Pentecost 19
October 11, 2009
When I was a teenager, the poet Archibald Macleish wrote a very popular play in which JB, a corporate executive in the course of a few weeks lost everything that mattered to him—his job, status, wife, children. A few weeks ago the Coen brothers who wrote and produced the movie Fargo, came out with their latest film, A Serious Man, about a Jewish college professor who struggles to cope with the collapse of his life and stay decent and upright at the same time
Both the play and movie were inspired by the Book of Job which we will be reading as our first lesson for the next few weeks. This ancient book, probably written about 500 BC, still has the power to move and challenge writers and readers.
Like a fairy tale the Book of Job begins, “once upon a time”: “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job.”
He was a good and righteous man, with a loving wife, ten healthy children, not a rich man but comfortably well off.
The story moves to a fantastical scene. At a gathering in heaven, the story goes, God brags about Job, how good and righteous he is. Satan, who strangely enough is sitting right there with God , says, “Of course he’s a good man. Why not?—he has everything a human being could want. But, God, what if we were to test him? What will happen if you take everything he possesses away from him? I’ll bet you that he won’t love you then!”
God agrees to the wager. Job’s troubles begin. First all Job’s beasts are killed, then his servants, then tragically, his children.
At first Job bears it. He refuses to complain. Then Satan says to God, “Ah, but what will happen if his body is stricken with disease? Will he still endure in silence?” Satan then inflicts loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.” Job’s response?—he still will not complain “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?”
Three friends come to console Job in his misery.
They don’t do a very good job.
Have you ever been in pain of some sort and the pastor or relative or friend drop in and you know they’re good people and they’re just trying to help, but they manage to say all the wrong things?
Job’s friends are like that. Specifically, the friends think they’ve got an explanation. “Job,” they say, “You must have sinned against God. Repent and God will return to you all that has been destroyed.”
Instead of consoling Job, their words prod him into defending himself. He knows himself, knows he has not sinned. “But you must have,” his friends argue.
Job refuses to give in. Almost in a frenzy, he cries out, “I am innocent!,” and he challenges God to listen to his case. He wants to bring God into court.
He’s sure he’ll win: “I would lay my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments. . . . he would give heed to me . . . and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.”
Strong words. But then Job’s defiance cracks and he seems to lose his nerve. Job admits that he’s terrified. Because now suddenly the worst thing happens—JJob can’t feel God, can’t hear God, can’t in any way sense God’s presence. When he calls out, God doesn’t answer. For Job—God is utterly hidden.
One of my favorite psalms is Psalm 139. “Where can I go then from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I climb up to heaven, you are there; if I make the grave my bed, you are there also . . . “ All places on earth and in heaven: “Even there your hand will lead me and your right hand hold me fast.” Such confidence in God’s constant presence, no matter what is happening.
But Job reverses those words of confidence and it’s chilling—: “If I go forward, God is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.”
Anyone who has lived to adulthood has walked through those terrifying times when nothing makes sense, when we are stripped of what we love. When someone we love is stricken with a terminal disease, or our wife or husband leaves us, or our adult child rejects us, or we suddenly take a clear eyed look at the world around us crawling with cruelty and injustice.
It’s then that we need to know that it is ok to pray like Job. “Where are you, God?” “I can’t bear this anymore,” “Why, why, why?” It is not only ok, it is Biblical to cry out our indignation, our anger, our sense of abandonment.
It is always ok to pray the truth of ourselves. What is not ok is to lie to God about who we are or what we are feeling.
This is what I most dread in my role as pastor: when I am called to a hospital room or a funeral home, and someone demands that I defend God.
A grieving wife asks me, for example, “Why did my good husband have to die so young when terrible criminals live long lives?”
The worse thing I can do is give her what she wants—an explanation.
If I did, I’d be like one of Job’s “friends,” trying to second guess God. Trying to make sense of what just doesn’t make sense.
The best thing I can do is to walk alongside her and help her to pray Job’s prayers: “Where are you, God?,” “I can’t bear this anymore,” “Why, why, why?”
When you go through a hard time in your life, don’t be afraid to pray with Job’s honesty. Lightening will not strike you, God’s hand will not rise up against you.
Remember that it is not only Job who prayed this way. On the cross, Jesus, God’s Son, bleeding, straining for each breath, cried out in pain and terror the Job-like words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Only once he’d cried out his despair, could he go on to utter words filled with trust: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Pentecost 17 September 27, 2009
Pentecost 17
September 27, 2009
When I was a girl, whenever my parents left me at my grandparents’ house, I’d take their big black bible off the shelf and settle down with the Book of Esther. Here it is in the Old Testament, only ten chapters wedged between Nehemiah and Job. It was my favorite Bible story.
For good reason: it’s got romance (sort of), humor, suspense, and best of all for a ten year old girl—a poor girl who not only becomes a queen, but also a hero.
During the whole church year we only read the little bit of the Book of Esther in today’s first lesson, so here’s a refresher on the plot:
We travel to Persia, where many Jews made their home after they were released from captivity in Babylon. In Persia, they lived mostly without persecution, easily Integrated with the rest of the population.
One day King Ahasuerus, reveling with his friends, orders his queen, the beautiful Vashti, to display her beauties before the court. She refuses. Irate and pressed by his courtiers who are worried that their wives might learn a lesson from Vashti, deposes her as queen.
In good fairy tale fashion, Ahasuerus orders all the young women of the kingdom to come to the palace so that he might—after they’ve undergone twelve months of spa treatment—choose a new queen.
Esther and her uncle Mordechai are Jews living in the capital. Esther enters the contest for queen and Ahasuerus chooses her. Meanwhile a lowly courtier named Haman is promoted by the King to be his Chief Officer. The honor goes to Haman’s head and he demands public honor by all the citizens, but Mordechai won’t bow down. Haman finds out he’s a Jew and decides to get rid of him by destroying the whole Jewish people.
Mordechai, terrified for their people, tells Esther to go into king and reveal that she’s a Jew. But to go in without an invitation means death. Even though she’s frightened, she takes on the responsibility. She orders Mordechai to ask all the Jews to fast on her behalf; she fasts as well. Meanwhile, Mordechai publicly protests the decree by lying in sackcloth and ashes at the court gate. Haman so infuriated that he builds a gallows 75 feet tall and goes into persuade the king to execute Mordechai on it. But by coincidence the king has a sleepless night and reads in the court annals that Mordechai earlier had foiled a plot to overthrow the king. King wants to reward Mordechai, and is shocked when Esther tells him that Haman is preparing to execute him as well as Esther and all the Jews in Persia. King Ahasuerus sentences Haman to death. After the King leaves Esther’s room, Haman throws himself on her couch to plead for his life. The king thinks he’s attacking her and orders Haman to be executed on the gallows he has built for Mordechai.
It’s a great story!
But over the 2500 years since it was written, it has been controversial.
Martin Luther hated it: “I am so hostile to this book that I wish that it did not exist for it .. . has too much heathen naughtiness.”
Ordinary Jewish people have always loved the Book of Esther, and read it aloud on the annual feast of Purim. But some scholars and authorities disliked it. For one thing, neither Esther nor Mordechai act much like Jews. Even by today’s standards they were not observant Jews.
That means that Esther and Mordechai were apparently living outwardly at least, completely assimilated (in that case, Persian) lives—no kosher, no ritual baths, no peculiarly Jewish dress.
And there was an even more important problem with the Book of Esther. In the entire book, there is no reference to “God.” Not one! A bit surprising for a book of the bible.
Those peculiarities are why now, as a grownup, I still love the Book of Esther.
