Acts 10:44-48
Psalm 98
1 John 5:1-6
John 15:9-17
In the book of Acts, there is an ongoing struggle about what one has to do to be a member of the community of Jesus’ followers. Peter and James and the church in Jerusalem are inclined to believe that one must be a Jew first before being a member of the church. Paul and his colleagues see it differently – gentiles need not first make full conversion to Jewish faith and practice before becoming members of the church. So we hear the text today: “While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God.” And Peter changes his mind.
After a recent discussion about preaching on Facebook, I am cautious about the use of humor in preaching – so think of the following as more of a footnote than an attempt at a joke. You may be familiar with the joke about the man newly arrived in heaven. He is met by a guide who gives him a tour of endless beautiful rooms, sparkling bodies of water, green fields and endless gardens filled with people interacting with joy and harmony. Then they come to an elegantly appointed room full of people enjoying each others’ company. The guide cautions the man to be quiet as they approach the room. They observe it silently for a while and move on. Once they’re far enough away not to be heard, the guide says “those are the Episcopalians, they think they’re the only ones here.” Depending on the audience, you might say those are the Baptists, or Presbyterians or the Fraternal Order of Moose, but you get the idea of this footnote. When it comes to what we believe in, many of us are certain that we’re the only ones who have it right and that we will be rewarded for it.
We become increasingly aware of the variety and diversity of religious belief and practice in which we function as a community of believers. Among some of our brothers and sisters in Christ there is still an insistence that we are right and “they” – that being anyone who believes different from me and those who agree with me are wrong. Some go so far as to say they’re really, really wrong and God is going to punish them for it. Others simply believe that it is their responsibility to set the wrong ones straight and get them on the right path. Like Peter, in today’s lesson from Acts, they may eventually be very surprised upon whom the spirit falls.
Krister Stendahl, a New Testament scholar who was a bishop of the church of Sweden and a Professor at Harvard Divinity School had some important words of caution about judging the truth and validity of religious beliefs and practices other than our own. He noted that if you wish to understand another religion you can only truly do so by consulting one of its believers. He cautioned against comparing the best characteristics and achievements of one’s own religion against the least admirable ones of another faith. Finally, he said - Leave room for "holy envy." Make an effort to recognize elements in another religious tradition or faith that you admire and wish could, in some way, be reflected in your own religious tradition or faith.
The days of Christianity as some sort of default assumption for our culture are over, and that may be just as well. Whether religion as such is in decline, I don’t know. People seem to be talking about it a lot right now. And although much of that discussion is critical of what has been the role of religion in public life in our country, it’s still part of the conversation. It’s much better to be the target of criticism than it is to be considered irrelevant.
We who gather here weekly and who do the work of this community outside Sunday worship have made a decision about what we believe and a commitment to the church to live according to the baptismal covenant. We sense the presence of the spirit here among us and each of us senses it as we live out the many aspects of our lives. Let us reflect with joy and thanks upon the presence of the divine in our lives and let us acknowledge with generosity that we share that presence with many and diverse others with whom it has the power to unite us in peace and good will.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Monday, May 11, 2009
Fifth Sunday of Easter
Acts 8:26-40
Psalm 22:24-30
1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-8
This week my personal experience coincided with the lesson from Acts in today’s lectionary. I had someone come to me to inquire about being baptized. The conversation was friendly, but it included one statement that left me momentarily not knowing how to respond. When I asked “have you been baptized?” the response was “I haven’t been, but I’m a Christian.” For those of us within the church, our way of thinking makes that statement a contradiction. But apparently, there are those who understand it differently than we do. What I have frequently heard from people new to the church, or returning after a long absence is that when they come to the church seeking to learn or be included, the response is little more than a recitation of the rules and requirements that must be fulfilled in order to be considered or an explanation of all that they have done wrong in being absent from the church. I didn’t want this person to have that experience. So we simply continued to talk for a while. We left it that if she hadn’t visited on a Sunday by the end of this month, I would call her back to find out how she was doing.
The metaphor of the vine in today’s lesson from John’s gospel is a brilliant one for explaining the central ideas of the fourth gospel. John is determined that the reader clearly understand the relationship between Jesus and God. Its author is also struggling with issues of community – who is inside it and outside it, and what the consequences will be for that latter group. The richness of his metaphor and the clarity of his vision have made his words and ideas compelling to Christians through the centuries. The fourth gospel is full of quotable phrases like “I am the way, the truth and the life,” “nobody comes to the father except through me,” “ love one another as I have loved you.” They are statements that set clear boundaries; a community that embraces them is sure to be identified as standing for something specific and unambiguous.
But a lot of different kinds of things grow on vines – things as diverse as grapes, flowers, sweet potatoes, and ivy. My sense is that there are a lot of different kinds of spiritual foliage out there claiming to lie within John’s clear cut boundaries and making pronouncements about who is about to be pruned.
All three of today’s lectionary texts are about the importance of community for teaching and growing people’s faith and religious experience. I don’t think there’s any doubt that we uphold that ideal here. The church made it work relatively effortlessly for centuries. Our challenge now is to figure out how to preserve it within a larger culture, the presumptions of which are all about individuality, its expressions and demands. John points out the importance of the attachment of the fruit to the vine. The world we live in is focused on celebrating the variations in size and color of each grape and developing marketing strategies to meet their individual needs. The church’s way of doing things isn’t an easy fit with the expectations of a consumer culture. I can begin to understand why, when someone comes to one of my colleagues saying something like “I’ve never been baptized, but I’m a Christian,” his first impulse is to set that person straight about the traditions of Christian initiation.
What Philip does in today’s lesson from Acts may be an example for us. He looks for opportunity to bring a new person into Christian community. His spirit is open to the encounter with the Ethiopian. He makes the approach, but leaves room for questions. He responds with generosity. He realizes that the spirit moves others in the same way it does him. He allows its leading to move the Ethiopian to ask for baptism, rather than presuming to order the man’s spiritual life for him.
Human nature being what it is, those who are inclined to quote John’s gospel seem to focus more on the parts about the unproductive branches being removed and thrown into the fire. But throughout the gospels Jesus’ message has much more to say about the patience and forgiveness of God, both for those who do and do not produce good fruit. We and our companions among the spiritual foliage will always be tempted to express an opinion about the growth and productivity of others, but the gospel makes it clear that God will always be more generous than any of us can imagine. The communities we build ought to be guided by that ideal of generosity and acceptance, no matter what challenges we face in making that happen. Fear of those challenges may tempt us to build walls rather than opening doors. But, as we are reminded in today’s epistle lesson there truly is no fear in love and we can love because God first loved us.
Psalm 22:24-30
1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-8
This week my personal experience coincided with the lesson from Acts in today’s lectionary. I had someone come to me to inquire about being baptized. The conversation was friendly, but it included one statement that left me momentarily not knowing how to respond. When I asked “have you been baptized?” the response was “I haven’t been, but I’m a Christian.” For those of us within the church, our way of thinking makes that statement a contradiction. But apparently, there are those who understand it differently than we do. What I have frequently heard from people new to the church, or returning after a long absence is that when they come to the church seeking to learn or be included, the response is little more than a recitation of the rules and requirements that must be fulfilled in order to be considered or an explanation of all that they have done wrong in being absent from the church. I didn’t want this person to have that experience. So we simply continued to talk for a while. We left it that if she hadn’t visited on a Sunday by the end of this month, I would call her back to find out how she was doing.
The metaphor of the vine in today’s lesson from John’s gospel is a brilliant one for explaining the central ideas of the fourth gospel. John is determined that the reader clearly understand the relationship between Jesus and God. Its author is also struggling with issues of community – who is inside it and outside it, and what the consequences will be for that latter group. The richness of his metaphor and the clarity of his vision have made his words and ideas compelling to Christians through the centuries. The fourth gospel is full of quotable phrases like “I am the way, the truth and the life,” “nobody comes to the father except through me,” “ love one another as I have loved you.” They are statements that set clear boundaries; a community that embraces them is sure to be identified as standing for something specific and unambiguous.
