as it does answers. Right before this story Jesus promises to his disciples that they are going to see great things that speak of God’s glory which is to be revealed by and in Jesus. Interestingly, this story has an undercurrent of tension. It starts with Jesus’ mother apparently expecting him to do something about the problem of no wine half way through the wedding festivities. Of course, this is not to be taken as a supply problem. It is her invitation to Jesus to do what only he can do. He’s not particularly acquiescent, in fact he somewhat rebukes her, saying that it’s not for her to determine the timing of his work. And yet he goes and does it anyway but in a very subtle way. There is nothing flashy about this miracle. He takes the water in large stone jars, the means of ritual cleanliness and purification, and turns it into the wine of celebration. Also of interest, he does not do it so that anyone except his disciples notice it. The wine is turned over to the wine steward and he is amazed at the quality and does not know from whence it came. The party goes on and the miraculous wine flows freely. We are left to wonder about the people who drank that wine. Were they changed by it? In his commentary on the Gospel of John, catholic theologian Gerard Sloyan wrote about what the author of the fourth gospel was doing as he wrote this long after Easter and the birth of the church. He says, “John knows from the experience of years now that to believe in Jesus as the Christ is to live a life within a life. Nothing is changed but everything is changed. What had been water is wine. Word has become flesh. An hour that has not yet come is here…What will be is. What seemed to be is no more.”

What Jesus brings us changes every part of human life. In the course of his public preaching, Jesus redefined every relationship. He redefined marriage from a relationship of power to one of equality; he redefined neighbor – no longer just those we know and like but now even those we despise. He redefined family, no longer just his mother and brothers and sisters but now the whole Body of Christ. He redefined the outcast as those redeemed and reborn in their communities. He redefined peace from the product of imperial might to the product of justice. He redefined the relationship between humanity and divinity. But just as no one noticed the miracle in Cana, we have been slow to live the changes he brought.

While Mother Nature is not, God is frustratingly subtle in our lives. I enjoyed greatly a conversation with some of the inquiring minds of our newest youth group. Mateo wondered why God doesn’t just spit it out for us, just talk to us and tell us what is what and what to do. Wouldn’t that be nice? I told him that I believe that the divine wisdom is just that, wise. We must come to God on our own not because we are forced or scared into it. Real faith, real spiritual growth comes from responding to the invitation so gently and persistently offered.

And then sometimes it is offered in painful, dramatic fashion. We are presented with the suffering of others and everything we have tried to learn about love suddenly becomes real. We realize in a moment that they are not strange or strangers. They are our family. They are us and we reach out because we cannot stop ourselves. Without realizing it, we have been changed from the water of duty into the wine of love.

Christmas - it's a mystery!

A sermon preached at Faith on Christmas Eve, 2009.

It wasn’t a Christmas movie, but the Best Picture from 1999, Shakespeare in Love, got me through last week. In it, Geoffrey Rush played the theater owner who was attempting to put on a new play from Will Shakespeare, which turned out to be a little known piece called Romeo and Juliet. In the story, Rush’s character seemed to always be just one step away from disaster and when anyone asked him how something in the theater was going to possibly work out – he would always reply, “I don’t know – it’s a mystery!” And what made Rush’s character so compelling was that he seemed to revel in the unknown, the possibility of being surprised by the end result that he could not possibly have foreseen.

I found myself embracing this statement of faith as the planning of our Christmas week loomed. So many of our families had taken advantage of the full week off of school and gone away that we knew we were going to be a little thin casting the Christmas pageant; our annual women’s brunch had only half of the number of women signed up to come and those who had were dropping like flies due to flu, unexpected travel and assorted circumstances. Our flower guild was stressed by the loss of some ready hands at this busy time of year, the choir was struggling with the syncopated rhythms of one of the pieces for tonight and then last Friday night at the pageant rehearsal, our director called in sick. Disaster was gaining on me. Then the full impact hit when we realized that the oldest girl available for the pageant was 3 years old. She would be our Mary but every time I referred to her as Mary, she emphatically told me that her name was Raine, not Mary. The oldest cast member was six. When I finally got home, exhausted and wondering how we were going to pull this off, Geoffrey Rush popped into my head – “it’s a mystery!” In that moment, I decided that I was going to completely trust in the mysterious ways of Christmas and I’ve not been disappointed.

The Women’s Brunch was delightful – great food, the cut-throat gift exchange was its most riotous and fun. The choir is in fine form, the flowers are beautiful and the pageant was one for the ages. We began with the revolt of the angels – the boys who thought that “angel” sounded cool changed their minds when they discovered that the costumes were decidedly girly. So a quick change into shepherd garb. In the spirit of the mystery one of our girls showed up and was slapped into Angel of the Lord costume. Her sidekick angel was only two and pretty much frozen in place because she was stepping on the front hem of her dress and unable to move. Max the Churchdog made his triumphant reprise as the flock of sheep and every other bit of livestock. Mr. Vicar had to stand as Goliath to be slain by David. The shepherds were right to be afraid as the stand-in Angel of the Lord was clearly not happy; she stood there with her arms crossed and a scowl on her face refusing to share good news. And then Joseph showed up in Bethlehem alone. When I said, “Hey Cooper, you forgot Mary.” We heard from the back of the church, “She doesn’t want to come!” Our Mary finally arrived, not on a donkey, but in her mother’s arms. At any rate, it all worked out, mysteriously but it has let us all proclaim with assurance that here at Faith, Christ was born to Raine!