Because it’s just for those reasons that the story of Esther can speak in a special way to us. We’re Christians trying to live good Christian lives while looking, talking, and acting a whole lot just like everyone else around us. We’re mostly not super-religious and we certainly wouldn’t describe ourselves as holy.
Like Esther and Mordechai, we live our lives in a society which worships many things other than God—wealth, power, beauty, possessions, status
In our lives, as in Esther’s, God does not appear as a burning bush nor does God knock people off a horse with any frquency There are no hugely extraordinary events, there are no stunning miracles.
There’s just—well—life. The situations we find ourselves in, the people and communities we care about.
And as faithful people in a world without God’s direct word and without miracles, how do we live? Like Esther and Mordechi, we make the best choices we can in the circumstances we have. Like Esther and Mordechi, we hope, quietly, that we and God are going in the same direction, and then do our best.
For most of us, as for Esther and Mordechai, the closest we’re going to get to a miracle are coincidences.
Mordechai’s hanging out in the marketplace in just the right place and time to overhear the plot against the king. Chance? God’s prompting? Who knows?
The king’s insomnia—Indigestion? God’s prompting? Who knows?
I suspect we’ve all had those experiences in which we’ve wondered—is this a coincidence? Or the brush of an angel’s hand?
I just had an experience like that. I’m the volunteer chaplain on duty at Speare Hospital this weekend. On Friday, I got to the hospital around quarter of two in the afternoon to begin my shift.
I’d signed in and was heading down the corridor to stash my purse when I heard a voice say, “You’re the lady who did the funeral for my grandmother, aren’t you?” It turned out that yes, I was that lady. I’d deeply loved the grandmother, and through her illness and death, I’d become acquainted with the whole family.
The woman went on: “You’ll never believe this, but my mother-in-law is in intensive care and people are coming from my church to do a healing service in ten minutes.” And at the same instant we spoke together. She said: “Wouldn’t you love to come?” and I said, “I’d love to be part of it, if it’s all right.”
So at 2:00 I was standing at the woman’s bed, in a circle with family members and others, praying for peace and healing for her. And all the time, I was shaky with awe. If I’d come into the hospital in the morning as I’d planned, or even a half an hour later in the afternoon, I would have missed this moment of grace..
The upshot of all this is this:
All we have is our ordinary lives and every once in a while an amazing coincidence. No burning bushes, no miraculous healings—but standing at that bedside that day, it was enough, it was enough
September 27, 2009
When I was a girl, whenever my parents left me at my grandparents’ house, I’d take their big black bible off the shelf and settle down with the Book of Esther. Here it is in the Old Testament, only ten chapters wedged between Nehemiah and Job. It was my favorite Bible story.
For good reason: it’s got romance (sort of), humor, suspense, and best of all for a ten year old girl—a poor girl who not only becomes a queen, but also a hero.
During the whole church year we only read the little bit of the Book of Esther in today’s first lesson, so here’s a refresher on the plot:
We travel to Persia, where many Jews made their home after they were released from captivity in Babylon. In Persia, they lived mostly without persecution, easily Integrated with the rest of the population.
One day King Ahasuerus, reveling with his friends, orders his queen, the beautiful Vashti, to display her beauties before the court. She refuses. Irate and pressed by his courtiers who are worried that their wives might learn a lesson from Vashti, deposes her as queen.
In good fairy tale fashion, Ahasuerus orders all the young women of the kingdom to come to the palace so that he might—after they’ve undergone twelve months of spa treatment—choose a new queen.
Esther and her uncle Mordechai are Jews living in the capital. Esther enters the contest for queen and Ahasuerus chooses her. Meanwhile a lowly courtier named Haman is promoted by the King to be his Chief Officer. The honor goes to Haman’s head and he demands public honor by all the citizens, but Mordechai won’t bow down. Haman finds out he’s a Jew and decides to get rid of him by destroying the whole Jewish people.
Mordechai, terrified for their people, tells Esther to go into king and reveal that she’s a Jew. But to go in without an invitation means death. Even though she’s frightened, she takes on the responsibility. She orders Mordechai to ask all the Jews to fast on her behalf; she fasts as well. Meanwhile, Mordechai publicly protests the decree by lying in sackcloth and ashes at the court gate. Haman so infuriated that he builds a gallows 75 feet tall and goes into persuade the king to execute Mordechai on it. But by coincidence the king has a sleepless night and reads in the court annals that Mordechai earlier had foiled a plot to overthrow the king. King wants to reward Mordechai, and is shocked when Esther tells him that Haman is preparing to execute him as well as Esther and all the Jews in Persia. King Ahasuerus sentences Haman to death. After the King leaves Esther’s room, Haman throws himself on her couch to plead for his life. The king thinks he’s attacking her and orders Haman to be executed on the gallows he has built for Mordechai.
It’s a great story!
But over the 2500 years since it was written, it has been controversial.
Martin Luther hated it: “I am so hostile to this book that I wish that it did not exist for it .. . has too much heathen naughtiness.”
Ordinary Jewish people have always loved the Book of Esther, and read it aloud on the annual feast of Purim. But some scholars and authorities disliked it. For one thing, neither Esther nor Mordechai act much like Jews. Even by today’s standards they were not observant Jews.
That means that Esther and Mordechai were apparently living outwardly at least, completely assimilated (in that case, Persian) lives—no kosher, no ritual baths, no peculiarly Jewish dress.
And there was an even more important problem with the Book of Esther. In the entire book, there is no reference to “God.” Not one! A bit surprising for a book of the bible.
Those peculiarities are why now, as a grownup, I still love the Book of Esther.
Because it’s just for those reasons that the story of Esther can speak in a special way to us. We’re Christians trying to live good Christian lives while looking, talking, and acting a whole lot just like everyone else around us. We’re mostly not super-religious and we certainly wouldn’t describe ourselves as holy.
Like Esther and Mordechai, we live our lives in a society which worships many things other than God—wealth, power, beauty, possessions, status
In our lives, as in Esther’s, God does not appear as a burning bush nor does God knock people off a horse with any frquency There are no hugely extraordinary events, there are no stunning miracles.
There’s just—well—life. The situations we find ourselves in, the people and communities we care about.
And as faithful people in a world without God’s direct word and without miracles, how do we live? Like Esther and Mordechi, we make the best choices we can in the circumstances we have. Like Esther and Mordechi, we hope, quietly, that we and God are going in the same direction, and then do our best.
For most of us, as for Esther and Mordechai, the closest we’re going to get to a miracle are coincidences.
Mordechai’s hanging out in the marketplace in just the right place and time to overhear the plot against the king. Chance? God’s prompting? Who knows?
The king’s insomnia—Indigestion? God’s prompting? Who knows?
I suspect we’ve all had those experiences in which we’ve wondered—is this a coincidence? Or the brush of an angel’s hand?
I just had an experience like that. I’m the volunteer chaplain on duty at Speare Hospital this weekend. On Friday, I got to the hospital around quarter of two in the afternoon to begin my shift.
I’d signed in and was heading down the corridor to stash my purse when I heard a voice say, “You’re the lady who did the funeral for my grandmother, aren’t you?” It turned out that yes, I was that lady. I’d deeply loved the grandmother, and through her illness and death, I’d become acquainted with the whole family.
The woman went on: “You’ll never believe this, but my mother-in-law is in intensive care and people are coming from my church to do a healing service in ten minutes.” And at the same instant we spoke together. She said: “Wouldn’t you love to come?” and I said, “I’d love to be part of it, if it’s all right.”
So at 2:00 I was standing at the woman’s bed, in a circle with family members and others, praying for peace and healing for her. And all the time, I was shaky with awe. If I’d come into the hospital in the morning as I’d planned, or even a half an hour later in the afternoon, I would have missed this moment of grace..