But a lot of different kinds of things grow on vines – things as diverse as grapes, flowers, sweet potatoes, and ivy. My sense is that there are a lot of different kinds of spiritual foliage out there claiming to lie within John’s clear cut boundaries and making pronouncements about who is about to be pruned.
All three of today’s lectionary texts are about the importance of community for teaching and growing people’s faith and religious experience. I don’t think there’s any doubt that we uphold that ideal here. The church made it work relatively effortlessly for centuries. Our challenge now is to figure out how to preserve it within a larger culture, the presumptions of which are all about individuality, its expressions and demands. John points out the importance of the attachment of the fruit to the vine. The world we live in is focused on celebrating the variations in size and color of each grape and developing marketing strategies to meet their individual needs. The church’s way of doing things isn’t an easy fit with the expectations of a consumer culture. I can begin to understand why, when someone comes to one of my colleagues saying something like “I’ve never been baptized, but I’m a Christian,” his first impulse is to set that person straight about the traditions of Christian initiation.
What Philip does in today’s lesson from Acts may be an example for us. He looks for opportunity to bring a new person into Christian community. His spirit is open to the encounter with the Ethiopian. He makes the approach, but leaves room for questions. He responds with generosity. He realizes that the spirit moves others in the same way it does him. He allows its leading to move the Ethiopian to ask for baptism, rather than presuming to order the man’s spiritual life for him.
Human nature being what it is, those who are inclined to quote John’s gospel seem to focus more on the parts about the unproductive branches being removed and thrown into the fire. But throughout the gospels Jesus’ message has much more to say about the patience and forgiveness of God, both for those who do and do not produce good fruit. We and our companions among the spiritual foliage will always be tempted to express an opinion about the growth and productivity of others, but the gospel makes it clear that God will always be more generous than any of us can imagine. The communities we build ought to be guided by that ideal of generosity and acceptance, no matter what challenges we face in making that happen. Fear of those challenges may tempt us to build walls rather than opening doors. But, as we are reminded in today’s epistle lesson there truly is no fear in love and we can love because God first loved us.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Fourth Sunday of Easter
Acts 4.5-2
Psalm 23
1 John 3.16-24
John 10.11-18
Psalm 23 has been a source of inspiration and comfort for centuries. The image of the shepherd in connection with spiritual leadership is an enduring one in the sacred writings of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. It appears in various parts of both the New and Old Testaments. It is an interesting coincidence that the lectionary offers us Psalm 23 and its words of assurance of God’s presence and providence as we contemplate the potential effects of an influenza pandemic and the ongoing world economic crisis.
The true historic context in which the Psalms were created is impossible to determine with any certainty, but it has been speculated that at least some of them were composed in exile. It is not difficult to imagine a poet giving voice to a desire for hope and consolation in a time of helplessness, alienation, sorrow and fear. It has been suggested that those who created John’s gospel and the three epistles of John in the New Testament also found themselves in a situation of helplessness, alienation, sorrow and fear. The image of the shepherd who offers his life for the sheep was a familiar one to the first century followers of Jesus who knew the Old Testament and it is not surprising that they wove it into their stories about him.
The passage from John’s gospel about Jesus as the good shepherd and the words of comfort offered by Psalm 23 have been taken by some as a motivation to put their troubles “in God’s hands.” I’ve never actually asked anyone who has said those words to me what he really meant by them. My sense is that one who speaks those words frequently imagines that human beings can figuratively hand over their problems to the divine with the expectation that God will sort them out and return the results promptly. Traditional teachings of the church emphasize our powerlessness to make ourselves righteous; they are filled with a strong sense of human sinfulness and the incompleteness of our nature. Such an outlook, coupled with images of God as generous and loving father have motivated some faithful people to take an outlook of moral passivity and assume that God can and will fix their lives for them. I would never say that humanity is free of sin or fully realized. But despite our imperfection, God has blessed us with the gifts of memory, reason and skill. Humanity can and has been characterized theologically as a created co-creator, doing the work that God has given us to do.
The genius of the leaders of the first century church was in transforming peoples’ perceptions of Jesus’ death. The idea of a crucified messiah was, as Paul puts it, a stumbling block for the Jews and a joke for the gentiles. Anyone who might have become a follower of Jesus was going to have to find a way to get his mind around it. The leaders of the early church made that possible by helping their contemporaries understand Jesus’ death as a noble offering of himself in support of a new way of understanding the world and as a sacrifice that renewed the relationship between humanity and God. That is the teaching that has come down to us. The leaders of the early church used the image of the shepherd – already familiar from the Psalms and the prophets to help people make sense of what they were teaching.
The descriptions we have of those early Christian communities suggest that they used Jesus’ teachings to change the way people interacted with each other. Within the community they broke down barriers that existed outside of it. Paul refers in his letters to the prohibition of eating meat sacrificed to idols. He’s talking about the ritual meals that followed the sacrifice of animals in pagan temples. The ritual of sacrifice and the distribution of meat from the animal that was killed followed a prescribed pattern that reminded participants of the social and economic pecking order in which they had a role. The rich and powerful received the most and the best along with the power to give the prescribed portion to those whose loyalty and service maintained their wealth and power. The ritual meal of Jesus’ followers was very different. At that meal the sacrifice was rememorative – it made a present reality Jesus’ redeeming death which had made new his followers’ relationship with God. The participants gathered as equals, beloved of God and shared equally the food which was distributed. That is how we come together each week.
We share equally also in the responsibility for coming to this table for strength as well as solace and for renewal as well as pardon. We may know Christ as the good shepherd whose presence strengthens and inspires, but we also know him as the one who sends us forth into the world to be shepherds ourselves as it were, to live as a people who know what it means to gather around this table.
I can’t tell you exactly how you might do that. In general I can tell you that we are called to be a people who live in hope rather than fear. In a time of anxiety as we are experiencing now, we can be realistic and intentional about taking the kinds of precautions that promote health and prevent the spread of disease. We can offer that sense of realistic precaution to those around us who tend to let their fears overcome their reason. We can also offer our time and resources as we are able to those who are in trouble – we can be the body of Christ – eyes that observe need and suffering, hands and voices that take action and inspire others to generosity. We can do all of these things with a sense of God’s presence and power – not as the one who fixes our lives for us but who empowers us to lead and offer support to others who are struggling with helplessness, alienation, fear and sorrow.
We are a people who know ourselves to be always, as the Psalmist says, in the presence of God’s goodness and mercy. As you go forth from this place, the house of the Lord, take goodness and mercy with you and offer them to the world.
Psalm 23
1 John 3.16-24
John 10.11-18
Psalm 23 has been a source of inspiration and comfort for centuries. The image of the shepherd in connection with spiritual leadership is an enduring one in the sacred writings of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. It appears in various parts of both the New and Old Testaments. It is an interesting coincidence that the lectionary offers us Psalm 23 and its words of assurance of God’s presence and providence as we contemplate the potential effects of an influenza pandemic and the ongoing world economic crisis.
The true historic context in which the Psalms were created is impossible to determine with any certainty, but it has been speculated that at least some of them were composed in exile. It is not difficult to imagine a poet giving voice to a desire for hope and consolation in a time of helplessness, alienation, sorrow and fear. It has been suggested that those who created John’s gospel and the three epistles of John in the New Testament also found themselves in a situation of helplessness, alienation, sorrow and fear. The image of the shepherd who offers his life for the sheep was a familiar one to the first century followers of Jesus who knew the Old Testament and it is not surprising that they wove it into their stories about him.