2009 has been a really tough year by anyone’s standards. People have been unemployed for way too long, too many have lost their homes and some have lost hope. If there were ever a time for glad tidings and great joy, it would be now. However, we look around and see that it is still a mean world but Christmas says that meanness does not triumph. In Los Angeles Mirna Gonzalez had saved her change all year to be able to have some money for Christmas for her sons. She took the jar and went to the change machine – it totaled $620. But before she could even put the money in her purse – she was robbed. She turned to an organization called MEND – Meeting Every Need with Dignity. She saw just that. People who were worse off than she was, all struggling with needing to ask for help. The staff was so kind to everyone that Mirna was determined to help them. So she made lunch; enchiladas, taquitos, beans, and a flan enough for 25 people and took it by. The staff was moved to tears. An LA Times reporter heard about the story and wrote it on her blog. The community’s response became the page two column on Tuesday. Her generosity triggered the generosity of others and we all had our hearts lifted a bit. How did it all come together? It’s a mystery.

But there is more mystery in this night than people moved to generosity. It is the mystery of the incarnation – that intersection of the human and the divine in the infant we celebrate tonight, that living idea of God. We don’t need to know exactly how those two different things fit into one, all we need to know is that love now has a face. And in the way of good mysteries, that face is revealed in each and every face. I don’t understand the incarnation to mean that God was not in the world before Jesus. But this little light of the world has helped us to see it. Because of Christmas, the divine in the world, in you and in me has been drawn out of the shadows cast by meanness and indifference. It is no wonder that so many of Jesus’ healing miracles involved restoring sight to the blind. Through him we can all see the each other clearly and recognize ourselves as family.

We have been invited into this Christ way of living for 2000 years. I don’t know if God thought we were going to catch on quickly or not. The meanness of the world has not yet been overcome and it is here that I need the voice of Geoffery Rush the most because quite honestly, I don’t see how it’s going to work out. I don’t know that is going to stop us from hurting each other. I don’t know what is going to make the suffering of others unacceptable to us. I have no idea how we are ever going to learn self-sacrifice. But it doesn’t matter if I don’t know because God does.
Christmas tells me that God is not content to let us stumble around in the dark, snarling when we bump into each other. I don’t have to know how we are all going to figure it out one day. It’s a mystery and I’m fine with that.

A Colony of Heaven

A sermon for Faith on October 11, 2009

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” That’s a pretty big question from the rich young man in today’s gospel reading from Mark. I wonder what he was really asking. Was he asking, “What must I do so that I may live forever?” or was it something else? Whatever he was asking, he didn’t like the answer that he got. Jesus got a little too personal when he started talking about his money and his stuff. And so the young man decided that eternal life, whatever that was, wasn’t worth it and he “went away sorrowful.”

But from what was he walking away? Is eternal life really about some “fountain of youth” kind of immortality? The Gospel of John says something different. In prayer, prior to his arrest, Jesus says, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” That sounds a bit different than living forever.

Here’s my take on it…eternal life is participation in the life of the eternal, taking part in the story that God is telling, a story that has a beginning and an end. The beginning of the story predates creation – God who was and is and ever shall be at some point, in some way, created something other than the divine being. Time and space were created and God, the divine, continues to exist outside of such limitations but maintains relationship within time/space with creation. Things were kind of ok until that special bit of creation, us, began acting like the willful, bratty, greedy, violent children that we are. In the Christ event – the Incarnation, something new happened; God began the redemption of the world. This is the part of that story into which we are invited and by virtue of our baptism we have RSVP’d and shown up. We understand what God is like and what God wants because of Jesus. We are invited to be made new, to forsake “willful, bratty, greedy and violent” for loving, committed and faithful, generous and peacemaking.

This work of redemption has begun; it is by no means completed. Jesus invited the rich young man to join in this work but the price was too high. Following Jesus means to love what Jesus loves, more that what the world loves. The rich you man could only understand what Jesus said as losing something; he didn’t hear it as something new gained. The work of redemption is to replace the world’s values with the values of God’s kingdom. That distant time when God’s vision has overtaken the world is the end of the story we are living and that is what gives meaning to the Christian life.

