Bishop Dan's Sermons

Building A Civil Society: Reflections On The Moral Legacy Of The First Lady Of Las Vegas, Helen Stewart

2011-12-05T17:39:00.000-08:00

Helen Stewart is the kind of hero we need to keep in mind today.
She is a hero for women – pioneering the place of women as leaders
in the public square.
She is a classic Western hero – making a go of ranching for decades
in this hard land.

To me, she is most of all a hero as a builder of civil society,
a former of community.
The first great work of literature is the Epic of Gilgamesh from Ancient Sumer.
In it, young Gilgamesh is something of a super hero run amok.
Although he is the king, he does not care for his people.
He lives for himself.

His reckless youth comes to an end when he discovers that people are mortal.
So he sets out on a quest for the way to overcome mortality
or to live with enough gusto that his life can be worthwhile
even if it will end.
After many adventures, he realizes his quest is futile;
so he returns home to Uruk, the capital of his kingdom.

On his arrival, Gilgamesh looks up and sees the walls of Uruk.
At that moment, he finally realizes that authentic human life
is lived in a community, a civil society, a neighborhood of people
who are intentionally neighbors to each other.
He realizes his quest for his own individual well-being is futile
because our individual well-being cannot be split away
from the common good.
So he dedicates himself to the service of his people.

The myth about the Westerner is that we came here to escape civil society.
The truth is that Westerners began constructing civil society
from the time they got here.
The myth of ranchers is that they lived in their own fiefdoms
Ignoring -- or even riding roughshod over -- townspeople and others.
Helen Stewart is proof that is far from the case.

As a widowed rancher and mother, she had her hands full.
But she was determined to build a civil society in this Valley.

Aside for providing the land for the railroad,
she was a founder of Christ Church – a church which has never
been a haven of spiritual escapism but has always been
committed to the welfare of all of Las Vegas
– a church from which many charitable and civic organizations
have been born.
She was a founder of the Mesquite Club,
Nevada’s oldest women’s charitable organization.
As Postmaster, she worked to help us to exchange messages
essential to social and business life.
As a founder of the Society of Nevada Pioneers,
she worked to preserve our history
because a culture has to know its own story.
On the school board, she worked for the education of our children.
While she sold the land that became Las Vegas,
she donated the land that became the Paiute Colony.

The list of her accomplishments goes on.
But the point is simple:
she was dedicated to our common good.

We do well to honor her with this excellent statue.
But this statue should do more than remind us of a time
when people cared enough about each other
to do their civic duty.

Helen Stewart would want us to remember
that the task of building and sustaining a civil society in Las Vegas
is as challenging today as it was then.
The challenges are different, but just as great.
Our sense of community is wounded today.
The institutions Helen Stewart helped to build -- from the Postal Service
to the education system – are in trouble.
We see a reversal of her efforts
in the neglect of our schools and public institutions,
and in the neglect of needy people which the First Lady of Las Vegas
would never have countenanced.

But there are people today working on several fronts to continue
the good work Helen Stewart began in her day.
Communities in Schools works to restore our education system
so our children have hope for a better future.
Las Vegas Valley Interfaith unites our people across lines
of race and religion to work for the good of families.
3-Square combats hunger on our streets.
Not For Sale combats the sexual exploitation of children.
We might ask: if Helen Stewart were here today,
in which of these organizations would she be a leader?
The answer is clearly most of them, and maybe others.
She would be a leader in different groups so she could network them
together for the benefit of everyone.
I believe that is what she would hope we will do.

As we dedicate this statue to the memory and honor of Helen Stewart,
we rededicate ourselves to building a community of decent folks
who care for each other – neighbor to neighbor –
to make this city a home where all our people can prosper and thrive.

New Job Opening: Herald Of Good Tidings.

2011-12-05T17:19:00.000-08:00

Our lives are made of time so how we relate to time
determines the flavor and the tenor of our lives.
The present moment is absolutely important;
but each moment contains both memory and anticipation.
Each moment arises in the context of a past and a future.
What happened yesterday shapes today’s experience;
and what we expect tomorrow determines
whether we live today in hope, anxiety, or despair.

As for the past, it can be a blessing or a curse.
It depends on whether we draw wisdom from our past
or get stuck in it.
It is so easy to get stuck in memories.
Good memories can capture us in nostalgia,
longing for a past that can never be recovered
precisely because it is the past.
We refuse to move on into the future because we know
it could never be as good as the good old days.

Bad memories can capture us in despair.
We can identify with our old wounds.
I am the one who suffered this or suffered that.
There is a sticky tragic quality to old wounds and grievances
that traps us like flypaper.

The power of the past over the present depends
entirely on what we think of the future.
We live each moment with some kind of expectation.
The natural human condition is to be alert, to be expectant,
to scan the horizon to see what might be coming up over it.
We are all always watching for something.
But we are rarely watching neutrally.
We watch the world with preformed expectations.
We live in dread or hope, faith or fear.

Nothing is more fundamental to our way of being in the world
than our attitude toward the future.
Prophesy is God’s word spoken to us to infuse hope.
Prophesy breaks up the stony soil of pessimism
with the plow of God’s promise.
Judah had been having a long, hard time.
For 40 years they had been in exile,
writing songs of lament.
“By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
as we remembered Zion.”
Before they were utterly vanquished by Babylon,
they were occupied by Assyria.
Before that they had been a vassal state of Egypt.
Before that they had been besieged by Aram.
No living Jew could remember peace and prosperity.

Their plight raises a question for us:
is it possible to hope for something we cannot remember?
Is it possible to anticipate something we have not experienced yet?

When churches are in transition situations,
I always ask them,
“what do you hope for in this time of change?”
We I ask about hope for the future, invariably, they answer
with a memory from the past.
Is it possible to hope for something we cannot remember?

For humans, probably not.
But with God all things are possible.
Judah could not even remember happiness,
but God spoke to his prophet, 2nd Isaiah, saying,
“Comfort, O comfort my people . . . .
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her
that she has served her term
that her penalty is paid.”

Can you hear God saying that to you?
Can you take the old habitual sorrows of your life
as a time of exile, and hear God say
“You have served your term; it’s over”?

The Exiles had lost a lot – the temple, homes, families.
We all lose what is dear to us.
Then we live in the loss; abide in the sorrow.
Isaiah acknowledges the loss, but then reminds us
there is something we have not lost and can never lose.
He writes,

“All people are grass . . . .
The grass withers, the flower fades;
but the word of our God will stand forever.”

And what is the word of our God that stands forever.
It is good news. It is gospel.
“Get up to a high mountain O Zion,
herald of good tidings.
Lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem,
herald of good tidings.”

“Herald of good tidings.”
Can you imagine not only hearing God’s promise;
that you will be peaceful and at ease,
that you will be happy
– can you imagine that you not only hear that
as God’s promise to you;
but that you are, this day, appointed as God’s messenger
to tell that good news to other people.
Whatever your identity has been up to now,
you have a new one – “herald of good tidings.”

What are those good tidings?
Because they are beyond the reach
of anything we have experienced,
they are beyond the capacity of human language
to express directly.
So Isaiah uses metaphors:
“Say to the cities of Judah, here is your God . . . .
He will feed his flock like a shepherd.
He will carry the lambs in his arms
and carry them in his bosom
and gently lead the mother sheep.”

Can you imagine living in expectation
of a serene joy that you have never felt before?
If you can, then you will experience right now
a hope you have never felt before.
Even in the midst of the trials and hardships of today,
you will carry in your heart a warm ember of consolation
already glowing.
The quality of this present moment will be transformed by hope.

I invite you each to hear this promise for you personally.
Jeremiah delivered this message from God:
“I know the plans I have for you;
plans to prosper you and not harm you,
plans to give you a hope and a future.”

I invite you to hear the promise that God will do a new thing in you,
that Christ will become more real to you,
and play a larger part in each of your days than ever before.
I invite you to hear that promise also for this congregation.
In Christian spirituality, the transformation of the individual
and the transformation of the community are intimately connected.
You cannot change without changing those around you
and if this congregation changes it will change you.
So I invite you to imagine,
that Grace in the Desert will matter to you in a larger way;
and that this congregation will do in Las Vegas
what no congregation has done before
–that this congregation will become a center of spiritual renewal
in the midst of a city awash in despair;
that you will be a “herald of good tidings”
for the lost children on our streets,
the faltering schools of our community,
a herald of good tidings for social transformation,
for art, culture, and justice in the public square.

If you live in that hope, you will invest in it.
You will prepare the way for your own transformation
though a discipline of prayer, study, and service.
You will, at the same time, prepare for the transformation of this congregation.
You will support it now with your labor, your money, and your prayers.
You church prays for you. Do you pray for your church?

In the coming year, Grace in the Desert will have the opportunity
to take a bold leap forward.
You have made great strides in recent years.
For that I am most deeply grateful.
But you are on the brink of becoming something new
– not just a gathering place for mutual support in hard times
but a “herald of good tidings” for those around us.

With this promise, comes a challenge
– to invest the labor, the money, and the prayer
to make room for miracle.

This is what the Lord said to those who were to receive his promise.
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord.
Make straight in the desert – this desert
--a highway for our God.

Every valley – even the Las Vegas Valley
-- shall be lifted up . . .
Then the glory of the Lord shall appear
and all the people shall see it together
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

The Divine Duty Of Leaders In A No Blame No Shame Zone

2011-11-20T17:33:00.000-08:00

Our lesson from Ezekiel has quite a history.
It has been so controversial that for the past 200 years,
we have glossed over it or ignored it.

But, for two thousand years before that, this lesson was the basis
for the divine right of kings.
Ezekiel wrote at the time of the Exile.
Babylon had sacked Jerusalem, imprisoned and blinded King Zedekiah,
and taken the nation’s leaders into Exile.
The governor Babylon appointed for Judah
was then assassinated by the king’s family.

In the ensuing anarchy, many Judeans fled the opposite direction
into Egypt as refugees.
The Lord called his people scattered sheep;
and there was no one to bring them home.
The King was powerless; the governor was dead.

So the Lord spoke to Ezekiel saying,
“I myself will search for my sheep
and seek them out.
I will rescue them from all the places
where they have been scattered.
I myself will be the shepherd to my sheep.”

The Lord himself would do what Judah’s leaders failed to do.
He would bring the dispersed exiles back together.
He would care for their common life.

Ezekiel did not say how God would do that.
His methods become clear a generation later in 2nd Isaiah.
I happened alright and the Psalmist sang,
“When God restored the common life, our hope, our liberty
At first it seemed a passing dream, a waking fantasy.
A shock of joy swept over us for we had wept so long
The seeds we watered once with tears sprang up into a song.”

Ezekiel didn’t know how God would do it,
but he expected an extraordinary act of God
directly intervening in history.
That was not God’s usual M.O.
It was not how he had led Israel before or how he would do so
in the future.
God ruled through kings and he would do so again.

Our lesson continues:
“I will set up over them one shepherd,
my servant David.”
The historical David had been dead 200 years.
He means an heir of David, someone like David,
a brave, wise king, like David.

“ I will set up over them one shepherd,
my servant David
and he shall feed them and be their shepherd.”

The Bible contains different political viewpoints.
But on the whole it’s a monarchist book.
God chose kings, anointed kings, and stood by kings
as long as they ruled righteously.

But the monarchist verses in the Bible
did not wear well over time.
They were cited to defend the power of kings
who lounged on thrones while workers plowed the fields.
Why? Because God said so.
Kings who lorded it over their people
and lived in luxury gave monarchy a bad name.

Eventually the English had enough of it
and lopped off the head of King Charles I,
setting a bloody example for the French
who decapitated King Louis XVI,
and the Russians who gunned down Queen Victoria’s nephew,
Tsar Nicholas II.

Since we got into the habit of regicide,
we have not known what to do with Ezekiel.
We don’t know how to take God promising the people a king,
and thinking that’s supposed to be good news.

But look what kind of king God wanted Judah to have.
“He shall feed them.
He shall feed them and be their shepherd.”
God by his own example showed what a king is supposed to do.
“I will . . . rescue them from all the places they have been scattered
and bring them to their own land.
I will feed them with good pastures.
I will make them lie down.
I will seek the lost and bring back the strayed.
I will save my flock and they shall no more be ravaged.”

The godly king is a servant, a protector, a healer.
The godly king lives to nurture his people, not exploit them.

All the bad kings have made it hard for us to imagine
the good King God was promising.
We have learned to hate kings.
In our era, we have become hostile to any kind of leaders at all.
We hate incumbents whether they are liberals or conservatives.
The electorate careens from left to right
to cast out whoever the leader may be at the time.
It is as if we elect people not to lead but to blame.

We do the same thing in the church.
We blame and we blame shift.
We blame our leaders until they say “ok, I’ve had enough.”

Eventually, we have no leaders
or the leaders have no followers,
And we become, as Ezekiel said,
“scattered as on a day of clouds and thick darkness.”

If we are to find our way home, as nation or as church,
If we are to rediscover that belonging to God
means belonging to each other,
if we are to recommit to the common good
as our ancestors did in Liberty Hall,
at Gettysburg, through the depression and World War II,
we will need to rethink and refeel
our attitudes toward leadership and followership.

We have to reframe today’s lesson.
It is no longer about the divine right of kings.
It’s about the divine duty of leaders.

We all must be brave enough to lead
because in a free society and in the church,
everyone takes turns leading.
We must be brave enough to lead
and humble enough to lead for the sake of others,
not to puff up our own pride.

Jesus said “the greatest among you is the one who serves.”
We lead in ways that build up the followers.
We equip them to take our place so we can step aside.

We must be brave enough to lead and brave enough to follow.
It takes courage to trust that someone else might actually wish us well.
It takes patience to follow until it is our turn to lead.

Ezekiel tells us what leadership is about
– caring for, protecting, nurturing, and building up the followers
until they become leaders themselves.
Ezekiel tells us what followership is about
– supporting the leaders and learning from them
–participating in the process, growing into more responsible roles,
taking turns.

It’s a no blame no shame system.
It draws us together in relationships of mutual concern,
mutual respect, and mutual appreciation
while we work together for the common good.

When we rejected the divine right of kings,
we replaced it with nothing but random individuals
slavishly bound to their own wills.
We replaced the divine order with chaotic selfishness.

What if we replaced the divine right of kings
with the divine duty of leaders
– the duty to live together as faithful servants
of a shared mission, God’s mission
Suppose we tried that in the Church?
What if we decided all of us belong here,
so we’d better find ways to live together?
What if, just in our little corner of the world,
we established a no blame no shame zone
so we could get on with sharing God’s love
in a desperately lonely city?

Here’s what I wonder:
Is it possible people outside the Church might notice and learn something?
Might our government and business leaders learn to lead differently?
Might the electorate, workers, and consumers learn to follow differently
– sharing the load of problem solving instead of pointing fingers?

Ezekiel is a 2,900 year old book, a message in a very old bottle.
We have just read it.
What shall we do with it?
What might be possible if we took God’s word seriously?
What if we took God’s word out into God’s world?

The Performance Principle Is Excrement, To Put It Nicely

2011-10-11T22:25:00.000-07:00

Have you ever noticed that the harder you work
the behinder you get.
It’s true.
If we do more, people expect more.
Our boss sees we can produce, so he pushes harder.
Our customers demand more.
We can never catch up.

It is standard practice in most industries.
If a salesman exceeds his quota, management will increase his quota.
We never get ahead.
We never even catch up.

The German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse
said that most of us feel frustrated and futile
in our work because of something he called
“the performance principle.”

The Performance Principle means that our human worth
is measured by how well we carry out some task.
And that is a lousy way to live.
First of all, we can never do the task well enough.
Second, the task is often not worth the amount of energy and worry
we invest in it.
But third and most importantly, it turns us into tools.
We cease to be human beings valuable, even sacred,
in our own right.
Instead, we are means to the end of some project.

St. Paul knew all about the Performance Principle.
He was an ambitious young man, performing at being
a rising rabbi and stellar scholar of Jewish law.
Years later, he listed for the Philippinas,
all hard won accomplishments.
He was a Jew among Jews, a devout, learned, and pious
man of the faith.

But then he said none of that was worth anything.
Paul actually used a graphic Greek word
to say what all that amounted to.
The delicate people who translate the Bible for us
render that word as “refuse.”
But that doesn’t get it.
If I said the word in church you would be offended.
So I’ll just say excrement comes closer,
and although it only has 4 letters,
Texans pronounce it with 3 syllables for emphasis.

Now when Paul speaks so disparagingly of his accomplishments,
remember those were accomplishments in the realm
of religion and spirituality.
He calls being a top flight spiritual leader excrement.

Now what does that say about all the things we work so hard at?
What does that say about our goals and objectives, our quotas,
our strategic plans, and our profit margins?
What does it say about our standing in the community?
Paul might say we are valuing them a mite more highly
than they deserve.

But Paul isn’t saying that any of our work is bad.
He doesn’t mean it’s really worthless.
He doesn’t mean all our good deeds don’t count.

He has just found something so wonderful that,
by comparison, nothing else matters.
Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus,
and he had spent the rest of his life
getting to know Jesus better.
Jesus showed Paul what God’s love is like.
And by comparison, nothing else mattered.

1200 years later, St. Thomas Aquinas had a similar experience.
Thomas was the greatest theologian of the Middle Ages,
quite likely the greatest theologian who ever lived.
He wrote massive tomes of brilliant theology and philosophy.
He wrote the Summa Theologica, the Bible of systematic theology
even now 900 years later.

Then one day, while he was celebrating the Mass,
he glimpsed something of the glory of God.
After Mass, he said, “All I have written is as straw.”
He walked off to his room, and never wrote again.

What Paul discovered was the unconditional love of God.
He called it grace.
Paul is the one who introduced the word grace
into our faith.
Jesus showed it to him,
so Paul taught it to all the churches.

Once we dare to trust in God’s grace
to make us happy and secure,
it causes a fundamental shift
in how we experience life.
We still work at our jobs.
We still do our best.
But the pressure is off.
Our basic well-being doesn’t depend our being successful.

That leads to a whole different kind of life,
a life that can be savored and enjoyed,
a life that consists in gratitude and sharing
more than striving and achieving.

It makes for a life that is lovely in its security.
Paul went on to say, “I have learned the secret
of having much and of having little,
of being hungry and being well-fed. . . .”

Paul said, “I can do all things
through Christ who strengthens me.”
When things go wrong according to our preconceived notions
of how they are supposed to be,
we know “We can do that.”
We can do hunger. We can do loneliness.
We can do family conflict. We can do failure.
We can do whatever life throws at us,
because it is not happening the context
of the Performance Principle.
It is happening in the context of a life
that floats in God’s unconditional yes to who we are.

We don’t have to perform our lives just so.
We don’t have to succeed at life.
We just have to live it in the sea of grace.
That grace will hold us up.
It will sustain us.
It will get us through.

It got Paul through worse times than most of us
will ever come close to having to endure.
And it will set us free to really live our lives,
to live them boldly and joyfully,
not on a treadmill of production and success,
but in a dance of delight and joy.
Amen.

The Necessity Of Starlight In A Land Where Desire Careens Into The Canyon

2011-09-05T07:36:00.001-07:00

150 years ago, people came West for a lot of reasons.
Some were running away from troubles back East.
Some were hoping to get rich.
Some were trying to get free.

I don’t know why Ozzie Whittaker came in 1863.
I sometimes joke that he might have been trying to miss
the Battle of Gettysburg.
For whatever reason, he spent two years in Gold Hill,
then went back to Connecticut, married well,
and got a cushy position in a rich, stable church.
But after just two years of the clergy version of the good life,
he struck out for Virginia City.
In a few minutes, I’ll tell you why.

But serving this rowdy Comstock church was not enough.
So he mounted his horse and rode over to Pioche,
where there was no church,
and celebrated the Eucharist in a saloon
using the bar for an altar.
Before long, they made Ozzie the Bishop of Nevada and Arizona.
He spent over a decade here at St. Paul’s
and riding horseback all over the Great Basin.
I just drive from Vegas to Welles in an air-conditioned Ford
with Sirius FM radio.
But Ozzie was the real deal.
It’s a long way from the Comstock
to Tucson, Tombstone, and Nogales.
He didn’t get rich. He wasn’t that free.
And he wasn’t running away from anything back East.
He had another thing in mind.

Some other folks had the same thing in mind.
There was Bishop Daniel Tuttle who began the Episcopal Church
in Utah the same year Ozzie arrived Virginia City.
In Helena, Montana, the Rev. Leigh Brewer founded the church
while his wife Henrietta built the hospital.

Ozzie got to know the West those first two years in Gold Hill.
He knew this to be a lovely but a lonely land
– a place where every desire of the human heart
was set loose but apt to careen into despair.
By the time Ozzie got here, Henry Comstock was busted,
gone to Montana, & would take his own life in under two years.

The missionaries came here because we needed them.
We needed a spiritual compass, a glimpse of the moral order.
We needed the Gospel of Jesus Christ
-- for without it we were like sailors on a starless night
back when they navigated by starlight.

Such was the West in the 1860s.
Such is the world again today.
Last week on the Today Show,
Matt Lauer interviewed the widow of one of the Navy Seals
who recently died in Afghanistan.
He asked her how her husband would want to be remembered,
and what she would tell their children about him.

The first words out of her mouth were “his faith in Jesus Christ.”
But when NBC ran clips from the interview later in the day,
and when they posted it on their website,
they edited out the part about Jesus.

Bethany Hamilton, a young surfer, lost her arm a shark attack.
Her book, Soul Surfer, tells how her Christian faith gave her the courage
to get back in the water and become a champion professional.
It’s now a major motion picture.
But the screenwriter said the problem was this:
The script needed to be spiritual enough to draw
“the faith based market”
but not so Christian as to offend anyone.
So the movie shows she had faith
but tries to feather brush out what she had faith in.

The tattooed pierced young cashier at a bagel shop says to me,
“I really like your cross. They won’t let me wear mine here.”
A woman tells the sales clerk at a jewelry store
that she wants to buy a cross.
The clerk says “Do you want a plain cross or one with the little man on it?”
Brothers and sisters, the stars are not out tonight.
We cannot see lights by which to steer.
So we grasp onto strange things.

Jonathan Kay, in his book Among The Truthers,
examines the growth of increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories
in the United States.
Irrational paranoia is rampant.
Asked to explain why conspiracy theory is on the rise, Kay answers
our society has lost its moral and spiritual compass.
In Christianity, we go away from the devil and toward God.
Kay says, conspiracy theories don’t give people a God,
but they at least provide a devil.

For some, that devil is the government;
for some it is 16-foot tall inter-galactic lizards
who are secretly in charge here.
Those who do not have Christ
are desperate to find a devil
– and most any old devil will do.

Without a moral compass, we cannot know what matters.
The ad for the evening news on one Nevada tv channel says:
“The most important news story is the one that affects you.”
Really? A story about road construction on I-15
is more important than the drought in Kenya.

People who are protected from hearing the name of Christ
spoken by a Navy widow,
protected from the sight of a cross worn by a young cashier,
hear that the story that matters most is the one that affects us.
We have no basis other than our own greed and self-interest
to say that something matters.

Well, maybe that’s right.
It is right if we know that the story that affects us most
is the story of salvation,
the story of God who created the world out of love,
sustains us every breath we take out of love,
and redeems us from our brokenness and spiritual failure
– all out of love.

Then the most important story is the one that affects all of us
– the story of Jesus going to the cross
because that’s where he could forgive us all
and that’s how he could show the depth of divine love.