The passage from John’s gospel about Jesus as the good shepherd and the words of comfort offered by Psalm 23 have been taken by some as a motivation to put their troubles “in God’s hands.” I’ve never actually asked anyone who has said those words to me what he really meant by them. My sense is that one who speaks those words frequently imagines that human beings can figuratively hand over their problems to the divine with the expectation that God will sort them out and return the results promptly. Traditional teachings of the church emphasize our powerlessness to make ourselves righteous; they are filled with a strong sense of human sinfulness and the incompleteness of our nature. Such an outlook, coupled with images of God as generous and loving father have motivated some faithful people to take an outlook of moral passivity and assume that God can and will fix their lives for them. I would never say that humanity is free of sin or fully realized. But despite our imperfection, God has blessed us with the gifts of memory, reason and skill. Humanity can and has been characterized theologically as a created co-creator, doing the work that God has given us to do.
The genius of the leaders of the first century church was in transforming peoples’ perceptions of Jesus’ death. The idea of a crucified messiah was, as Paul puts it, a stumbling block for the Jews and a joke for the gentiles. Anyone who might have become a follower of Jesus was going to have to find a way to get his mind around it. The leaders of the early church made that possible by helping their contemporaries understand Jesus’ death as a noble offering of himself in support of a new way of understanding the world and as a sacrifice that renewed the relationship between humanity and God. That is the teaching that has come down to us. The leaders of the early church used the image of the shepherd – already familiar from the Psalms and the prophets to help people make sense of what they were teaching.
The descriptions we have of those early Christian communities suggest that they used Jesus’ teachings to change the way people interacted with each other. Within the community they broke down barriers that existed outside of it. Paul refers in his letters to the prohibition of eating meat sacrificed to idols. He’s talking about the ritual meals that followed the sacrifice of animals in pagan temples. The ritual of sacrifice and the distribution of meat from the animal that was killed followed a prescribed pattern that reminded participants of the social and economic pecking order in which they had a role. The rich and powerful received the most and the best along with the power to give the prescribed portion to those whose loyalty and service maintained their wealth and power. The ritual meal of Jesus’ followers was very different. At that meal the sacrifice was rememorative – it made a present reality Jesus’ redeeming death which had made new his followers’ relationship with God. The participants gathered as equals, beloved of God and shared equally the food which was distributed. That is how we come together each week.
We share equally also in the responsibility for coming to this table for strength as well as solace and for renewal as well as pardon. We may know Christ as the good shepherd whose presence strengthens and inspires, but we also know him as the one who sends us forth into the world to be shepherds ourselves as it were, to live as a people who know what it means to gather around this table.
I can’t tell you exactly how you might do that. In general I can tell you that we are called to be a people who live in hope rather than fear. In a time of anxiety as we are experiencing now, we can be realistic and intentional about taking the kinds of precautions that promote health and prevent the spread of disease. We can offer that sense of realistic precaution to those around us who tend to let their fears overcome their reason. We can also offer our time and resources as we are able to those who are in trouble – we can be the body of Christ – eyes that observe need and suffering, hands and voices that take action and inspire others to generosity. We can do all of these things with a sense of God’s presence and power – not as the one who fixes our lives for us but who empowers us to lead and offer support to others who are struggling with helplessness, alienation, fear and sorrow.
We are a people who know ourselves to be always, as the Psalmist says, in the presence of God’s goodness and mercy. As you go forth from this place, the house of the Lord, take goodness and mercy with you and offer them to the world.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Third Sunday of Easter
Acts 3:12-19
Psalm 4
1 John 3:1-7
Luke 24:36b-48
Our 1st and 2nd century spiritual forbears have left us an interesting record of their struggle to build the church. It lives in the pages of the gospels, Acts of the Apostles, many of the New Testament epistles and other writings that are not included in the Bible. The meaning that their words and stories had for them is sometimes obscured by its distance from us in time and cultural context. We reach across 20 centuries looking to their words for meaning for our own lives. That’s a good thing for us to do. Because in many ways, their struggles are not dramatically different from ours.
The early church took its message in two different directions. We read about the disagreements between Peter and James of the church in Jerusalem, and Paul, the church’s persecutor who became its champion. Peter and James were leaders of a community that was evolving from a primarily Jewish culture. The members of that community understood monotheism. They were accustomed to setting themselves apart from the spiritual traditions of the Roman Empire. But their community attracted followers of Jesus who were not Jews. In the book of Acts you can read about their struggle over the question of what is required to be a member of the community of Jesus’ followers. Do you have to be a Jew first? Do you have to follow the law of Moses in order to be a follower of Jesus?
Even in this moment, our church is struggling with cultural distinctions that have threatened to dismantle the Anglican Communion. Our co-religionists in Africa and Asia tell us that they cannot achieve the respect of the majority muslim cultures in which their churches exist unless we in the west agree to exclude our gay, lesbian and bisexual members from full participation in the church. Do you have to be straight or at least act straight in order to be a follower of Jesus?
Those who undertook the mission of spreading the teachings of Jesus within the Jewish community struggled also with Jewish traditions concerning the messiah and resurrection. Jewish thought and tradition were no more monolithic in the first century than they are in the 21st, but the church’s teachings about Jesus as the messiah and about his resurrection were distinctly different from Jewish tradition. In very broad strokes, that tradition envisioned the messiah’s coming within the context of a messianic age – a time in which the world would live in peace and plenty and all (Jews and non-Jews, by the way) would be gathered into the presence of God. For Jews who believed in resurrection, it was an event in which all participated together. The resurrection of one man, and the claim that he was the messiah in the absence of a messianic age were challenges to traditional expectations. The stories of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances were a means of attempting to deal with those expectations.
John’s three letters, one of which we hear from today in the epistle, and Paul’s letters were written to congregations dealing with internal conflict or struggling to define themselves in relation to others. Having no more knowledge of Jesus than they did, it’s not surprising that they interpreted his teachings in a variety of ways. Human nature being what it is, there was an inclination to draw boundaries around what the community would believe and do and what it would not. The trick was getting everyone to agree on where the boundaries would be. How often do you hear of different varieties of Christians condemning each other for false teaching.
The leaders of the early church took their message to an audience that was at the very least skeptical, and in many cases hostile. In addition to the discontinuity between Jewish and Christian teachings about the messiah and resurrection, the early church had other challenges to deal with when offering the good news to non-Jews. Church teachings prohibited such activities as eating meat offered to idols. Participation in the religions of Greece and Rome was important to the social and economic life of prospective non-Jewish converts to Christianity. The social life of the pagan temples was integral to maintaining one’s economic standing in the community. Worshipping in the temples of the gods identified with one’s city of residence was considered essential to public well-being and the common good. Were they to leave that activity behind, they would be judged as disloyal and perhaps even dangerous by friends and family. For many, becoming followers of Jesus meant leaving behind an entire way of life.
Since the first century, the church has had the experience of being the driving social and political force in western culture. We have been representative of the cultural majority and have had a voice in public life, for good and ill, depending on the circumstances. The church has also experience the challenge of the enlightenment and the rise of science as a means of explaining natural phenomena and human behavior. In our country we see now, on an almost daily basis demands that individual religious belief be taken into account in the formulation of law and the standards of various professions. We regularly hear religious faith ridiculed as fantasy by those who would seem to elevate science as a belief system on par with religion.
The 21st century church takes its message to a generation of young adults, a large proportion of whom have built lives and identities and communities for themselves in which Christianity is perceived as irrelevant and potentially destructive. The church is arguably at least partly responsible for those perceptions. Too much of our time has been spent in answering questions the world is no longer asking. Too much of our energy has been spent on defining boundaries and too little on finding ways to include people in our mission.