The upshot of all this is this:
All we have is our ordinary lives and every once in a while an amazing coincidence. No burning bushes, no miraculous healings—but standing at that bedside that day, it was enough, it was enough
Pentecost 12 August 22, 2009
Pentecost 12
August 22, 2009
I’ve been edgy all week.
At first I thought it was the weather—in the immortal words of Cole Porter, it’s just been “too darn hot.”
But then I noticed that I’d stopped listening to the news, started ignoring the newspaper. Hmm, I wondered, what’s that about?
Then I realized what’s going on. I’m scared. The health care “debate” has dominated the news and the level of anger and hostility at the town hall meetings has escalated and I’m feeling the threat of violence in the air. Something feels seriously wrong.
I’d like to ignore it and get on with my summer.
But like you in my lifetime I’ve witnessed violence in this country and certain of these incidents changed forever the way I see the world, especially the Vietnam War and the horrific string of assassinations during the 1960’s—John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and others.
September 11th traumatized whole new generations of Americans and undermined their trust that peace and civility will prevail.
What can we Americans Christians do about hostility and violence?
Jesus gives us a clear answer about what we should be doing. In the Sermon on the Mount he says: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” The catechism of the church (in the very back of the BCP) tells us that the basic mission of the church is to make peace: “The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.”
Does that mean that we Christians are called to be wimps? Does God want us to give in and give up our principles and beliefs in order to “keep the peace”?
The writer of the second lesson today certainly doesn’t think so. He tells Christians to suit up (spiritually speaking) like a Roman soldier in full armor complete with the “sword of the Spirit.”
So does that mean, as opposed to being wimps, are Christians supposed to wade into disputes like the Crusaders of old full of self-righteous zeal and the conviction that “God is on our side”?
Nope—neither wimps nor militants. The passage from the Book of Ephesians is clear that the spiritual armor we’re talking about is not ours—not our strength, our “truth,” our righteousness—but God’s, God’s, bestowed upon our powerlessness by God’s grace.
When we try to construct our own armor, to forge our own sword, that’s when we get into trouble. That’s when we’re self-righteous, rather than righteous. When we have faith in our own opinions rather than in the mystery of God’s will. When we fight to the death with the sword of our own self-will.
The passage also says—and this is terribly important— the battle is not against our fellow human beings, our enemies, the bad guys.
No, the battle we’re armed and armored for is a lot scarier than that. It’s against “the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Against, that is, demonic powers, especially those of violence and hatred which can, like the demons in horror movies, take us over and possess us.
How can we become Christ’s peacemakers in a place and time that desperately need them? We need to start small.
First of all—and maybe this is the hardest thing—we’ve got to recognize the hatred and hostility, the rage and wrath we find within ourselves.
I’m slowly learning that if I’m angry a hefty percentage of the time, it’s probably not the other person or people I think I’m angry at that I’m really angry at.
There’s a good chance that the demons are really inside me and not in the other person—resentments from my past, triggering reactions way bigger than they deserve. So I try and remember that wonderful line from the old cartoon “Pogo”: “we have seen the enemy and it is us.” I’m learning that this is a good time to beat a strategic retreat and do a bit of soul-searching and a lot of praying.
Secondly—as Christian peacemakers-in-training we need to look at how we act in the small things, how we are every day with one another in our families or in the church. Can we disagree with someone without hurting or degrading them? Can I admit that I may be wrong and you admit that you may be wrong and can we then stay in that uncomfortable place of disagreement until God’s wisdom and God’s Spirit has had time to work in us?
.
This week I happened to pick up a book on what’s called “the new monasticism,” Christians who choose to live together as communities in the world.
One story has stuck with me: The writer describes two men—one white and one black— who lived and worked together for years in an interracial religious community in the South. They finally admitted to each other and the community that they really didn’t get along very well and the reasons stemmed from race.
They finally went to a counselor. He showed them that they couldn’t make peace when one was always trying to triumph over the other.
The only thing that could help them, they finally realized, was to trust that God’s grace is powerful enough to work through and in them if only they could get their own egos out of the way. One of the men reported, “John [the counselor] taught me what was enough. It is enough to get the love of God into your bones , , , ,. It is enough to care for each other, to forgive each other, and to wash the dishes. The rest of life, he taught me, is details.”
I’m still afraid of the anger seeping through this country right now.
But I know that God’s grace is infinitely stronger than the demonic powers of anger and hostility.
It’s not easy—but each day we can each in our own lives and in our lives together apprentice ourselves to a peace-making God, praying: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.” Or, in other words, care for each other, forgive each other, do what needs to be done, and . . yes, wash the dishes.
August 22, 2009
I’ve been edgy all week.
At first I thought it was the weather—in the immortal words of Cole Porter, it’s just been “too darn hot.”
But then I noticed that I’d stopped listening to the news, started ignoring the newspaper. Hmm, I wondered, what’s that about?
Then I realized what’s going on. I’m scared. The health care “debate” has dominated the news and the level of anger and hostility at the town hall meetings has escalated and I’m feeling the threat of violence in the air. Something feels seriously wrong.
I’d like to ignore it and get on with my summer.
But like you in my lifetime I’ve witnessed violence in this country and certain of these incidents changed forever the way I see the world, especially the Vietnam War and the horrific string of assassinations during the 1960’s—John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and others.
September 11th traumatized whole new generations of Americans and undermined their trust that peace and civility will prevail.
What can we Americans Christians do about hostility and violence?
Jesus gives us a clear answer about what we should be doing. In the Sermon on the Mount he says: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” The catechism of the church (in the very back of the BCP) tells us that the basic mission of the church is to make peace: “The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.”
Does that mean that we Christians are called to be wimps? Does God want us to give in and give up our principles and beliefs in order to “keep the peace”?
The writer of the second lesson today certainly doesn’t think so. He tells Christians to suit up (spiritually speaking) like a Roman soldier in full armor complete with the “sword of the Spirit.”
So does that mean, as opposed to being wimps, are Christians supposed to wade into disputes like the Crusaders of old full of self-righteous zeal and the conviction that “God is on our side”?
Nope—neither wimps nor militants. The passage from the Book of Ephesians is clear that the spiritual armor we’re talking about is not ours—not our strength, our “truth,” our righteousness—but God’s, God’s, bestowed upon our powerlessness by God’s grace.
When we try to construct our own armor, to forge our own sword, that’s when we get into trouble. That’s when we’re self-righteous, rather than righteous. When we have faith in our own opinions rather than in the mystery of God’s will. When we fight to the death with the sword of our own self-will.
The passage also says—and this is terribly important— the battle is not against our fellow human beings, our enemies, the bad guys.
No, the battle we’re armed and armored for is a lot scarier than that. It’s against “the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Against, that is, demonic powers, especially those of violence and hatred which can, like the demons in horror movies, take us over and possess us.
How can we become Christ’s peacemakers in a place and time that desperately need them? We need to start small.
First of all—and maybe this is the hardest thing—we’ve got to recognize the hatred and hostility, the rage and wrath we find within ourselves.
I’m slowly learning that if I’m angry a hefty percentage of the time, it’s probably not the other person or people I think I’m angry at that I’m really angry at.
There’s a good chance that the demons are really inside me and not in the other person—resentments from my past, triggering reactions way bigger than they deserve. So I try and remember that wonderful line from the old cartoon “Pogo”: “we have seen the enemy and it is us.” I’m learning that this is a good time to beat a strategic retreat and do a bit of soul-searching and a lot of praying.
Secondly—as Christian peacemakers-in-training we need to look at how we act in the small things, how we are every day with one another in our families or in the church. Can we disagree with someone without hurting or degrading them? Can I admit that I may be wrong and you admit that you may be wrong and can we then stay in that uncomfortable place of disagreement until God’s wisdom and God’s Spirit has had time to work in us?