The 1st Century A.D. was a lot like today.
The old order was coming apart
and the new order had not yet come into view.
In the 1st Century A.D.,
the world had lost its moral and spiritual compass
-- especially in the old seats of power.

So somebody back then did the same thing
in Turkey, Greece, and Rome
that Ozzie Whittaker, Daniel Sylvester Tuttle, and Leigh Brewer
did out here in the 1860’s.
I hope you know who that was.
It was your patron saint, Paul of Tarsus.

Paul travelled the known world to tell the most important story,
the one that affects everybody.
Ozzie Whitaker left his cushy life in Connecticut
to tell the most important story to Virginia City.

Who is going to tell that story today?
Who is going to speak the name of Christ
in spite of the censors who find it offensive?
Who is going to reveal the love of God
as a living rebuttal to the so-called Christians
who proclaim a God of violence and hate?
I can think of no one better for the job
than the spiritual off-spring and heirs of Ozzie Whittaker.

Do you know why you are here?
You are not here to enjoy the ambience of a historic building.
You are not here to enjoy the congenial company
of other nice people.
You are not here to listen to pious words
that helps you get through the week.

You are here to learn the most important story
so you can tell it to a world that is dying to hear it.
You are here to polish your spirits until they shine,
so you can be “the light of the world” that Jesus said you are,
so you can provide some star shine to all the people lost at sea.

That is why it is so important that you study, pray, and serve.
Study, pray, and serve every day.
Study, pray, and serve in the church and in the world.

Be the change. Light the light. Keep the faith.
Do it for the broken, bleeding world.
Do it for Paul and Ozzie.
Do it for Jesus.
Do it now. Do it tomorrow. Do it for the rest of your life.

What The Young Priest Said That Got Him Slapped

2011-08-29T17:16:00.000-07:00

Paul was on his way to meet the Romans,
but he had not yet laid eyes on them
when he wrote his famous letter.
Paul had heard that they were having some troubles.
The church dispute was so bad that Emperor Claudius
threw half the congregation out of Rome for awhile.

The hymn “They’ll know we are Christians by our love”
had not been written yet
– but it’s a pretty good capsule version of everything Paul
had to say in the New Testament.
But if visible love is how you recognize a Christian community,
the Church in Rome was not likely to be busted.

I imagine that Paul was worried about all the turmoil
for two reasons:
First, a community that divided could not
work together for God’s mission of spreading the good news.
Second, they didn’t seem to have understood the Gospel themselves.

As Paul understood it and taught it,
the good news is all about grace.
The good news is that everything depends on God’s free gift.
Our life is a gift. Our salvation is a gift. Heaven is a gift.
That utterly and completely reversed the old time religion
of having to bribe God with sacrifices, do the right rituals,
follow all the right rules to win God’s favor.
Paul said, “You’ve already got God’s favor.
You don’t earn it. You don’t buy it.
God’s love is a gift.”

The Gospel message is just that truth
and an invitation to live in it.
The Romans hadn’t gotten the truth part straight,
and they were a long way from living in it.
So Paul writes several chapters on the truth:
everything worth having is a gift from God.
Then in today’s lesson he explains how to live in that truth.
It is really a matter of being like God.
The word God means our highest ideal.
God is who we honor most, admire most, want most to be like.
So if we think God is a harsh judge,
we go about judging each other harshly.
If we think God is an angry tyrant,
we go about barking angry orders.
If we think God is an assembly line supervisor with a clip board,
examining our lives for errors and indiscretions,
we’ll keep a close watch on each other
to see what fault we can find.
Over the course of a lifetime,
everyone becomes more and more like the God he believes in.

The good news is that God isn’t like that.
God created the universe out of love
and God created each of us out of love.
God loves us – as we are.
It’s a gift because God is the unconditional Giver.

Paul invites us to believe that and rejoice.
But believing isn’t as easy as just saying
“Oh ok, that works for me.”
Spiritual truth only sinks in; it only goes to the heart,
when we don’t just say it – we have to live it.

The Romans weren’t getting the gospel
because they weren’t living the gospel.
So Paul gives them some instruction.
It isn’t that we have to do any of this to earn God’s love.
But we can’t experience God’s love,
we can’t know the freedom of being loved like that,
until we live our way into it.

So here’s what Paul says.
“Love one another with mutual affection . . . .
Outdo one another in showing honor . . . .
Bless those who persecute you;
bless and do not curse them.
Rejoice with those who rejoice.
Weep with those who weep.
Live in harmony with one another.
Do not be haughty but associate with the lowly.
Do not claim to be wiser than you are. . . .”
Paul teaches us to be godly so that we can know God.

It’s the same thing John says in his first Epistle,
“Since God loved us, we ought to love one another . . . .
No one has seen God,
But if we love one another, God lives in us
and his love is perfectly expressed in us.”

Do you see how this makes Christianity a team sport?
We can’t do it on our own.
We can only experience the truth of God’s love
by showing it to others – not telling them about it,
but showing it to them.
We love people with God’s own love so they can see it,
and that’s how we come to experience it.

John Stone Jenkins was a wise old priest in Louisiana.
But when he was a young priest,
he was once attending a birth.
As it was done in those days, the young father to be
was in the waiting room and the priest was with him.

Then a nurse came out from the delivery room
and said the mother
was having a hard time in transition.
So she wanted the father to come in.
John Stone Jenkins patted the young man on the shoulder
and said “Go on in. I’ll be out here praying.”But the nurse looked at John Stone Jenkins and said,
“No Father, she means you.”

With a gulp and prayer, he went into the delivery room.
Seeing the mother in the worst pains of labor,
he had no idea what to do,
so he leaned over her and said, “Jesus loves you.”She swore, and slapped him.
The she said, “I know that. How do you feel about me?”

It doesn’t do much good to talk about God’s love
unless we live it, unless we show people what it looks like.
How do we show people God’s love?
“Rejoice with those who rejoice.
Weep with those who weep.
Live in harmony with one another.”

In all my years in the church, 21 of them as a clergyman,
I’ve heard church folks fretting about all sorts of things.
There’s not enough money.
The building needs fixing.
There aren’t enough young people
or the young people are taking over.
We don’t have any children or the children make too much noise.
The hymns are too slow or too fast.
The ritual is too Catholic or not Catholic enough.

98% of the things people fret over in the Church
cannot be found in the Bible
because they don’t really matter.
What matters is the relationships.
Where the relationships are full of love,
the money is enough, the building is enough,
the right people are there and anyone new
is right too.
It’s about the relationships because that’s where the gospel is.
That’s where we live the gospel so that we can know the gospel.

It’s a beautiful and joyful truth Jesus showed us
and Paul taught us.
All we have to do is live it -- together.

Which Dream Will You Choose?

2011-08-22T16:59:00.000-07:00

Just a few basic insights can crack the Bible open
and make it into a fascinating book.
Biblical scholar Walter Bruegemann’s
two-dream thesis may be
the most valuable of them all.
He sees the whole Bible as a struggle between
Pharaoh’s dream of scarcity and Moses’ dream of freedom.

Pharaoh, you will recall, had a dream of famine.
A later Pharaoh had fantasies of a different kind
of scarcity or weakness.
He was afraid of being invaded by Assyria, now known as Iraq.
It wasn’t very likely. They were a long way off and not that powerful.

But he was afraid.
It is a bit reminiscent of when our government
thought that Iraq was going to come after us
with their non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Well, Pharaoh couldn’t do much about the Assyrians.
They were too far off --
so he shifted his anxiety to the Jews
living inside his borders.

He was afraid that when the Assyrians invaded Egypt,
the Jews might rise up to support the Assyrians.
Not that there was any reason for that paranoid delusion,
but, as I said, he was afraid.
So Pharaoh did the ancient equivalent
of detaining the Jews at Guantanamo Bay.
He rounded them up in Goshen, pressed them into forced labor,
and eventually he took the next step.
He instituted a program of genocide
by killing the male babies.

All of this would be hard to believe if it didn’t keep happening.
Egypt was the most powerful empire on earth,
the most powerful empire the world had ever known.
Pharaoh was not a mere king.
He was a god. He held life and death in his hand.
His power was supreme and unlimited.
No one had ever been this powerful.

But all the power the world has to offer
cannot deliver us from fear.

Fear drives us to garner power for our own security,
but the more power we acquire,
the more afraid we become.
It may even make us bigger targets.

So the almighty Pharaohs always dreamed of famine,
lived in dead of invasion by weaker,
distant weaker neighbors.
Today’s lesson tells how, during a level orange terror alert,
they enslaved the ethnic minority of their own nation,
and finally resorted to genocide.

Such is the world into which Moses was born.
I trust you know the story of how he escaped death
through the stealth of his mother
and the subterfuge of midwives,
how he grew up as a Prince of Egypt,
discovered his roots, killed an Egyptian slave driver,
then fled to Midian where he became a shepherd.

There, while tending his father-in-law’s flock,
Moses had his dream – a vision of a burning bush --
from which the voice of God spoke to him,
saying “I have heard the cry of my people . . . .
Go therefore to Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go.”//

Moses’ vision is so simple, a vision of freedom,
as direct and straightforward
as Pharaoh’s fearful dream of scarcity.
That simple vision of freedom will grow into a richer vision
of equality, justice, and inclusion.
It will become the Law as we find it in Exodus and Deuteronomy.
This vision will command the Jews to shelter the homeless sojourners,
remembering that they were once sojourners in Egypt.
It will require those who have wealth
to share it with those who do not.
It will forbid the charging of interest on loans
and will protect debtors from foreclosure.

The law of Moses is designed– not like so many legal codes
which protect the wealth of the wealthy
and impose the power of the powerful
– but rather a law to share wealth and defend the powerless.
Such was the dream which gave birth to Israel.
Perhaps it sounds familiar.
I doubt that the deist Thomas Jefferson
would admit it, but his dream for America
was lifted right out of Moses’ vision
which became the Law of Israel.

Regrettably Israel was not exempt from the fear
that corrupted Egypt.
Having been oppressed once,
even having fought for freedom once,
is no guarantee of perpetual virtue.
A freedom fighter can turn into a tyrant,
and a nation like Zimbabwe can find
it has rid itself of Ian Smith
only to suffer at the hands of Robert Mugabe.

Moses himself was never corrupted.
He remained a defender of freedom and justice all his life.
But Israel began to remember how great Egypt had been.
They began to fear the Philistines.
And they thought, “Why can’t we be like the Egyptians?”
More wealth, power, land, and a standing army would protect us.

So hierarchy and a caste system arose.
New laws were added, to protect ethnic purity, social structures,
the privileges of a priestly caste, an aristocracy, and a royalty.
In Bruegemann’s book, Solomon, he demonstrates how
David’s son became the Jewish personification of Pharaoh,
complete with forced labor and wars of conquest.

Throughout the Bible, we hear two voices arguing.
One voice is that of Pharaoh, a voice of fearful, rigid rules.
It comes out of the mouths of priests as the book of Leviticus
and of the royal spin masters as the books of Chronicles.
Against that voice cries the voice of Moses,
out of the mouths of prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos.

If we did not have the voice of Pharaoh in our Scripture,
we would have no idea what Moses was talking about.
But when people quote Scripture,
we must always listen very closely
to see whose voice is speaking
– Pharaoh or Moses,
Ahab or Elijah,
Caiaphas or Jesus.

Ah yes, Jesus. It all leads to him.
You see this is what the fight
in the New Testament is about.
People wanted a messiah alright,
a messiah in the tradition
of Solomon, of David, and of Pharaoh.
But Jesus spoke with the voice of Moses,
the voice of freedom, justice, equality, and inclusion.
After Jesus, the Church carried on the conversation.
Peter spoke too often with the voice of Pharaoh.
He will speak with that voice in next week’s Gospel lesson.
Paul replied with the voice of Moses.
“For freedom Christ has set us free,” he said.

And the struggle continues in the world today.
Bruegemann calls the voice of Pharaoh “the Empire.”
It may manifest as one nation or another.
But it is always the Empire,
and against it stands the Gospel.

We read our religion and we read the world,
we read the Bible and we read the newspaper,
though the same set of bifocals.
We look reality either through the dream of Pharaoh
or the dream of Moses.
Moses’ way lives by a certain trust in life. We call it faith.
Pharaoh’s way lives by fear of death. We call is despair.
“I set before you life and death,” Moses said. “Choose life.”

Jesus Repents: The Gospel Trajectory Finds Its Course

2011-08-22T16:53:00.000-07:00

When we read a novel or a play for a literature class,
the professor will usually ask
“who is the main character?”
There is a rule of thumb for figuring out
who a story is primarily about.
Does anyone know how to tell the main character?
It is the one who changes most.
The main character is not a stable prop in someone else’s drama.
The main character learns things, grows.

King Lear is called “King Lear” because the foolish old king
eventually sees his own injustice and he repents.
Shakespeare didn’t name his play after faithful Cordelia
who is good and virtuous throughout.
He named it “King Lear” after the character who moves,
changes, makes spiritual progress.
Same thing with Oedipus Rex, David Copperfield,
or the Cather in the Rye.
So, who is the Gospel of Matthew primarily about?
It might be about Jesus.
If that is the case, instead of taking everything Jesus
ever said as the final word for all time,
we might look to see if Jesus ever changes his mind.
Instead of taking snapshots of his spirituality
at one point, we might look at the course of his life
to see if we can plot a trajectory.

Let’s start with his first teaching, the Sermon on the Mount.
Not much grace in that sermon.
Here’s what Jesus says about the law.
“”Not one letter or stroke shall pass away from the law . . .
Whoever breaks . . . the least of these commandments . . .
will be called the least in the kingdom of heaven.”
Jesus doesn’t say the Pharisees are too strict.
He thinks they are soft on sin.
He wants to make the law more rigorous.
Jesus starts out as Super Puritan.
But there’s something good in it.
His point is that doing the right thing isn’t enough.
You have to get your heart right.
He’s insisting on an authentic spiritual core to morality.

Now fast forward to today’s lesson to see where that leads.
The disciples have just violated a ritual purity regulation
about hand washing.
The Pharisees cry “Shame. Not one stroke or letter . . .” they say.
“Whoever breaks one of the least
of these commandments . . .” they say.

But Jesus says “It’s no big deal.” His position has shifted.
He explains, “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles,
but what comes out it.”
The heart is what matters. Not ritual purity.

First Jesus turned his attention from the right actions alone
to having your heart right.
Then he began to wonder what ritual purity
has to do with the heart.
Maybe if your heart was right,
it didn’t matter if you kept the law perfectly,
so long of course as you were Jewish
and kept the law pretty well.
That teaching drew fire from the Pharisees.
So Jesus took a little vacation from his mission
in the non-Jewish country of Tyre and Sidon.

He had strictly ordered his disciples
not to even tell non-Jews about the gospel.
They were the wrong race, wrong set of ritual purity customs,
“not our sort dear.”
At this point in the story, Jesus hadn’t changed his mind on that.
So he was in Tyre and Sidon on a vacation, not a mission.

But along came this non-Jewish woman begging him
to heal her daughter.
Jesus ignored here. She persisted.
The disciples said, “One of the goyim is bothering us.
Send her away.”
So Jesus told her he ministered to Jews only.
In desperation, she threw herself down in front of him.
He called her a dog and ordered her out of the way.
But she said, “Even dogs eat the crumbs from their master’s table.”

That rocked him.
She had called him her master.
That was at once beautiful and a violation of the taboo
separating Jew and Gentile.
It was so wrong under the law, so right in the heart.
Jesus repented.

In last week’s lesson, Jesus had just said to his disciples
– who were the right race, right gender, right religion --
“O ye of little faith.”
Now he says to this foreigner
– wrong race, wrong gender, wrong religion –
“Woman, great is your faith.//
Let it be done for you as you wish.”
And her daughter was healed.

Do you see Jesus stumbling toward a new way
of seeing the world, a new kind of religion?
We might pause to consider the importance
of this nameless woman who converted Jesus.

Matthew’s book still has a long way to go.
But can you guess how it ends?
I hope you won’t skip reading it just because
I’m giving away the thrilling conclusion.

It ends like this:
Jesus says to his disciples,
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations . . . .”
“Nations” means the non-Jews.

Let’s retrace what has happened here:
One third of the way in the story,
Jesus sent his disciples out to spread the gospel,
but then he said,
“Go nowhere among the Gentiles
and enter no town of Samaria,
but rather go to the lost sheep of . . . Israel.”

But after meeting the gentile woman of great faith,
he began to change his tune.
In the end, he sent his disciples to baptize all nations.

So what can we learn from this story?
The first thing we see is Jesus modeling an open mind
and an open heart.
His faith was a living, growing thing.
It changed. It moved. It morphed.

It wasn’t so soft and flexible that it had no shape.
Jesus didn’t go around saying “maybe this or maybe that.”
“This is true for me but it might not be true for you.”
Jesus took stands in the name of God.

But he wasn’t so stuck in what he said yesterday
he couldn’t move on to a new truth tomorrow.
He wasn’t so spiritually lazy as to let his faith lounge
in the same things he was taught as a child.
Jesus moved. So how about us?

It’s good to check our faith from time to time
to see if it has any buds on it, any green shoots.
If not, we might want to fertilize it a bit
with a new prayer practice, a new book,
a retreat or some acts of mercy.

Maybe we need to meet someone outside our comfort zone
-- some modern equivalent of a Canaanite woman
with a sick child
– someone to shake up our stultifying certainties.

The second thing we notice in this story
is its ethical trajectory.
Right from the beginning,
the distinctive thing about Jesus
was his gospel of inclusion.

Right from the beginning,
he sat down at table with sinners and social outcasts.
But at first he was calling them into an even smaller circle
of strict rules than the Pharisees had drawn.
Then he extended the circle by disregarding
ritual purity rules that kept people outside
even if their hearts were faithful.
Then he took in lawless gentiles who approached him in faith,
and finally sent his disciples out to gentiles
who had never even heard of him.

It is an expanding ethic of inclusion, an ethic of embrace.
St. Paul kept extending further that trajectory of inclusion.
“In Christ there is neither slave nor free, neither male nor female,
neither Jew nor gentile,” he wrote.

We have our trajectory set in the life of Jesus.
Who might be outside our circle of caring or acceptance?
Who might be the Canaanite woman for us?
If we keep an eye out for the people we are tempted
to avoid, they may show us the growing edge of our faith.

May our ability to accept each other grow day by day.
May our appreciation extend to those we now scorn.
May our capacity for love grow beyond anything we have yet imagined.

Rock Walls of Petrified Moments of Grace

2011-08-08T20:27:00.000-07:00

Transfiguration – transformation – renewal – becoming new again.
One of our prayers for the Transfiguration says,
O God who. . . . revealed (Christ’s) glory upon the holy mountain:
Grant that we . . . may be . . . changed into his likeness
from glory to glory.”
The Christian life – perpetual transformation – becoming new again and again –
“Grant that we may be changed . . . . from glory to glory.”

I had a life crisis a few years back.
I was at the end of my spiritual and emotional rope
with no power to help myself -- but God saved me.
It was in Idaho in the early 80’s.
My philosophy of life that was already pretty dark.
Then my legal practice brought me up against depths of evil
I had never before encountered.
The possibility of any redeeming light to make the world still good
seemed to have gone out.

But God saved me.
He did it through good old traditional Episcopal worship and prayer
at St. Michael’s Cathedral
on the corner of 8th and Washington, Boise, Idaho.

Objectively speaking, they didn’t do such a great job of everything.
But they were the safe harbor on my stormy night.
So to me, St. Michael’s, Boise became the model for what Church
is supposed to be
– and nowhere will ever measure up the standard of St. Michael’s 1982
– not even St. Michael’s 2011 even though it is in every objective way bigger, better, brighter, more inspiring now than it was then
– to me it’s not the same.

Peter, James, and John had a mountain top experience.
They saw Jesus transfigured and that was pretty cool.
But then they saw Moses and Elijah
– the personal faces of the Law and the Prophets.
That was just over the top.
So Peter wanted to freeze the moment.
“Let us stay in this place,” he said. “It is good for us to be here.
Let us make three dwellings
– one for Moses, one for Elijah, and one for you.”
Let us live forever in this holy place, this holy moment, just like this.”

But God came over them as a cloud and said,
strange things about Jesus.
After that Moses and Elijah were gone.
Peter’s moment was over.
You know the rest of the story.
They do not live happily ever after on Mt. Tabor.
They go back downhill and get on with the mission.

Instead of the Transfiguration being something to stay stuck in,
it was the jumping off place for a life
of being perpetually “changed from glory to glory.”

Almost every church person has had their life saved
or has had a mountain top experience
at some point or another.
Maybe it was a church that came to their spiritual rescue.
Maybe they got saved at a revival or renewed at a Cursillo.
Maybe they saw the light at a Marriage Encounter
or while doing Prison Ministry.

We are all blessed at some point with a moment of grace
as Peter, James, and John were on the Mountain.
Thank God for those moments of grace.
The problem is what we do with them.
Peter tried to freeze his moment, set it in stone,
keep it mummified in a shrine
like me wanting to turn the whole church in all times and all places
into the image of St. Michael’s, Boise 1982.

Peter and I are not alone in this.
A lot of us have petrified our moments of grace
and used the stones to build rock walls around our spirits
lest liberating grace should touch and change us again.

The Church changed dramatically in the 70s in the aftermath of Vatican II
and in the heat of liturgical renewal.
That change was a great grief to people who had their moments of grace
with the 28 Prayer Book in King James English like Jesus spoke it
and the altar back against the wall where God put it.

But Pope John XIII said to open the window and let a fresh breeze in.
So we did – and we sang folk songs written by monks.
Now 40 years later, if you see a sign for a “contemporary service”
it means there will be folk songs written by monks in the 1970s.
Do you see the problem?
We opened the window for a fresh breeze in the 70s; it blew in;
and we slammed the window shut lest it get back out.

One of our city churches recently added a contemporary service,
yes 70’s folk songs, in order to attract the young people.
I asked the priest: who said this would attract young people?
It was, as I suspected, one of our church growth experts from the 70s
who is himself in his own 70s.
But in big cities today, the pierced, tattooed, orange haired young people
are not so taken with their parents’ folk songs.
They are demanding Rite I Morning Prayer with incense,
because they think it’s mystical.
We, however, are calling the hot new liturgies of 1975 “contemporary”
and planning young adult evangelism to attract people in their 60s.

My friend Grey Temple is one of the leading lights
of the charismatic renewal movement.
He has had religious experiences that would curl you hair.
His church in the 90s was full of folks
who had seen the light in the 70s and gotten stuck in it.

Grey wrote a book about spiritual experience and its aftermath.
He called it The Molten Soul, because in a moment of grace,
our stony hearts and souls melt and flow hot and bright like lava.
But the next thing we know, they have ossified, returned to stone
in the dead shape of what was once a living experience.

Grey had some psychological and theological explanations for that.
His book is a good read.
But my point this morning is just to say that our graced moments
were just that -- moments.
We can cherish their memories in our hearts.
But we cannot live in them.

Life moves. The Christian life moves.
It is a path of perpetual transformation.
St. Paul said to the Corinthians,
“We who . . . all reflect the Lord’s glory are being changed
into the same image, from glory to glory.”

Not we have been saved and now we’ve got it.
Not we have been transformed so we are now as God wants us.
But “we are being transformed . . . . “

If you may be a little uncomfortable with your new parish hall
because it does not look and feel like your old parish hall,
I agree with you in part.
I am uncomfortable with it because it does not look and feel
like the Parish Hall of St. Michael’s, Boise as it was in 1982.