Last Thursday night and last Friday morning, St. Mary’s took an important step into our future. I’ve been talking to you for at least three years now about the need to restore and renovate our building. Last Thursday night the Vestry voted to allocate funds from the William T. Kemper grant for the first major project to that end. On Friday morning, the Landmarks Commission approved the design for that work. Our first project will be replacement of all of the exterior doors of the church building and repair or replacement of doorsteps and masonry surrounding the doors. This project will move us in the direction of making the building look open and active. Working first on the doors is an important expression of how St. Mary’s has defined itself during the last several years – as a place that is open and welcoming to all who come here.
We have many things in common with our first century church counterparts – we’re small, we’re short of resources, we have a few dedicated people doing a lot of important work. Most importantly though, we’re committed to communicating our mission outward, rather than holding it within and we greet with joy all those who visit with us and welcome them to stay and join with us in our work. Let us join together in giving thanks for the generosity, skill and devotion to our mission that have allowed us to come to this point and ask God’s blessing on the work on our building that we are about to undertake and upon all those who enter through our doors at this time and forever.
Psalm 4
1 John 3:1-7
Luke 24:36b-48
Our 1st and 2nd century spiritual forbears have left us an interesting record of their struggle to build the church. It lives in the pages of the gospels, Acts of the Apostles, many of the New Testament epistles and other writings that are not included in the Bible. The meaning that their words and stories had for them is sometimes obscured by its distance from us in time and cultural context. We reach across 20 centuries looking to their words for meaning for our own lives. That’s a good thing for us to do. Because in many ways, their struggles are not dramatically different from ours.
The early church took its message in two different directions. We read about the disagreements between Peter and James of the church in Jerusalem, and Paul, the church’s persecutor who became its champion. Peter and James were leaders of a community that was evolving from a primarily Jewish culture. The members of that community understood monotheism. They were accustomed to setting themselves apart from the spiritual traditions of the Roman Empire. But their community attracted followers of Jesus who were not Jews. In the book of Acts you can read about their struggle over the question of what is required to be a member of the community of Jesus’ followers. Do you have to be a Jew first? Do you have to follow the law of Moses in order to be a follower of Jesus?
Even in this moment, our church is struggling with cultural distinctions that have threatened to dismantle the Anglican Communion. Our co-religionists in Africa and Asia tell us that they cannot achieve the respect of the majority muslim cultures in which their churches exist unless we in the west agree to exclude our gay, lesbian and bisexual members from full participation in the church. Do you have to be straight or at least act straight in order to be a follower of Jesus?
Those who undertook the mission of spreading the teachings of Jesus within the Jewish community struggled also with Jewish traditions concerning the messiah and resurrection. Jewish thought and tradition were no more monolithic in the first century than they are in the 21st, but the church’s teachings about Jesus as the messiah and about his resurrection were distinctly different from Jewish tradition. In very broad strokes, that tradition envisioned the messiah’s coming within the context of a messianic age – a time in which the world would live in peace and plenty and all (Jews and non-Jews, by the way) would be gathered into the presence of God. For Jews who believed in resurrection, it was an event in which all participated together. The resurrection of one man, and the claim that he was the messiah in the absence of a messianic age were challenges to traditional expectations. The stories of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances were a means of attempting to deal with those expectations.
John’s three letters, one of which we hear from today in the epistle, and Paul’s letters were written to congregations dealing with internal conflict or struggling to define themselves in relation to others. Having no more knowledge of Jesus than they did, it’s not surprising that they interpreted his teachings in a variety of ways. Human nature being what it is, there was an inclination to draw boundaries around what the community would believe and do and what it would not. The trick was getting everyone to agree on where the boundaries would be. How often do you hear of different varieties of Christians condemning each other for false teaching.
The leaders of the early church took their message to an audience that was at the very least skeptical, and in many cases hostile. In addition to the discontinuity between Jewish and Christian teachings about the messiah and resurrection, the early church had other challenges to deal with when offering the good news to non-Jews. Church teachings prohibited such activities as eating meat offered to idols. Participation in the religions of Greece and Rome was important to the social and economic life of prospective non-Jewish converts to Christianity. The social life of the pagan temples was integral to maintaining one’s economic standing in the community. Worshipping in the temples of the gods identified with one’s city of residence was considered essential to public well-being and the common good. Were they to leave that activity behind, they would be judged as disloyal and perhaps even dangerous by friends and family. For many, becoming followers of Jesus meant leaving behind an entire way of life.
Since the first century, the church has had the experience of being the driving social and political force in western culture. We have been representative of the cultural majority and have had a voice in public life, for good and ill, depending on the circumstances. The church has also experience the challenge of the enlightenment and the rise of science as a means of explaining natural phenomena and human behavior. In our country we see now, on an almost daily basis demands that individual religious belief be taken into account in the formulation of law and the standards of various professions. We regularly hear religious faith ridiculed as fantasy by those who would seem to elevate science as a belief system on par with religion.
The 21st century church takes its message to a generation of young adults, a large proportion of whom have built lives and identities and communities for themselves in which Christianity is perceived as irrelevant and potentially destructive. The church is arguably at least partly responsible for those perceptions. Too much of our time has been spent in answering questions the world is no longer asking. Too much of our energy has been spent on defining boundaries and too little on finding ways to include people in our mission.
Last Thursday night and last Friday morning, St. Mary’s took an important step into our future. I’ve been talking to you for at least three years now about the need to restore and renovate our building. Last Thursday night the Vestry voted to allocate funds from the William T. Kemper grant for the first major project to that end. On Friday morning, the Landmarks Commission approved the design for that work. Our first project will be replacement of all of the exterior doors of the church building and repair or replacement of doorsteps and masonry surrounding the doors. This project will move us in the direction of making the building look open and active. Working first on the doors is an important expression of how St. Mary’s has defined itself during the last several years – as a place that is open and welcoming to all who come here.
We have many things in common with our first century church counterparts – we’re small, we’re short of resources, we have a few dedicated people doing a lot of important work. Most importantly though, we’re committed to communicating our mission outward, rather than holding it within and we greet with joy all those who visit with us and welcome them to stay and join with us in our work. Let us join together in giving thanks for the generosity, skill and devotion to our mission that have allowed us to come to this point and ask God’s blessing on the work on our building that we are about to undertake and upon all those who enter through our doors at this time and forever.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Fifth Sunday in Lent
5th Sunday in Lent
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33
Today’s gospel lesson includes that familiar text: “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” There’s a book we use for confirmation class now entitled “Those Episkopols.” It’s been highly praised within the church as a brilliant, elementary exposition of the Episcopal Church and what it means to be a part of it. People really seem to enjoy reading it and get a lot from it. In this book the author devotes many words to the Episcopal Church’s interconnectedness with the world and our sense of its value and goodness and of God’s presence there. I don’t disagree with him, but it may be what most clearly sets us apart from other Christians whose faith is characterizes or even overshadowed by the sense that humanity and the world we live in are inherently corrupt. A faith with that area of focus is very different from one that embraces the world with all its wonders and risks. This text from John is one that is frequently claimed as proof that they are right and we are wrong.
It is a text that may have meant something very straightforward to the one who composed it. Many of his recent ancestors and contemporaries were probably called upon to give their lives for their faith. A sacrifice of that magnitude has to mean something. Those who offer it and those who witness it feel compelled to communicate that meaning to future generations. Twenty centuries later, we may be growing increasingly skilled at imagining threats but the demand that we give our lives for our faith still seems a remote possibility. If that is true, how can we honor the meaning of this text in our own time and place?
I’ve been reading a book entitled The Age of the Unthinkable. Its subtitle is “why the new world disorder constantly surprises us and what we can do about it.” The author is Joshua Cooper Ramo. One of the things he describes in the book is a physics experiment initially imagined by a Danish physicist named Per Bak. Think first about Galileo’s experiment of dropping two balls from the tower of Pisa, one light and one heavy, and noting that they hit the ground at the same time. As Ramo notes, in physics it is not uncommon that multiple layers of complexity underlie a relatively simple observation.