.
This week I happened to pick up a book on what’s called “the new monasticism,” Christians who choose to live together as communities in the world.
One story has stuck with me: The writer describes two men—one white and one black— who lived and worked together for years in an interracial religious community in the South. They finally admitted to each other and the community that they really didn’t get along very well and the reasons stemmed from race.
They finally went to a counselor. He showed them that they couldn’t make peace when one was always trying to triumph over the other.
The only thing that could help them, they finally realized, was to trust that God’s grace is powerful enough to work through and in them if only they could get their own egos out of the way. One of the men reported, “John [the counselor] taught me what was enough. It is enough to get the love of God into your bones , , , ,. It is enough to care for each other, to forgive each other, and to wash the dishes. The rest of life, he taught me, is details.”
I’m still afraid of the anger seeping through this country right now.
But I know that God’s grace is infinitely stronger than the demonic powers of anger and hostility.
It’s not easy—but each day we can each in our own lives and in our lives together apprentice ourselves to a peace-making God, praying: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.” Or, in other words, care for each other, forgive each other, do what needs to be done, and . . yes, wash the dishes.
Pentecost 11 August 16, 2009
Pentecost 11
August 16, 2009
The last Sunday I preached before my vacation I spoke about Jesus and the feeding of the 5000.
By the following Thursday, preparing a wedding for 175 people felt like feeding 5000. I’d learned something I’d never known before—weddings are all about the food.
From Tuesday before the wedding literally until the wedding bells were sounding, we were slicing and chopping and mixing and baking and frosting.
Of course for a do-it-yourself potluck-style wedding you’re a little closer to the food issues than you might be otherwise.
But no matter who prepares or serves it, for the wedding couple, families and friends eating together comes right up there with the rings in making weddings special. Sharing food is an expression of sweetness, love, and joy, a way to act out generosity and affection. What better way to celebrate two people giving themselves in love to one another!
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is still talking to the same crowd whom he fed with the loaves and fishes. They loved the free food and they think they love him and they’ve followed him back to a synagogue in his home town with one idea in mind: to make him king of Israel so he can keep right on feeding them.
He’s been talking for a while and he suspects they’re not really listening. So he turns to an effective ploy for public speakers—shock.
“Anyone who eats this Bread will live—and forever!” ok. But then the zinger: “The Bread that I present to the world so that it can eat and live is myself, this flesh-and-blood self.”
Whoa! Now they’re paying attention. As one translation says, “At this, the [people] started fighting among themselves: ‘How can this man serve up his flesh for a meal?’”
Jesus knows he on to a good thing, so he keeps pushing it: “Only insofar as you eat and drink flesh and blood, the flesh and blood of the Son of Man, do you have life within you.” It gets even weirder: “The one who brings a hearty appetite to this eating and drinking has eternal life . . . My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.”
It was shocking to them—especially the mention of “drinking blood” which was forbidden to Jews.
It can be shocking even now.
I’ve mentioned before how a friend brought her two daughters to my ordination. They’d never been to church before. As the bishop said the words you and I probably don’t even hear anymore we’ve heard them so often—”This is my Body” and “This is my Blood.”—they whispered to their mother, “We’re supposed to eat a body?”
When I invite you forward to Communion, I deliberately use the (I hope) slightly shocking words, “to share in the Body and Blood of Christ.”
Because it is a constant temptation to consider sharing in Holy Communion a nice thing to do when it’s convenient.
But Jesus doesn’t want a “nice,” “convenient” relationship with us. In wedding terms, he’s after marriage not just an occasional date.
So he offers himself—himself, his own true whole and holy self to us, to you and to me in Holy Communion.
I’m not going to start an argument about what happens to the bread and wine during the Eucharistic Prayer and Who/What it is exactly that we receive when we come forward to the Communion rail.
I don’t know—nobody does—although there’s a wide range of thoughts about it. But I do claim to know a couple of things from my own experience:
First, Holy Communion feeds real hunger. That’s part of what Jesus was trying to tell the crowd. We hunger physically, yes. We all know what that feels like, although probably few of us here this morning have ever felt the kind of physical hunger women, children, and men experience when they have no idea when they will be able to eat next.
But have you ever felt a hunger for something “more,”? for a life that’s deeper, more meaningful, more grounded in things that really matter? A hunger for what Jesus calls “eternal life”? A hunger for a love that will never desert you?
Those hunger pangs can strike when we’re shopping or watching the Red Sox or getting up and going to work even to a job we love and we suddenly feel empty and say to ourselves, “Isn’t there more to life than this?”
Second, in Holy Communion, Christ gives himself to us to feed that deep hunger. We “become what we eat.”
The Creation story says that God created us, men and women, in God’s own image and likeness. When we spoiled it, when we humans besmirched our godly image by sin, Jesus came to live among us. Jesus became flesh and dwelt among us.
Because he himself was human, Jesus knew from his own experience how weak and easily tempted we are. To become more like Jesus, more like the likeness of God, we humans need something stronger than words.
Jesus’ amazingly creative idea was to offer us the possibility of taking his divine life not just into our heads, not just into our emotions, but into our whole selves, our souls and bodies. And Jesus doesn’t hold back—he gives himself to us without reservations, without boundaries.
When we receive Holy Communion, Jesus promises us, we are eating and drinking Christ’s life. And Christ’s life is the same as God’s life. And more and more, as the sacrament works in us, nourishes us, Christ gives us the power to become what we eat—to become more and more like Christ—more compassionate, more merciful, more patient, more just, more kind.
We seem to have drifted pretty far from a wedding feast.
But I know that one big reason we were all there sharing that marvelous food, was that Hannah and Paul had both felt a deep hunger for a loving companion to walk through their lives with.
And for me, one of the most touching moments at the wedding was when Hannah and Paul fed each other the wedding cake. They were offering to each other without reservation the gift of love.
And when later I invite you to come forward to share in the Body and Blood of Christ that’s what’s on offer here at the altar rail: a full, pure, given-without-reservation gift of Love.
August 16, 2009
The last Sunday I preached before my vacation I spoke about Jesus and the feeding of the 5000.
By the following Thursday, preparing a wedding for 175 people felt like feeding 5000. I’d learned something I’d never known before—weddings are all about the food.
From Tuesday before the wedding literally until the wedding bells were sounding, we were slicing and chopping and mixing and baking and frosting.
Of course for a do-it-yourself potluck-style wedding you’re a little closer to the food issues than you might be otherwise.
But no matter who prepares or serves it, for the wedding couple, families and friends eating together comes right up there with the rings in making weddings special. Sharing food is an expression of sweetness, love, and joy, a way to act out generosity and affection. What better way to celebrate two people giving themselves in love to one another!
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is still talking to the same crowd whom he fed with the loaves and fishes. They loved the free food and they think they love him and they’ve followed him back to a synagogue in his home town with one idea in mind: to make him king of Israel so he can keep right on feeding them.
He’s been talking for a while and he suspects they’re not really listening. So he turns to an effective ploy for public speakers—shock.
“Anyone who eats this Bread will live—and forever!” ok. But then the zinger: “The Bread that I present to the world so that it can eat and live is myself, this flesh-and-blood self.”
Whoa! Now they’re paying attention. As one translation says, “At this, the [people] started fighting among themselves: ‘How can this man serve up his flesh for a meal?’”
Jesus knows he on to a good thing, so he keeps pushing it: “Only insofar as you eat and drink flesh and blood, the flesh and blood of the Son of Man, do you have life within you.” It gets even weirder: “The one who brings a hearty appetite to this eating and drinking has eternal life . . . My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.”