Those places live in our hearts.
But we can’t live the Christian life inside a wall of petrified memories.
Life flows.

To live afresh, to be renewed, to become new again and again,
takes more than courage.
It takes faith.
It takes faith to follow Jesus forward into life.
You have demonstrated both courage and faith
living into your mission with a new parish hall.
I commend you.

But I have a feeling that God has plans
for much bigger changes in our lives
– both in our individual spiritual lives
and in our life together as the Body of Christ on earth.

If we follow Jesus, he leads us to Mt. Tabor for a vision
then down from the mountain for a mission.
We follow him in faith being changed again and again
from glory to glory.
Amen.

Right Field Prayer

2011-07-30T13:50:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you can strike two Scripture texts
against each other like flint and steel, and it makes a spark.
That’s what our lectionary does.
It strikes lessons against each other so we see things we might miss
if we just looked at one of them.

In our Old Testament lesson,
David has just died after being King for 40 years.
After some palace intrigue,
the crown is now going to young Solomon.
On the eve of his coronation the boy is praying
as we pray only when we are scared.

Back when I was a boy,
your first summer in Little League,
you started out in right field.
That’s the position least likely to see action.

But when there is action out there,
it demands skills no Little Leaguer has his first year.
Catching a long fly ball and rifle-shotting
it to third base is not something a 9-year-old can do.
So every Little League right fielder knows this primal prayer:
“O God don’t let them hit it to me.”

According to Friederich Schleiermacher,
the father of modern theology,
who sounds as if he played a little right field himself,
that prayer is the basis of religious experience.
My spirituality hasn’t advanced very far beyond it.
Solomon was praying quite earnestly that night
like any 9 year old right fielder.

“My God you have made your servant king . . .
and I am only a little child.
I do not know how to go out or come in. . . .
Give your servant therefore an understanding mind
to govern your people,
able to discern good from evil . . . .”

Solomon prayed for the wisdom he needed to serve his people.
God liked that -- so he granted the boy’s request. He said:
“Because you have asked this,
and have not asked for yourself a long life or riches
or the life of your enemies,
but have asked for yourself wisdom to discern what is right . . . .
Indeed I give you a discerning mind . . . .”

People have lots of desires, which are mostly good in themselves,
but our desires unguided by wisdom can run amok
and get us into all sorts of trouble.
Not just individuals but whole societies
can go over the cliff with greed, fear,
the compulsion for revenge – you name it.

Each of us has inside a maelstrom of swirling feelings
– and that’s good.
It’s part of what makes us human and keeps life interesting.
But to live well, to flourish, we need a still center.

We need a core of wisdom and serenity out of which
we can discern truth and justice.
We need a balanced place from which to make decisions.
For 500 years before Jesus, Jewish Wisdom teachers
extolled the importance of that balanced place.
“Wisdom is more precious than rubies.
Nothing you desire can compare to her.” Proverbs 3 verse 15.

The lectionary sets our Old Testament lesson about Wisdom
alongside our Gospel lesson of parables from Matthew.
That sets these parables in a new light.
In Matthew, Jesus is first and foremost a teacher of wisdom.
He says, “the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure
hidden in a field . . . .”
When someone finds the treasure in the field,
he sells all he has to buy that field.”

When Jesus talks about the kingdom of heaven,
he doesn’t mean a place we go when we die.
Kingdom doesn’t mean a place –it means being in charge.
He’s talking about who’s in charge of our lives.
When Jesus says “kingdom of heaven” he means
a spiritual state where we are not governed
by passing whims or ingrained habits.
It is the state of being governed by Wisdom.
Jesus means the balanced place from which
we can see clearly and act skillfully.

Do you see how Jesus is echoing Proverbs?
“On finding one pearl of great value,
he sold all he had and bought it.”
Wisdom is the gift we must have first
before we can possess anything else.
Without wisdom, any other gift is apt to possess us.
That’s why Solomon was right not to ask for any other gift
but the gift of discernment.
Without discernment, how could he know what to ask for?

One verse of today’s lesson has been twisted
and needs a bit of special attention. It says:
The kingdom of heaven is like a net that catches all kinds of fish,
both good and bad.
Then the good are kept and the bad thrown out.
A later writer has added a line turning this verse
into an allegory about the last judgment.
But Jews didn’t use allegory.
Jesus would not have said that part.

Take the verse back to Jesus’ original message,
and it means Wisdom entertains all kinds of ideas,
all kinds of possibilities, then sorts them out,
tossing the foolish options, keeping the good ones.

Finally, Jesus describes the wise person.
He calls the wise person “the scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven.”
Jesus says, this scribe is the master of his household.
That means he is in charge.
He has his feelings but his feelings don’t have him.
He is in charge of his own life.

Then Jesus says, the wise person
can bring out of his treasure, that is call forth from his wisdom,
things that are old and things that are new.

The wise person does not forget the wisdom of ancient tradition,
but he is alert to new insight,
fresh creative approaches to life.
He is not rootless – but he is not mired in the past.

Wisdom starts small inside us,
like a tiny seed that grows into a tree or
a pinch of yeast the leavens the entire loaf.
It is that small stillness between our in breath and our out breath.

Now specifically how do we cultivate Wisdom
so we can live well and be fully human?
Step one: we study the wisdom of others.
We study Scripture, the lives of the saints, the teachings
of the sages.
The first step is paying attention to wise people.
The best way is to go deep into one tradition
and study a little in several other traditions
to get a broader perspective.

Second, we make a discipline of visiting that balanced place
inside ourselves.
We make contact with our souls when we pray or meditate.
Some people do that best on their knees in church;
others, on a meditation pillow;
others, while walking, swimming, biking, or dancing.
My spiritual director used to say
“Pray the way that you can and not the way that you can’t.”
It doesn’t matter so much how we pray or meditate,
but that we pray or meditate every day.

Third, we make a discipline of looking before we leap,
of watching our feelings, measuring our feelings,
knowing our feelings before we act on them.
Our natural practice is: ready, fire, aim.
Wisdom is a simple adjustment in that sequence.

Step four is the hard part.
Remember why Solomon wanted wisdom.
It was so he could serve his people.

There is no such thing as selfish Wisdom
because selfishness is foolish.
Selfishness is self-defeating.
Wisdom can only be cultivated while serving others.

Fr. Jim has led St. Patrick’s in a commitment
to become a Church for others.
A church for others sets an example for each of us
in the wise practice of self-giving.
Generosity is simply opening our hands and our hearts.
That turns out not to be just good but also wise.
Generosity is wise because
only open hands and open hearts can let life in.
So study, pray, and look before you leap,
then give yourself to Life that Life may give itself to you.

Labor Pains: Practical Religion For The Real World

2011-07-18T07:58:00.000-07:00

William James was the father of American psychology.
In the early 1900’s, he was a leader
of a movement called pragmatism.
James was interested in what works in the real world.

When it came to religion, he wanted to know what works.
He asked what kind of religion actually sustains us in real life.
James said the two most effective religions in the world
were Buddhism and Christianity.
They were effective because they faced up to how hard life can be
and worked with that situation in a creative, helpful way.

For a religion to be effective, James said,
it has to be true to our experience
but it also has to offer us hope that goes beyond our experience.
He contrasted Christianity with another approach
to life he called “the religion of healthy mindedness.”
That’s the idea that if we just get our minds right
everything will be just fine.

Since the William James days, a lot of happy minded religion
has found its way into Christian churches,
and even more into Christian television and radio.
Just believe right and it will make you healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Get your religion right and your marriage will be smooth,
your kids will behave, and your stocks will go up.
It’s called “the prosperity gospel.”

If that kind of religion works for someone,
I wouldn’t want to take it away from them.
But what does the prosperity gospel say
when your marriage has issues, your kids don’t behave,
or your stocks go down?
It says: you aren’t right with God.

Whatever happens to you is your fault,
and by the way you’re probably going to hell.
The religion of happy mindedness works fine as long as things are alright,
but when the going gets tough,
the religion of healthy mindedness gets harsh.

Orthodox Christianity doesn’t tell us that everything is alright
or that it will be alright if we just think the right thoughts.
Christianity does not say that hardships are illusions
or that they are punishments for not having enough faith.

Christianity is clear and emphatic that this world is not yet
the way God wants it.
Libraries full of books have been written to explain
why the world is the way it is.
You can find several different ways of looking at it in the Bible.
But they all agree that things are not right.

There are religions that sing nothing but happy praise songs
all the day long.
There are churches that never sing a hymn in a minor key.
But orthodox Christianity knows how to sing the blues.
We have songs like Wayfaring Stranger and Balm in Gilead.
We have Lent and Holy Week.
We have saints and martyrs who were far from happy minded.
We have preachers like Charles Spurgeon who said,
“No cross; no crown.”
Folk singer Nancy Griffith sang,
“It’s a hard life. It’s a hard life.
It’s a very hard life.
It’s a hard life wherever you go.”
Of course, it isn’t always a hard life.
Sometimes it’s a lot of fun.
But when life is hard,
what is a Christian supposed to think about that?

Let’s look at what St. Paul says in today’s lesson.
“I consider that the sufferings of this present time
are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”

Paul doesn’t say it’s alright now, but that there’s something coming.
Paul is dreaming of an uncloudy day.
He says that the world will be changed and that we ourselves will be changed.
Listen to this:
“For the creation waits with eager longing
for the revealing of the children of God;
. . . .the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay
and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. “
Right now life can be an ordeal,
but Paul calls all our ordeals “labor pains.”
He says this:
The whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now;
and not only the creation, but we ourselves,
. . . groan inwardly while we wait for adoption,
the redemption of our bodies.”

One of the best philosophers alive today is an Anglican priest
named Marilyn McCord Adams.
In one of her books, she looks at some of the explanations
for why things go wrong.
She talks about free will and that sort of thing.
When it comes to ordinary hardships,
those explanations work more or less.
But then she asks about the really awful things that happen.
She calls those things “horrendous evils.”

I won’t cast a pall on your morning with examples.
But you know what she means – the real horrors of war, crime, terrorism,
and natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti.

In the face of those things,
the nice little philosophical musings all ring hollow.
Besides, Adams says, we don’t want those things explained.
We want them redeemed.
And so, she says, they shall be.
God is infinitely beyond anything we have experienced, she says.
God is infinitely greater than even the most horrendous evils
that have ever happened on this earth.

What does God have waiting for us?
God has God’s own self to give us.
God promises that all our hardships, all our griefs,
will be swallowed up
in the transcendent glory of his love.

That’s what Paul means when he says,
“I consider that the sufferings of this present time
are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed . . . .”
We don’t live in passive acceptance of things as they are.
We live in hope that things will not just be better,
they will be glorious.
The difference between Christian suffering and ordinary suffering
lies in a single word: hope.
And that single word makes all the difference.

St. Paul said,
“For in hope we were saved.
Now hope that is seen is not hope.
For who hopes for what is seen?
But if we hope for what we do not see,
we wait for it with patience.”

We have a faith that can sing the blues
but we sing the blues with hope.
Ordinary suffering is laced with despair
because it doesn’t believe in tomorrow.
We live with today because we have supreme confidence
in tomorrow – a tomorrow in the presence of God.
Amen.

Three Kinds Of Saving

2011-06-20T14:35:00.000-07:00

The Trinity is like a poem that says a little about God,
gives us a few hints about God,
but leaves us still looking for more.
The Trinity tells us just three of the 798,000 things
we might say about God,
but they are three very important things.
They are three of the main ways God saves us
when life is hard and we need saving.

When we call God “Father”, we are saying God is parental toward us.
So what kind of a Father is God?
The Father’s main quality is wisdom
-- vast impenetrable wisdom.
It comes of his unique perspective as the one who was in the beginning,
is now, and ever will be
– the Father who knows everything – past, present, and future.

From that perspective, the Father sees how things that rock our world
in the worst way will someday be redeemed in ways we cannot imagine.
The Father is the Old Wise One, the Ancient of Days,
to whom we run when we are in panic to hear him say,
“Hush, child. It will be alright.”

The Father cares, but he cares calmly, confidently.
He has feelings without being overcome by feelings.
The Father’s feelings are in perfect balance,
supremely centered because the Father takes the long view of eternity.
In that long view, God’s has unshakable confidence that “all will be well,”

Such a Father cares for us but is not anxious about us.
While caring, God remains “infinitely at peace.”
There is in God a Serene Center,
unmoved, unshaken, eternal, sitting Buddha-like in perfect balance.
The Father God is, in T. S. Eliot’s words, “The still point of the turning world.”

The Father’s eternity and serenity are necessary to our hope.
But, the Father’s response, standing alone, is infuriatingly aloof.
If God remains immune to life’s ups and downs,
he cannot understand in a personal way what we go though.

That’s why we need another part of God – the Son.
The Son is the part of God that chooses to join us in our pain.
In his Treatise On The Love Of God, the Spanish philosopher
Miguel de Unamuno describes spiritual love this way:
“The lovers do not come to love one another this way . . .
unless they have suffered together,
When the powerful hammer of sorrow
has pummeled their hearts,
. . . . when they have suffered together,
. . . plowed the rocky ground
bound to the same yoke of a common sorrow.”

We see this part of God in Jesus on the Cross.
Jesus shows us a God who values us enough to join us in our suffering
instead of sitting blissfully serene in Paradise.

But it didn’t just happen once.
This is how God the Son is every moment of every day.
The Son is God’s infinite compassion and the word “compassion”
means literally “to suffer with.”
When we sing “there is no place where earth’s sorrows
are more felt than up in heaven,”
we are singing about the Son.

The Son is so present with the hungry that his stomach cramps;
so present with the lonely that his throat constricts
and cannot call out for comfort;
so present with the grief-stricken that he cannot move.
This is not God almighty, but God all vulnerable with us.

It is a good thing to have a God
who is serene when we are in a panic.
The Father’s wise serenity can be our eye in the hurricane.
It is good to have a God who loves us enough to suffer with us.
The Son’s compassion gives profound meaning to suffering
that might otherwise be for nothing
Those two parts of God are both essential to our salvation.
But they are not enough.
We need something more.

The Spirit is the divine force that both gives and restores life.
Our Creed calls the Spirit, “the Giver of Life.”
God gave Adam life by breathing into Adam’s nostrils
God’s own breath, God’s own spirit.
When Jesus lay dead in the tomb,
the Spirit breathed life back into him.
the Spirit breathes life back into us.

Just so, the Spirit is the force that raises us from death.
In an old spiritual, we sing,
“Sometimes I feel discouraged and like my life’s in vain.
But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again”,

Life is often more than we can bear.
And yet, to our utter amazement,
people do rise from their ashes and walk on,
sometimes heroically, wisely, compassionately
– occasionally, even joyfully.
When this happens, we know we are witnessing a miracle and a mystery.
Human beings are not this resilient. No one could be.
And yet, it happens.

When the Spirit raises us from despair,
it does not just restore us to our old life.
We do not just carry on as before.
Life in the Spirit is new life with a new agenda.
When the Spirit of God fell upon prophets or kings,
it was not just to cheer them up, but to empower them
for a mission of service to others.
Jesus said:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor . . .
to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind
to set at liberty those who are oppressed
and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

Several years ago, a 20 year old college student in my parish
died in the crash of TWA 800.
Her devastated mother asked me “why?”
And I had no answer to give her.
I had no comfort to offer. But God did.

A few months later another woman in our parish
fell into renal failure.
She was blind, disabled, and at times psychotic.
She had no family to care for her.

So the bereaved mother got up from the bed of her grief
to do what had to be done.
Later she said, God had sent her that mission of mercy
to save her own life.

The Spirit calls and empowers us to help the afflicted.
God serves the suffering through the hands
of flesh-and-blood human servants.
The Spirit transforms us into those servants.

When we are hurting, it is natural to become focused on our own pain.
It is natural for our attention to turn toward ourselves.
Natural as these responses are, they are the very responses
that cripple us, that hold us back from moving on, experiencing new life.
The Spirit sets us free from obsessive thinking,
from old patterns of feeling and acting that keep we trapped
in lives less than God wants for us.
The Spirit liberates us by converting our self-focus to service.
The Spirit transforms our own pain can into compassion for others.
The Prayer Of St. Francis says, “
It is in giving that we receive; it is in forgiving that we are forgiven . . . “
Just so, it is in healing others that we ourselves are healed.

Life in this world is hard and it’s complicated.
You’ve know that.
So we need a big God and a complicated God.
We need a God who is perfectly serene,
we need a God who vulnerable and compassionate;
we need a God who powerful enough to create the universe
and when our world falls apart to put it together again
and raise us up from the graves of our despair.

We need all that and more.
But we got lucky.
God is all of that and more – “infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.”

The Mind Is Its Own Place

2011-06-12T18:04:00.001-07:00

Last week we celebrated the Feast of the Ascension
– the day when Jesus passed the torch of his mission to us
and promised that we would receive his power to continue
his mission.
Today we celebrate the birthday of the Church,
the day we received the spiritual power to change the world.

But as we celebrate the fact that we are here,
I find myself considerably confused as to what it is we are doing.
This is what confuses me.
Only 10% of Americans attend church.
But 92% of Americans believe in God.
By my count, that means 82% of Americans,
believe in God but don’t see the connection with Church.

These numbers make me wonder about several things.
What do they think religion is for?
What do they think Church is for?
What do we think Church is for?

One of our greatest living theologians, John Hick, looks at these facts
-- most people believe in God
but only a tiny minority attends Church –
and he has this observation:

“(T)he small minority of church attenders are generally happy
with the message they receive from the liturgies, hymns, and prayers,
and enjoy meeting with their friends there Sunday by Sunday .
They see the Church as destined to always be a small minority . . .
and believe this is an OK situation.
It means we are where we should be within our comfort zone.
But is this the right way to think?
Personally,” John Hick says, “I don’t think so.”

So what is wrong with this picture?
A few hundred years ago Christianity got lost
and drifted into a carrot and stick religion
all about going to Heaven and staying out of Hell.
Going to Church was our admission ticket at the pearly gates.
If we put in enough hours listening to boring sermons,
God rewards us with a get out of hell free card.
That's a far cry from the Bible and the teachings of the Early Church
which have surprisinglylittle to say on that whole subject
which became the end all and be all of Christianity in the Middle Ages.

But eventually some theologian decided
all we really have to do is believe that God exists.
In the words of the country singer, Don Williams,
“I don’t believe that Heaven waits
For only those who congregate.”
So church just doesn’t seem necessary.

That’s right as far as it goes.
God does not require us to log x hours of church time
as our price of admission to Heaven.
But without the inner transformation that comes
from a lifetime of spiritual practice,
Heaven may feel pretty uncomfortable.

As John Milton said,
“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”//
Getting God to let us into Heaven is not the point.
Transforming our minds so that we are capable
of experiencing Heaven is more like it.
St. Paul said, “Be transformed by the renewing of your minds.”

What we do here is not to buy our way into Heaven.
We are here to be changed right down to the core of our being.
Yes, this is to prepare us for Eternity,
but Eternity doesn’t begin when we die.
Eternity is now.

What we do here is to change us now and for eternity
into the likeness of Christ.
Christian practice -- which includes study, prayer, worship, and service –
changes us now.
We receive the Holy Spirit – not when we die – now!

And what difference does that make?
It changes our hearts and our minds so we become
new people with new capacities – new powers.
Paul said, “If anyone is in Christ,
that person has become a new creation.
The old has gone. The new is here.”

That’s what it means to receive the Holy Spirit.
We become capable of new things.
In Galatians, Paul gives us a list of 9 of the new things
we can do and experience by the power of the Spirit.

The first is love. Everybody wants to be loved.
But the problem is we are not very good at loving
– needing maybe – but not so good at loving,
at caring for someone, at appreciating them.
We are here to learn how to do that.

Second is joy. How much joy do you have in your life right now?
How much deep down shout hallelujah joy?
Is it that the universe is not wonderful enough?
Or is it that our hearts are not sufficiently open to it?
We are here to learn and practice the art of joy.

Third is peace.
How many of us have mastered true serenity
– the capacity to be the eye of the hurricane?
Deep inner peace comes from training our hearts to pray
without ceasing until we float in grace
no matter what is happening in our outer circumstances.

The fourth is forbearance.
That means the capacity to keep our mouth shut
when words will do more harm than good,
the capacity to be still and wait.

Then there’s kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness.
The last is self-control.
Have you noticed that most of the world is out of control?
Have you noticed how often we are not in control of ourselves?
Someone says x so we automatically feel y and then do z.
Other people push our buttons and we bark to their tune.
What would it be like to pull back
and be ourselves instead of reacting to the button pushers?

So about the 90% of Americans who are at home this Pentecost
-- will God let them into heaven? Sure.
But how much joy do you see in their faces?
When they enter a room, do they fill it with peace?
Have they mastered self-control?
If we want to do those folks any good,
we need to get clear on what we are here for
and what we have to offer.
It’s not admission tickets. This is not the celestial box office.
We are here in the business of spiritual transformation.

In Ezekiel, the Lord said,
“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you.
I will remove from you your heart of stone
and give you a heart of flesh.”
That’s what we are here for new spirits, new hearts
– hearts fit for this life and fit for the life to come.

We are about changing hearts, changing minds, changing lives.
That is what we ritualize in worship.
It’s what we pray for and accomplish through meditation.
It’s what we study in our ancient wisdom teachings.
It’s what we practice in our relationships and in our service.

When we change our hearts, when we change inwardly,
the change doesn’t stop inside our skin.
We become change agents in the culture.
We Anglicans are not defined by a detailed set of theological opinions
but by our spiritual practices and our mission.
We have 5 marks or points of our mission:
To proclaim the good news of God
To teach, baptize, and nurture new believers
To respond to human need with loving service
To transform unjust social structures; and
To safeguard and sustain the life of the earth.

This is about transforming the whole tone of our personal lives, yes.
But it’s more than that.
It’s about changing the world in which we live.
It’s about filling -- not only our own homes and friendships
but the whole world --
with love, peace, forbearance, kindness,
gentleness and self control.

That’s what people do when they have new spirits and new hearts.
That’s what we do when we stop just believing in God
and become disciples of Christ.
That’s what the Holy Spirit is doing through us.
Glory to God whose power working in us can do infinitely more
than we can ask or imagine.
Amen.

3 Practices & 2 Songs For Spiritual Power

2011-06-06T13:29:00.001-07:00

Jesus’ last words to the apostles were:
“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you
and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea,
in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

This is Jesus’ last will and testament, his legacy to us.
His parting words threaten to change our lives.
Jesus hands over his mission to us.
To carry out his mission, we need his power.
That makes us distinctly uncomfortable.
No one admits to wanting power.
So what are we doing in a religion that promises power?

Talking about power conjures up images of tyrants, dictators,
political wheeler dealers, and financial robber barons.
Put it together with religion and you get one those double chinned bishops
who’s always eating turkey drumsticks in Renaissance movies.
Nice people don’t talk about power, especially in church.
What has power to do with Christianity?
As Christians we are supposed to be simpering, pusillanimous, dispensers
of charity and pious platitudes, are we not?

But is that kind of Christianity honest?
Does it have any place in the real world?
Sociologist of religion, James Davison Hunter says,
“Human relations are inherently power relations.
Power saturates all of social reality . . . .
How people engage the world is at least implicitly
a question of how they relate to power.”

To truly have nothing to do with power
is to disengage from the world.
To pretend we have nothing to do with power is
to deal with the world, and with our selves, deceitfully.
So we might start by talking about power honestly.