I mentioned in the newsletter that I have a new favorite book, and it’s not by Marcus Borg. It’s called Resident Aliens; Life in the Christian Colony by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon. Hauerwas is a giant in the field of Christian ethics who has written many books and here he has teamed up with a Methodist pastor to propose that we re-imagine the church as something really quite exciting. In their words, “The church is a colony, an island of one culture in the middle of another. In baptism our citizenship is transferred from one dominion to another, and we become, in whatever culture we find ourselves, resident aliens.” But as residents aliens, we have something to offer to the world and that is a vision of what can be, a vision that is from God.

Life in this colony is informed by, indeed modeled after, what we know of God as revealed to us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The colony knows Jesus, believes in Jesus and follows Jesus and he makes the difference for us. In our relationship with him, we are transformed. In Jesus, we understand what God is doing, the future toward which God is drawing the world. The word church in Greek is ecclesia – and it means “those called out”. We are called out of the world and into the Kingdom of God. At the same time, we are not called to withdraw from the world, this is not some utopian experiment in Southern Indiana. The colony that is the church is to be a part of the world, just in a different way with a very clear purpose. Hauerwas says that the only job of the church is to figure out how to be in the world so that the world notices this alternate way of being and is eventually changed by it.

If we really try to live as a colony of heaven, we will find ourselves at odds with the rest of the world but that’s a good thing because it is the way that God will continue the work of redemption in our broken world. How do we do this? Well, we start with the description of the Kingdom of God, which you find all through the Bible, Genesis, Isaiah, Amos, Micah and Jesus, over and over again. It’s a place of generous hospitality, stewardship, peace, health, blessing, justice, and equality. Then we ask ourselves, what does that look like here, in Orange County, California, USA, North America, planet earth. Here’s an example; the Kingdom of God is a peaceable kingdom, a place of non-violence. The US is a country that loves its guns. The 2nd amendment is idolize and each and everyone of us can buy and own as many guns as we wish – that’s the way of the world. But in God’s world, there would be no guns, therefore, in a colony of Heaven, people would probably say, yes, I have the world’s right to own a gun, but I choose not to. We are not trying to tell the world that they can’t have their guns; we are showing them a different way to think about them. That might look like giving something up but it also might look like embracing something new.

One of the reasons that we are receiving a weekly shipment of organic fruits and vegetables here is because it’s good stewardship of the earth and of our bodies which are two attributes of a the Kingdom of Heaven. From here, I hope that we will begin to examine everything that we eat and ask the important questions, it is good for the earth, would Jesus want a little child to have a steady diet of this. We have to ask ourselves about the fish we eat, is it poisoning us with mercury and is being caught in death-dealing drift nets? As a community, we might decide to swear off the kinds of meat that lead to the destruction of the rain forest or create conditions of misery for the animals because those things would not happen in God’s kingdom.

There are lots more difficult topics to tackle, particularly the one that caused the rich young man to turn away. In a colony of Heaven, we must examine our feelings and attachment to our possessions and our money. And since the pledge campaign is coming up soon, we’ll have lots of time to ask the question, “What do you love?”
I find this idea of seeing ourselves as colonists, resident aliens in the world to be most intriguing. The church as a colony of Heaven is very different from a common understanding of the church that I heard the other day. “I don’t go to church because I don’t think I need a middle man between God and me.” We don’t need a middle man, a gatekeeper, or ticket taker and that’s not what the church is supposed to be. Imagine if people could hear about the church as a colony of heaven in which members support one another in living our love for God out loud because we all know what God is doing in the world and we want to be a part of it.

Real justification

A sermon on James 2:1-5, 8-10, 14-18

Jesus asked his companions “Who do people say I am?” It’s a good question ask about many of the people in the Bible. Take the author of the letter of James, for instance. How do people say he is? Unlike Jesus, James didn’t engage in any sort of “I am” statements so we are left with tradition to help us answer the question. Church tradition proposes that this letter was written by James of Jerusalem who was the brother of Jesus. However, there is nothing in the letter to identify the author as that James or any other. We really don’t know anything about the author, except that he wrote in fairly sophisticated Greek, something that might be unlikely if it were written by a simple Palestinian laborer. Some early church writers cast doubt on the identity of the author. Every book in the Bible has some measure of mystery about it. The uncertainty surrounding the book of James became an important issue for Martin Luther.

It is a Lutheran urban legend that Luther wanted to throw James out of the Bible. He did clearly express his doubts as to its origin. Here’s what he had to say; “Though this epistle of St. James was rejected by the ancients, I praise it and consider it a good book, because it sets up no doctrines of men but vigorously promulgates the law of God. However, to state my own opinion about it, though without prejudice to anyone, I do not regard it as the writing of an apostle…”
The center of Luther’s historic disagreement with this book is found in today’s reading. “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” About which Luther had this to say “In the first place it is flatly against St. Paul and all the rest of Scripture in ascribing justification to works. Luther had his Road to Damascus moment – his big epiphany – during his contemplation of the Letter to the Galatians in which Paul wrote that we are “justified by faith in Jesus Christ.”