It was shocking to them—especially the mention of “drinking blood” which was forbidden to Jews.
It can be shocking even now.
I’ve mentioned before how a friend brought her two daughters to my ordination. They’d never been to church before. As the bishop said the words you and I probably don’t even hear anymore we’ve heard them so often—”This is my Body” and “This is my Blood.”—they whispered to their mother, “We’re supposed to eat a body?”
When I invite you forward to Communion, I deliberately use the (I hope) slightly shocking words, “to share in the Body and Blood of Christ.”
Because it is a constant temptation to consider sharing in Holy Communion a nice thing to do when it’s convenient.
But Jesus doesn’t want a “nice,” “convenient” relationship with us. In wedding terms, he’s after marriage not just an occasional date.
So he offers himself—himself, his own true whole and holy self to us, to you and to me in Holy Communion.
I’m not going to start an argument about what happens to the bread and wine during the Eucharistic Prayer and Who/What it is exactly that we receive when we come forward to the Communion rail.
I don’t know—nobody does—although there’s a wide range of thoughts about it. But I do claim to know a couple of things from my own experience:
First, Holy Communion feeds real hunger. That’s part of what Jesus was trying to tell the crowd. We hunger physically, yes. We all know what that feels like, although probably few of us here this morning have ever felt the kind of physical hunger women, children, and men experience when they have no idea when they will be able to eat next.
But have you ever felt a hunger for something “more,”? for a life that’s deeper, more meaningful, more grounded in things that really matter? A hunger for what Jesus calls “eternal life”? A hunger for a love that will never desert you?
Those hunger pangs can strike when we’re shopping or watching the Red Sox or getting up and going to work even to a job we love and we suddenly feel empty and say to ourselves, “Isn’t there more to life than this?”
Second, in Holy Communion, Christ gives himself to us to feed that deep hunger. We “become what we eat.”
The Creation story says that God created us, men and women, in God’s own image and likeness. When we spoiled it, when we humans besmirched our godly image by sin, Jesus came to live among us. Jesus became flesh and dwelt among us.
Because he himself was human, Jesus knew from his own experience how weak and easily tempted we are. To become more like Jesus, more like the likeness of God, we humans need something stronger than words.
Jesus’ amazingly creative idea was to offer us the possibility of taking his divine life not just into our heads, not just into our emotions, but into our whole selves, our souls and bodies. And Jesus doesn’t hold back—he gives himself to us without reservations, without boundaries.
When we receive Holy Communion, Jesus promises us, we are eating and drinking Christ’s life. And Christ’s life is the same as God’s life. And more and more, as the sacrament works in us, nourishes us, Christ gives us the power to become what we eat—to become more and more like Christ—more compassionate, more merciful, more patient, more just, more kind.
We seem to have drifted pretty far from a wedding feast.
But I know that one big reason we were all there sharing that marvelous food, was that Hannah and Paul had both felt a deep hunger for a loving companion to walk through their lives with.
And for me, one of the most touching moments at the wedding was when Hannah and Paul fed each other the wedding cake. They were offering to each other without reservation the gift of love.
And when later I invite you to come forward to share in the Body and Blood of Christ that’s what’s on offer here at the altar rail: a full, pure, given-without-reservation gift of Love.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Doesn’t this sound all too familiar?
You make plans with your spouse or your kids or your best friend you haven’t seen in years. It’s great, you’re just settling in for good conversation or an afternoon of peaceful fun and---------isn’t it inevitable?!—something comes up.
Take, for example, my daughter the actress. Out of the last four auditions she’s had that have led to actual roles, three have occurred when she’s been out of New York, and two of them were when she and her fiancé were up here on vacation. No question: they had to drop everything to rush back to the city.
The last time it happened, her fiancé had a meltdown and accused the universe of conspiring against them. It’s lucky she got the job!
In the Gospel the apostles are aching for Jesus-time. They’ve just returned from their first mission trip out on their own, and they’re bursting with stories about how this healing went and what that demon yelled on his way out, what worked and what didn’t work?
And Jesus wants to hear all the details.
So he invites them to a time apart—a retreat: “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”
But—uh oh—people spot their boat and take a shortcut overland and a whole crowd of them is there to greet Jesus and the apostles when they come.
Remember Jesus is human—he’d wanted this time away with his friends as much as they had. Imagine now how his heart must have sunk when he saw the crowd on the shore, voracious for his care.
Yet he doesn’t order them to turn the boat around and head on out for another try farther on down the shore.
Because he’s realized that this is a great teaching moment. After all, these friends and students of his—Peter and Andrew, James and John, and the rest, are “apostles in training.” The word ‘apostle’ is from the Greek. Jesus was preparing his friends and students to be sent out into all the known world.
Jesus as a good teacher sees a way to be present with them and at the same time deepen their sense of what it means to be an apostle.
This may be interesting in a bible-study kind of way. But, you may be asking, what does this have to do with me?.
But consider the end of our Eucharist service. We’re not invited to stay here forever, until the next Eucharist, and so on and so on.
No. In the last prayer we say together, we pray, “Send us out into the world in peace.” And the very last liturgical words are mine: “Let us go forth into the world” and yours, “Thanks be to God.”
So we too are apostles in training. So we too need some basic lessons in apostleship, right along with Peter, James, John, Matthew, and the rest.
The first lesson of apostleship: We’re not living in a controlled environment. We’re living real lives in a real world. Circumstances can change on a dime, expectations get blown out of the water. And being an apostle means dealing with it, rather than yearning for something else. Means understand that this is where you and God have wound up. The places we’re sent are often surprising and often, alas, not at all what we ourselves would choose. And—and this is a wildly unfashionable thing to say—being an apostle often means sacrifice—including the sacrifice of one’s hopes and dreams in the long or short term to the circumstances God puts in front of us.
You may, for example, find yourself grappling with terrible health issues in your family. It is not what you expected, absolutely not what you wanted—but right now it is where you are called to be an apostle, to love and serve God and one another.
Second lesson of apostleship taught by Jesus as the boat heads into shore: Jesus looked at the rabble on the shore with compassion and saw not misfits and undesirables and people one would rather not know, but “sheep without a shepherd.” Being an apostle means getting your heart stretched. Pat L’Abbe and I learned that the first day we walked into the Offenders’ Program and felt our hearts tugged toward men who from the world’s point of view, were absolutely unlovable.
Finally, Jesus takes the apostles to another town, Gennesaret, for lesson #3.
Basically the same thing happens. More crowds, more sick, more “sheep without a shepherd.” So many that people beg just to touch the fringe of Jesus’ cloak.
The third lesson of apostleship lies here: our work is to make the “fringe of Jesus’ garment” available wherever we are.
You and I are called to be Christ-carriers, Christ-bearers. Wherever and whenever we are. It’s not we who console people, or give people new self-respect, or offer God’s care and concern through presence and prayer:
No. What happens is that people can look at us, talk to us, be with us, and through and in that relationship find access to Christ. We can become his healing presence for them, knowing all the time that it’s not we who are doing any of this.
Later, when we pray to be sent forth into the world after the Eucharist, let us say it with all the conviction and humility and trust in God we can muster, remembering the lessons of apostleship Jesus has taught us today:
--opportunities to carry Christ’s healing, loving presence occur in all of our lives, even in (or possibly especially in) those circumstances which surprise us, bushwack us, change all our carefully made plans;
--as apostles we are called to respond to these circumstances with hearts willing to be stretched by Christ’s compassion within us;
--we ask God’s mercy that we may live so that through us others can touch the “fringe of Jesus’ cloak.”
Doesn’t this sound all too familiar?