Jesus said, “You will receive power.”
2nd Timothy says, “God did not give us a spirit of fear,
but of power . . . .”
Ephesians says, “Glory to God whose power working in us
can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.”
Paul said, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection.”

Jesus wants to give us power for his mission.
If we don’t claim that power, we remain spiritual parasites,
not partners with Christ in mission.
So what is this spiritual power Christ offers?
Is it something we might dare claim for ourselves
and put to use in his mission?

First, forget what you know about worldly power.
This is another thing altogether.
Spiritual power is not dominating power.
Jesus always resisted dominating power.

Spiritual power is relational.
It is the ability to influence others
out of something deep and authentic.
If you are a stranger to me, then you cannot influence me.
If you are a fool, you cannot influence me
unless I’m a bigger fool than you are.

But suppose we get to know each other.
Suppose I come to trust that you mean me well.
And suppose I believe you know something worth knowing.
Suppose I experience you as sane, wise, honest, and decent.
Then I will believe in you and what you say.
Then you can influence me for good.

Worldly power, dominating power is one person
diminishing the power of another person
– trying to make himself more by making someone else less.

Spiritual power is energy.
It flows between people to make them both stronger.
Relational power, spiritual power, can heal, encourage, inspire.

Look at any interpersonal transaction, be it in Scripture, current events,
or your personal life, and check the power dynamics.
Does one person exert power to diminish someone else?
Or does one person share power, empower the other person?
That’s how we distinguish the world’s power from the Jesus power.

We cannot empower others
unless we claim and cultivate our own spiritual power first.
There are three ways to receive the spiritual power Christ offers.

First, it takes prayer.
After Jesus told the apostles they were to receive power for the mission,
the Bible says, they constantly devoted themselves to prayer.
Prayer connects the circuit for Christ’s power to flow through us.

Second it takes study.
Remember that you gain the power to influence me
only if two thing come together.
One, I can tell you mean me well.
Two, I can tell you know something.
2nd Peter says, “His divine power has given us
everything we need for life and godliness.
This power was given to us through knowledge. . . .”
Proverbs 24 verse 5:
“A person of knowledge increases power.”
We do not grow in spiritual power unless we value our faith
seriously enough to study it.

Finally, spiritual power is relational.
Its roots are in Christ-centered relationships with each other.
Spiritual power grows through the intentional discipline
of paying attention to each other, caring for each other,
and finding things to appreciate in each other.

We grow in spiritual power when we do three things:
Pray, study, and befriend each other in Christ.
When we do that, we cease to be spiritual parasites
and become partners -- powerful agents for the kingdom.

But do we dare to claim the power Christ wants to give us?
I see several signs that make me wonder if we are that bold.
Some are a bit delicate.
The least sensitive examples are in our music.

The basic hymn for ordinations in the Episcopal Church
is the old Celtic song, St. Patrick’s Breastplate.
It’s so normative for ordinations and common for confirmations
that most bishops have heard enough of it for a lifetime.
It’s the basic strap on your gun belt song from every Western movie.
The words are an incantation St. Patrick prayed on the plain of Tara
before doing battle with the army of wizards of King Laoghaire.
It goes:

“I bind unto myself today
The strong name of the Trinity . . . .
I bind unto myself the power
Of the great love of cherubim . . . .
The power of God to hold and lead,
His eye to watch, his might to stay . . . .”

It’s what we sing at confirmations before the bishop prays,
“Strengthen O Lord your servant. . . .”
My question is: why have I never once in our diocese,
in any church large or small, high or low, traditional or hip,
not once anywhere in our diocese ever heard that song?

Example 2:
Three of Nevada’s last 4 bishops all attended the same seminary.
That seminary has a theme song, a bit of a fight song actually.
It’s called Chelsea Square named for the seminary’s location
in New York City.
It’s a vigorous song, a marching into mission song.
The opening lines are:
“Put forth O God thy Spirit’s might
And bid thy church increase. . . .”
You can guess my question.
Why have I never heard it in Nevada?

I am not really worried about holes in our musical repertoire per se.
I am wondering what this might say about our gumption
– our willingness to be strong in faith, powerful in mission.

Eucharistic Prayer C says,
“Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this table
for solace only and not for strength.”
Is strength part of what we mean by the word Christian?
Are we willing as Christians to claim and exercise spiritual power?
If not, why am I about to pray for the confirmands
“empower them for your service”?

The Body of Christ needs a backbone.
The Body of Christ needs some fire in its belly.
The Body of Christ needs a steady eye, a firm hand,
and strong right arm.

We need Christians who pray until they radiate spirit,
who study their way into holy wisdom,
who have the relational power to hold fast to a friend
in the strongest storms of life.

When we have that kind of religion, brothers and sisters,
we’ll have the faith of the apostles.
When we have that kind of religion,
our faith will not be an aid to ordinary life
lived in an ordinary environment.

It will be the driving force of extraordinary life
that transforms our environment with justice and mercy.
We will be change agents for the kingdom of God.
When we have that kind of religion,
we will have been baptized with fire as the Bible promises
and the world will feel our transforming energy.
Amen.

Atheists, Agnostics, Dogmatists And "The Unknown God"

2011-05-29T18:47:00.000-07:00

When St. Paul brought the gospel to Athens,
he found a wonderful point of contact.
All around the city were altars to Zeus, Athena, Hermes,
Aphrodite, Ares and the rest of the gods.
But in one Athenian temple, Paul found something mysterious
-- yet somehow familiar to him as a Jew.
He saw an altar dedicated to “the unknown God.”
So when Paul was given a chance to explain his new religion,
he told the Athenians he worshiped the unknown God.

In my line of work, people sometimes ask me,
“So how do you know there is a God?”
And I always think silently, “How do any of us know anything?”

Bear with me, I have to review just two minutes of philosophy.
The father of modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant,
divided reality into two categories.

One category was everything we know
or, at least in principle, might someday know.
The other category was the mystery, all the things
that we do not know and will never know.
As a matter of logic, we can never know
what unobserved butterflies are up to.
As Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti put it,
“The eye cannot see itself.”

Kant demonstrated 300 years ago that
there is relatively little we can actually know.
What we can know is limited to our own subjective experience,
but the realm of the unknown and the unknowable
is infinite.

20th Century physicist Werner Heisenberg discovered
that Kant was right even in physics.
Some things just can’t be known.

Around that time, philosopher Martin Heidegger showed
how the things we know create a kind of box
that we can never think completely outside of.
He and Ludwig Wittgenstein also observed
that we think in language
and the very structure of language
limits what we are capable of thinking.
In short, the mystery is vastly larger than the little piece of reality
we can see, hear, touch, and measure.

What does that have to do with God? Short answer: everything.
Roman Catholic Theologian Karl Rahner said,
“(human) knowledge is only a small island in a sea
that has not been travelled. . . .
The question is:
Which do (w)e love more,
the small island of (our) so-called knowledge
or the sea of infinite mystery?”
Religion is our attitude to that sea.

Protestant Theologian Gordon Kaufman says
that God begins where our capacity for knowledge ends.
The knowable world rests on a foundation of mystery.
It comes from mystery.
This is what Paul means when he says,
“In God we live and move and have our being.”

Whether the universe had a beginning or not
is something we didn’t know until very recently
but it was always something that could in principle be proven.
Now it has been and we know that the Big Bang Theory is right.
That’s how the universe began.

But what was there before the universe?
What happened five minutes before the Big Bang?
Who lit the fuse?
That is beyond the reach of human knowledge.

We can get hints of what the mystery is like
from the things we can know and experience.
The Anglican poet T. S. Eliot called our religion
“hints and guesses.”
There is some reason to believe the mystery
is creative and generous, kind and merciful.

We may be wrong.
But spiritual masters through the ages and around the world
have believed those good things
even though they cannot prove them.
Those who gaze in awe at the mystery, those who love it,
call the mystery “God.”

Agnostics are a little different.
Intellectually, they are absolutely right.
God is not a thing you can prove or disprove.
They are intellectually right.

But emotionally, they are like a man
who cannot let himself fall in love with a woman
because he can never be absolutely certain
what is in her heart.
Agnostics cannot love the mystery
because they don’t know enough about it.

Atheists are another matter still.
I like atheists. They are good for us.
The good thing about atheists is they smash our idols.
They take our too small ideas about God
and show that they don’t make sense.

So atheists do us believers a good service
by setting us free of idolatry.
But most atheists are intellectually arrogant and small minded.
You can see it in the mean spirited style of their writing.

Atheists deny the existence of God
because they can’t find his footprint like that of a Sasquatch
or get a picture of him at the Oscars.
They deny God because God is not on their little island of knowledge.
God is the sea on which the island floats.
God does not dwell inside the box of things we know.
God is the air outside the box extending infinitely into space.
The problem with atheists is they worship the box.

Paul, as a good Jew, knew that God is mystery.
That’s why the God of Israel had no name and no image.
You could not say he is this or that.
You could not carve a statue of God.

In the Jerusalem Temple, the Ark of the Covenant
served as God’s throne.
But the throne was empty.
A conquering general once marched into the Holy of Holies
and came out contemptuously announcing
there was nothing there.
Other nations who had a pantheon of little gods
called the Jews atheists because they had
no god with a name and a statue.
What the other nations didn’t get was that Jews were worshiping
“the unknown God.”

The greatest Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas
and the greatest Protestant theologian Martin Luther
both called God the “deus absconditus” – the hidden God –
because God does not fit inside the human mind.
The human mind fits inside God.

That’s why any religion that claims to have all the answers
is to be avoided at all costs.
Such religions are mind killers and soul shrinkers.
True religion stands in awe at the shore of oceanic mystery.
We don’t have all the answers.
We have very few answers.
But we have a warehouse full of marvelous questions.

Our doctrines are not platitudes to satisfy the simple mind.
They are puzzles and enigmas
– a God who is three and one;
a savior who is fully human and fully divine;
a God powerful enough to create the universe
but vulnerable enough to hang on a cross.
Whatever we say about God is not to define God, to pin God down,
but to make us shake our heads
and know that we do not know.

What is the point of a religion that stands in awe
rather than certainty?
The point is that it leads us outside our selves,
outside the walls of what we think we know,
beyond the prison of our pride
into something larger, vastly larger, than all the ideologies,
all the self-help guides to fixing our own lives,
all the programs and platforms humankind can imagine.
It leads us into wonder, inexhaustible wonder.
Amen.

Looking Inward For The Shepherd

2011-05-17T15:20:00.000-07:00

The fourth Sunday of Easter is Good Shepherd Sunday.
I am honestly surprised Good Shepherd Sunday
has survived the waves of liturgical reform
that have abolished countless metaphors
in which someone might lead someone else.
We recoil against any image that might suggest
we should obey anything other than our own whims.

I have spent two decades defending this day
from indignant Episcopalians who insist they are not sheep
and will not tolerate being treated as such.
Something in a human being rebels against the suggestion
we might need a shepherd.
But then something in a sheep also rebels against the suggestion
they might need a shepherd.

Like human beings, sheep are a thoughtless and errant species
inclined to wander willy nilly and get themselves in trouble.
We are certainly more articulate and smell better,
but we do share with sheep a tendency to go astray
and a certainty that we do not need a shepherd.
We have that much, at least, in common.

As modern Americans, we don’t like the notion
of someone telling us what to do – even if it’s Jesus.
Our American psalm, the feci viam meam, which will probably
Be in our next prayer book.
It’s by Frank Sinatra.
In English it’s, “I did it my way.”

So I wonder if there is anything in the lessons for Good Shepherd Sunday
that we might be willing to hear.
I hope so, because often our society reminds me of a lot of lost sheep
ambling about the desert going bah bah bah to the tune of
“I did it my way.”

When we read a Scripture lesson,
it’s important to put it in the context of the whole Bible,
and especially in the context of the whole book
where the text is found.
For example, the Good Shepherd lesson
is in the Gospel According to John.

In John, Jesus says he is the Good Shepherd
who knows his sheep, cares for them, calls them by name.
But where is he doing that from?
Is he sitting on a cloud watching us and saying “turn left,
no a little to right”?
Or has he delegated this job to ecclesiastical authorities
like priests and bishops?

No in John Jesus prays that he may dwell inside us.
That’s part of the meaning of Holy Communion.
We take Jesus into ourselves.

St. Paul says in Philippians,
“Have the same mind in you that was in Christ Jesus.”
So if we are looking for the Good Shepherd,
where are we to look?

After the Ascension, the disciples were staring at the sky,
looking for Jesus,
but the angels said, “You’re looking the wrong way.”
People have been looking at preachers, gurus, and so called saints
for generations hoping to see Jesus.
I can’t tell you how many times somebody has said of their priest,
“I just can’t see Jesus in him.”

That’s because they’re looking the wrong direction.
They are looking outward -- when to find Jesus,
we have to look inward;
to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd
we have to listen inward.

You see we are not each like an individual sheep.
We are each like a whole heard of sheep.
Inside each of us, there isn’t one will, one personality.
There’s a whole herd in there.

We are one person at work with one set of thoughts, feelings, attitudes.
At home we turn into somebody else.
Out with our friends, we actually think, feel, and act differently.
And those different parts of ourselves don’t always get along.
Sometimes the ambitious worker takes over and we ignore our family.
Sometimes we get so ensnared in our family duties
we don’t allow ourselves space to have any friends.

Sometimes some of us get taken over by a part that likes to feel sorry for itself.
Sometimes, a righteous judgmental part of us takes over
and goes after either other people or parts of ourselves.
There’s a whole herd of personalities in there,
each of them capable of wandering off on one fool path or another.

That happens to me every single day of my life.
But there’s somebody else in there too.
There’s a part we might call “the Good Shepherd.”

That’s the part that just stands back and watches over
the whole flock, caring for them,
knowing each one by name,
calling them back together.
Another metaphor might be to say that we have a spiritual gyroscope
that keeps us right side up and headed the right direction.

We have a lot of parts of ourselves that get agitated
over one thing or another.
There are parts of us that are inclined to go off on a tear.
And that’s ok.
Those parts of us are not bad.
Without them, we’d be pretty boring and our lives would be pretty bland.

But they will wander right off a cliff
if we don’t check in with another part
– the Christ within us, the Good Shepherd.
When we find the Christ we receive in the sacrament,
he is always serene, objective, wise, curious,
sometimes amused, and always compassionate.
He understands all the wild and crazy parts of us.
He doesn’t judge them or condemn them,
even when they judge and condemn each other.

He just calls them by name and nudges them back on the path.
He makes sure they all get fed and watered,
and he keeps them away from the predators.
That’s why it’s so important to listen,
so important to stop and pay attention
from time to time to the serene center of our souls.
It’s so important to feel what we feel, think what we think,
but then step back and check in with the Good Shepherd
before we act.
Can you see how different this is from the Proverb of the 1970’s?
Remember that one: “Go with your gut.”
Don’t do that.
Your gut is one of the sheep.
That’s where we keep our fear and loathing,
our regressive impulses, our unmitigated selfishness.

Don’t go with your gut.
Listen to the Shepherd.
Be still and look at your situation through the eyes of wisdom,
the eyes of mercy, the eyes of Christ.

That isn’t being docile.
It isn’t being timid.
It isn’t being indecisive.
It’s wisdom.
It’s spiritual balance.

If you are looking for Jesus, look inside yourself.
John says that’s where you’ll find him.
And he’ll speak softly, not harsh words of judgment,
but calm words of guidance,
“leading us beside the still waters,
restoring our souls.”

Dejection & Imagination: The Way Forward

2011-05-17T15:18:00.000-07:00

Our Gospel story begins in dejection.
Clopas and his friend had seen sorrow all their days.
They lived in a poor country where life was short and hard.
They had once been a great empire,
but the empire feuded -- then split,
and in its weakened state, it had been conquered.
10 of Israel’s 12 tribes had been deported and scattered,
forever lost.

The remaining two had been overrun by Assyrians,
then Babylonians, then Persians,
then Greeks, and finally Rome.
They were a defeated and oppressed people,
living under foreign rule which respected
neither their culture nor their God.

Then Jesus gave them hope.
They had hoped Jesus would drive out Rome,
restore the kingdom as in the days of David,
that he would feed the hungry, heal the sick, establish justice.
Hope ran high.
Then came Good Friday.
The bloody humiliation of their hero
showed how wrong they had been,
how foolish they had been to have hoped
that things could be different.

The world is as it is.
They were as they were.
Hopes dashed and discarded.
Greif gave way to dejection-- dejection to despair.

Some of us know how they felt.
We may or may not live in a conquered nation.
That depends on the perspective of our family heritage.
But we know that life is not what it ought to be.
We have experienced what Coleridge called
“the tears in the nature of things.”

So many of us have at one time or another
found some form of deliverance.
It may have been a relationship with another person
who we thought could make everything ok
like in the love songs.
Or it may have been that we became parents
and thought we could make it ok for our children
even if it hadn’t been so great for us,
and they would become the people we should have been.

We may have found our hope in a new psychology
or diet or exercise plan.
There are as many paths to redemption
as there are slot machines in the Las Vegas Valley.
But, compared to the paths of redemption, the slots are more reliable.
We may even have tried the Christian faith,
but if we tried to practice Christianity on our own,
we found out pretty quickly, it doesn’t work.
Christianity is a team sport. It is a family meal.
So to place our faith in Jesus, we had to place our faith in a church.
And maybe we found one
where the worship felt holy, the sermon was uplifting,
and the people were friendly.
We thought, “I am home now. This, at last, is a safe place.”

But before long,
we discovered that even the best of churches,
especially the best of churches,
have the same problem.
They are infested with people,
and human frailty does not disappear
at the narthex door.

Our church may have done something
unjust, insensitive, or morally wrong.
Maybe the priest said something or did something
that a priest should never say or do.
The people may have resorted to power politics
or character assassination.
The church we thought was the Body of Christ,
the demonstration model for the Kingdom of God,
turned out to human, all too human.

Each of us has our own version of this story.
Each of us has found our path to redemption
and has seen it come to an apparent dead end.
So we know what dejection is like.

That is how it was for Clopas and his friend,
as they walked home to Emmaus.
It was on that road they met Jesus,
but they didn’t recognize him.
He did not appear in the form they remembered.
He wasn’t the same old Jesus as before.
But really it was that they no longer looked
at him through the eyes of hope.
They looked at Jesus through a cataract of despair.
So they didn’t know him.

When we have been so deeply disappointed
it’s hard, it’s very hard, to open our hearts again.
That’s part of why it took them all day
and into the night to recognize their Savior.

But let’s give them due credit.
Even in their despondent mood,
they were willing to walk the road with a stranger.
Despite their disappointment,
they were still willing to open their minds
and to study the Scripture.

Many of us are so sure we already know what the Bible says
about this or that –
so sure we know the Bible’s basic themes.
But the more I study the Holy Scriptures, the deeper I go,
the more wild and wonderful and surprising that book becomes.
If we assume we know what the Bible says,
if we stop with a simple literal reading,
it will close our minds.

The simple literal meaning of the texts
Jesus was teaching Clopas and his friend that day
did not point to a crucified messiah.
It took a bold new way of reading the Bible
to open these men’s hearts.
That’s what Jesus gave them,
and to their credit, they listened.

And to their credit,
they welcomed the stranger into their home.
How often we come to a church or any path of redemption,
wanting to be healed and consoled ourselves.
But the healing and consolation don’t happen
until we drop that agenda for self,
and serve or welcome someone else.

They broke bread together.
It was the first Eucharist.
They hadn’t expected it to be a Eucharist.
But there it was.
The blessing, the breaking, the giving of bread
after hearing the good news from Scripture –
they joined in this simply – with no expectation –
just open minds.
In that moment, they recognized the Lord.

Then Clopas and his friend got it right again.
Even though it was night, they hurried back to Jerusalem
to share the good news with the other disciples.
But Jesus had been meeting with them too.

Stop. How did that happen?
Jesus was now appearing to people in different places
at the same time.
Wonders just keep multiplying
when we share good news with each other.

So what can we learn from our story?
Maybe a lot of things.
The first lesson may be about dejection.
It happens.
It is a common part of the spiritual life.
It may even be a necessary part of the spiritual life.
Spiritual masters like St. Ignatius Loyola
and St. John of the Cross thought so.

And we may also learn a virtue from this story.
The virtue is that, when we are feeling dejected,
keeping our hearts and minds open to grace
can lead to a deeper redemption
than we had hoped for to begin with.

That’s especially true if we can open our hearts and minds
to grace in a new and unfamiliar form,
grace from the lips of a stranger,
grace showing us the Bible means something
quite different from what we had thought.

The word “open” did not first appear in the Church
a few decades ago.
It is one of the most frequently used verbs
in the Gospels for what Jesus does.
He opens eyes, opens ears, opens graves.

May Jesus open our spirits to each other this day
and to his own gracious person from this time forth
that we may know more fully his saving grace.
Amen.

Spirit Power & Infinite Hope: Easter and the Ghost Dance

2011-04-25T19:32:00.000-07:00

For a sermon at Pyramid Lake a text would not work, so this is just an outline. It comes from something I learned from a Bible Study for Community Organizing -- how to do a power analysis of a Scriptural text. In this sermon I portrayed the drama of Holy Week, enacted around the world for millennia, as a ritual unmasking of the power struggle that goes on perpetually in world affairs, in history, and in our daily lives – the struggle between two kinds of power: Dominating Power which conquers, dominates, and ultimately kills vs. Spirit Power (or relational power) which empowers, enlivens, creates, and gives birth.
Two examples of Spirit Power – the life of Jesus “anointed with the Spirit and with Power” who promised that “the Holy Spirit would descend upon us and we would receive Power” and the Ghost Dance of Wovoka.
In Holy Week, Domination Power thought it had won, when it had done all it can do – kill. But Spirit power gives life and is the source of what Dr. King called “infinite hope.”
Easter 1 – 2011
The Resurrection is about Power
There are 2 kinds of power:
Dominating power –
The one who exercises DP takes power from another Ex: governments, bullies, empires
In NT, that would be Rome.
DP is sterile
Spiritual power – relational power
It is energy – it is the power to empower
Power to heal, power to reconcile, power to give hope
In, NT that would be Jesus – look how he used power
Spiritual Power is fertile

Domination power is afraid of relational power
because relational power cannot be dominated
Wovoka and the Ghost Dance
Jesus and the Cross

Holy Week is about relational power going head to head with dominating power
Having loved his own
Washing of the feet
Communion
Going to the Cross
Forgiving from the Cross
Dominating power thinks it has won when it has killed

The Resurrection is the victory of Relational Power
n Not the power to kill but the power to give life.
n HS came upon Jesus and restored his life – that’s power.
n The Holy Spirit will come upon you and you will receive power
That’s what it means to be raised with Christ.

To be a Christian is not to believe a story – but to live in the power of the story
To reject the dominating power in 2 ways:
1. Not to exercise it
2. Not to submit to it
To live into Relational Power
How do we live into Relational Power today?
Poverty – how do we come together to help each other support our families?
War – how do we come together to make peace in a world at war?
How do we overcome racial and religious prejudice that divides us?
Addiction – how do we come together to support people
who want to be free from the bonds of addiction?
Family violence and conflict – how do we find the love to heal the wounds
in our most important relationships?

This is the Holy Week we live every week – our struggle.
There will be Good Fridays.
MLK: “In this world we must accept finite disappointments;
but we must never lose infinite hope.”
Even death is a finite disappointment.
Our infinite hope is in the spiritual power of God.