This has set up centuries of conflict about the role of faith and the role of works in our hope for salvation. But as always, context is everything. Luther’s issues with “works” came from his fight nearly to the death with the church hierarchy in Rome. He was particularly offended by the practice of indulgences. An indulgence was an action – usually a charitable one – undertaken after confession, absolution and penance in hopes of lessening one’s punishment prior to admission into heaven. I must confess that I can’t follow the logic of it. During Luther’s time, there had developed quite a lot of abuse around the selling of indulgences. It looked to Luther and others, as though the church was acting as a broker for sinners to buy their way into heaven, to buy God’s forgiveness. The church banned such practices in the 16th century but apparently under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, indulgences have made a comeback – but that’s beside the point of this sermon, I was just shocked when I saw it the other day.

Luther fueled the Protestant Reformation with his outrage at these abuses and planted his flag firmly in “justification by faith through God’s grace.” Faith in Jesus was the only way to be saved – the only way to be justified. The idea that anyone could play a role in their own salvation was an anathema as Reformation theology developed.

Well, Luther had his epiphany in the book of Galatians; I have had mine in Marcus Borg’s new book on Paul(The First Paul). What Borg and his partner Dominic Crossan have done – what they have uncovered and reclaimed is nothing short of “knock me off my horse and strike me blind” kind of stuff.

I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night thinking about this and mostly I have been wondering whether or not anyone will really care. You see, what would you think if I told you that the entire premise on which Christianity has been packaged and passed down to us is wrong? We have been told that in some distant time, long after we have left this mortal coil, the golden moment will come when we will all be raised and dwell with saints and angels in heaven. Our goal is get there, to not mess up so badly that we find ourselves on the outside looking in at the good times in God’s Kingdom. Some time after Paul wrote to his churches, Christianity became about the next life. Marcus Borg, God bless him! has been gently leading us with his book on Jesus and now his book on Paul, to the possibly uncomfortable awareness that we’ve had it all wrong.

Jesus and Paul did not talk about the promise of a better life in the next life. They both preached and lived the kingdom realized here and now. Borg points out that the question of “justification” may be stem from a misunderstanding of the word itself. It is defined in my Handbook of Theological Terms as “that act by which God brings man back into proper relationship with him.” It involves the forgiveness of sins, supernatural grace and all sorts of things. There are all kinds of disagreement about it – mostly around faith and works. Are you justified by simply believing in Jesus or does how you live your life have anything to do with it?

Borg and Crossan smack us between the eyes with their simple observation that Paul’s use of the words “justify” and “justification” are to be understood in a much more direct way. When we believe in Jesus, which means that we commit ourselves to what he was doing, then we can no longer act the way the world acts and we become just. We create justice and we do this here and now in our families and in our communities. Go figure that “justification” means “to become just!” With this definition, we can then actually understand that we are only right with God when we are right with each other. The letter of James makes more sense when we hear it in this light. You cannot be “in Christ” and live in the old way. Unless it shows in how you live with others, it isn’t of Christ – it is dead faith. Paul built churches with the intent that they would be a new kind of community and be like the mustard seed and spread like mustard. Previously unequal, hierarchical relationships, both personal and political would be transformed into just relationships of complete equality and then we would all see the kingdom.

But it didn’t happen that way. The world was too in love with power and the violence that maintains it to let go of it. The church was not able to resist being assumed into that world. Paul’s crazy experiment was just too dangerous for the ways of the world. So it was co-opted. The church became the most hierarchical institution ever imagined and lost it voice against the powers and principalities of the world. “Justification” was taken out of this world and redefined into the afterlife. The people who were granted full participation in Paul’s communities, women and slaves, were told to get over it and behave. The message was changed and we were all told to wait for justice until that time in the unknowable future.

I have found this profoundly disturbing and liberating at the same time. It fires my imagination and gives me strength. But my question remains – are we any more ready for the real Christianity now than we were 1900 years ago? Does knowing this change anything about how you understand why you belong to a church or why you might believe? Does this help you answer Jesus question “Who do people say that I am?” We can offer several answers, “He is the one who will get us into heaven?” or “He is the one who showed us and helped us to create heaven on earth?”

What we want for our children

A sermon for baptism

There is nothing more adorable than a little one, just after a bath. They jump in all sticky and sweaty from a full day of play and emerge sweet smelling, their fingers wrinkly, and too cute for words after their hair is combed and their little jammies donned. Then they climb into your lap and cuddle for a story before surrendering to sleep. I apparently am in serious need of grandchildren! But even if I were not in such a condition, the sight of a child washed free of the world’s grime would still make me go, “aaaw!” There’s something about the innocence and vulnerability that makes us want to give them everything, the perfect life, the perfect world. That’s a pretty tall order, even for the most accomplished and energetic among us. It also invites some questions….