The question posed by Per Bak was this: If you piled sand, one grain at a time into a heap about the size of your fist, how would you know when the first little avalanche would occur? It was a certainty that as the sandpile got higher and the sides steeper, some would slide off. How would you predict when that would happen? Bak’s conjecture was that the sandpile would initially organize itself into instability. He described that condition as one in which adding one grain of sand would trigger an avalanche OR have no effect at all. What made this conjecture depart from the conventional thinking and observation of his discipline is that he was saying that these cones of sand – that looked fairly stable were deeply unpredictable. There was no way of telling what was going to happen next and the relationship between input and output was a mystery. It was organized instability. Bak went on to say that he thought that the energy of systems constantly poised on the edge of unpredictable change was a fundamental force of nature, giving as examples the assembly of clouds and the hard-to-predict onset of rainstorms or the evolution of mammals whose progress frequently jumps past the next logical step. Ramo observes that this sandpile view of the universe does not deny that stability exists in the world, but sees it as a pause in a system of incredible and unchartable dynamism. It is what science calls a “nonlinear” system in which internal dynamics disrupt the idea that you can expect a given action to produce the same reaction every time.
If you could make a model of such a system, you might begin to make sense of how and why they evolved over long periods of time. Another physicist set out to model Bak’s sand pile conjecture. He took sand from the beach and put it through a sieve to get grains of about the same size. He dried them thoroughly and put them in a device that looked like an automatic pepper mill. The mill could measure and control how many grains it dispensed over a period of time. Below the mill he put a plate the size of the palm of your hand, put the plate on a scale and the entire apparatus inside a plexiglass box. Then he hooked it up to a personal computer and started making sand piles. As predicted they initially shaped themselves into cones. Nobody told the grains of sand where to go, but the intrinsic physics of a falling grain of sand meant that they would organize themselves into a pile. But once the pile reached a certain size it went into a strange “critical” state predicted by Bak’s conjecture. With one pile, the addition of a single grain of sand at this point would trigger an avalanche. With another pile, a thousand additional grains could be added before any sand started sliding. You could predict the general chances of getting an avalanche at any given point, but whether or not that next grain of sand would set one off was fundamentally unpredictable. What happened within the pile – the shifting and sliding of grains of sand against each other was as important as any outside force acting upon the pile. There was no clear link between what you did to it and how it responded, nor was there any proportionality between cause and effect. And measuring all of those tiny, instantaneous changes in relationship between the grains inside the pile was impossible. No computer could manage it.
Ramo, the author of The Age of the Unthinkable suggests that the world we live in is much more like one of those piles of sand than we have been willing or able to understand up to this point. It certainly seems true that the world grows more chaotic and the effects of the chaos are hitting closer and closer to home, eroding our sense of security and causing us to question whether the way we have become accustomed to live is sustainable.
What if we do have to figure out how to live in this chaotic and unpredictable environment? In particular, what if we have to do so as Christians continuing to shape our own lives around the baptismal covenant and to encounter the world with a sense of love for God and neighbor? We might begin by re-imagining our understanding of loss. John does it when he describes the grain falling into the ground and dying. How do we make our losses redemptive? Just as an example, how do we experience empathy with the many comfortable and privileged persons who after watching the events of September 11 on television complained “I don’t feel safe any more” But then how do we go on to find a way to help them feel empathy with the child growing up impoverished, with an addicted parent, hearing gunshots outside his windows all night – someone who hasn’t felt safe a day in his life.
Or how might we empathize with the victims of someone like Bernard Madoff but then find a way to help them understand their losses in relation to the life of a single parent trying to raise a family with a minimum wage job in a tough economy?
The analogy of the sand pile, in which the fate of each grain is utterly and completely dependent upon its relationship with all the others offers a different perspective on John’s words about loving one’s own life and the grain of wheat falling into the ground and ultimately bearing fruit. What we imagine to be our individuality and autonomy may be little more than illusion. At the very least, it has less relative importance that we typically give to our life in community. Losing our lives may mean our realization and acceptance of the knowledge that they are linked with those of others in ways that we will never understand, control or predict. What Jesus teaches us is that in living out the baptismal covenant the links between our lives and those of others will be signs of God’s presence. In the experiment of creating the sand piles, the ultimate effect of piling grains of sand was an avalanche. We think of an avalanche as negative – they injure and kill people and destroy things. But that negative connotation is an artifact of the words used to describe it. In the reality that is modeled by this sand pile experiment, the avalanche produced by mysterious shifts in relationship between the grains of sand can be beneficial as well as destructive. What Jesus’ life offers us is the knowledge is that the fruits of our gains and the redemptive nature of our losses are always to be shared and made meaningful.
We may not always have control over what happens to us, but we always have the opportunity to give meaning to it. What we cannot control can bring us an awareness of the love expressed for us by God in shaping a world in which all is interdependent an in which that which is lost is ultimately made meaningful.
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33
Today’s gospel lesson includes that familiar text: “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” There’s a book we use for confirmation class now entitled “Those Episkopols.” It’s been highly praised within the church as a brilliant, elementary exposition of the Episcopal Church and what it means to be a part of it. People really seem to enjoy reading it and get a lot from it. In this book the author devotes many words to the Episcopal Church’s interconnectedness with the world and our sense of its value and goodness and of God’s presence there. I don’t disagree with him, but it may be what most clearly sets us apart from other Christians whose faith is characterizes or even overshadowed by the sense that humanity and the world we live in are inherently corrupt. A faith with that area of focus is very different from one that embraces the world with all its wonders and risks. This text from John is one that is frequently claimed as proof that they are right and we are wrong.
It is a text that may have meant something very straightforward to the one who composed it. Many of his recent ancestors and contemporaries were probably called upon to give their lives for their faith. A sacrifice of that magnitude has to mean something. Those who offer it and those who witness it feel compelled to communicate that meaning to future generations. Twenty centuries later, we may be growing increasingly skilled at imagining threats but the demand that we give our lives for our faith still seems a remote possibility. If that is true, how can we honor the meaning of this text in our own time and place?
I’ve been reading a book entitled The Age of the Unthinkable. Its subtitle is “why the new world disorder constantly surprises us and what we can do about it.” The author is Joshua Cooper Ramo. One of the things he describes in the book is a physics experiment initially imagined by a Danish physicist named Per Bak. Think first about Galileo’s experiment of dropping two balls from the tower of Pisa, one light and one heavy, and noting that they hit the ground at the same time. As Ramo notes, in physics it is not uncommon that multiple layers of complexity underlie a relatively simple observation.
The question posed by Per Bak was this: If you piled sand, one grain at a time into a heap about the size of your fist, how would you know when the first little avalanche would occur? It was a certainty that as the sandpile got higher and the sides steeper, some would slide off. How would you predict when that would happen? Bak’s conjecture was that the sandpile would initially organize itself into instability. He described that condition as one in which adding one grain of sand would trigger an avalanche OR have no effect at all. What made this conjecture depart from the conventional thinking and observation of his discipline is that he was saying that these cones of sand – that looked fairly stable were deeply unpredictable. There was no way of telling what was going to happen next and the relationship between input and output was a mystery. It was organized instability. Bak went on to say that he thought that the energy of systems constantly poised on the edge of unpredictable change was a fundamental force of nature, giving as examples the assembly of clouds and the hard-to-predict onset of rainstorms or the evolution of mammals whose progress frequently jumps past the next logical step. Ramo observes that this sandpile view of the universe does not deny that stability exists in the world, but sees it as a pause in a system of incredible and unchartable dynamism. It is what science calls a “nonlinear” system in which internal dynamics disrupt the idea that you can expect a given action to produce the same reaction every time.