"The Great Bright Dream Of Procreating And Perishing

2011-04-17T21:16:00.000-07:00

Archibald MacLeish rewrote the story of Job as a modern play in verse.
He called it J.B.
After J. B.’s children are all killed in a single night,
the stunned father is looking for the meaning in his tragedy.
He says: If I knew! If I knew why!
What I can’t bear is . . . the blindness . . .
Meaninglessness . . . the numb blow
Fallen in the stumbling night.

The disciples must have felt that way on Good Friday.
For them, the crucifixion was an unmitigated disaster.
There was no meaning in it – just catastrophe.
It was the death of the messiah, with his mission,
as they understood it, utterly defeated.

It’s hard for us to hear the Passion Story
the way they experienced it
because the meaning of Jesus’ death has been
drummed into us since Sunday School 101.

Jesus suffered on our behalf.
He suffered so we wouldn’t have to.
Jesus took the bullet.

A simple, clear, heroic meaning.
There is definitely something to that interpretation.
If that interpretation brings you closer to Christ,
I wouldn’t want to interfere with it.
In fact, I believe, with a few corrections,
there’s a lot of truth in it.

But the idea that Jesus suffered so that we wouldn’t have to
is not to be found in the Gospels.
It did not become the Christian party line
until a thousand years later.
Jesus didn’t say “I am going to the cross so you won’t have to.”
He said, “Take up your cross and follow me.”
That’s different.

We can’t see the death of Jesus through the disciples’ eyes
if we start out with the interpretation before the event
and skip the moment of meaningless disaster.
We have to start where they did, saying with J. B.
If I knew! If I knew why!
What I can’t bear is . . . the blindness . . .
Meaninglessness . . . the numb blow
Fallen in the stumbling night.

The New Testament authors struggled for decades
to find meaning in the Passion.
They did not come up with just one answer.
There are stammering starts at several different answers.
Theologians ever since have continued to try to make sense of it.

The Passion can mean one thing to you
and something else to me.
None of us has a lock on the Holy Mystery of salvation.

Today’s Epistle lesson gives us one way to understand it.
St. Paul gives us a poem that captures the whole life,
death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Paul had heard the words of Jesus quoted,
“Take up your cross and follow me.”
So he said,
“Have the same mind in you that was in Christ Jesus.”
Do as he did – and what was that?

“Though he was in the form of God,
he did not count equality with God
as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave
being born in human likeness.”

Religions usually involve a lot of escapism.
Life is hard.
Human beings are vulnerable.

We get sick.
We get in trouble.
We die – and we don’t like that.

We’d rather be like God.
We want out of this hard life.
We want to be hunky dory day in and day out.
We don’t like being human.
We want to be gods -- above it all.

But what happens when the God we want to be like
chooses to be human?
What if God does not hang on to his safe cushy perch
above the changes and the chances of this life
– but chooses instead “to live and die as one of us.”

Then the way to godliness isn’t to run away from life.
It isn’t to be spiritual with a blissy smile.
It’s to live this life, as it is, with all its ups and downs,
all its joys and sorrow, all is victories and defeats.
It’s to live a human life and die a human death.

But that’s not the end of the story.
Paul says that because Jesus plunged into humanity,
God exalted him to the highest heaven.
The Christian way is not salvation from suffering,
but salvation through suffering.

Elsewhere Paul wrote,
“Just as the sufferings of Christ overflow into our lives;
so too does the encouragement we receive through Christ.”
And in another letter,
“(I want) . . . to partake of his sufferings by being molded
toward the pattern of his death,
striving toward the goal of resurrection from the dead.”

Some theologians say that means that God makes us suffer
because it’s good for us.
I don’t believe that.
I believe life is just the way it is.

Buddha said that life is made up of
“10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows
inextricably woven together”
so you can’t have one without the other.
The question is: what do we do with that?
Jesus chose to live into it all the way
right through disgrace, defeat, suffering, and death.

That is the way of salvation.
That is the way to union with God
– not by avoiding real life, but by living it.
The cross didn’t just happen in 30 A.D.
The cross happens today.
The cross happens in our lives each day
– sometimes in big ways; sometimes in small ways.

The cross means that this life with all its joys and sorrows
is not an illusion to be seen through.
It is not a fallen, degraded realm to be despised.
It is the path to God.

In Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Gilead, old pastor Ames
is nearing death, looking forward to heaven,
but also looking back on his mortal life. He says:

“I know all this is all a mere apparition
compared to what awaits us,
but it is only lovelier for that.
There is a human beauty to it.

And I can’t believe that when we have been changed
and put on incorruptibility that we will forget
our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence,
the great bright dream of procreating and perishing
that meant the whole world to us.

In eternity, this world will be Troy . . . and all that has passed here
will be the epic of the universe,
the song they sing in the streets.”

How we understand the Cross of Christ
is desperately important
because it is our cross too.

Paul says that if we bear it with faith, if we bear it with hope,
if we bear our cross with courage and with compassion
for those who suffer around us,
then it becomes the gateway to heaven.
This mixed life of 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows
is our true sacrament.

A Grande Grace - Mild -- With Room For Cream

2011-04-10T18:50:00.000-07:00

On Lent 5, we hear about Lazarus.
His story falls on Lent 5 because in John’s Gospel,
this is the tipping point.
Raising Lazarus pushed Jesus’ opposition
over the edge into a murderous plot.
This is the point at which they realized
what a revolutionary change Jesus was ushering
into the world.

What do you suppose life was like for Lazarus
before he fell ill?
Scripture doesn’t say.
So it probably wasn’t remarkable.
It was probably typical – an ordinary life.

I asked a friend this week, “How are you?”
He answered honestly. He said “Mixed.”
His life was somewhat afflicted but generally ok.
That’s how life usually is.
That’s how Lazarus’ life was.
Then he got seriously sick and life was a lot worse.
So his sisters sent word to Jesus.
They wanted him to come and heal their brother.
They wanted him to restore Lazarus from illness back to his mixed life.
Sigmund Freud said the goal of psychoanalysis is to cure mental illness
so the patient can resume a life of “ordinary misery.”
Mary and Martha wanted Jesus to restore the balance,
to put Lazarus back the way he was.

That is what a lot of our religion is for.
We have gotten used to life as it is,
settled into our ordinary misery,
and when that balance is threatened
we want Jesus to set things back the way they were.
We don’t harbor much hope that things can be dramatically better
than they have always been.

We are a bit like the righteous pagans
in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Dante had the greatest respect for the virtues
of great pagans who lived before the time of Jesus.
They were good. They were even noble,
but in the Divine Comedy, Dante consigned their souls to limbo
– neither the punishments of hell nor the joys of paradise.
The righteous pagans had lived and died without any concept of heaven,
no idea that union with God is possible,
no hope to see the beauty of the divine and be lost
in wonder, love, and praise.
So Dante relegated them to limbo, the mixed state,
because they failed to imagine anything better.

I don’t know where righteous pagans go when they die
and neither did Dante
but he was making this spiritual point:
It is very hard to achieve what we cannot first imagine.
If we cannot imagine that life might be utterly new,
if the best we hope for is the way things were,
then we erect a barrier to what Jesus wants to give us.

So Mary and Martha called Jesus to come quick
and set things back the way they were.
But he didn’t do it.
He waited for two days until Lazarus had died
and all hope to put things back the way they were
was gone.

That’s when Jesus arrived with something better.
He replaced Lazarus’s ordinary life with a miracle.
What happened to Lazarus after that?
We don’t know for sure.
His name is not said again.

But there may be an answer – at least a theory.
No one knows who wrote the 4th Gospel.
Tradition gave it the name of John,
but it pretty clearly wasn’t John the Son of Zebedee
and brother of James.
We don’t know who wrote the 4th Gospel,
but there is a respectable group of scholars
who think it was Lazarus.
It may be that the mystical Gospel,
the loftiest poetry and the truest knowledge of Christ,
came from this man who had seen the other side.
We don’t know that.
But I cannot imagine that Lazarus resumed his ordinary life.
From that day forth, he knew the life giving power of Jesus
-- not as an idea, but an experience; not a theory, but a fact.
Lazarus knew what Paul meant when he said,
“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.
The old has gone. The new has come.”

But is that what we want?
The self-help books and the psycho-pundits on the talk shows
all have techniques to tinker a little with our lives
-- countless ways to make a little adjustment here
or there so we might, with luck and hard work,
make ourselves 3% happier --
but without changing anything too much.

On any given day, 3% happier may be
about as much as we think like we can stand.
So we pray for that, and many a time
that’s what Jesus does for us.
“I’ll have a Grande grace, the mild brew, not bold,
with room for cream.”
But sometimes Jesus may have a venti grace in mind
and our cup won’t hold it.
We need a different cup.

Jesus wants better for us than we want for ourselves.
Jesus wants better for us than we can imagine,
but it’s natural for us to be afraid of it.
Room has to be made to hold so much grace.
The ordinary things that make is feel safe,
the things that give us our hints of well-being,
have to fall away to make room
“for the glory which is yet to be revealed.”

Holy Week is the story of that falling away.
It is a story of death – like the death of Lazarus
– the kind of death that opens the way to new life
– not to old life refurbished, buffed and refinished
– but utterly new life – a new creation.

This makes a difference for how we understand
what happens in our life all the time.
It changes how we understand what is happening
when the ordinary things that make is feel safe,
the things that give us our sense of well-being,
fall away.

And that is all the time.
As Joni Mitchell so wisely said,
“Something’s lost and something’s gained
in living every day.”

When life is falling apart,
in big ways or in little ways,
how do we understand it?
It’s hard to lose the things that make us happy
-- jobs, homes, people, relationships.
Even though he knew about resurrection,
Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus
because the Lazarus who came out of the tomb
would not be the same man who went into it.
Even Jesus missed the old Lazarus.
So naturally, when we lose what we love, we grieve.

But we do not suffer without hope.
Peter says,
“After you have suffered for a little while.,
the God of all grace who has called you
to his eternal glory in Christ
will himself restore you, support, and strengthen
and establish you.”
Paul says,
“. . . (T)he sufferings of this present time are not worth
comparing to the glory about to be revealed . . . .”

There is a Zen adage that goes,
“The barn has burned.
Now I can see the moon.”

That’s a new meaning for a barn burning.
When the barn is burning in our lives,
we do our best to put out the fire.
But when the barn has burned, we look for the moon.
When Lazarus has died, we look for the resurrection.
When we lose the things that make us happy,
we look for the glory of Christ to make us ecstatic.
Amen

Change Your Course

2011-04-04T16:54:00.001-07:00

In Ephesians Paul says,
“Once you were darkness.
Now in the Lord you are light.
Live as children of light.”

A navy ship was out at sea when the captain saw the light
of an oncoming ship.
He radioed a message:
“This is the USS (whatever his ship’s name was).
Change your course 10 degrees to starboard.”
The answer came back. “No. Change your course.”

The Captain was offended so he radioed back.
“This is Captain John Williams of the United States Navy.
Change your course.”
The answer came back,
“This is Willie Brown, seaman second class.
Change your course.”
The captain was really angry now.

He radioed back,
“This is an Iowa class battleship.
Change your course.”
The message came back.
“This is the light house.
It’s up to you.”

Brothers and sisters, the world needs you.
The world needs you because you are the light.
You are the lighthouse.
When people see the light of Christ in your lives,
that’s what they have to steer by.

But where do we need the light? Where should it shine?
There is an Islamic story about a famous fool,
Mullah Nazradin.
A friend saw him one night crawling around
on the sidewalk under a street light.
The man said, “Mullah Nazradin can I help you?
What is the problem?”

Nazradin answered, “I dropped my keys
and I am looking for them.”
His friend began looking around too.
Eventually he said, “Where were you standing
when you dropped your keys?”
“In my bedroom inside the house,” Nazradin answered.
“Then why aren’t you looking in your bedroom” his friend asked.
Nazradin replied, “The light is better out here.”

Jesus said, “You are the light of the world.”
He meant for us to shine in the world.
The light isn’t for the church.
Our mission is to be the light out there
where people live.

In our Old Testament, Samuel anointed David.
He poured oil on David’s head.
In those days, oil was used in lamps.
It burned. It was energy. It gave off light.

The Bible says from the time he was anointed,
“the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David
from that day forward.”
So David was anointed with power,
the energy kind of power like electric power today
– power that gives off light.
We were anointed at our Baptism for the same thing,
for God’s Spirit to come mightily upon us
empowering us to be the light of the world.

But where did David serve the Lord?
Not in the church for there was no church.
Not in the temple for there was no temple.
Not in the synagogue for there was no synagogue.
All those things were centuries away.

David anointed to serve the Lord as a political leader.
David served God in the public affairs of his people.

Filled with the Holy Spirit,
David made a difference in people’s lives
– not by showing up for regular worship
but by fighting for freedom and justice in Israel.
That’s where David brought the light of Christ –
in the public square where justice was at stake.

Now let’s look at our Gospel lesson.
Jesus is the world’s true light.
That’s what we see whenever Jesus heals a blind person,
as he did in today’s lesson.
Jesus brought light into the darkened lives of the blind.

But where did Jesus heal the man?
He wasn’t in the Temple. He wasn’t in the synagogue.
Not once did Jesus ever heal a blind person
in a place of worship.
Jesus was on the road, the public highway.
He said, “I am the light of the world” and showed that man the light.

Are you getting my point?
What we do here in Church is necessary.
It’s where we recharge our batteries.
But the Christian life happens when we carry the Christ light
out into Las Vegas.
You do that in your homes and at your jobs and in your neighborhoods
when you act in ways that are shaped by faith.

Yesterday, a lot of Episcopalians were on the Strip
for a rally against Human Trafficking.
That was one rare occasion of our shining the light for justice.
It is too rare.
When I represent the Episcopal Church at Las Vegas Interfaith,
where we join hands with other people of faith,
to make this a better place to live,
it is always Fr. Bernardo, Fr. Hilario, and myself.
Rarely anyone else.
It is rare when we shine the light for justice in Nevada.
So I was grateful for yesterday.

Such things are not rare in the Philippines.
The Diocese of Santiago speaks out boldly on issues of justice
– especially land reform and government corruption.
The Episcopal Church in the Philippines gets its hands dirty.
The Church there organizes agricultural cooperatives.
It forms businesses to give people jobs.

Episcopalians there don’t just provide houses of worship
where they find other Episcopalians.
They form cooperatives and improve people’s lives
in towns where there are not any Episcopalians;
then the people in those towns say,
“Thank you. Now can you send us a church?
We like what we see in you.”

We carry the Christ light into the world
by being visibly Christian at home,
at work, and in our communities.
We carry the Christ light by having the mind of Christ,
by modeling everything we do on his example,
and then living that way in Las Vegas, Nevada, year 2011.
When we fail to live our faith in the world,
the world is left in darkness.
Without a lighthouse, people we know
and people we do not know,
crash into the rocks.
Our children and other people’s children crash into the rocks.
The ship of state crashes into the rocks.

Jesus said, “You are the light of the world . . . .
Let your light shine before others,
so that they may see your good works
and give glory to your Father in heaven.”

May we follow the good example
of our brothers and sisters in the Philippines.
May we follow the words of Jesus and of Paul.
“Now in the Lord you are light.
Live as children of light.”

Brothers and sisters, be the lighthouse
saying to the battleship, “Change your course.”
Call out to this world -- hell-bent as it is for destruction,
“Change your course.”

Brothers and sisters, stand for justice.
Show mercy to the suffering.
Welcome the stranger.
Care for the outcast.
And do it all in the name of Jesus.

Let Las Vegas know the Body of Christ is here.
The Light of Christ shines here.
Amen.

I Have Not Loved The World

2011-03-21T21:29:00.000-07:00

There is a term that comes up a lot in John’s Gospel.
It’s “the world.”
In John, “the world” doesn’t mean the planet earth or nature.
It means the way things are – the system
-- the way of the world, so to speak.
It mostly means human society.

The world doesn’t come off too well in John.
When he talks about “the world” John doesn’t have much good to say.
The world hates Jesus. The world hates the disciples.
The world in John is a fallen place, a realm of darkness.
Disciples unfortunately have to live in the world,
but they should not belong to it.

We find John’s basic attitude in the hymn
“I have decided to follow Jesus.”
You know the line I mean.
“The world behind me. The cross before me.
I’ll follow him.”

It’s all pretty clear. Jesus good. World bad.
But in today’s lesson, right smack dab in the heart of John,
we find a most peculiar-- a downright amazing -- verse.
When John saw what he had written, he shook his head and muttered,
“Where did that come from?”
It may be the most famous verse in the New Testament.
But we usually miss what a shocker it is
in the context of a book about how bad “the world” is.

John 3: 16 – “For God so loved the world . . . . //
For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son
that whoever believes in him might not perish but have eternal life.”

It was hard for John to write that
because John and the world
were clearly not on good terms.
He felt hated by the world. He says that straight out.
And it sounds as if he hated the world right back.
That’s not an unusual attitude.

Lord Byron wrote:
“I have not loved the world; nor the world me.
But let us part fair foes. I do believe,
though I have found them not, there may be
. . . hopes which will not deceive, . . . I would also deem
O’er others griefs that some sincerely grieve,
That two, or one, are almost what they seem – . . . . “
“I have not loved the world; nor the world me.”

Byron didn’t much like the world because it didn’t like him.
John was the same way.
He felt rejected by the world, judged by it.
He wasn’t what the world thought he ought to be.
So naturally he responded in kind.
The world wasn’t what he thought it ought to be either.

I don’t know how that strikes you,
but sign me up with Byron and John.
The world hasn’t always judged me kindly
and I am perfectly ready to return the favor.

I had unkind labels for every girl in college
who declined to go out with me.
Nowadays, whenever someone honks their opinion of my driving,
I have to fight a reflex to express my opinion of their honking.

The world is addicted to judging, condemning, guilting,
and shaming.
Not good.
So I judge the world back, condemn it, guilt it, shame it
– and in judging the world, I join it.
I become part of the elaborate network of mutual condemnation.

Then I bump into John 3: 16 and it jerks me up short.
“For God so loved the world . . . . “//
That’s good news and bad news.
The good news is that I’m part of the world God loves.
The bad news is that God loves the rest of the world too.
What could he be thinking?

God’s love for the world runs right through Scripture.
Genesis Chapter 1 verse 31:
“God saw all that he had made and indeed it was very good.”
It wasn’t perfect but it was very good.

Sociologist James Davison Hunter has written a helpful book
titled To Change The World.
It’s about how Christians are called to relate to American culture,
how we can make a positive difference.
The first step he says is appreciation. Hunter writes,

“Goodness, beauty, and truth remain in this fallen creation . . . .
(P)eople of every creed and no creed have talents and abilities,
possess knowledge, wisdom, and beauty that are . . .
in harmony with God’s will and purposes. . . .

(T)here is a natural life . . . a natural order in creation. . . .
the dazzling processes of growth in a tree
or a bug or a newborn baby,
the intricacies of molecular biology
the stunning ordered complexity of mathematics,
the underlying logic of music
all speak of an order that God has created . . . .
These things . . . ,” Hunter says,
“Christians should neither dismiss nor disparage
but rather be grateful for and be delighted by
because they are gifts of God’s grace . . . .”

There really is something good about the world.
People may be wrongheaded, neurotic, and dysfunctional.
But there is still something there to enjoy,
something to shake our heads and laugh about,
something that makes us say, “That’s special.”

So here’ s a suggestion for a Lenten discipline this year.
Suppose we ease up on the world a little.
It’s easy to get stuck in an attitude
-- easy to get grouchy and grumbly
seeing everything and everybody
through a lens of negativity.

Suppose this Lent we keep eating chocolate
and checking our Face Book pages,
but we take a break from focusing on faults.

We have to start with a 3 step process of garbage removal.
The first step is knowing that the world’s judgments of us are rubbish.
The second step is forgiving the world for being too broken
to see us as we really are.
The third step is to know that our judgments of the others
are every bit as twisted as their judgments of us.
Then we are free to begin enjoying people.

Our appreciation and delight muscles
are likely to be out of shape.
It may be a strain at first.
This takes practice.

One way is to sit still for 5 minutes
and let people come randomly to mind.
As each person’s image pops up,
we hold onto the thought of them
just long enough to think these words:
“Equally a child of God.
Equally destined for likeness with Christ.”

So what does this have to do with the Christian faith
and the sacrament of Confirmation?
Check the vows of the Baptismal Covenant.
What have we promised in our Baptism?
What does Confirmation spiritually empower us to do?
“To respect the dignity of every human being.”
“To seek and serve Christ in all persons,
loving your neighbor as yourself.”

We cannot make a positive difference in this world
with our hands
until we have first looked kindly upon this world
with our eyes.

That is how we bless this world and convey God’s blessing.
We cultivate our appreciation of things and of people.
So this Lent, I urge you to take on this arduous discipline.
Cheer up. Lighten up. Be kinder.
Take a close look at someone each day
to find a spark of goodness to enjoy.
Amen

Gilgamesh And Jesus: Repenting Of "Spirituality"

2011-03-14T14:25:00.001-07:00

In the desert Jesus faced an issue
that confronted the King of Uruk 2,800 years before.
His story is The Epic of Gilgamesh.
There are different versions of that story.
This is one.

Gilgamesh, the young king of Uruk, was a superman
– the greatest athlete, the greatest lover,
the greatest warrior – to busy being a superman
to pay attention to his people.
He best friend, Enkido, was another superman
and they had super adventures together
until Enkido fell ill and died.

Up to now Gilgamesh thought death was for ordinary people.
But if Enkido could die, then he too was mortal.
So Gilgamesh went on a quest to find the way to immortality.

He tried going back to nature and living like a wild animal,
but that turned out to be a subhuman life not worth living.
He tried hedonism. Eat, drink, and be merry.
If you live life with enough gusto it will go on forever.
But that just gave him a hangover.
So he crossed an ocean to find a spiritual master
seeking a religion to escape death.
But religion proved to be just beyond his capacity.
All his efforts to escape the common lot of humankind failed.

So he got back in his boat and went home.
As he arrived at the shore of his kingdom,
he looked up and saw his city.
The story ends with his words, “Lo the walls of Uruk.”

Gilgamesh, a mortal man, went back to his mortal people
and took up the task of caring for them.
He repented of his narcissism
and became a responsible member of the human race.

Last Wednesday, many of us had crosses traced in ashes
upon our foreheads and were told in somber tones
that we are dust and to dust we shall return.

In his classic book, The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker wrote,
“The idea of death . . . haunts the human animal
like nothing else.”
Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm said we suffer from this fear
because of all creation we alone are caught in the existential paradox.
We are spiritual beings, capable of reflection,
interpretation, and aspiration.
We treasure the spiritual realm like angels.
But we are nonetheless animals who die like animals.

The paradox is there in the 82nd Psalm,
“You are Gods. You are sons of the Most High.
But you will die like mere men.”
And Psalm 49:
“No man can redeem the life of another or ransom his own life
. . . . Man, despite his riches does not endure
but he is like the beasts that perish.”

Because we are spiritual, we do not feel that we should be mortal.
But we are – and nothing can change that hard fact.
Our Christian faith ultimately answers death with resurrection
to a new and better life.
But that does not happen until we have lost this life
which is so rightly precious to us.
We don’t get to Easter without walking the Lenten way
all the way through Good Friday.

If we feel spiritual, Jesus was more so.
He learned at the Jordan River that he was the Son of God.
But what did that mean?
He went to the desert to find out.
And Satan had some answers.