What would a perfect life look like? Does perfect mean that the answer to every prayer is ‘yes?’ Jim Carey’s movie Bruce Almighty gave us a humorous take on that. If every prayer were answered with a yes, everyone would win the lottery, get into an Ivy League school with a full scholarship, marry the most beautiful girl or the smartest, richest man. You would get every job you applied for and be well paid. We would all be perfect physically and always healthy. This kind of life only sounds ideal for how could there be any sense of accomplishment if everything were handed to you? How could we ever develop a sense of compassion? Such a life would be the death of imagination, so I don’t think that could be what we mean when we consider what a perfect life would be like for little Sara Jane, who is, after all, about to get her holy bath. What do Scott and Amber envision in their hopes and dreams for their daughters? What do all of us want for our children?

I think that we want for our children is a world filled with the things that the apostle Paul identifies as the gifts of the spirit in his letter to the Galatians; love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. It’s hard to argue with such things but I think we also seek something more - a world that is fair, a world in which hard work and honest effort produce a satisfactory outcome; we want a world in which there is an opportunity to express and actualize what we sense is useful and fun. We want a world in which we enjoy some level of security, both physical and emotional. We want a world in which we have some level of ability to choose and make our own decisions about what we do and how we do it. I don’t think I’m wrong in saying that such desires are fairly universal—we all want this for our children. But the real question for this morning is how badly do we want this for all the children of the world?

Now let me ask you, how many of you think we live in a just world? How many of you think that we live in a world in which there is justice for some and not for others?

Let me take this a little further, do you believe that the things we want for our children could actually be jeopardized if the world continues to be an unjust place? Martin Luther King reminded us on more than one occasion that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Continued injustice keeps the Kingdom of God unrealized.

The prescription for this condition is right in front of us – we see it in the cross, we hear it the Gospel, we taste it in the sacrament of bread and wine. It is a commitment to the Kingdom of God which is possible when we give ourselves up and become the true Body of Christ.

We know the difference between how our world operates and how God would have it operate by what we know of Jesus’ life. Jesus’ first words in the Gospel of Mark, the earliest record of his teaching, were “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” In these words, Jesus becomes the sunrise of God’s time on a broken world. And then he set about creating the Kingdom wherever he was, starting with healing all who were brought to him. In God’s Kingdom, no one is sick. He fed people who couldn’t afford to feed themselves. In God’s Kingdom, no one goes hungry. He lifted up little children as examples of how all people are within the kingdom of God. He called people on hypocrisy and gave hope and good news to people who for whom those were in short supply. The deaf man in today’s Gospel needed Jesus’ intervention to be able to hear the news of God’s love and God’s will for his life. That healing wasn’t the healing of just one man, but all of humanity that had been deafened and made voiceless by indifference and injustice.

Jesus knew that the work was not his alone. He gathered people around him who heard the message he delivered and believed in God’s Kingdom. He shared himself and his power with them. That power is the one that we become a part of when we are in Christ. Having our ears and hearts opened begins it. Baptism is our yes to God’s invitation and with every subsequent baptism, we recommit ourselves to what we want for all of the children of God. We are promising to do all that we can to give Sara Jane and every other child a just world, a peaceful world, a world that looks more like the Kingdom God today than it did yesterday.

Injustice that defiles

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,
'This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.'
You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition."
Then he called the crowd again and said to them, "Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23


It’s not easy to understand what is at stake in this morning’s Gospel reading. Is it really about washing your hands before eating? Yes and no. The reason that I go through the ritual hand washing before celebrating is an honoring of the purity and holiness laws in scripture. It’s not really about making my hands germ free – heaven knows that a little water poured over my fingers can’t do that – it’s a tradition that is an enacted metaphor. I step into a different place when I approach the altar to become a part of the mystery. The hand washing is a symbolic gesture that prepares me to do so, just as the kissing of my stole when I put it on and take it off – it sets apart as holy the time during which I wear it. It’s a good thing. So I don’t think that it’s the kind of thing that was at the bottom of the spat between Jesus and his critics.

While we will never completely understand each portion of the purity code in scripture, why meat cannot be cooked with dairy products or why certain animals are clean while others are not, what we do know is that the ideas behind the development of the dietary laws were to set the Jews apart from the culture of their captors while they were in Babylon. This code was a visible sign that clearly defined who belonged in the community and who did not. It was very important for the survival of a people in captivity. It’s no wonder that this sort of thing became an issue again during Jesus time. The influence of the Greco-Roman culture was a threat to the integrity of the Jewish way of life. You cling fiercely to your traditions when you feel threatened. So it wasn’t just the tradition of washing hand before eating, it was the larger tapestry of what it meant to be a “holy people”

Prolific Catholic author and theologian Jerome Neyrey explains the purity or holiness system this way; holiness is an attribute of God which comes from God’s power to bless which is achieved mainly through the creation of order. When order is maintained, the people prosper. The holiness codes seek to keep the categories of creation distinct. That included people as well as foods. The purity laws provided an organizing principle for Jewish society, some basic categories that determined your often determined place – pure or defiled, clean or unclean, in or out. In times of stress, people are much more likely to enforce such social traditions strictly in an attempt to feel that there is something you can count on.
Prof. Neyrey says that “While Mark presents Jesus challenging the Jewish purity system, he also describes him as reforming it in favor of other core values. He is "the Holy One of God" and agent of God's reform: he is authorized to cross lines and to blur classifications as a strategy for a bringing about the Kingdom of God about which he preached incessantly. As God's agent of holiness, Jesus makes sinners holy and the sick whole.” Jesus redefines holiness. He offered a broader understanding of who and what is acceptable to God.

