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.

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.

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.

Sermon - First Sunday in Lent

First Sunday in Lent

Genesis 9.8-17
1 Peter 3.18-22
Mark 9.15

If you were looking for a theme that unites today’s Old Testament and Gospel lessons, it could be the title of a U2 album from about eight years ago – “All That You Can’t Leave Behind.” There is a song on that album with lyrics that speak of a journey “that has to be believed to be seen.” The lesson from Genesis is God’s promise after the flood. The opening chapter of Mark’s gospel sets its readers and its main character on the journey toward the cross. We know the end of both of those stories, but for the persons described in the stories they are journeys that have to be believed to be seen. Our lives have similar journeys.
To me, of all the seasons of the church year, Lent makes its message most tangible. It gives us the opportunity to walk that journey toward the cross through our own chosen disciplines – fasting, doing without things, making important life changes or deliberately choosing to learn or do new things. In doing so, we learn what can and can’t be left behind. We make the journey in faith – believing in an outcome that we cannot see, because it will only be revealed in the experience.
You’re all very familiar with the story of the flood in Genesis from which today’s Old Testament lesson is taken. That story describes the destruction of the earth, leaving only the most essential elements of a new beginning. In the aftermath of that disaster is a promise from God that it will never happen that way again and the command to go forth and give life to a new world.
The theme of a new world also underlies the first chapter of Mark from which today’s gospel lesson is taken. Mark was almost certainly the first of the four gospels in the Bible to be written. It reflects the pain and hardship of the first century Jewish-Roman war and the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. More subtly, the writing of Mark may have coincided with a power struggle between four would-be Roman emperors from which Vespasian emerged as the winner. It is especially interesting to think about the language of the first chapter of Mark in that context. After the stories of Jesus’ birth that we are accustomed to from Matthew and Luke’s gospels, along with the historic creeds and centuries of tradition, we are in the habit of believing that the title “son of God” was one uniquely claimed and deserved by Jesus. In reality, Mark’s claim of divine sonship for Jesus in today’s gospel lesson was a shockingly bold appropriation of a title commonly given to the Roman Emperor. The terms “good news” and Savior are also associated with the Roman emperor in the literature of Mark’s day. From the mid first century chaos of warfare and political struggle, Mark invites us to re-imagine the world as God’s imperial domain – a more literal translation of the greek basilea tou theou than the words “kingdom of God” which we’re accustomed to reading in the Bible. Mark offers his readers that invitation with the voice of God to back it up. And he establishes without a doubt the continuity of this new “son of God” with the faith of his fathers by portraying John the Baptist as the heir of Elijah’s credentials. As Mark describes it, John proclaims the coming of the one who will be greater than all who came before him. As Jesus undergoes the ritual submergence and emergence from the water, with all of its symbolic connotations of chaos and creation, death and re-birth, his identity as God’s son is proclaimed by no less than God’s own voice. These few verses are a breathtaking fusion of past, present and future – the proclamation of a new world order that will change everything. The audacity of Mark’s hope, to paraphrase President Obama, is only truly apparent when you consider the magnitude of the destruction from which it emerged. The Jewish-Roman war was, by contemporary accounts, a horrific struggle. It reinforced the divergence between Christian and Jewish communities and it brought about the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. To imagine in the midst, or the immediate aftermath of that conflict, that anything good would come of it must have been a tenuous hope indeed. And to challenge the Roman Empire as Mark does in this first chapter was a remarkable act of courage – a journey that had to be believed in order to be seen.
In today’s gospel lesson, Mark describes Jesus as being driven into the wilderness by God’s spirit. This departure from the ordinary sustenance of life – physical, mental and emotional, echoes the enforced isolation of the creatures who accompany Noah in the story of the flood. The metaphor of a time in the wilderness has remained commonplace and now, frequently takes on non-religious connotations. We apply it to experiences of emotional hardship, loss of power or privilege or a sense of dislocation from what has been familiar. Usually it ends with a new outlook and the realization that what seemed like a painful end was the beginning of what was yet to be created.
Our experience of Lent – its scriptural associations and the church traditions and spiritual practices associated with it can be a way of organizing and interpreting our own experience of discerning all that can’t be left behind. Lent can be a reminder that even in an absurdly risk-averse world that threatens to drown us in useful information, there are still journeys that must be believed in order to be seen. Our culture of late has taught us to believe that success is about appearances rather than substance. We have come to expect quick results that require little effort or sacrifice. The consequences of those beliefs and expectations are now upon us. The good news of God in Jesus is that the journey we envision, that goes beyond the cross to resurrection is a reality that we will see. The kingdom of God has come near – believe the good news.