The desert told Jesus that he was still a mortal animal.
The sun did not spare his skin.
He was hungry and thirsty as anyone would be.
The desert did not care that he was mortal.

Then along came Satan inviting him to escape
from the common lot of humanity.
Along came Satan offering material sustenance and comfort.
Along came Satan offering protection from the death dealing
power of the nature’s laws.
“Jump off the temple. You will not die. Just claim your divine status.”
Along came Satan offering world dominion.
Surely if we can gather enough power, it will make us immortal.
Satan introduced each of the temptations with “if you are the Son of God.”
He said anyone as spiritual as Jesus ought to be exempt
from the fate of ordinary people.

But Jesus said no to all the temptations.
Gilgamesh has already tried all of those things
and knew they didn’t work.
Maybe Jesus had read Gilgamesh. We don’t know.
But Jesus didn’t escape his humanity by being the Son of God.
Instead, like Gilgamesh going home to Uruk,
Jesus went home to Galilee.
There, he didn’t call himself “the Son of God.”
He called himself “the Son of Man”
to claim his humanity, his brotherhood with us.

Being mortal together is a profound connection.
Poet laureate Ted Kooser wrote in his poem “Mourners,”
“After the funeral, the mourners gather
under the rustling churchyard maples
and talk softly, . . . .
They came this afternoon to say goodbye,
but now they keep saying hello and hello,
peering into each other’s faces,
slow to let go of each other’s hands.”

This life we share is precious because it is brief.
When we remember that,
we value each other a little more.
The brevity of life is reason enough to be kinder.
The vulnerability of life is reason enough for patience and generosity.

There is something proud and individualistic
in the spirituality of our time.
Whether it is Christian, New Age, or the Westernized versions
of ancient Eastern philosophies,
it all seems aimed at making ourselves alright
– at escaping the hardness of life and death.
Have faith. Fill up your tank with the Holy Spirit
and your life will be just fine.
Just meditate until you realize your problems
and those of your neighbors are just thoughts.
Get your mind right and be happy.

But that kind of spirituality is a pipe dream,
aptly portrayed in Paul Simon’s lyrics,
“So I’ll continue to continue to pretend
My life will never end
And flowers never bend with the rainfall.”

But Jesus did not teach, and did not live,
a spirituality of escape from the human condition.
He did not offer a way of salvation from life and death
but a way of salvation through life and death.
Jesus faced his own vulnerability and made it the point
of connection with us in our vulnerability.
The poem “In A Parish” by Czeslaw Milosz
expresses the compassion that comes from knowing
our own vulnerability and fallibility.
The poet surveys a parish graveyard and says,
“Had I not been frail and half broken inside
I wouldn’t think of them, who are like myself broken inside.
I would not climb the cemetery hill by the church
To get rid of my self-pity.
Crazy Sophies,
Michaels who lost every battle,
Self-destructive Agathas
Lie under crosses with their dates of birth and death. And who
Is going to express them? Their mumblings, weepings, hopes,
tears of humiliation?”

On Ash Wednesday the Church reminds us that we are dust
so that we will be a little kinder to the dust next to us.
In Lent we remember our sins so that we might be more ready
to forgive the sinner next to us.

The first step on the Christian way is a serene confidence
in God’s love and our ultimate salvation.
The second step is to know our own frailty – our total frailty:
physical, psychological, moral, and spiritual frailty.
The third step is to turn the knowledge of our frailty
into gentleness toward one another.

A great contemporary theologian, Nicholas Wolterstorff,
summed up the Christian way in this mortal life.
“Mourn humanity’s mourning,
weep over humanity’s weeping,
be wounded by humanity’s wounds . . . .
But do so in the good cheer that a day of peace is coming.”

This Lent, as a church, it is time to repent from escapist religion,
from Gilgamesh’s quest for individual ok-ness.
It is time turn our attention to each other and the communities
where we live, to organize and restore our communities,
as Gilgamesh rebuilt the walls of Uruk.
Isaiah 61, the Scripture Jesus chose to define his mission and our mission,
says, “They will renew the ruined cities.”
It is time to repent of saving ourselves and rather lose ourselves
in devotion God’s mission of mercy.
Amen.

Light, Thomas Traherne, And Enjoying The World

2011-03-07T11:22:00.000-08:00

Since the day I got here I have known Nevada is a special place.
Over 3 years deep into it now, two things about Nevada
still amaze me – the people and the light.
On this Transfiguration Sunday, I want to talk about the light.
I can’t describe what is different
about Nevada light, but it is decidedly unique.
It makes the sky bluer.
It surges up behind the mountains
in gold white auroras.

The only other place I have been so struck
by the sheer quality of light is the Outer Hebrides of Scotland
in the North Sea.
The Holy Island of Iona there also has light that elicits prayer.
That’s how it is with our light here.

Light is one of God’s great gifts.
In fact it was his first one.
In Genesis, when the earth was without form and void,
God spoke into the dark chaos
and the first thing God said was,
“Let there be light.”

Whether you read Genesis or a scientific account
of the Big Bang, creation begins with light.
The existence of time depends on light.
Life cannot exist without light.

So light becomes a metaphor in the spiritual life.
To see the light of day means to live.
We say Christ is the world’s true light.
When someone an insight, we say that have seen the light.

Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures,
when God appears to people
as God appeared on Mt. Sinai in today’s lesson,
God appears as “glory.”
Glory means a captivating light,
a light so beautiful we cannot look away.

Epiphany, the season of light,
concludes with the transfiguration,
that mysterious occasion when the disciples saw
holy light emanating from Jesus.
This is where we get our prayer for Vespers,
the Phos Hilaron,
“O gracious light,
Pure brightness of the everliving Father in Heaven,
O Jesus Christ, holy and blessed. . . .

We can appreciate light in two ways.
First, we can enjoy its beauty all on its own.
Some lights are harsh and unpleasant.
But other lights have their own distinct loveliness.
Think of starlight in the desert
or moonlight sifting through clouds.
You have just immeasurably improved the quality of light
in your chapel.

Light matters.
Light is its own art form, its own medium.
But there is a second way to appreciate light.
Without it we cannot see anything at all.
Light may be beautiful in itself,
but the main thing it does
is showing us everything else.

Now, the light of Nevada is unique and wonderful.
The only place I have ever seen this special light
is this special place, this unique landscape.
I wonder something though.
I wonder how another place might look
in Nevada light.
If we could bottle Nevada light and shine it on
Georgia or Texas or Colorado,
I wonder how they would look.

That’s impossible, of course, but if it were possible,
I bet those states would look different.
Light makes it possible to see things at all,
and the quality of light makes a difference
as to how things appear to us.

Just so, the season of Epiphany,
especially this Sunday of the Transfiguration,
teaches us that our joy and our salvation
depend on our seeing things through new eyes.
Being happy doesn’t depend as much on changing our circumstances
as changing our outlook – seeing the same people, the same situations
in a different light.
If we are going to find serenity and joy,
we need a new perspective.

The path of the classical Christian spirituality
is in 3 steps: purgation, illumination, and union.
Purgation is a process of detachment from the snares of life.
Illumination is enlightenment, seeing things in a fresh way.
That comes before union.
Before we can unite our hearts to the will of God,
we have to see the world anew.

Illumination is what our Epistle lesson means
when it speak of “the day dawning and the morning
star rising in our hearts.”
The day does not dawn and the morning star does not rise
in the world around us until it happens inside.

The 17th Century Anglican poet Thomas Traherne said,
Your enjoyment of the world is never right
till every morning you wake in heaven,
see yourself in your Father’s palace
and look upon the skies, the earth, the air
as celestial joys: having such a reverend esteem of all
as if you were among the angels.

To be a Christian isn’t just to acknowledge the existence of God.
It is to know that God is the beauty of all Reality.
God is a radiant beauty, the Bible calls it glory,
the splendor that shines over our mountains at the sunrise
and with a softer reflective glow at sunset.
God is the star shine over our deserts
and the firelight of our hearth
in a dark room on a winter night.

To believe in God is far more than acknowledging
the existence of a Supreme Being.
To truly believe in God is to trust
that everything that exists
comes from a primal beauty
and is destined for an ultimate beauty.
That includes ourselves and our lives.
To truly believe in God isn’t to have an idea
about something we cannot see.
It is to look at the things we do see
with what Traherne calls “reverend esteem.”

That includes – in fact it begins with –
how we see ourselves.
No matter how unfinished and crude we feel at the moment,
we trust that we came from primal beauty
and are destined for ultimate beauty.

If we see ourselves in this light, in God’s light,
it will set us free to see everything through new eyes,
like Bartimeaus or any of the other people
to whom Jesus gave vision.

God is glorious.
That’s the main message of the Hebrew Scriptures.
God radiates a light that is so beautiful
we cannot turn away from it.
God’s radiance shines upon our lives
and our world to show us their loveliness.

How often have we been critical of someone else,
until we learned something new about them,
learned about some wound they had suffered,
or some good deed they do or some burden they bear.
Suddenly we see them differently.

That is God’s gift to us, to show us ourselves,
to show us each other, to show us the world
in a way that evokes love.

Thomas Traherne spoke the God’s truth:
(O)ur enjoyment of the world is never right
till every morning (we) wake in heaven,
see (ourselves) in (our) Father’s palace
and look upon the skies, the earth, the air
as celestial joys: having such a reverend esteem of all
as if (we) were among the angels.

Jesus didn’t come just to get us out of trouble for our sins.
He came to show us ourselves, each, other and the world
in the way Traherne describes them.

So if we would have insight, if we would be enlightened,
if we would enjoy the world aright,
we must look at it through Christ’s holy eyes.
And we can practice that.
Brother David Stendahl-Rast teaches a very simple
practice in seeing the world anew.
It is called blessing.
That’s what God does.
That’s what God means for us to do.

Each day, we bless four people.
They can be friends or strangers on the street.
We bless them in two steps.

First we notice something good about them,
however small or insignificant.
We notice something good,
then we wish them well.

Remembering the source and destiny of all things,
we practice enjoying the world aright,
for that is how we praise and glorify God.
Your enjoyment of the world is never right
till every morning you wake in heaven,
see yourself in your Father’s palace
and look upon the skies, the earth, the air
as celestial joys: having such a reverend esteem of all
as if you were among the angels.
Amen.

A Modicum Of Boldness In The Age Of Anxiety

2011-02-28T11:09:00.001-08:00

Our opening prayer is called the collect of the day,
because it collects the themes from each of the lessons
into a single point.
The single point is in the first line,
“Most loving Father whose will it is for us . . . . to fear nothing
but the loss of you . . . . Preserve us from faithless fears
and worldly anxieties.”

Today’s lessons are about fear.
A funny thing happened to our culture a few decades ago.
During the Depression, the President used to tell us
that we had nothing to fear but fear itself.
Courage and hope were the backbone of life itself.
Courage and hope were national policy
and core values of our culture.

But as we entered the next era,
we were taught to be afraid.
The government taught us to be afraid of communists
lurking behind every bush.
We were afraid of the atom bomb for decades.
Then we learned to be afraid of all sorts of things.
The poet W. H. Auden captured the new spirit
of our time in his poem The Age Of Anxiety.
The composer William Bernstein saw Auden had pegged
the mood of our time, so he wrote The Age of Anxiety symphony.

Jerome Robbins picked up the idea and wrote The Age of Anxiety ballet.
And philosopher Alan Watts titled the first chapter one of his early books,
“the age of anxiety.”

Soon, corporate marketing learned to play on our fears.
They made us afraid of criminals to sell us alarms for our window,
afraid of accidents to sell us insurance,
afraid of body odor to sell us soap.

The escalation of fear has been accelerating.
When I left Idaho to move to New York,
I found people there were afraid o being mugged.
That made sense to me.

But 3 years later I moved to Macon, Georgia,
a sleepy little Southern college town,
and found that people were more afraid there
than New Yorkers.

Today, the P. A system of every airport I go through,
tells me that various precautions are being taken
because of “heightened security.”
It sounds as if something especially dangerous is happening that day.
But it says that every day.
The security is perpetually heightened.
“The security level is orange” an ominous voice says.
That’s bad. Almost red. But it’s always orange, always.
We should always be afraid.

Clergy training is grounded in fear.
Do not let a child sit on your lap at the parish pic nick.
You may be accused of child molesting.
Never meet with a church member of the opposite sex
without the door open, a witness present,
and a tape recorder running.
And it might be best do use the same precautions
with church members of the same sex.
Churches close their doors to AA groups
and others who want to use our buildings
because we are concerned about potential liability.

Risk management is a leading science.
I wonder what today risk managers would have said is
to Ferdinand and Isabella when crazy Columbus
said he wanted to sail around the world to India.
What would they have told Lewis and Clark?
What would they have told Jeremiah Johnson
about his career choice to be a mountain man.

I have been one of those crazy people singing songs
and carrying signs for this cause or that cause for decades
– end the war, desegregate, ban the bomb, you name it.
Next month I am participating in a rally against human trafficking,
but this is the first time I have been required to register as a participant
and – get this – sign a liability waiver in case I fall off the sidewalk
or another demonstrator pokes me in the eye with his sign.
We built a culture, we formed a civilization,
with courage and hope.
We formed a free society by daring to take risks.
But that culture built on the foundation of courage is crumbling
from a studied and deliberate practice of cowardice.

Fear is a tool of manipulation and control.
Fear and intimidation keep people from exercising power politically.
Fear is used to sell everything from cars to mouthwash
not to mention alcohol and xanax.
And the price we pay is our very lives
because life requires a certain modicum of boldness.

I don’t expect congregations to be major Biblical scholars.
But I want you to know this.
If you don’t know anything else about the Bible I want you to know this.
What instruction did Jesus give people more than any other?
What was the one imperative sentence he said more than any other – by far.
It was this very simple sentence – “Do not be afraid.”//

The bottom line central message Jesus taught was “Do not be afraid.”
He didn’t make that up himself.
It was an old teaching in his religion.
When God first called Abram to leave his home in Ur and travel to Canaan,
God said to Abram “Do not be afraid.”
When God called Moses to liberate his people in Egypt, God said to Moses,
“Do not be afraid.”

Every time God sent the judges or the kings into battle,
he always said, “Do not be afraid.”
Prophets like Isaiah said, the Lord has inscribed you on the palm of his hand.
"Do not be afraid."
So it went down through the centuries
until one day an angel appeared to the Virgin Mary,
and the first thing he said to her was “Do not be afraid.”
Jesus’ mother probably taught her little boy
the words of that angel, “Do not be afraid.”

That’s what today’s lessons are about.
Paul was under attack at his church in Corinth.
People were calling him a fraud and a swindler.
But Paul was not afraid of their accusations.
He was not afraid of the judgment of the people.
He would not be silenced, shut down, or driven out by fear.
In Matthew, Jesus says not to be afraid of poverty,
not to be afraid of not having the necessities of life.
Don’t let fear consume your life.

Well, it’s easy enough to say “do not be afraid.”
But there really is danger in the world.
There really are threats to our safety.
There really are criminals, terrorists, drunk drivers,
and carcinogens.
And there are plenty of forces in society
to play on our fears, to rev them up, to amplify them.
How can we possibly not be afraid
especially when we live in the age of anxiety.

We are going to feel afraid sometimes.
That’s human.
But when Jesus says “do not be afraid,”
he does not mean never feel fear.
He means do not “be afraid”
– do not let the fear become your identity.
It’s one thing to have a feeling.
It’s another thing when the feeling has us.

We can feel fear without believing our fears.
We can feel fear without letting the fear control our lives.
We can be aware of a risk but not live our lives
like mice hiding in the dark.

Of course we need to be reasonable.
We need to take sensible precautions.
Having faith does not mean leaving our wallet in the car
with the door unlocked.
But faith means daring to live our lives trusting God
to bring us through life and even through death
into his love and blessing.

Faith is knowing that the God of love and mercy
who created us is also our destiny
and nothing can take that from us.

Paul wrote,
“If God is for us who can be against us. . . .
For I am certain of this:
Neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities,
nothing already in existence and nothing yet to come,
nor any power, nor heights nor depths,
nor any created thing whatever, will be able
to separate us from the love of God.”

He was echoing the teaching of Isaiah 800 year before,
“Surely it is God who saves me.
I will trust in him and not be afraid.
For he is my stronghold and my sure defense
and he will be my Savior.”

There is a way to pray into that faith.
Just close your eyes and let your fears come to mind,
all your worries one by one, summon them up,
and as each one comes to mind hold it there and say
“Even if . . . “ then fill in the blank with your fear.

“Even if this happen, I am a beloved child of God
and all will be well.”

However great our fear may be,
whatever disasters may actually befall us,
God is bigger. God’s love is greater.
And God will be our Savior.
That’s the Christian way of risk management.
Amen.

Being A Community Of Life

2011-02-14T13:54:00.001-08:00

The author of Ecclesiasticus writes:
“Before each person are life and death,
And whichever one chooses will be given.”//
He is echoing the words the Lord spoke through Moses
in Deuteronomy centuries before:
“I have set before you life and death . . . . Choose life.”//

Every moment of every day,
each of us is given the choice between
the way to life and the way to death.
We have a chance to speak to each other in a way
that will invite life-giving relationship
or in a way to offend, to put someone on the defensive,
to wound and distance.
We have the choice to greet each new day as a fresh start
or to spend our days rehashing all that went wrong in the past.
We have the choice to open our hearts or to close them.
It is our choice – ours alone.

But we are creatures of habit
and our habits are shaped by the culture we live in.
If we live in a family, a neighborhood, a society
that habitually chooses the way of death
in any of its many forms,
then our first impulse is apt to be
the way of death – not the way of life.

Do you know what I mean by the way of death?
It has a number of forms.
We can start with the 7 deadly sins
but it doesn’t stop there.
One is the habit of self-pitying victim status.
Another is drowning our spirit in drink, work,
or any addictive distraction from life.
Another is using fight-flight conflicts about side issues
instead of getting on with a shared mission.
Another is living in old wounds, clinging to old grudges
instead of living today with a hopeful eye
looking toward tomorrow.
These are all ways to sabotage life instead of living it.

The most important thing a church can do for its people
is to be a culture of life
and so help them to form the habit of living.
But not all churches are cultures of life.
Far from it.
The great Catholic novelist, Walker Percy, asked,
“If Christ came to give life, why do the churches smell of death?”
Churches choosing death is all too common.
Churches choosing to wring their hands over division and decline
are all too common.
Churches sabotaging their own mission are on every corner.

Does that matter? I say “yes, it matters.”
It matters because when churches choose the way of death,
they instill in their members the way of death.
As if by osmosis, a dying church teaches its members
to choose death in their families, in their jobs,
in their neighborhoods, and in the world.
Churches of death can suck the life out of a whole city.

But other churches instill life in their people.
You know what it’s like to be in a meeting, a party,
a class or a social gathering.
If certain people walk into the room,
the energy level goes up.
If other people, walk into a room,
the energy level goes down.
The test of a church’s mission is what happens
when its members walk into a room.

The living church recharges people with life energy
that they share with everyone they meet.
They make the world a better place, a more godly place.
They are agents of the kingdom.

Choosing life is how we beat death in the end.
People who choose life can outlive their bodies.
In death their spirits still glow like embers.
The Holy Spirit can breathe on such embers
and restore them to life, make them blaze up
into a brighter flame than ever before.
We can be breathing our last breath and still choose life
because we trust in the Lord, the Giver of Life,
who is stronger than death.
That’s why it is so important that churches
be vital, energetic, creative places on the move.
Such churches nourish the part of us that does not die.

Some folks have the notion that the bishop’s visit
is some kind of inspection,
that I am here to see if you are “doing everything right.”
That is not actually what I have come to do.
If that were my purpose, I’d have an inspector’s clipboard
instead of a miter and staff.

There is, however, one thing I do need to check on
– not just when I visit but all the time.
I need to know whether a congregation is alive or not.
I need to know that because life is a gift of God,
a gift to be accepted or rejected,
and whenever it is accepted,
then it is a gift to be celebrated.
I am glad to report that St. Martin’s is very much alive.
I can tell -- because you are breathing.
You are breathing in and you are breathing out.

The in breath of a church is everything the church does
to strengthen and support the members.
It is fellowship and it is study like your Sunday School
and your weekly Bible Study.
It is prayer like your practice of Evening Prayer.
Some churches just show up on Sunday morning
and go through the motions.
But where there is fellowship, study, and prayer,
that is a church drawing in a good strong breath.

But we cannot live just by breathing in.
We also have to breathe out.
The outbreath of a church is its apostolic mission,
its service to the community, its engagement with the world
outside the walls.

You do that in so many ways.
You feed the hungry.
You care for the children, the youth, and the seniors.
You recycle everything from cell phones to bicycles.
This church is breathing out as well as it breathes in.
That is choosing life.

So I am not here with an inspector’s clipboard.
I am here to celebrate your life, your creativity, your energy.
I am grateful to you and inspired by you.
You give me hope.

I am here to say thank you
and I pray to God you keep being who you already are
– a living witness to the Lord, the Giver of Life.

What We Can Learn From The Servant-King

2010-12-02T14:01:00.001-08:00

This high holy day evokes the paradox of Christ the King
who is also Christ the Servant.
There’s a lot we can learn in this paradox of the Servant-King,
a lot we can learn about our own leadership
and our own way of being in the world.

Let’s start with today’s lesson from Jeremiah.
God had entrusted the care of his people to leaders,
the kings of Israel.
In this lesson, he calls them shepherds of the people.

God entrusted Israel to shepherds because he is a God
of order, not chaos; of harmony, not anarchy.
The leader’s job is to preserve the pattern of the common life.
Civilized people have leaders.

Take an example from our own history.
Nevada did not secede from the Utah Territory
to reject governance – quite the opposite.

We had a serious fracas breaking out
over disputed mining claim in the Comstock.
It was getting completely out of hand,
and the Territorial government in Salt Lake
wouldn’t do anything about it.
They had their own problems in Utah about then.
So we seceded from Utah and petitioned Washington
to send us some government.

It took awhile, but President Lincoln sent us Governor Nye
and his trusty Secretary Orion Clemens
to restore order.
Just as President Lincoln entrusted Nevada to James Nye,
God entrusted Israel to the kings.
But they did a poor job of it and God was decided displeased.

“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter
the sheep of my pasture,” God says.
“It is you who have scattered my flock
. . . and you have not attended to them.”

What went wrong?
Our lesson says there were two kinds of failed leadership
– there was the aggressive leadership that scattered the flock
– and there was the passive leadership that failed to attend to the flock.
It all fits what we know about the psychology of leaders.

Psychologists Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette
describe leadership in Jungian terms.
They call our inner leader the King archetype.
It’s the part that orders and blesses the whole.
It orders and blesses our own personal life.
It orders and blesses our family, our workplace,
our church or the larger society.

This capacity to lead in this godly way, to order and bless,
is universal.
It isn’t that some people have it and some don’t.
We all have the capacity to order and bless.
It is part of being made in the image of God.

But Moore and Gillette also explain
how leadership can go wrong.
It can slip into the shadow side,
“the dark side of the Force,” Darth Vader would call it.
Moore and Gillette say there are two forms of that shadow
– the tyrant and the weakling.
The tyrant does not lead. He rules, commands, pushes people.
The weakling does not lead. He goes passive.
But these are two sides of one coin.
The tyrant is just a weakling overcompensating.