What Jesus was shining a light on was the unintended consequence of the holiness laws – they became an instrument of classism. Consider the plight of the poor in Israel at Jesus’ time. They were barely surviving, many were malnourished. If you and your family are starving and the only food you can forage is the mussels that cling to the rocks in the Sea of Galilee, what are you going to do? Say, “Ach, shellfish are unclean, can’t do that!” or are you going have them for dinner? If you are a day laborer working in the hot sun clearing rocks out of a field where the only water is the precious little that you have saved for the hot afternoon ahead, are you going to use it wash your hands before eat your meager lunch? I think what Jesus is doing in today’s Gospel is showing how the traditions of his faith had succeeded in marginalizing a whole lot of people. In another passage when his friends are criticized for working on the Sabbath because they picked some grain while walking through a field he says, “the Sabbath was created to be a blessing to people not a hardship.” The Sabbath commandment could be the source of suffering if the only day that you have to gather and prepare food for your family is the day when you don’t have to work for someone else. In Jesus’ eyes the only way for the Sabbath to be available for everyone was for the world to be transformed into the Kingdom of God so that everyone could afford to take a day for rest, refreshment and prayer. The poor don’t have that luxury.

We generally have a sanitized image of Jesus, he would never say anything crude. Well, keep in mind that Jesus was a part of a very earthy culture, speaking with farmers and laborers and he understood how to communicate with them. He was not shy about using humor and satire so today we have Jesus, channeling his inner-fourth grader, and comparing the evil that is expressed by a class system to that which comes out of the human body. There was apparently no snappy comeback from his critics when he equated what they were doing to excrement. I mean, what could you say but “Oh yeah!” Mostly they went away thinking “Rats! He did it to us again!” Jesus did his bet work when he turned the tables on self-aggrandizing, moralizing bullies.

It’s important that we not be too hard on Jesus critics. They lived in their world and had the where with all to not have to consider the lives of the people that were flocking to Jesus, until they became so numerous as to be noticed. People in Orange County are shocked to learn that in this beautiful prosperous place, there are over 35,000 homeless people. I’ve had two conversations this week in which that information caused jaws to drop. These were not arrogant, mean, moralizing people, they just didn’t know.

I look at my life and frankly, it looks like Jesus’ description of the Kingdom of God. I am healthy and if I’m not, I have insurance that pays for my medical care, no one tells me I can’t go certain places or do what I want to do, I have more than enough to eat, as evidenced by those couple of pounds I’d like to shed before Melanie’s wedding, no one in my family is in debtor’s prison, I have a beautiful home that is full of love and peace, I get to decide what I want to do on my day off. The question for me is what is my response to such blessing? The only thing that makes sense to me and that allows me to sleep at night is to commit myself to work on behalf of those who are not so outrageously lucky. The Kingdom of God already here, it is just waiting for us to tear down the walls that are keeping people out. I pray that that is a compelling enough vision to be the reason that we come together as a community of faith. There is a lot of resistance to such an idea.

Gary Cummins is the Rector at St. Luke’s in Long Beach and he shared a story in a newsletter this week. He said, “ When I was in seminary, our very old, very thin, very traditional, and venerable Liturgics Professor always spoke in a very low voice. He enunciated very clearly or taking notes would have been an exercise in futility.

One day he quietly unfurled a story from the Sixties when our Book of Common Prayer was being revised. After the service one Sunday morning, a parishioner complained about a verse in the prayers in Morning Prayer service – “let not the hope of the poor be taken away.” The parishioner raised his voice in outrage, “That’s Communism!” Gary’s quiet professor, gave voice to his still evident frustration and shouted, “It’s not Communism, it’s the Psalms!”

I would add, it’s the Gospel, it is our mission, I hope it is our reason for being here together this morning.

Unearthing Paul

A sermon on Ephesians 5:21-33

This week, I’ve heard from daughter Melanie about a variety of wedding details, not the least of which was her decision not to have father “give her away”. For those of you who know Melanie, this probably comes as no surprise, but it happens to be very relevant to the lessons presented to us today bringing us the words “wives” and “subject to” in the same sentence. —the last time this one came around, I dodged this one – probably substituted Winnie the Pooh.