You make plans with your spouse or your kids or your best friend you haven’t seen in years. It’s great, you’re just settling in for good conversation or an afternoon of peaceful fun and---------isn’t it inevitable?!—something comes up.
Take, for example, my daughter the actress. Out of the last four auditions she’s had that have led to actual roles, three have occurred when she’s been out of New York, and two of them were when she and her fiancé were up here on vacation. No question: they had to drop everything to rush back to the city.
The last time it happened, her fiancé had a meltdown and accused the universe of conspiring against them. It’s lucky she got the job!
In the Gospel the apostles are aching for Jesus-time. They’ve just returned from their first mission trip out on their own, and they’re bursting with stories about how this healing went and what that demon yelled on his way out, what worked and what didn’t work?
And Jesus wants to hear all the details.
So he invites them to a time apart—a retreat: “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”
But—uh oh—people spot their boat and take a shortcut overland and a whole crowd of them is there to greet Jesus and the apostles when they come.
Remember Jesus is human—he’d wanted this time away with his friends as much as they had. Imagine now how his heart must have sunk when he saw the crowd on the shore, voracious for his care.
Yet he doesn’t order them to turn the boat around and head on out for another try farther on down the shore.
Because he’s realized that this is a great teaching moment. After all, these friends and students of his—Peter and Andrew, James and John, and the rest, are “apostles in training.” The word ‘apostle’ is from the Greek. Jesus was preparing his friends and students to be sent out into all the known world.
Jesus as a good teacher sees a way to be present with them and at the same time deepen their sense of what it means to be an apostle.
This may be interesting in a bible-study kind of way. But, you may be asking, what does this have to do with me?.
But consider the end of our Eucharist service. We’re not invited to stay here forever, until the next Eucharist, and so on and so on.
No. In the last prayer we say together, we pray, “Send us out into the world in peace.” And the very last liturgical words are mine: “Let us go forth into the world” and yours, “Thanks be to God.”
So we too are apostles in training. So we too need some basic lessons in apostleship, right along with Peter, James, John, Matthew, and the rest.
The first lesson of apostleship: We’re not living in a controlled environment. We’re living real lives in a real world. Circumstances can change on a dime, expectations get blown out of the water. And being an apostle means dealing with it, rather than yearning for something else. Means understand that this is where you and God have wound up. The places we’re sent are often surprising and often, alas, not at all what we ourselves would choose. And—and this is a wildly unfashionable thing to say—being an apostle often means sacrifice—including the sacrifice of one’s hopes and dreams in the long or short term to the circumstances God puts in front of us.
You may, for example, find yourself grappling with terrible health issues in your family. It is not what you expected, absolutely not what you wanted—but right now it is where you are called to be an apostle, to love and serve God and one another.
Second lesson of apostleship taught by Jesus as the boat heads into shore: Jesus looked at the rabble on the shore with compassion and saw not misfits and undesirables and people one would rather not know, but “sheep without a shepherd.” Being an apostle means getting your heart stretched. Pat L’Abbe and I learned that the first day we walked into the Offenders’ Program and felt our hearts tugged toward men who from the world’s point of view, were absolutely unlovable.
Finally, Jesus takes the apostles to another town, Gennesaret, for lesson #3.
Basically the same thing happens. More crowds, more sick, more “sheep without a shepherd.” So many that people beg just to touch the fringe of Jesus’ cloak.
The third lesson of apostleship lies here: our work is to make the “fringe of Jesus’ garment” available wherever we are.
You and I are called to be Christ-carriers, Christ-bearers. Wherever and whenever we are. It’s not we who console people, or give people new self-respect, or offer God’s care and concern through presence and prayer:
No. What happens is that people can look at us, talk to us, be with us, and through and in that relationship find access to Christ. We can become his healing presence for them, knowing all the time that it’s not we who are doing any of this.
Later, when we pray to be sent forth into the world after the Eucharist, let us say it with all the conviction and humility and trust in God we can muster, remembering the lessons of apostleship Jesus has taught us today:
--opportunities to carry Christ’s healing, loving presence occur in all of our lives, even in (or possibly especially in) those circumstances which surprise us, bushwack us, change all our carefully made plans;
--as apostles we are called to respond to these circumstances with hearts willing to be stretched by Christ’s compassion within us;
--we ask God’s mercy that we may live so that through us others can touch the “fringe of Jesus’ cloak.”
July 12, 2009
Sixth Sunday of Pentecost
July 12, 2009
Who ever said worship is boring? Today we’re invited to witness unadulterated, boisterous spiritual joy in the person of King David as he dances the Ark of the Covenant into his new capital city of Jerusalem.
Of course we’re not talking about a boat like Noah’s “ark.” The Ark of the Covenant, for those of you who haven’t seen “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” was a very large chest or trunk. It carried Israel’s greatest treasure, the two stone tablets inscribed with the ten commandments.
Remember that the Israelites at this point in their history were nomads, wandering the desert. So God ordered their craftspeople to build a portable shrine, large enough to hold the tablets, but small enough to be carried moved from place to place.
For nearly 40 years, the Ark with its precious cargo of the ten commandments led the people as they traveled through the desert on their way to the promised land.
Once the Israelites settled into Canaan/Palestine the Ark was placed in a position of honor in one of the main cities.
Many years later, the Philistines invaded Israel. They were eager to get their hands on the Ark because they believed it held the divine power of Yahweh, Israel’s God.
But the Israelites hid it away for 20 years until David defeated the Philistines (remember Goliath?) and was declared King of Israel.
David then took the Ark out of hiding and marched it in ceremonial procession to his new capital city, Jerusalem.
For the people of Israel, the Ark of the Covenant not only held the stone tablets but in some sense was the presence of God among them.
They had good reason for this. The ten commandments confirmed and expressed God’s unfailing care for the chosen people, what in Hebrew is called ‘heset,’ or “steadfast love” because they showed that God cared enough about them to give them rules for living.
So David’s dance that day in Jerusalem expressed pure spiritual joy at the coming of God’s presence into Jerusalem.
Or—maybe not.
There’s that peculiar little scene of Michal, one of David’s wives, observing from the palace window. As everyone else in Jerusalem was partying outside, his wife chose to stay inside and watch the spectacle from there: “Michal, daughter of Saul, looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD; and she despised him in her heart.”
What’s going on with her? Is she nursing a private grudge? Why can’t she share David’s spiritual fervor? Doesn’t she believe God’s presence is in the Ark of the Covenant?
When she looks out the window and sees David dancing, she doesn’t see joyous spirituality, David ecstatic in the presence of God. She sees a raw (and very effective) display of political power.
Michal is the daughter of the former king, Saul, whom God deposed in favor of David. For Michal, the Ark of the Covenant rolling into Jerusalem cemented David’s claim to the throne. Religious awe?—no way. Political cynicism—that’s all she could feel.
I see Michal as the patron saint of many people today.
People who love spirituality, but distrust religion.
How often have you heard someone say, “I like the teachings of Jesus Christ, but I just can’t bring myself to belong to a church.” And then they may go on to cite, as many recent books have done, sins of the churches over the two millennia since Jesus lived on earth
We all know the scandalous history of Christianity: Catholics murdering Protestants, Protestants murdering Catholics. Executions of so-called witches. Suppression, imprisonment, silencing, or even executions of the scientists of the Renaissance.
Many churches in the United States condoning slavery. Silencing and exclusion of women, people with handicaps, people of differing sexual orientations from worship and certainly from positions of authority. Churches in many nations supporting cruel and repressive regimes.
Even you, even I, may occasionally step back and look at Church from behind a curtain and think, “So what does God have to do with this?” It’s no accident that the fastest growing faith group in the United States right now is “spiritual but not religious.”
This past week and in the week ahead, you might feel a bit like Michal as the drama of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA unfolds.