We see this in government, church, and family life.
We lead badly when our ego gets engaged
and we need to get our own way at the expense of others.
Or we are afraid we won’t get our way so we disengage.
We convince ourselves we are leading for the common good.
But our egos have silently slipped like the snake into the Garden.
That’s when we do more harm than good.

This is a crucial lesson for all of us in two ways.
First, we all exercise leadership somewhere
– perhaps in our home, in a civic club, or at work.
We are all in charge of something or have influence with somebody
from time to time.
How we lead can be a spiritual blessing or a curse
to those around us and to ourselves.

Second, the way we lead others expresses how we
order and bless our own thoughts, feelings, ways of being.
Even if we were hermits on an island,
we can bless or curse, shepherd or scatter,
parts of our own personalities.
That’s called self-leadership.

When things had gone awry in Israel,
God promised to raise up new shepherds
who would be real shepherds, good shepherds,
not tyrants or weaklings.
In Baptism, we have all been raised up to be shepherds to one another,
each of us in our life situation.
Being a good Christian doesn’t just mean being a good sheep.
It means being a good shepherd.
Jesus is our model.
He showed us how to live and how to lead his whole life.
He made it most clear at the Last Supper
when he washed the disciples’ feet.
We usually read that story as being about Christ the Servant.
But as he washed their feet, he taught them.
He said, “You call me master and that is who I am.”
Jesus claimed his authority, but he showed us how to exercise it.
The master’s right to lead is based on his willingness to serve.

The point is about ego.
Jesus chased the serpent of ego right out of the garden.
“I am among you as one who serves,” he said.
Jesus was not passive and he was not a tyrant.
So just how did he lead?

Moore and Gillette say,
“It is the . . . king’s duty not only to . . . take to his people
the right order of the universe . . . . but, even more fundamentally,
to embody it in his own person, to live it in his own life.”
The good king in antiquity, they say, “lived the order in his own life;
only secondarily did he enforce it.”

Plato said it long ago.
Before one can lead a government,
one must first establish order in one’s own personality.
That means we must cultivate the practice of sitting still
and watching the racing thoughts and surging feelings
inside our heads and our hearts.
We don’t watch them with harsh judgment,
but we also don’t get carried away by them.
We cultivate a serene curiosity and gentleness toward ourselves.

Then we can regard others with a serene curiosity and gentleness.
We become more interested in understanding others than we are in trying
to get them to do what we want.

We lead by listening rather than shouting,
by seeing deeply into people’s hearts
rather than projecting our ego visions on screens
for them to salute.

Then the goal of our leadership is not to get our way.
It is to build up the other person, to empower them to lead too.
Look at the first verse in our Epistle lesson.
This is the lesson that calls Christ the head of all creation,
but it does not say, “Therefore cringe and cow tow before him.”
It says, “May you become strong
with all the strength that comes from his glorious power.”

Jesus is not trying to subjugate us but to liberate and empower us.
His hope is that we will then liberate and empower each other.
This isn’t easy.
It takes tremendous discipline when things are going wrong,
in our opinion, not to react, but to watch, to wonder,
to ask questions.

There is an option to squaring off in opposing camps.
That option is there in government, business, and home.
It is always there – the option of awareness and compassion.
The ego-reflex is fight flight, but we have the spiritual option.
Jesus gave it to us and showed us how to use it.

So my prayer for each of you is the prayer from Colossians,
“May you grow strong” – but not with the aggressive, dominating strength
that scatters the flock, tears us apart, and oppresses the weak.
No “may you grow strong with . . . (Christ’s) power,”
relational power, serene power, power devoid of ego,
the power to order and bless.”
Amen.

Writing The St. Stephen's Story

2010-11-15T14:19:00.000-08:00

Speaking on this occasion is beyond me.
Thankfully, this is just one of three sermons for your closing
– Fr. Joe last week; me today; Fr. Rick next week.
Out of our three perspectives, you may glean some material
to use in crafting your own perspective
– which, after all, is the only one that matters.

Most of you probably remember Joni Mitchell’s song, “The Circle Game.”
It’s about an innocent child catching dragon flies.
He becomes a pre-teen when “promises of someday make his dreams,”
then a teenager, then a young adult
– and that’s as far a Joni was able to tell the story
because she was only 25 at the time she wrote it.

There’s a poignant sadness in those lyrics
as the passing of each stage is a loss.
The chorus insists four times,
“We can’t return. We can only look behind
From where we came.”//

There’s regret in that.
I want to return, to go back.
Surely you must want to go back too.
We miss our past, our youth, the good times
– even when they were not entirely good
– but good or bad, they were our times.
The children of Israel even wanted to go back to Egypt.
Knowing “we can’t return; we can only look behind
from where we came” – that’s a grief.

There’s also hope in the lyrics.
After acknowledging that the boy’s
“dreams have lost some grandeur coming true,”
she adds this promise,
“there’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty.”

That is also true.
As Christians we live by that hope.
We have heard God’s promise in the words of Jeremiah,
“I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord,
plans for your good and not evil.”
We know that God brings life out of death,
and hope out of despair.
We know that.
But we also want to go back.
We love the place we have been.
It does no good to deny it.
We are losing something precious.

I have known St. Stephen’s for only three years.
But I mourn this passing.
People all over this diocese from Ely to Tahoe
and down in Las Vegas are saddened.
I can only imagine what it must be like for you
who have lived in this family, who have loved this family,
and who have devoted so much of yourselves
to sustaining it all these years.

So I acknowledge your grief.
It is not only right; it is inevitable, that you should grieve.
I cannot and would not try to deny your grief or to foreshorten it.
Grief has its own integrity which must be honored.

Brothers and sisters, I won’t tell you how to feel.
Don’t let anyone tell you how to feel.
You must feel what you feel.
This is your church and your life.

But there must be more than feeling.
Great change calls for reflection.
It calls for finding the meaning in things.
In this case, it is necessary to find two thing kinds of meaning:
First, you must discern the value of St. Stephen’s life.
Second, you must discern the St. Stephen’s legacy.

First let’s reflect upon St. Stephen’s life.
What has transpired here matters. It counts.
You must tell this story in a way that has a point.

I have sometimes heard your story told
in a way that focused on your traumas.
Every life has traumas and they are part of your story.
How you dealt with them then and deal with them now
is part of the meaning.

I have sometimes heard your story told
with a focus on mistakes that were made.
Every life has mistakes.
What we learn from our mistakes
is part of the meaning.

But, wiht my own eyes, I have seen you rejoice.
I have seen you worship.
I have seen you pray.
I have seen you serve the outcast in Jesus’ name.
You have borne the Christ light for each other
and for people outside these walls.
God has been here.
I feel in your presence, I feel at this altar,
that God has been here
in your light and in your darkness.

This story is yours to write – not mine.
But I implore you not to write too readily
the story of a victim
or the story of a mistake.
When the gospel has been proclaimed
and the sacraments of life shared,
that is a story deserving of respect.

I implore you to be faithful to who you have been.
I implore you, as a gospel people,
to write your story as gospel,
as a chapter in God’s epic of good news.

A voice in your heart may whisper,
“If it was so great, then why isn’t it continuing?
We must have done something wrong.”

We like to think that way.
We like to think there is some magic formula
that will make things last forever.
It’s our way of denying mortality.
But the 2nd Noble Truth of the Buddha
and the entire Gospel of Luke insist that it isn’t so.

We arise out of the universe without cause
other than God’s mysterious will.
Then we dissolve and reconfigure in new forms,
all in the mystical providence of God.

St. Stephen’s has lived for a purpose, God’s purpose.
If St. Stephen’s passes away,
does that mean you have failed in your purpose?
Has God failed?
Or has the mission perhaps been accomplished
to the extent that it can be accomplished in this form
– and is it now time to regroup
in order to continue God’s mission in a new way?

These are questions for you to answer – not me.
But I have not noticed that the good live longer than the evil.
Billy Joel tells us “only the good die young.”
I don’t know about that, but the good do die, sometimes young.
The difference is that the good are also resurrected.

I hope when you write the St. Stephen’s story in your memories,
it will be a story to cherish, to hold fondly,
and to tell to others with love -- and not regret.

The second way to find meaning in the midst of this pain
takes both reflection on the past
and imagination about the future.
This part is determining the St. Stephen’s legacy.
Did your prayers, your study of wisdom, your works of mercy
have any lasting value?
Is it all up in smoke? Was it all for nothing?

Or did you create something that will endure
– perhaps something not of bricks and mortar
– but of the spirit?
Is something being buried here?
Or is something being set loose?
Has something been longing to transcend
its old structure to become beautiful in a new way?

As Joni Mitchell said in Both Sides Now,
“something’s lost and something’s gained
in living every day.”
We know what is being lost.
It takes spiritual imagination to see
what is being gained.
I urge you to engage your spiritual imagination.
You may not be ready yet. That’s ok.
But when you are ready, engage your spiritual imagination,
and follow as best you can the adage of Gordon Lightfoot,
“If you’re going to face tomorrow, do it soon.”

It isn’t a betrayal of the past to embrace a future
to which the past has given birth.
The future is the child of the past,
and it gives the past its lasting value.
Look within your hearts and ask
“How am I better today because I was part of St. Stephen’s?
What will I do tomorrow to honor what I learned at St. Stephen’s?”

There is a close tie between these two reflections.
The meaning you find in St. Stephen’s life
is the key to the legacy you will make for St. Stephen’s.
If you tell a story of traumas and mistakes,
that’s the kind of legacy you will carry forward.
But if you find joy and grace in St. Stephen’s life,
that’s the kind of legacy you will share with the Church
and the world.

Brothers and sisters, I thank you and I honor you
for all you have done here so faithfully and for so long.
I have more than confidence,
I have a “sure and certain hope in the resurrection”
of St. Stephen’s spirit in many places and many ways,
for generations yet to come.

Sanctity And Underwear Reform In The Middle Ages

2010-11-08T18:10:00.000-08:00

Today we celebrate all the saints.
But who and what are saints?
St. Jerome, a 5th Century theologian,
translated the Bible from Greek into Latin.
He was a bad theologian and a questionable translator.
He surrounded himself with women whom he constantly maligned,
both personally and theologically.
But it is said he once removed a thorn form the paw of lion,
to the lion and he became good friends.
That probably gives him a better claim
to being the patron saint of animals
than St. Francis who merely preached to birds.

Sts. Sergius and Bacchus were officers in the Roman army.
They were favorites of Emperor Maximian,
until they admitted they were Christians.
Then Maximian forced them to parade through the streets in drag,
and eventually had them executed.
Speaking of being in drag, there’s the 4th Century St. Pelagia.
Before her conversion, Pelagia was an exotic dancer
with the stage name of Pearl.
After her conversion, she changed her name to its male form, Pelagius,
dressed as a man, and lived in Jerusalem as a monk.

3rd Century St. Calistus began life as a slave,
then after his emancipation became a professional thief.
Later he became the Pope, and ordered that penitent sinners,
Including murderers, were welcome in the Church.

St. Odo of Cluny was a 10th Century monk.
He suffered from severe headaches,
but was nonetheless able to institute
many important church reforms – not the least of which was
requiring monks to wash their underwear every Saturday.

So what makes a saint?
Some were notably kind, good, and generous.
Others, not so much.
Some were smart – like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
Others not so smart.
Some, like Joan of Arc, did great things that shaped history.
Othrs, like St. Jean-Baptiste Vianney lived simple lives
far removed from the world’s great affairs.

Saints are not necessarily moral heroes who got it right.
Many of them were deeply flawed.
Some were downright nuts.
So why do we canonize them, celebrate them,
devote special days to their commemoration?

The saints are a communion of sanctified humanity.
Let’s look at each of those three terms
– communion, sanctified, and humanity
– starting with humanity.
Being human gives us the ability to imagine and create,
to love and appreciate beauty,
to remember and to dream.
But those good gifts come along with vulnerability
to all sorts of flaws and foibles.
Humanity is, to use Bishop Tutu’s word, “untidy.”
It’s complicated. It’s fraught with ambiguities and contradictions.
People are not consistent. Frankly, we are pretty squirrely.

Most people are sometimes happy.
All people sometimes suffer.
We know all about loneliness and anxiety.
We all have death looking over our shoulder.
We all want to be special,
and most of us are afraid we are not.
This is the stuff of being human.

Now what might make this humanity sanctified
and still be human?
Something is sanctified if it’s dedicated to God.
A cup is just a cup, until we set it aside to use
as the chalice for Holy Communion.
No matter how ordinary it is – be it chipped, bent, or misshapen –
once dedicated to this sacred purpose, it is a sanctified chalice.
Another cup may be exquisitely crafted silver,
but if it’s used for any old purpose, it isn’t sanctified.

The saints are just people as holy chalices are just cups,
but saints are dedicated to God.
The saints of history just lived the best they could, as we all do.
When they did well, it was for God.
When they did poorly, that was for God too.

The old saying goes, “God carves the rotten wood.
He rides the lame horse.”
We do our best – then God uses our faults as well as our virtues
as channels of grace.
The quirkiness and even sinfulness of the saints
is proof of God’s readiness to work
with whatever we have to offer.

Finally, what makes all these sanctified sinners into a communion?
Being a communion means belonging to God’s family.
It means acknowledging that we already belong to the human family,
and are willing to associate with an especially mixed up batch
of humanity called the church.

St. Jerome, the woman hating celibate scholar,
and St. Pelagia, the exotic dancer,
were, no doubt, surprised to find themselves
in the same family.

The Church isn’t a club of nice people who all think alike.
It isn’t a bunch of people who agree about everything.
It’s a family.
Sometimes we are proud of our family.
Sometimes people in our family embarrass us.
Being family doesn’t mean approving of people.
It means belonging to them.

We join this family through baptism.
We renew our commitment to it every Sunday
by gathering at the family table
to eat from one loaf and drink from one cup.

The communion of saints is a picture
of God’s quirky family.
We are human – together – with all the loneliness, vulnerability,
crankiness, and squirreliness that goes with being human.
We are sanctified together because we are all dedicated
to “one Lord, one Faith, one baptism, one God and Father over all.”
God has provided no way for anyone to be sanctified alone.
When we dedicate our lives to the one God,
those lives are joined at the deepest level
- the level of their reason to live.

Our purpose is to be a communion.
Our sanctification, our dedication to God,
consists precisely in our struggle to live together,
to share each other’s joys and sorrows,
to accept and even appreciate each other’s humanity.
As St. John of the Cross said,
“God has so ordained that we are sanctified
only through the frail instrumentality of each other.”
Amen.

Lazarus & Mimetic Desire: Or Why Claude Raines And Humphrey Bogart Should Be Cast In This Gospel

2010-11-08T18:07:00.000-08:00

Rene Girard is one of the most influential philosophers of our time;
but he started out as a teacher of literature.
He wrote about what was going on in Don Quixote.
Then he noticed the same thing going on in Tolstoy.
The he saw the same pattern in Shakespeare.
Girard eventually realized the reason the same thing
kept happening in all these novels and plays
is that it is what happens in real life.

It works like this: People don’t trust their own hearts
so we don’t know what we truly want.
Instead of feeling our own feelings, we copy the feelings of others.
We don’t know what we genuinely want
-- so we assume that what other people want is valuable
and try to get it.

We all act as if we want the same thing,
and that puts us in fierce competition with each other.
We hurt each other trying to get whatever it is that we think is valuable,
but then when we get it, it doesn’t make us happy.

Rene Girard started out as an atheist,
after he came to understand the cause of human unhappiness,
he saw that Christianity was the best answer.
Let’s see how Girard’s ideas play out in today’s Gospel lesson.

Zacchaeus was a tax collector – the chief tax collector.
In those days, tax collectors got paid on a commission basis,
so they were pretty oppressive.
As the chief tax collector, Zacchaeus was the most oppressive of all;
so the Bible says, “he was rich.”

Now what motivated Zacchaeus to become the chief tax collector?
Is it really obvious?
Did his commissions make him happy?
His wealth had not made him popular.
Tax collectors were universally hated
and it’s clear that the Jericho crowd despised our boy Zacchaeus.
So what did this quest for wealth do for him?

As the story unfolds, we begin to see how his mind worked.
Zacchaeus was desperate to see Jesus,
just to catch a glimpse of Jesus.
But why was that?
Does Zacchaeus strike you as a theologically curious guy?
Do you think he is a spiritual seeker?
Not very likely. The man is an avaricious tax collector.
He’s been doing it long enough to work his way to the top.
That’s not the sort of fellow who just goes spiritually curious.
What was his interest in Jesus?

Blind Bartimaeus sitting beside the road – him we understand.
He wanted his vision back.
The 10 lepers we read about a few weeks ago
calling out to Jesus – them we understand.
But why was Zacchaeus so desperate to see Jesus?

Zacchaeus wanted to see Jesus
because the crowd wanted to see Jesus.
If a crowd has gathered, there must be something to see.
If they want to see it, then we want to see it, right?
But this crowd could see Jesus and Zacchaeus couldn’t.
That’s what made him crazy.

This was a competition.
He wanted it because they had it and he didn’t.
That’s what his whole life felt like
– always competing with the crowd
whether it was for money
or a glimpse of the celebrity.
That’s what made him run ahead of the others
and climb the sycamore tree.
It was his way to outsmart them, to win.

Jesus saw all this.
He knew what was going on.
Somehow he knew Zacchaeus’ name,
and apparently his heart.
Jesus knew Zacchaeus was a desperate man
who didn’t know what he wanted.
He was just competing with the crowd.

Most of us rarely recognize that we are such copycats.
But isn’t it true?
Don’t the movies and the magazines tell us
what constitutes a good looking person?
Don’t we want to drive what the cool people on tv
look so happy driving?

Don’t the advertising people tell us what to want
by persuading us that other people want it.
The other day I bought a tie.
I don’t wear ties much but I got one for the odd occasion.
The salesman was not a good salesman.
After I chose it, he said, “A lot of people wouldn’t go for that tie,”
and immediately I felt that I had made a mistake.
Whether I liked it didn’t matter.
It was the judgment of the crowd I cared about.

So there was Zacchaeus scrambling about like a fool
to see a celebrity he didn’t know
just because the crowd was cheering.
When Jesus saw the poor guy up a tree,
he did one of those absolutely Jesus things.
He did the odd thing that somehow flipped the situation around.

He said, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down,
for I must stay at your house today.”
And look what happened.
The crowd had thought Jesus was totally cool
until he befriended Zacchaeus.
After that, they weren’t so impressed with him anymore.
Jesus wanted the wrong thing
– friendship with someone who was unpopular,
even despised.

But Jesus didn’t care what they thought.
Jesus wouldn’t have cared whether a lot of people liked his tie or not.
He saw Zacchaeus and he valued him, called him a son of Abraham,
appreciated him for who he was.
Even though Zacchaeus didn’t know himself, Jesus knew him,
and claimed him as a friend.

Then look what happened.
Zacchaeus immediately gave away half his wealth
plus promised to repay everyone he had cheated 4-fold.
It looks like the money hadn’t made him all that happy
if he was so ready to part with it.
He didn’t need it anymore.

Jesus had given him something worth more
than all the money in Jericho.
By seeing him, by acknowledging him, by calling him by name,
Jesus gave Zacchaeus a sense of himself.
Jesus held up a mirror to Zacchaeus
and said, “Look, you exist. You matter. You are a son of Abraham.”
Now Zacchaeus wanted to be Jesus’ friend
Even though Jesus was no longer the hero of the crowd.
They went off to lunch alone because neither one of them was popular anymore.

The crowd called Zacchaeus a sinner.
Jesus just said Zacchaeus was lost and he was.
He had lost himself in trying to get what other people wanted.

This is the gift Jesus has for each of us.
He sees us as we are and values us for what we are.
We get lost in the copy cat wanting culture.
But Jesus finds us and gives us back our own hearts,
gives us back out own lives.
Amen.

The Tao, The Truth, And The Life

2010-10-28T20:09:00.000-07:00

From the early days of the Christianity,
there was a great division.
On one hand, there was a sacrifice religion.
Those folks got Good Friday right off.
Jesus was the sacrifice for us.
That’s all you really needed to know.

Yes, that kind of Christianity got Good Friday,
but they didn’t have a clue what to do
with Jesus’ teachings and the story of his life.
They didn’t know what Jesus’ teachings meant
so they just put them out of mind
and got back to what they understood,
brutal bloody sacrifice.
Tertullian was the big name for Christianity
that took pride in not thinking over much.

But there was another brand of Christianity also from the start.
Justin Martyr, St. Cyprian of Carthage,
Origen of Alexandria and St. Ireneaus of Lyons
saw the whole life, death, and resurrection of Jesus
as meaning something.
To them, Jesus wasn’t just the sacrificial lamb.
He was also the spiritual master who knew
the Father and the way to the Father.
They followed Jesus, who said,
“To you it has been given to know the secrets of the Kingdom
. . . . Blessed are your eyes for they see and your ears for they hear.”

Jesus for them was the way shower, the guide to God.
That kind of Christianity flourished in the British Isles.
It was the religion of St. Columba of Iona,
St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, and St. Bridgette of Kildare.
They knew that before our religion was called “Christianity,”
it was called “The Way.”

Of course they called it the Way in Greek and Aramaic.
If they had been Chinese, they would have called it the Tao,
since that is how you say “the Way” in Chinese.
That may be why in the 8th Century and earlier,
Chinese Christians had such an easy time
sharing their faith with Taoists and Buddhists.
They were all looking for the way of life.

Those ancient Chinese Christians believed
that Jesus taught the way
and he showed the way by his own life.
Taoists and Buddhists respected that belief,
and they listened.

I grew up with Tertullian’s religion.
I didn’t get brutalized by it.
I didn’t mind the guilt.
Being a neurotic, I rather enjoyed it in a sick masochistic way.
But I did get bored.
More than boring me,
Tertullian’s religion left me hungry for something.
I needed some wisdom to live by.

Knowing Jesus died for me was true but it wasn’t enough.
It didn’t tell me how to cope with life’s ups and downs,
didn’t tell me what to do in the face of aggression,
didn’t help me manage the pride and shame,
the craving and aversion, the fear and loathing
that tugged me to and fro each day.

Christianity seemed to offer no guidance for life
except rules against
a few culturally unacceptable vices
and a vague admonition to behave respectably.
Theologian, Stanley Hauerwas,
speaking of his own Methodist Church,
said that he once thought Methodists had no theology.
But, Stanley said, after years of teaching at Duke Divinity School,
he had learned they believe that “God is nice
and we should be nice too.”
It isn’t just Methodists. That was what I saw as Christianity too.

So I went shopping in the psycho-spiritual marketplace.
At Big Sur, I primal screamed.
In Denver, I strained my sacroiliac
while liberating my kundalini.
In Boston, I watched my breath
until I saw pretty cool light shows, drug-free.

But there was still something missing.
There is a truth in Jesus that I needed.
No one had said it, but I sensed it.
The truth is there in his life and between the lines of his words.
He told stories that surprised us
and broke open our assumptions and fixed concepts.
His stories still open the heart and the mind.

So I came back.
At one point when Jesus’ followers had had enough
and were abandoning him,
he said to Peter, “Are you leaving too?”
Peter said, “Master, where can I go? You have the words of life?”
So Peter stayed with Jesus and I came back.

When I came back, I discovered the Jesus who said,
“To you it has been given to know the secrets of the Kingdom
. . . . Blessed are your eyes for they see and your ears for they hear.”
I discovered the Jesus who was steeped in Jewish Wisdom teachings
which were already old in his day.