Today, though, I felt more prepared to tackle it because Marcus Borg has a new book that he wrote with Dominic Crossan called The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon. You just know I have to love this.
There are a number of important contextual points that apply to this one of Paul’s letters. First is that, of the thirteen letters that bear his name, only seven are thought to have actually been authored by Saul/Paul of Tarsus. Three letters, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus are commonly knows as the “pastoral letters” and appear to have been written some time after the turn of the 2nd century. Their historical setting is quite different from that of Paul, the church planter. Somewhere in between Paul’s seven letters and the Pastorals the remaining three letters, Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians were written, and probably not by Paul. This has been recognized for quite a long time, primarily due to the very different voice and vocabulary used in the letters. Borg and Crossan arrive at what they call the three “Pauls.” The original voice of the seven letters they call the radical Paul. They call the voice of the pastoral letters the reactionary Paul and the other three disputed letters, including today’s challenging one from Ephesians, make up the conservative Paul. Our two scholars have done an incredible job of drawing out the differences and identifying the reasons that letters like Ephesians do not reflect the Christian vision of the real Paul. Clearly the later letters suggest that the communities Paul had been addressing were having difficulty absorbing his message, so the writers started to alter that message. It reminds us of the similar difficulty many people in Jesus’ immediate culture had with his message of non-violent, self-sacrifice for God’s kingdom of peace and justice.

The original voice of Paul was one of transformed lives and relationships. He tackles the relationship between slaves and their owners in the charming little letter to Philemon. It is an amazing example of persuasive genius. Paul leaves his friend, Philemon, with little choice but to free his slave Onesimus, because Paul demonstrates how they are equals in Christ. Fast forward several decades to the writing of the letter to the Ephesians in which we find this – “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ…masters, stop threatening them, for you know that both of you have the same master in heaven and with him there is no partiality.” It does not sound like the original Paul, though there is at least a nod to making life better for slaves. However, in another couple of decades, in the letter to Titus we hear this, “Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to talk back, not to pilfer, but to show complete and perfect fidelity, so that in everything they do may be an ornament to the doctrine of God our Savior.” This is clearly antithetical to Paul’s vision. As Borg and Crossan point out, “there is nothing there about any mutuality of obligations for slaves and masters. And there is nothing addressed directly to slaves. There is a single verse, and it begins, ‘Tell slaves.’”

This is why it is so critical to take on the contextual meaning of all scripture. Here we not only find that Paul’s message was co-opted but that it potentially arms anyone wishing to provide Biblical support for slavery with some rather shocking ammunition. Don’t you suppose that letter was used once or twice in the plantation churches to keep slaves in line? It’s pretty good ammunition to be able to say, “see, it’s right here in the Bible!”

All of this makes our reading from Ephesians a lot less problematic than it might seem. Sure, the letter is in there, but we shouldn’t go blaming Paul for it. The voice of the radical Paul has quite a different understanding of the proper Christian relationship between men and women. In the 1st letter to the Corinthians, Paul presents a vision of equality in the family—what right for one is right for the other, and what is wrong for one is wrong for the other in matters of divorce, abstinence, and equality in the assembly and equal entry into the community of apostles.

As with Paul’s view of slavery, this prescription for equality was a shocking development for a patriarchal world and sure enough, within a couple of decades we are treated to the revisionism of today’s reading—and while the expectations established for the behavior of men is more challenging than the local culture was used to, it still falls far short of the radical equality Paul believed in and articulated in his original seven letters.

These two examples of equality incorporated into Paul’s radical vision are the means by which he taught his congregations to participate in the work of atonement. Patriarchy and slavery are endemic to cultural systems in which some segments of the population were dominated by others. For Paul, Jesus’ death on the Roman cross and his subsequent resurrection was an indictment of that system of domination. The question we have to ask ourselves is “how much has really changed?” Do we not still allow the radical vision of both Paul and Jesus to be co-opted by more recent interpretations that are designed to perpetuate some group’s domination of another? How many women have had scripture used against them in abusive relationships? How long did slavery continue, justified by Biblical references that have been improperly attributed to Paul and made authoritative?

Paul was able to grow Christianity because people were hungry for freedom from an imperial system. But we live in a democracy that survived ended slavery and drastically altered our cultural view of gender relations. Today we have a non-white president, and we have Bishop Katherine, Speaker of the House Nancy and Secretary of State Hilary. Many inequalities have been breached even though not every heart has been won.

There are things in the letter to the Ephesians that I love, some truly radical things like “universal salvation” but it’s really important that we understand what has happened here and ask, if the earliest Christians were not ready for such a radical message are we? It takes great courage to stand against the things that seek to dominate and oppress us. It means to swim against the flow of your culture, sometimes your immediate community or family. But once armed with an understanding of the transformation Jesus and then Paul offer us we stand ready to be made into more than we ever thought possible. Once we know that, the only questions that remains is, “do we really want it?”

An Assault on Truth

A sermon on Ephesians 4:25-5:2.