You might think—all this wrangling, especially about sexuality, it’s just embarrassing.
You might feel like shouting, Church shouldn’t have anything to do with politics or social issues—why don’t we all just worship together? What does all this have to do with God and spirituality?
David’s fervor and Michal’s cynicism both have something to teach us about the reality of church.
Yes, God is present in our worship. God continues to love us with hesed, with steadfast love. Jesus Christ continues to show up in the Eucharist.
But Michal’s clear-eyed appreciation that religion and politics are thoroughly intertwined is also necessary. As soon as you get more than two people gathered together, Christ may be in the midst of them, but so will politics.
In any church, from CHS right up to national and international church bodies, the question is how do we do the necessary politics of the church?
In our vestry recently, we’ve been working hard practicing “spirit-filled listening,” in which we all try to respect the integrity of people we disagree with, and realizing that we individually may not have the truth nailed down. It’s really hard—we all love our own opinions and our own voices, but we’re working at it.
At General Convention this week, the House of Delegates declared an unprecedented one hour pause in Roberts Rules of Order for strangers in pairs to talk to one another about their personal histories around sexuality and spirituality, days before they will all vote on those issues.
A religious organization, a church, is people getting it wrong, struggling over and over to get it at least righter, returning to the well of both personal and communal spirituality, —to what David danced for that long ago day in Jerusalem—God’s unfailing, steadfast love.
July 12, 2009
Who ever said worship is boring? Today we’re invited to witness unadulterated, boisterous spiritual joy in the person of King David as he dances the Ark of the Covenant into his new capital city of Jerusalem.
Of course we’re not talking about a boat like Noah’s “ark.” The Ark of the Covenant, for those of you who haven’t seen “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” was a very large chest or trunk. It carried Israel’s greatest treasure, the two stone tablets inscribed with the ten commandments.
Remember that the Israelites at this point in their history were nomads, wandering the desert. So God ordered their craftspeople to build a portable shrine, large enough to hold the tablets, but small enough to be carried moved from place to place.
For nearly 40 years, the Ark with its precious cargo of the ten commandments led the people as they traveled through the desert on their way to the promised land.
Once the Israelites settled into Canaan/Palestine the Ark was placed in a position of honor in one of the main cities.
Many years later, the Philistines invaded Israel. They were eager to get their hands on the Ark because they believed it held the divine power of Yahweh, Israel’s God.
But the Israelites hid it away for 20 years until David defeated the Philistines (remember Goliath?) and was declared King of Israel.
David then took the Ark out of hiding and marched it in ceremonial procession to his new capital city, Jerusalem.
For the people of Israel, the Ark of the Covenant not only held the stone tablets but in some sense was the presence of God among them.
They had good reason for this. The ten commandments confirmed and expressed God’s unfailing care for the chosen people, what in Hebrew is called ‘heset,’ or “steadfast love” because they showed that God cared enough about them to give them rules for living.
So David’s dance that day in Jerusalem expressed pure spiritual joy at the coming of God’s presence into Jerusalem.
Or—maybe not.
There’s that peculiar little scene of Michal, one of David’s wives, observing from the palace window. As everyone else in Jerusalem was partying outside, his wife chose to stay inside and watch the spectacle from there: “Michal, daughter of Saul, looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD; and she despised him in her heart.”
What’s going on with her? Is she nursing a private grudge? Why can’t she share David’s spiritual fervor? Doesn’t she believe God’s presence is in the Ark of the Covenant?
When she looks out the window and sees David dancing, she doesn’t see joyous spirituality, David ecstatic in the presence of God. She sees a raw (and very effective) display of political power.
Michal is the daughter of the former king, Saul, whom God deposed in favor of David. For Michal, the Ark of the Covenant rolling into Jerusalem cemented David’s claim to the throne. Religious awe?—no way. Political cynicism—that’s all she could feel.
I see Michal as the patron saint of many people today.
People who love spirituality, but distrust religion.
How often have you heard someone say, “I like the teachings of Jesus Christ, but I just can’t bring myself to belong to a church.” And then they may go on to cite, as many recent books have done, sins of the churches over the two millennia since Jesus lived on earth
We all know the scandalous history of Christianity: Catholics murdering Protestants, Protestants murdering Catholics. Executions of so-called witches. Suppression, imprisonment, silencing, or even executions of the scientists of the Renaissance.
Many churches in the United States condoning slavery. Silencing and exclusion of women, people with handicaps, people of differing sexual orientations from worship and certainly from positions of authority. Churches in many nations supporting cruel and repressive regimes.
Even you, even I, may occasionally step back and look at Church from behind a curtain and think, “So what does God have to do with this?” It’s no accident that the fastest growing faith group in the United States right now is “spiritual but not religious.”
This past week and in the week ahead, you might feel a bit like Michal as the drama of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA unfolds.
You might think—all this wrangling, especially about sexuality, it’s just embarrassing.
You might feel like shouting, Church shouldn’t have anything to do with politics or social issues—why don’t we all just worship together? What does all this have to do with God and spirituality?
David’s fervor and Michal’s cynicism both have something to teach us about the reality of church.
Yes, God is present in our worship. God continues to love us with hesed, with steadfast love. Jesus Christ continues to show up in the Eucharist.
But Michal’s clear-eyed appreciation that religion and politics are thoroughly intertwined is also necessary. As soon as you get more than two people gathered together, Christ may be in the midst of them, but so will politics.
In any church, from CHS right up to national and international church bodies, the question is how do we do the necessary politics of the church?
In our vestry recently, we’ve been working hard practicing “spirit-filled listening,” in which we all try to respect the integrity of people we disagree with, and realizing that we individually may not have the truth nailed down. It’s really hard—we all love our own opinions and our own voices, but we’re working at it.
At General Convention this week, the House of Delegates declared an unprecedented one hour pause in Roberts Rules of Order for strangers in pairs to talk to one another about their personal histories around sexuality and spirituality, days before they will all vote on those issues.
A religious organization, a church, is people getting it wrong, struggling over and over to get it at least righter, returning to the well of both personal and communal spirituality, —to what David danced for that long ago day in Jerusalem—God’s unfailing, steadfast love.
July 5th, 2009
Proper 9
July 5th, 2009
Americans have always sung their faith.
From native American songs, drums, and flutes, through the harmonies of Anglican psalm singing at churches like Old North Church in Boston and Bruton Parish in Virginia, to Roman Catholic Gregorian chant in Spanish Florida and California; to the cries of lament and longings for freedom of African slaves; to the boisterous praise songs of camp meetings and revivals, Hebrew chant and now Hindu and Muslim and Buddhist sacred songs—Americans love to sing their prayers!
Today, mindful of this weekend’s celebration of our country, I want to look at four hymns as lenses to focus on some of the strands that have uniquely formed our spiritual lives as American Christians.
Processional: “The Spacious Firmament on High” Blue hymnal #409.
Not officially an “American” hymn. Joseph Addison was an English poet who never ventured across the Atlantic to the colonies. The poem itself, based on Psalm 19, was published in an English literary newspaper in 1712.
I chose it for this morning because it reveals an important strand of American spirituality in the English colonies and in the first years of kind United States. This strand—we still get this in New England—is a kind of “gentlemanly distance” from God.
Joseph Addison held a point of view very important to Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and other Founding Fathers.
They were “deists”—That means that they believed in God, yes, but not a personal God. In their minds, God was the “great clockmaker,” the creator who had set the world going, but then stepped back and let it work itself out according to laws of nature which were just being discovered by Isaac Newton and others.