If you could make a model of such a system, you might begin to make sense of how and why they evolved over long periods of time. Another physicist set out to model Bak’s sand pile conjecture. He took sand from the beach and put it through a sieve to get grains of about the same size. He dried them thoroughly and put them in a device that looked like an automatic pepper mill. The mill could measure and control how many grains it dispensed over a period of time. Below the mill he put a plate the size of the palm of your hand, put the plate on a scale and the entire apparatus inside a plexiglass box. Then he hooked it up to a personal computer and started making sand piles. As predicted they initially shaped themselves into cones. Nobody told the grains of sand where to go, but the intrinsic physics of a falling grain of sand meant that they would organize themselves into a pile. But once the pile reached a certain size it went into a strange “critical” state predicted by Bak’s conjecture. With one pile, the addition of a single grain of sand at this point would trigger an avalanche. With another pile, a thousand additional grains could be added before any sand started sliding. You could predict the general chances of getting an avalanche at any given point, but whether or not that next grain of sand would set one off was fundamentally unpredictable. What happened within the pile – the shifting and sliding of grains of sand against each other was as important as any outside force acting upon the pile. There was no clear link between what you did to it and how it responded, nor was there any proportionality between cause and effect. And measuring all of those tiny, instantaneous changes in relationship between the grains inside the pile was impossible. No computer could manage it.
Ramo, the author of The Age of the Unthinkable suggests that the world we live in is much more like one of those piles of sand than we have been willing or able to understand up to this point. It certainly seems true that the world grows more chaotic and the effects of the chaos are hitting closer and closer to home, eroding our sense of security and causing us to question whether the way we have become accustomed to live is sustainable.
What if we do have to figure out how to live in this chaotic and unpredictable environment? In particular, what if we have to do so as Christians continuing to shape our own lives around the baptismal covenant and to encounter the world with a sense of love for God and neighbor? We might begin by re-imagining our understanding of loss. John does it when he describes the grain falling into the ground and dying. How do we make our losses redemptive? Just as an example, how do we experience empathy with the many comfortable and privileged persons who after watching the events of September 11 on television complained “I don’t feel safe any more” But then how do we go on to find a way to help them feel empathy with the child growing up impoverished, with an addicted parent, hearing gunshots outside his windows all night – someone who hasn’t felt safe a day in his life.
Or how might we empathize with the victims of someone like Bernard Madoff but then find a way to help them understand their losses in relation to the life of a single parent trying to raise a family with a minimum wage job in a tough economy?
The analogy of the sand pile, in which the fate of each grain is utterly and completely dependent upon its relationship with all the others offers a different perspective on John’s words about loving one’s own life and the grain of wheat falling into the ground and ultimately bearing fruit. What we imagine to be our individuality and autonomy may be little more than illusion. At the very least, it has less relative importance that we typically give to our life in community. Losing our lives may mean our realization and acceptance of the knowledge that they are linked with those of others in ways that we will never understand, control or predict. What Jesus teaches us is that in living out the baptismal covenant the links between our lives and those of others will be signs of God’s presence. In the experiment of creating the sand piles, the ultimate effect of piling grains of sand was an avalanche. We think of an avalanche as negative – they injure and kill people and destroy things. But that negative connotation is an artifact of the words used to describe it. In the reality that is modeled by this sand pile experiment, the avalanche produced by mysterious shifts in relationship between the grains of sand can be beneficial as well as destructive. What Jesus’ life offers us is the knowledge is that the fruits of our gains and the redemptive nature of our losses are always to be shared and made meaningful.
We may not always have control over what happens to us, but we always have the opportunity to give meaning to it. What we cannot control can bring us an awareness of the love expressed for us by God in shaping a world in which all is interdependent an in which that which is lost is ultimately made meaningful.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany
A Service of Healing
The concept of healing is a big part of the Judaeo Christian tradition. We have story after story in the Bible about cures of bodily illness or emotional disorder brought about through spiritual means. We have extended that idiom to refer to the healing of relationships between individuals and larger communities. Biblical accounts of healing have a particular form – there is something similar about all of them. The sufferer of the affliction is identified. We may or may not learn the details about the effect that it has had on his or her life. A healer is identified who describes the means by which well being can be restored. The afflicted one chooses whether to undertake those means with varying degrees of deliberation. The results are made known.
The means by which healing takes place are usually some kind of ritual words or actions. To us in the 21st century they can seem almost magical. Certainly they are distinct from the kinds of medical procedures, medications or therapies that we are accustomed to identify with the restoration of health from a physical or a mental ailment. There is one thing that never happens in these stories. Healers don’t apply the means of healing without somehow engaging the one afflicted and receiving his or her assent and cooperation. Occasionally the one who is ill is so sick that others seek healing on his behalf, but in one way or another, the one being healed really has to want to change.
Today’s story from the book of Kings is interesting for its little side excursions from the main story. Naaman, the great Aramean general (Aram is the ancient name of Syria) is ill with the fearsome disease of leprosy. Knowledge of a cure comes from a very unlikely source – a young Israelite girl who has become enslaved as the spoils of war. There is an odd irony to that. Why is this insignificant one who has suffered as a result of the great general’s military genius inclined to be so generous? Why doesn’t she at least use this knowledge to bargain for her freedom? And why do all of these more powerful people even listen to what she has to say? If we are looking to be made well the means of doing so may be revealed in unexpected ways. That revelation may reflect unexpected and undeserved generosity on the part of another. From the readers point of view in this story from 2 Kings the revelation puts the general in the debt of one whom he may indirectly have harmed. Her generosity of spirit is an implied forgiveness for his actions that puts him on the road to healing.
The Syrian King sends him off to the King of Israel with an explanation of their request and an impressive array of gifts. The King of Israel views the request for healing through the lens of his own limitations. His life isn’t about healing – it’s about politics. The king can’t put aside his own sense of limitations or his fear for his own well being to engage with the afflicted general. Life will put in our path those whose well being we can have a hand in. Those opportunities may be unexpected and they may seem daunting. They may appear to be threatening to our own sense of who we are and who we want to be. To assist them may seem to require an unreasonable sacrifice. Our responses to fear and threat may blind us to need which seems to great, but with which we are truly capable of assisting.
Fortunately for Naaman, Elisha steps in. He explains to Naaman what he must do to be healed – wash himself in the Jordan seven times. It is, as we might expect, a ritual action. An act of cleansing that is both literal and symbolic – the latter because of the powerful presence of the Jordan in Israel’s sense of itself as a nation and its spiritual life. We learn at this point that Naaman has traveled to Israel with some expectations about how healing is supposed to happen. His expectations are focused on the outward manifestation of the illness and an inclination to place the means of healing outside himself. He wants the healer to wave his hand over the spot on his body where the leprosy is evident and call upon the God of Israel to cure it. He doesn’t anticipate much of a part for himself in the cure. And if it isn’t going to happen as he envisioned it, he’s a little disgusted that he had to travel all the way to Israel and wash in their river when there are perfectly good rivers where he comes from. Naaman’s expectations threaten to get in the way of his being healed. He comes to Israel not expecting to have a part in his own healing. And he comes without expecting that the means of healing will take him beyond what he already knows and where he has already been. The means by which we will be healed is frequently simpler and more straightforward than we imagine it will be. But it is never something applied exclusively from the outside – we always have a part in it. It will take us into unknown territory – perhaps to a place that challenges our assumptions of who we are and where we belong.
Naaman is furious when he hears Elisha’s instructions. He storms off, intending to refuse the healing altogether. His servants call him back and persuade him to try it – even though it may look too easy and seem very unsatisfying. He does it and is restored to health.
Healing is often much more about accepting a challenge to our own assumptions about who we are and what we should do than it is about anything coming to us from the outside. Shedding our afflictions can truly just that – letting go of what makes us sick, unhappy or anxious, robs us of our integrity or seems to make us behave in ways that we. Letting go involves the engagement of the one who is to be healed. It isn’t relief enacted entirely from the outside, independent of our engagement. As Naaman learns, the process of healing may seem to be less than it is cracked up to be and more trouble than it is worth until we experience the results.