There’s something very bad going on in our country right now. Actually there are lots of bad things going on right now, people out of work, people out of their homes, people who have had their life savings either stolen or decimated by medical bills or the crashing market. These are all dire experiences that surround us. We as a congregation have been very fortunate. I’m sure that there are difficulties about which I am unaware, but for most of these things, we have been passed over. People in this church have made it through rounds of layoffs and are still employed. That’s not to make light of the financial challenges many of us face at this time but for the most part, we are weathering this storm well.

The bad thing that I am most worried about is what is happening to truth. The opening of our reading from the letter to the Ephesians today says “let everyone speak the truth with his neighbor…” As important as it is to speak the truth, it is also important to allow others to do the same for as the letter to the Ephesians continues, “for we are members of one another.” The fabric of a culture is held together by truth telling. If you cannot trust what people say, things break down; relationships fray and people move away from each other and become isolated. The challenge for us is what to do when we are faced with a lack of or an assault on the truth.

This week the news has been filled with scenes of vitriolic and sometimes violent behavior as members of Congress have gone home on recess to have Town Meetings with their constituents about what is going on in Washington, but primarily about health care reform. Town Hall meetings are usually pretty sedate and boring things but what members of Congress have been met with are groups of people determined to shout down any attempt to talk about the proposed health care bills in committee and the process. There appears to be a thriving cottage industry right now dreaming up outrageous claims about what will happen if our insurance conglomerate run health care system is reformed. Some of the more outlandish claims go like this: under this proposed law, old people will be encouraged by their doctors to end their lives – the poster version of this is “ObamaCare = euthanasia” or “Obama want to kill your grandmother.” Another one is that under this plan, the government will pay people to have abortions. Another big scary story is that the government might take over Medicare and Medicaid. Think about that one. From there things just degenerate into signs like “Health Care Reform = Holocaust which are usually found next to the ones that say “Obama, Osama” and “Where’s the Birth Certificate?”

Now it’s one thing for crazy, wild things to spring up on the internet, it’s another for members of the media and elected official to be promoting this nonsense. There is a concerted effort to stoke peoples’ fears and not for the purpose of any helpful dialogue, but merely as a political game and the truth is a casualty. What has happened to our country?

Truth is an important concept in the Judeo-Christian tradition; from the legal aspect, the commandment against bearing false witness makes it clear that honesty is not just a personal virtue, it is a communal one. Speaking with authority is recognized as a sign of one who speaks the truth. Jesus’ critics often asked the source of his authority; they heard the truth in what he said, they just didn’t know from whence he had learned it. It is said that what got Jesus killed was that he spoke the truth to power. And then in the Gospel of John, he said, “I am the truth.” We therefore take truth seriously.

Standing before Pontius Pilate and answering his taunting statement, "You are a king, then!" Jesus answered, "You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. " And then Pilate asks, “what is truth?”

In the Old Testament, truth is an attribute of God and it’s actually not simple to define. There is no specific one-to-one translation for the word “truth.” Constant, permanent, faithful, reliable are all used to translate the Hebrew word. For the people of Israel, truth was a moral and relational concept, not an intellectual one. In Greek thought, truth is very intellectual; it is known as opposed to trusted or relied on. In his letters that make up much of the New Testament, Paul combines the relational and intellectual sides of truth. So we arrive at an understanding of truth as an eternal dynamic in relationship, it’s like the mortar that holds bricks together.

If an interpersonal relationship breaks down when truth has been damaged, what happens in a culture when the truth is violated? My Biblical Dictionary says that the opposite of truth is malice and evil. Using people fears by an intentional manipulation of a complicated subject comes pretty close to that for me. There is a lot of money being put into promoting some crazy ideas with little thought of how to put the genie back in the bottle if it goes too far – and it going too far. There is at least one investigation into death threats against a Congressman and more calls to “bring your guns to these Town Hall meetings” are flying around the internet. This is not about politics – this is a moral and a spiritual issue and I am concerned.

Last month, as I sat around the Communications and Media area at the recent General Convention, I heard lots of conversation about the resolutions being discussed and passed. The clearest statement about our relationship with Anglicans around the world and the church’s position on refusing to exclude people from roles in the church came out of a desire to tell the truth to our neighbors. For the last three years, the Episcopal Church, in response to outrage from elsewhere, had turned its back on some of our members. There are many who felt as though we had sold our souls, saying that “we are willing to be inauthentic, if not down-right dishonest, just to stay in communion with parts of the Anglican world who see things very differently.” It was a very uncomfortable place to be. Finally people stood up and said, “we must say to those that disagree with us that we cannot be in true communion with you if we are not true to ourselves.” The letter to the Ephesians doesn’t say, “speak the truth, only if people with agree with you.” We are trying to do this in such a way that we are also in accord with this reading when it says. “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you…and forgive..”

What’s going on at Town Hall meetings and in the churches that may now leave The Episcopal Church is the same thing. Misinformation used to stoke fear. We have to be worried about how we achieve any sort of reconciliation after this storm blows itself out. This is a head and a heart thing – be gentle with those that afraid but be armed with knowledge and the truth of God’s love and acceptance for each and every one of us.

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.