This attitude was not un-religious nor un-spiritual. It expresses deep reverence and awe which comes from what one of my professor’s used to call “the size gap” between God and God’s world:
Let’s read aloud together the first verse. As you read the words, try and feel in your imagination the holy awe the writer felt toward the Creator of such a perfectly lawful and orderly uiniverse: . . . .
This “gentlemanly reserve” toward God was quite prevalent in colonial times and in the early days of the United States.
But the 19th century gave rise to two urgent and powerful movements towards a greater intimacy with God.
Gospel: “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” LEVAS 175
African slaves, pushed to desperation by captivity, cruelty, disruption of families, had nowhere or no one to turn to beside God. This was the God who had freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and that gave them hope.
But sometimes all they could do was lament: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, Nobody knows but Jesus.”
There’s no size gap here, no, not at all-- no reverent distance,no philosophy or complicated theology—the slave is crying from his or her very bones to the only One who might possibly listen..
Offertory: “In the Garden” LEVAS 69
Meanwhile waves of religious fervor were burning through white communities in the United States during the 19th century in a series of what were called “Great Awakenings.” Women and men sang their hearts out at huge revivals.
The God of the revivals was not at all the distant and disinterested Clockmaker of the Revolutionary War period. On the contrary, God, especially in the person of Jesus, was vividly, emotionally present, saving them right there in the church or tent or open field, healing their bodies and forgiving their sins.
For many individuals the fervor of revivals eventually gave way to a quieter, but maybe even more intimate, sense of God or Jesus as a personal friend. These people felt perfectly comfortable talking with God and confidently asking for help..
“In the Garden,” written in 1912, expresses this radical sense of intimacy. Some of us may love this old hymn. And I suspect that others of us, it’s embarrassing, because it’s so off-the-charts sentimental.
And yet . . . , and yet . . . , isn’t there something gripping in the idea that you and I can walk, like Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection, with Jesus himself beside us? Anywhere? Any time? What if it’s really true that Jesus won’t put up any barriers between us.
I have just read a history of Alcoholics Anonymous which points out that this has been the favorite hymn of many recovered alcoholics over the years Why?. Because only such a sense of intimacy with Jesus/God/their “Higher Power” that allows alcoholics and other addicts to make the leap of faith and surrender their lives to a God who truly cares for them.
Let’s pray this hymn, saying verses one and two with the chorus, and while we’re speaking, imagine that we’re walking with Jesus in a July garden:
Recessional: “America the Beautiful” #719.
Written at the top of Pike’s Peak by a young woman professor from Wellesley College in 1893.
She’d just traveled west by train for the first time. She’s seen the “alabaster city” of Chicago all spruced up for the Columbian Exposition. She’d watched the “amber waves of grain” as the train crossed Kansas on the 4th of July.
On the top of Pike’s Peak, Katherine Lee Bates’s heart burst out in a prayer for her country. I love this hymn: it doesn’t express uncritical admiration nor a jingoistic thanksgiving for a perfect nation. Rather, Bates’ prays that her country’s physical beauty may be matched by moral and ethical beauty.
Each verse concludes with a prayer, one of which is repeated—“America! America! God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea,” and this, which deserves to be prayed before every deliberation of every governmental body in this nation: “America! America! God mend thine every flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”
July 5th, 2009
Americans have always sung their faith.
From native American songs, drums, and flutes, through the harmonies of Anglican psalm singing at churches like Old North Church in Boston and Bruton Parish in Virginia, to Roman Catholic Gregorian chant in Spanish Florida and California; to the cries of lament and longings for freedom of African slaves; to the boisterous praise songs of camp meetings and revivals, Hebrew chant and now Hindu and Muslim and Buddhist sacred songs—Americans love to sing their prayers!
Today, mindful of this weekend’s celebration of our country, I want to look at four hymns as lenses to focus on some of the strands that have uniquely formed our spiritual lives as American Christians.
Processional: “The Spacious Firmament on High” Blue hymnal #409.
Not officially an “American” hymn. Joseph Addison was an English poet who never ventured across the Atlantic to the colonies. The poem itself, based on Psalm 19, was published in an English literary newspaper in 1712.
I chose it for this morning because it reveals an important strand of American spirituality in the English colonies and in the first years of kind United States. This strand—we still get this in New England—is a kind of “gentlemanly distance” from God.
Joseph Addison held a point of view very important to Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and other Founding Fathers.
They were “deists”—That means that they believed in God, yes, but not a personal God. In their minds, God was the “great clockmaker,” the creator who had set the world going, but then stepped back and let it work itself out according to laws of nature which were just being discovered by Isaac Newton and others.
This attitude was not un-religious nor un-spiritual. It expresses deep reverence and awe which comes from what one of my professor’s used to call “the size gap” between God and God’s world:
Let’s read aloud together the first verse. As you read the words, try and feel in your imagination the holy awe the writer felt toward the Creator of such a perfectly lawful and orderly uiniverse: . . . .
This “gentlemanly reserve” toward God was quite prevalent in colonial times and in the early days of the United States.
But the 19th century gave rise to two urgent and powerful movements towards a greater intimacy with God.
Gospel: “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” LEVAS 175
African slaves, pushed to desperation by captivity, cruelty, disruption of families, had nowhere or no one to turn to beside God. This was the God who had freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and that gave them hope.
But sometimes all they could do was lament: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, Nobody knows but Jesus.”
There’s no size gap here, no, not at all-- no reverent distance,no philosophy or complicated theology—the slave is crying from his or her very bones to the only One who might possibly listen..
Offertory: “In the Garden” LEVAS 69
Meanwhile waves of religious fervor were burning through white communities in the United States during the 19th century in a series of what were called “Great Awakenings.” Women and men sang their hearts out at huge revivals.
The God of the revivals was not at all the distant and disinterested Clockmaker of the Revolutionary War period. On the contrary, God, especially in the person of Jesus, was vividly, emotionally present, saving them right there in the church or tent or open field, healing their bodies and forgiving their sins.
For many individuals the fervor of revivals eventually gave way to a quieter, but maybe even more intimate, sense of God or Jesus as a personal friend. These people felt perfectly comfortable talking with God and confidently asking for help..
“In the Garden,” written in 1912, expresses this radical sense of intimacy. Some of us may love this old hymn. And I suspect that others of us, it’s embarrassing, because it’s so off-the-charts sentimental.
And yet . . . , and yet . . . , isn’t there something gripping in the idea that you and I can walk, like Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection, with Jesus himself beside us? Anywhere? Any time? What if it’s really true that Jesus won’t put up any barriers between us.
I have just read a history of Alcoholics Anonymous which points out that this has been the favorite hymn of many recovered alcoholics over the years Why?. Because only such a sense of intimacy with Jesus/God/their “Higher Power” that allows alcoholics and other addicts to make the leap of faith and surrender their lives to a God who truly cares for them.
Let’s pray this hymn, saying verses one and two with the chorus, and while we’re speaking, imagine that we’re walking with Jesus in a July garden:
Recessional: “America the Beautiful” #719.
Written at the top of Pike’s Peak by a young woman professor from Wellesley College in 1893.
She’d just traveled west by train for the first time. She’s seen the “alabaster city” of Chicago all spruced up for the Columbian Exposition. She’d watched the “amber waves of grain” as the train crossed Kansas on the 4th of July.
On the top of Pike’s Peak, Katherine Lee Bates’s heart burst out in a prayer for her country. I love this hymn: it doesn’t express uncritical admiration nor a jingoistic thanksgiving for a perfect nation. Rather, Bates’ prays that her country’s physical beauty may be matched by moral and ethical beauty.
Each verse concludes with a prayer, one of which is repeated—“America! America! God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea,” and this, which deserves to be prayed before every deliberation of every governmental body in this nation: “America! America! God mend thine every flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”
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