All of us have identified with more than one of the characters in this story at one time or another. Like the slave girl, you may have had an opportunity to step beyond the moral high ground of victimhood and offer help to one who has harmed you. Like the king and his wife, you may have listened to an idea from a source that seemed absurdly unlikely or too insignificant to be worth bothering with. Like Elisha, you may have had something important and valuable to offer to someone who was very reluctant to accept it. Like Naaman, you may have made the leap of faith and a journey toward healing that seemed to have too many twists and turns ever to be worthwhile. I welcome you to join in the prayers for healing today in whatever role you find that you occupy in this moment, trusting in God’s presence with us as we engage our own well being and that of others.
A Service of Healing
The concept of healing is a big part of the Judaeo Christian tradition. We have story after story in the Bible about cures of bodily illness or emotional disorder brought about through spiritual means. We have extended that idiom to refer to the healing of relationships between individuals and larger communities. Biblical accounts of healing have a particular form – there is something similar about all of them. The sufferer of the affliction is identified. We may or may not learn the details about the effect that it has had on his or her life. A healer is identified who describes the means by which well being can be restored. The afflicted one chooses whether to undertake those means with varying degrees of deliberation. The results are made known.
The means by which healing takes place are usually some kind of ritual words or actions. To us in the 21st century they can seem almost magical. Certainly they are distinct from the kinds of medical procedures, medications or therapies that we are accustomed to identify with the restoration of health from a physical or a mental ailment. There is one thing that never happens in these stories. Healers don’t apply the means of healing without somehow engaging the one afflicted and receiving his or her assent and cooperation. Occasionally the one who is ill is so sick that others seek healing on his behalf, but in one way or another, the one being healed really has to want to change.
Today’s story from the book of Kings is interesting for its little side excursions from the main story. Naaman, the great Aramean general (Aram is the ancient name of Syria) is ill with the fearsome disease of leprosy. Knowledge of a cure comes from a very unlikely source – a young Israelite girl who has become enslaved as the spoils of war. There is an odd irony to that. Why is this insignificant one who has suffered as a result of the great general’s military genius inclined to be so generous? Why doesn’t she at least use this knowledge to bargain for her freedom? And why do all of these more powerful people even listen to what she has to say? If we are looking to be made well the means of doing so may be revealed in unexpected ways. That revelation may reflect unexpected and undeserved generosity on the part of another. From the readers point of view in this story from 2 Kings the revelation puts the general in the debt of one whom he may indirectly have harmed. Her generosity of spirit is an implied forgiveness for his actions that puts him on the road to healing.
The Syrian King sends him off to the King of Israel with an explanation of their request and an impressive array of gifts. The King of Israel views the request for healing through the lens of his own limitations. His life isn’t about healing – it’s about politics. The king can’t put aside his own sense of limitations or his fear for his own well being to engage with the afflicted general. Life will put in our path those whose well being we can have a hand in. Those opportunities may be unexpected and they may seem daunting. They may appear to be threatening to our own sense of who we are and who we want to be. To assist them may seem to require an unreasonable sacrifice. Our responses to fear and threat may blind us to need which seems to great, but with which we are truly capable of assisting.
Fortunately for Naaman, Elisha steps in. He explains to Naaman what he must do to be healed – wash himself in the Jordan seven times. It is, as we might expect, a ritual action. An act of cleansing that is both literal and symbolic – the latter because of the powerful presence of the Jordan in Israel’s sense of itself as a nation and its spiritual life. We learn at this point that Naaman has traveled to Israel with some expectations about how healing is supposed to happen. His expectations are focused on the outward manifestation of the illness and an inclination to place the means of healing outside himself. He wants the healer to wave his hand over the spot on his body where the leprosy is evident and call upon the God of Israel to cure it. He doesn’t anticipate much of a part for himself in the cure. And if it isn’t going to happen as he envisioned it, he’s a little disgusted that he had to travel all the way to Israel and wash in their river when there are perfectly good rivers where he comes from. Naaman’s expectations threaten to get in the way of his being healed. He comes to Israel not expecting to have a part in his own healing. And he comes without expecting that the means of healing will take him beyond what he already knows and where he has already been. The means by which we will be healed is frequently simpler and more straightforward than we imagine it will be. But it is never something applied exclusively from the outside – we always have a part in it. It will take us into unknown territory – perhaps to a place that challenges our assumptions of who we are and where we belong.
Naaman is furious when he hears Elisha’s instructions. He storms off, intending to refuse the healing altogether. His servants call him back and persuade him to try it – even though it may look too easy and seem very unsatisfying. He does it and is restored to health.
Healing is often much more about accepting a challenge to our own assumptions about who we are and what we should do than it is about anything coming to us from the outside. Shedding our afflictions can truly just that – letting go of what makes us sick, unhappy or anxious, robs us of our integrity or seems to make us behave in ways that we. Letting go involves the engagement of the one who is to be healed. It isn’t relief enacted entirely from the outside, independent of our engagement. As Naaman learns, the process of healing may seem to be less than it is cracked up to be and more trouble than it is worth until we experience the results.
All of us have identified with more than one of the characters in this story at one time or another. Like the slave girl, you may have had an opportunity to step beyond the moral high ground of victimhood and offer help to one who has harmed you. Like the king and his wife, you may have listened to an idea from a source that seemed absurdly unlikely or too insignificant to be worth bothering with. Like Elisha, you may have had something important and valuable to offer to someone who was very reluctant to accept it. Like Naaman, you may have made the leap of faith and a journey toward healing that seemed to have too many twists and turns ever to be worthwhile. I welcome you to join in the prayers for healing today in whatever role you find that you occupy in this moment, trusting in God’s presence with us as we engage our own well being and that of others.
Sermon - Third Sunday in Lent
Exodus 20.1-17
1 Corinthians 1.18-25
John 2.13-22
Biblical text can mean different things depending on what lens you read it through. It is interesting to read John’s account of Jesus’ action in the temple amid our current economic environment. Our culture is engaged in the moral reckoning following a long time of confusing what we have and what we do with who we are. We are dealing with the consequences of having given moral value to wealth and moral credence to the wealthy whether they deserved it or not.
All four canonical gospels include the story that biblical scholars refer to as the “cleansing of the temple.” John’s account is different from the other three in that he places the story chronologically at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. Mark places it in the week before Jesus’ death and Matthew and Luke do the same. The fact that it is in all four books is an argument in favor of its being based on events that actually happened. The fact that John records it as well as the other three gospels suggests that the incident was sufficiently important for the story to have been very widely known – not just from a single strand of tradition about Jesus. But it is also possible that John simply knew of it from the works of Matthew, Mark and Luke.
But it is difficult to imagine exactly what happened. The temple mount in Jerusalem encompasses about 35 acres. At the times of the great Jewish festivals there would have been thousands of people engaged in all kinds of activity within that area, and people constantly moving in and out. One man’s action, however heartfelt or disruptive could not bring every bit of activity an area of that size to a halt. But there are so few stories of Jesus that are recorded with the consistency of this one across all four canonical gospels. It is contrary to the evidence to imagine that Mark created it from his own imagination for his gospel and the other three simply liked it well enough to carry it on into theirs.
It was typical of the Roman government to use local authority to establish control of conquered territories. The empire would give the locals enough latitude to keep their people under control to minimize the expense and effort required to hold the territory. The local authorities would be rewarded for doing what the empire wanted done. In Jerusalem, the high priests and other temple authorities were in collaboration with the empire. Rome appropriated the resources of conquered territories, allowing the local authorities a small measure of it in exchange for their cooperation. This system left about 98% of the population in a condition of economic hardship. And they lived in fear of violence from the Roman authorities who tolerated no challenges to their power or that of their local collaborators. The temple authorities may very well have believed that they were helping to assure the faithful religious practice of their own people. But at what cost?
The logical conclusion is that Jesus’ action in the temple was a challenge to the high priests and other temple authorities who had profited from collaborating with the empire at the expense of their own people. Jesus’ behavior would not have escaped the attention of the Roman army and it may well be that this incident in the temple, whatever, it really was, is the event that motivated his arrest.
Regardless of the details that underlie this story, it is timely to understand it as a criticism of our human tendency to let the pursuit of money and privilege creep into our lives and distort their real meaning. We have made a religion out of money in this country for the last three decades and now we are seeing the results. Earlier this week the NY Times re-ran a column by Judith Warner that had originally appeared last fall. In that column she describes the experience of coming of age in the 1980s and choosing a career doing something other than just making heaps of money. She and her husband live near New York with their two daughters. She writes about the two of them wondering whether the decision to work in creative fields rather than finance was irresponsible because of the limitations it places on the resources they are able to provide for their children. She notes the daily grind of living in that rarefied economic subculture where anyone who isn’t (or wasn’t) fully engaged in the pursuit of money for its own sake was considered a fool. Now we’ve discovered that what they were chasing was only an illusion. Many of them probably told themselves that they were doing it in order to assure the well-being of their families – to give their children everything they needed for a good life. But at what cost? Judith Warner writes about expecting to feel vindicated when the financial services industry collapsed. But it didn’t turn out that way. There was so little meaning there that even seeing them get their just deserts offered very little satisfaction. The effects of the economy’s rise and fall may not have been quite so extreme around here, but as I talk to all of you, you are feeling it. Your work hours limit your time with your children and families. Households in our church have been affected by layoffs and the diminished value of retirement savings. During the last several months, people seem exhausted and depleted – not wanting to do anything but get through the next day.
I’ve been trying to get a sense of what all of this could end up meaning. The belief that we would be better or happier if we just had a little more money in the bank or a few more things in our possession was a distraction from dealing with the reality of who we truly are – human beings who cannot perfect ourselves and our lives through our own efforts and accomplishments. Now, that illusion has been shattered. There is nothing left to chase; nothing to distract us from the real work of being human: honoring our God, making sense of our lives, building relationships and living well in community. Today’s Old Testament lesson is a time-honored starting point for that effort and this is a good a place as any to undertake it.
This week, even if you are feeling exhausted and fearful, connect with someone else who is worn out with worry or fear. Take action in support of someone who has been hurt by the economy. Watching millionaire swindlers being hauled off to jail on television was never going to give anyone a sense of justice being done. What could make things right is the reality that underlies the commandments and today’s gospel lesson: our ability and willingness to engage our sense of who and how God created us to be – here and now, in the wreckage of a culture and an economy that worked very hard to convince us we were or should be something very different. When you go out from here today, do it resolved to live in a manner that expresses your love for God and neighbor.
Exodus 20.1-17
1 Corinthians 1.18-25
John 2.13-22
Biblical text can mean different things depending on what lens you read it through. It is interesting to read John’s account of Jesus’ action in the temple amid our current economic environment. Our culture is engaged in the moral reckoning following a long time of confusing what we have and what we do with who we are. We are dealing with the consequences of having given moral value to wealth and moral credence to the wealthy whether they deserved it or not.
All four canonical gospels include the story that biblical scholars refer to as the “cleansing of the temple.” John’s account is different from the other three in that he places the story chronologically at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. Mark places it in the week before Jesus’ death and Matthew and Luke do the same. The fact that it is in all four books is an argument in favor of its being based on events that actually happened. The fact that John records it as well as the other three gospels suggests that the incident was sufficiently important for the story to have been very widely known – not just from a single strand of tradition about Jesus. But it is also possible that John simply knew of it from the works of Matthew, Mark and Luke.
But it is difficult to imagine exactly what happened. The temple mount in Jerusalem encompasses about 35 acres. At the times of the great Jewish festivals there would have been thousands of people engaged in all kinds of activity within that area, and people constantly moving in and out. One man’s action, however heartfelt or disruptive could not bring every bit of activity an area of that size to a halt. But there are so few stories of Jesus that are recorded with the consistency of this one across all four canonical gospels. It is contrary to the evidence to imagine that Mark created it from his own imagination for his gospel and the other three simply liked it well enough to carry it on into theirs.
It was typical of the Roman government to use local authority to establish control of conquered territories. The empire would give the locals enough latitude to keep their people under control to minimize the expense and effort required to hold the territory. The local authorities would be rewarded for doing what the empire wanted done. In Jerusalem, the high priests and other temple authorities were in collaboration with the empire. Rome appropriated the resources of conquered territories, allowing the local authorities a small measure of it in exchange for their cooperation. This system left about 98% of the population in a condition of economic hardship. And they lived in fear of violence from the Roman authorities who tolerated no challenges to their power or that of their local collaborators. The temple authorities may very well have believed that they were helping to assure the faithful religious practice of their own people. But at what cost?
The logical conclusion is that Jesus’ action in the temple was a challenge to the high priests and other temple authorities who had profited from collaborating with the empire at the expense of their own people. Jesus’ behavior would not have escaped the attention of the Roman army and it may well be that this incident in the temple, whatever, it really was, is the event that motivated his arrest.
Regardless of the details that underlie this story, it is timely to understand it as a criticism of our human tendency to let the pursuit of money and privilege creep into our lives and distort their real meaning. We have made a religion out of money in this country for the last three decades and now we are seeing the results. Earlier this week the NY Times re-ran a column by Judith Warner that had originally appeared last fall. In that column she describes the experience of coming of age in the 1980s and choosing a career doing something other than just making heaps of money. She and her husband live near New York with their two daughters. She writes about the two of them wondering whether the decision to work in creative fields rather than finance was irresponsible because of the limitations it places on the resources they are able to provide for their children. She notes the daily grind of living in that rarefied economic subculture where anyone who isn’t (or wasn’t) fully engaged in the pursuit of money for its own sake was considered a fool. Now we’ve discovered that what they were chasing was only an illusion. Many of them probably told themselves that they were doing it in order to assure the well-being of their families – to give their children everything they needed for a good life. But at what cost? Judith Warner writes about expecting to feel vindicated when the financial services industry collapsed. But it didn’t turn out that way. There was so little meaning there that even seeing them get their just deserts offered very little satisfaction. The effects of the economy’s rise and fall may not have been quite so extreme around here, but as I talk to all of you, you are feeling it. Your work hours limit your time with your children and families. Households in our church have been affected by layoffs and the diminished value of retirement savings. During the last several months, people seem exhausted and depleted – not wanting to do anything but get through the next day.
I’ve been trying to get a sense of what all of this could end up meaning. The belief that we would be better or happier if we just had a little more money in the bank or a few more things in our possession was a distraction from dealing with the reality of who we truly are – human beings who cannot perfect ourselves and our lives through our own efforts and accomplishments. Now, that illusion has been shattered. There is nothing left to chase; nothing to distract us from the real work of being human: honoring our God, making sense of our lives, building relationships and living well in community. Today’s Old Testament lesson is a time-honored starting point for that effort and this is a good a place as any to undertake it.
This week, even if you are feeling exhausted and fearful, connect with someone else who is worn out with worry or fear. Take action in support of someone who has been hurt by the economy. Watching millionaire swindlers being hauled off to jail on television was never going to give anyone a sense of justice being done. What could make things right is the reality that underlies the commandments and today’s gospel lesson: our ability and willingness to engage our sense of who and how God created us to be – here and now, in the wreckage of a culture and an economy that worked very hard to convince us we were or should be something very different. When you go out from here today, do it resolved to live in a manner that expresses your love for God and neighbor.
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