At the same time Socrates was holding forth in Greece,
Jewish sages were writing Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Sirach,
and the Wisdom of Solomon.
According to these ancient masters,
there is a knowledge that enables us to live well
– just as there are beliefs that make us live badly.
There are practices of living that open our hearts and minds
to better understanding just as there are habits of living
that make us callous and spiritually obtuse.

Biblical Scholars like Deirdre Good and Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza
have shown us that Jesus’ teachings and his counterintuitive life
are rooted in those wisdom teachings
that were already 500 years old when he was born.

Many of these writings are open ended.
They are jumping off places for thought and imagination.
Take our lesson from Proverbs.
“Wisdom has built her house.
She has hewn her seven pillars.”

What are the seven pillars of wisdom?
One scholar draws on the Epistle of James to say
the pillars of wisdom are seven virtues:
purity, serenity, gentleness, discretion,
reasonableness, humility and sincerity.
Others might equate the 7 pillars with the cardinal virtues
of faith, hope, love, prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude.
Others say they are insight into seven categories of reality:
the source of the universe, the nature of God, the way of salvation,
the planes of existence, the destiny of human beings,
and the destiny of the universe.

I don’t know what the seven pillars of wisdom are.
But any of these interpretations could make our lives deeper
and more holy.

The Christianity in which I have lived these 30 years,
is as rich, deep, and complex as any world religion
or philosophy.
It is not so much a set of neat answers
as challenging questions to ponder
and practices to master.
It takes connecting the head with the heart,
prayer with action, and worship with daily life.
It takes study, prayer, action, and believing.

But what’s the point of it all?
It’s higher ground.
I love that line in our song,
“My heart has no desire to stay
Where doubts arise and fears dismay.”
Christ bids us to come up higher by knowing his truth,
to rise above the petty squabbles of worldly life
and know his peace.

Paul prayed in Colossians
“that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will
in all spiritual wisdom and understanding.”
– and in Ephesians, “that you may . . . comprehend . . .
the breadth and length and height and depth,
and know the love of Christ . . . . “

There is much to know in this faith of ours.
There is no test. There is no competition.
There is no pride in knowing or shame in not knowing.
But there is joy in learning. There is peace and consolation.
There is wonder and delight.

As Paul wanted the Ephesians and Colossians
to be consoled, strengthened, and empowered
by deep wisdom, spiritual knowledge,
I want that for all of us.
Moses assured us,
“this is not too hard for us.”
Wisdom is God’s gift for all who will receive it.
Amen.

On Such A Winter's Day

2010-10-28T20:06:00.000-07:00

Our Gospel lesson ends with a haunting question,
“When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”//

First, who is this Son of Man?
That’s a profoundly ambiguous title.
Jesus used it to describe himself,
but what does it mean?
If Jesus is using these odd words the way the prophet Daniel did,
the Son of Man is a divine being coming in judgment
at the end of history.
But if Jesus is using the words “Son of Man”
the way most people meant them in his day,
they mean an ordinary person, the man on the street.

That’s how I think of them in this lesson.
I imagine the ordinary person on the street
and wonder if he will find faith on earth.

Here’s what I mean.
Some of you may be old enough to remember
the 1965 John Philips song, California Dreamin’
– or if you’re younger, you may have heard it
in last year’s movie, Fish Tank.
It’s about a guy feeling cold and lonely in New York on a winter day.
He stops into a church to get warm.

In how many movies have you seen someone feeling cold and lost
go into a church, perhaps to pray or just get warm – perhaps spiritually?
I’ve done it myself in real life.
When my daughter was backpacking through Europe,
she was homesick one day so far from home.
But she found an Episcopal Church
where a priest prayed with her
and it was like a shawl wrapped around her soul.

A church building embodies faith in an architectural way.
The priest embodies faith in a human way.
The paintings of Caravaggio and Fra Angelico embody faith in painting.
The sculpture of Michelangelo and Rodin embody faith in stone.

So here’s what the question in our Gospel lesson means to me:
When the cold and lonely John Philips of California Dreamin,
or my daughter in Europe, or any Son of Man
is wandering lost and lonely on life’s mean streets,
will there be a Church with a glowing hearth
where he can warm his soul?
I don’t just mean will there be church buildings around.
I mean: will there be faith in the world when we need it?
Will we find faith on earth?

By faith, I mean something that doesn’t fit a nifty definition.
I mean a deep trust that there is meaning and value to life.
Ultimate meaning and value is at least part of what I mean by God.

Faith is trust in the core of reality,
trust that the mystery will one day be revealed
for what is has always been:
good and true, beautiful and kind.
Faith is trust that there is redemption, forgiveness, and reconciliation.
Without faith, the streets get pretty cold on a winter’s day.

We need faith in order to live a truly human life.
One person clothes his faith in one religion.
Another person clothes his faith in another religion.
But faith cannot live naked in this world.
It’s too cold out there.

Faith needs a medium just like a medicine has to be mixed in a base.
Faith is the spirit inside religion.
Faith needs stories, rituals, art and architecture.
It needs songs and dances, holy days, saints, traditions.
These things are not faith themselves, but faith needs them to survive.

“When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
When we need faith, when our children and grandchildren need faith,
will they find it?

Brothers and sisters, faith is not an accomplishment.
It is a gift from God.
But it is a fragile gift, a precious gift that must be nurtured.
St. Paul called it a treasure held in a fragile clay jar.
It is like a seedling entrusted to us to water, protect, and cherish.
Faith is a gift that lives or dies, flourishes or perishes,
in our hearts and in our culture
depending on how we treat it.

That brings us to our Epistle lesson.
Faith is clothed in religion, mediated to us by religion
-- but the religion only works if we know it.
Notice all the words of learning and knowledge in this text.
“Continue in what you have learned and firmly believed,
knowing from whom you learned it
and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings
that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith. . . .
All Scripture is useful for teaching … (and) training . . . .
Proclaim the message, be persistent whether the time
is favorable or unfavorable . . . .with the utmost patience in teaching.”

To nourish our faith, we have to know our religion.
In my younger days, I was not a believer.
But I at least knew what it was I didn’t believe.
I knew it. I missed it. And when the time was right,
I knew where to look for it.
On a cold winter day, “I stopped in to a church
I passed along the way.”
Thanks be to God and the saints who have gone before us,
the church was there. The faith was there.
Now here’s what worries me.
A recent Pew Forum survey of religious knowledge
showed that most of us don’t know much about religion
– either our own or anyone else’s.
Atheists and agnostics knew almost twice as much
as mainline Protestants.

There’s a lot of Christianity to know.
I don’t know the half of it.
But in my worst times of fear and despair,
the words of Isaiah have carried me.
When I have been falling apart,
the Jesus prayer has held me together.

I was over 50 years old before the Doctrine of the Trinity
opened my eyes to life being more beautiful
than I had ever imagined;
and the Mystery of the Incarnation blew wide open
all my assumptions about who God is
and what it means to be human.

Faith is a precious gift.
We pass it down from generation to generation.
We tend it, shield it, feed and water it.
We tend our faith with prayer and practice,
worship and study.

“Continue in what you have learned and firmly believed,”
the Bible says, “knowing from whom you learned it
and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings
that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith. . . .”

Faith lives between the lines
of the wild story of salvation in our Bible.
It lives in the prayers of the saints
and the imaginations of the artists.
But only if we know these things,
only if we know our religion.

“When the Son of Man comes,
will he find faith on the earth?”
It’s up to us.
Amen.

Dukkha Du Jour

2010-10-11T08:27:00.000-07:00

What do 10 lepers on the side of the road
have to do with us in Carson City today?
If we take the story an inch deeper and a foot wider,
this story is precisely about you and me.

10 lepers cried out “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us”
for a simple, obvious reason.
They had leprosy.
Their flesh fell off and they exuded an offensive odor.
The lepers found that condition unsatisfactory.

We may not have leprosy,
but we know what it is to find our lives unsatisfactory.
Gautama Buddha said, “The first noble truth is this: There is suffering.”
Only he didn’t say “suffering,” because he didn’t speak English.
Speaking Sanskrit, he actually said, “There is dukkha.”
Suffering isn’t a good translation of “dukkha.”
Actually, it means dissatisfaction, discontent.
Robert Penn Warren said, “The earth grinds on its axis.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it, “the tears in the nature of things.”
W. H. Auden spoke of “all the failed caresses.”
St. Augustine, George Herbert, and modern theologian John Dunne
called it “restlessness.”
Dunne set out to follow his heart’s desire and discovered, in his words,
“how unfulfilled longing can be (like) an unrequited love.”

Leprosy was the specific form of dissatisfaction our lepers had that day.
It was the dukkha du jour on their life’s menu.

Like the lepers, we sometimes find our circumstances unsatisfactory.
I have been in circumstances so unsatisfactory, that in my eyes,
they made leprosy look like a hangnail.
I have cried “Jesus, have mercy on me” and he has done it.
Thanks be to God, the old hymn is true.
There is “power in the blood, wonder working power.”
He has brought me though the deep waters and the fiery trials.
Sometimes we bring our fear and our sorrow to Jesus and are redeemed.
But after we have been redeemed, are we then satisfied?
That is the question Jesus raised when one leper returned to give thanks,
and Jesus wondered,
“Were not 10 made clean? Where are the other 9?”

Indeed where were they?
It takes only a little imagination to answer his question.
They were made clean.
The priests restored them as members of society.
They saw, as they expected, it is better not to be a leper,
and they were happy -- for a week, maybe two.

Then they noticed that they were poor.
Unless you were a high roller like the leper King Uzziah
or dermatologically challenged General Naaman,
if you had leprosy, you were out of work.
Our 9 lepers were certainly destitute.
Being destitute was unsatisfactory. It still is.

Being hungry, having no roof or walls,
no bed to sleep in, nowhere to bathe,
these things are unsatisfactory.

I like to think that one or more of them
had a trade before they fell ill,
resumed their trade after they were healed,
and eventually got back on their financial feet.
Once restored to the blue collar middle class,
they saw that it is better to be solvent than impoverished.
So they were again happy – for a week, maybe two.

Then they noticed that they had no family and were lonely.
Or they noticed that they did have a family,
and their spouse was insufficiently attentive to them,
or their children were rebellious or indolent or slovenly.

Everyone’s children are too something.
If nothing else, they are too perfect. That is the worst.
There are two great forms of social unhappiness.
One is to have no family. The other is to have a family.
So again, their situation was unsatisfactory.

Perhaps, having been delivered from the distraction of leprosy,
they noticed, in that pre-dentistry era,
that they had chronic bad breath
and intermittent toothache.
Eventually mortality manifested as a specific terminal illness.
And terminal illnesses are decidedly unsatisfactory.

Can we see our lives in this?
Perhaps we have evolved from some discontent in the 80’s,
to a new tribulation in the 90’s,
to whatever burr is under our saddle today.
If so, that is not too bad.

Grading our lives on the existential curve,
that would be at least an A-.
It is better to move from one unhappiness to another,
than to remain forever mired in the same old misery.
It is at least more interesting.
Freud said the goal of psychotherapy is to liberate us from neurosis
so we can live lives of ordinary misery.

But one leper did something different.
One leper returned to give thanks.
Instead of rushing onward into the impossible quest for satisfaction
he returned to the source of the blessing he had already received.
He returned -- he turned around -- the Greek word is metanoia.
He repented – not of his sins but of self-seeking.
He turned from the common direction of human life
and gave thanks.
In Greek, the word for give thanks is “eucharist.”
It’s what we do today and every Lord’s Day.

It’s a spiritual practice in awakening something inside us .
Yesterday, in a KUNR radio interview, our own Rev. Stefani Schatz
called it “the heart of gratitude.”//

In reflecting on his earlier life of spiritual disquietude,
John Dunne said,
“I had not yet been able to say ‘thanks’ for the past
or ‘yes’ to the future, and so I was not yet able
to live in the present.”

The thankful leper in our story made that leap.
He said “thanks” for his past.
Then Jesus set him free to say “yes” to the future
and live in the present.
“Get up and go on your way,” Jesus said.
His grateful faith had set him free.

It is a good thing to enjoy our passing moments of happiness.
But it is a better thing to root that happiness in its source,
to turn our minds from checking our own emotional temperature,
from measuring our lives against some unachievable standard,
from dwelling on the half-emptiness of our glass
toward the eternal source of our blessing.
It is better to take delight in the existence of the Blessed One
who blesses us with reality itself.

When we awaken the heart of gratitude,
we discover a wealth of spiritual solace and strength.
Of course, troubles still come, we are still frustrated, disappointed.
Life is still what it is.

But life floats in a sea of grace.
Gratitude feels the buoyancy of that grace.
We see that in the one leper who turned around,
who turned his heart from seeking its own content
to praising God for his very life.
We cannot repay God for our blessings.
But we can acknowledge the source of our good.
That’s why we give our money as a Eucharistic offering,
to acknowledge that our livelihood is a gift.
That’s why we perform acts of mercy,
to acknowledge we have received mercy.
That’s why we pray for others,
to acknowledge that someone’s prayers have carried us.

There is another poor translation in today’s Gospel lesson.
At the end, our text says Jesus told the man,
“Get up and go on your way. Your faith has made you well.”
But Greek word is not “made you well.”
It is “Your faith has made you whole.”

Jesus cured the man’s leprosy at the beginning of the story.
At the end of the story,
gratitude completed the job
of setting him free from chronic disquietude.
To give thanks, to celebrate Eucharist is, as it says in Rite I,
“meet, right, and our bounden duty.”
But it is more than that, much more.
It is, as it says in Rite II, “a right, good, and a joyful thing.”
Amen.

Something There Is That Doesn't Love A Wall

2010-09-27T21:17:00.000-07:00

Faith does not happen in a vacuum.
It happens in the mix and muddle of human life.
As Robert Frost said,
“Earth is the right place for love.
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”
So faith happens in our actual lives,
our private lives and our public affairs alike.
But both our private lives and public affairs
are driven by forces other than faith.

This past week the bishops of the Episcopal Church
have been struggling to sort out the place of faith
in the national debate over immigration.
That debate is driven by quite different forces.
The non-faith principles, which are not necessarily bad -- just secular --
are in head to head conflict.

On the one hand, we have free market capitalism
which most Americans believe in.
Since the rise of capitalism in the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries,
it has depended on a freely mobile labor force
– people able to go where the jobs are.
Serfs had to be able to leave the rural manors
to go to urban factories to make the economy work.

On the other side, we also believe in nationalism.
Nations define themselves with borders
and protect the wealth inside the borders
from those on the outside.
The Dominican Republic where there are jobs
guards its borders against Haitians
who come there for work.
The same thing happens in France, Ecuador,
and numerous nations.

One could interject facts and statistics to argue
for one side or the other
on the immigration debate.
But facts are the business of economists and sociologists.
Certainly, people ought to learn the facts.
But the Church is here to teach faith,
to uphold spiritual and moral values
which are the framework for what we do with the facts.

The voice of faith in the immigration debate is bigger than one issue.
It speaks to our whole way of being in the world.
So faith cannot say anything about immigration
that does not also say something about
how we live our lives as congregations and as individuals
in our families, our friendships, and our daily work.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells the story of the rich man and Lazarus.
It does not say how the rich man got rich. It doesn’t matter.
It does not say how Lazarus became poor. It doesn’t matter.
What matters is the wall the rich man built to keep Lazarus out.
Lazarus longed “to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table.”
But the wall kept him out.

In the next life, Lazarus was comforted in heaven.
The rich man was tormented in Hades.
We don’t know why the rich man was tormented in Hades.
It doesn’t say it was for his callous disregard of Lazarus.
That might be -- it but we don’t know.

What we do know is that the rich man wanted Lazarus
to come give him some relief, to show him some mercy.
But Lazarus could not do it.
He could not come to the rich man’s aid
because “a great chasm had been fixed between them.”

The unspoken point is that it was the rich man
who had fixed the great chasm, built the wall,
locked the gate.
Now he found himself on the wrong side of it.

This Gospel lesson could say something about immigration.
Or it could tell us about the gated communities
in which so many of us live. I do.
Or it could say something about the walls of righteous rules
we use to hoard our own moral superiority
from the folks on the outside.

There is a spiritual problem that keeps building walls.
It built the Berlin Wall.
It built the Great Walls of China and Peru.
It built Hadrian’s Wall to keep barbarians out of the Roman Empire.
You can look at them now and see it isn’t a successful track record
that keeps us erecting walls.

It’s something inside us.
It’s the same spiritual problem that builds walls around human hearts
to protect us from the vulnerability
of caring too much about too many.
Jesus keeps saying all through Luke
that we can build our walls,
but there is no guarantee which side of the wall
we will wake up on tomorrow.

Life is a terribly uncertain proposition with lots of ups and downs.
Shakespeare said that in most of his plays.
Frank Sinatra said it in one of his classics:
“That’s life. That’s what all the people say.
You’re riding high in April, shot down in May.
But I know I’m gonna change that tune
When I’m back on top in June.
I said, ‘That’s life.’”

The spiritual problem that builds walls
is our notion that we can stop all that upping and downing.
We think we can build a wall to keep the workers out or the jobs in.
We think we can build a wall around our families
to make them little islands of wholesome tranquility
in cities beset by crime, poverty, and addiction.
But the walls don’t work.
Life is life and life moves no matter how hard
we try to wall it in or wall it out.

The moral of the story in Luke
is that walls imprison us.
They cut us off from each other
and we need each other.
The stranger is the unknown part of ourselves.
We cannot wall out risk without walling out blessing.

To open the gates of our hearts is to risk
caring too much for too many.
I don’t know what we ought to do about any public policy.
Others know more about economics and such.

But I do know that as long as we have walls around our hearts
we will keep building them around our nation
and our neighborhoods.
We will wall ourselves in and wall life out.

We began by quoting Robert Frost,
“Earth’s the right place for love . . . .”
He also said,
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall . . . .
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall . . . .” Amen.

Frank Sinatra Sings St. Luke

2010-08-31T17:22:00.001-07:00

Frank Sinatra Sings St. Luke

Jesus’ advice on where to sit at a banquet
is one of the most misunderstood sayings in the New Testament
and that misinterpretation has caused no end of trouble,
especially in the Church.

It sounds like Jesus is advising us to use false modesty
as a backdoor way to gain prestige.
Don’t put yourself forward if you would risk being put down.
How much better to deliberately sit below your station
so you will be invited up higher;
and thereby win public acclaim not only for your prestige
but also for your modesty.
The first thing to know is that this is a Jewish joke
– but we take it seriously.

Maybe a British joke will make the point better.
I am not a fan of Prince Charles
but sometimes he gets it right.
He was once given an award of some sort.
He said how grateful and honored he was by this award
as well as all the other awards he had received.
But he regretted that he had never gotten an award for modesty.
Actually, he said, he had once been given a medal for modesty,
but when he put on, they took it away from him.

Our Gospel lesson is usually read as a sneaky way
to get a medal for modesty.
They wouldn’t do this in the business world
where serious money is at stake.
They wouldn’t do it in sports where kids on the bench
jump up and down saying “put me in coach.”
But in places like the Church where status is more subtle
and is achieved in far more duplicitous ways,
we have to slip our pride in the back door.

People are readier to have root canals than they are
to put themselves forward to lead in ministry and mission.
No one wants to admit to considering himself “worthy” to lead.
We are all too humble to do the job Christ has given us.
Back when Agnes Sanford was the great teacher of healing ministries
in the Episcopal Church, after one of her workshops,
a man told her he felt called to a ministry of healing,
but he knew he was not worthy.
Agnes replied, “Then get worthy.”

But what about our Gospel lesson?
Is Jesus actually advising us to adopt a posture of false humility,
slinking into our unworthiness, wringing our hands like Uriah Heep?
Is Our Lord prescribing manipulative self-abasement
as a devious way to climb the social ladder?

I don’t think so.
Yes, he says “whoever humbles himself will be exalted;
and whoever exalts himself will be humbled.”
But it doesn’t really matter
whether we humble ourselves or exalt ourselves.
In Luke’s Gospel the lowly are always getting exalted;
and the exalted are always being brought low.

But then the formerly exalted become the lowly,
who are due to get exalted again.
Meanwhile the formerly lowly have gotten exalted
so they are the ones heading for a fall.
The picture of life we get from Luke’s Gospel is a see-saw.
In the words of the Frank Sinatra classic,
“That’s life. That’s what all the people say.
You’re riding high in April, shot down in May.
But I know I’m gonna change that tune
When I’m back on top in June.
I said, ‘That’s life.’”

It’s true isn’t it.? That is what happens.
But Jesus does not agree with Frank Sinatra on one point.
All that riding high and getting shot down are not life.
They are not what life’s actually about.
Life is about how we treat each other on the way up
and how we treat each other on the way down.

The gospel happens as truth and justice, as healing and mercy,
as relationships sparking between such unlikely friends
as Jews and Samaritans
– of such things, the Kingdom of God is constituted.
Those who climb any ladder, whether it is the ladder
of government, military, business, or church
achieve a perilous perch.
The higher we get, the farther we have to fall.
But refusing to step up a rung to do the job
is an act of either spiritual cowardice or moral sloth.
We have to be ready to rise and ready to fall for sake of the gospel.

Status is not the thing to focus on.
Rank is irrelevant. Authority is irrelevant. Prestige is irrelevant.
What matters is the mission – a mission that happens
not just in the church but also in the home, in the community,
in the workplace.
Our lesson from Hebrews describes the mission
as hospitality to strangers, mercy to prisoners and the suffering.
The mission is sharing God’s love with a broken world
in tangible ways.
What matters is the mission and the mission needs leaders.
But this kind of mission calls for a different kind of leader.

Jesus said, “The one who would be first among you
must be the one who serves.”
Throughout Luke’s Gospel, Jesus teaches
a different kind of leadership —servant leadership.
It isn’t about being a boss, a ruler saying “Do this. Don’t do that.”
Rulers are the ones who take the head of the table
in an attempt to gain rank.

But it isn’t about being a doer either.
It isn’t about the lone ranger servant who acts alone.
Doers are the sneaky ones who try to gain rank
by sitting at the foot of the table.
Of course it is easier to do something ourselves
than to get someone else to do it.
And there are advantages to doing it ourselves.
When we do ministry on our own,
people come to depend on us
and there is a kind of power in that.
What’s more, if I do it myself, it gets done my way.
But if I recruit someone else to do it,
they are apt to do it their way
– which may be right or wrong –
but it isn’t my way.
Pride wants its own way.

But the gospel leader, the Christian leader, the servant leader
is not a ruler or a solo doer.
The servant leader get his hands dirty serving the mission
then invites, encourages, and inspires
others to take the mission on.

Do you see the sacrifice, the humility it takes to be a servant leader?
It takes empowering someone else so that they don’t depend on us
– which is a loss to our status right there --
and it takes trusting them to do the job their way.

Can you imagine what it was like for Jesus at the Ascension
to hand over the gospel mission to a bunch of goof balls
like the apostles?
After the apostles planted churches all over the civilized world
they had to pass the job on to the first generation of bishops
– none of whom had even met the historical Jesus.

Jesus rose above pride when he handed the mission over
to the Apostles.
The apostles rose above pride when they handed the mission
over to the bishops.
The bishops rose above pride when they ordained the priests
and entrusted congregations to their leadership.
And so it goes.

We rise above pride when dare not just to do the job,
but to invite, encourage, and inspire
someone else to share it with us
– even take it over from us.
That’s how we build up the kingdom of God
from the ashes of our own pride.
Amen.

Three Feasts At One Altar

2010-08-27T09:12:00.000-07:00

The Eucharist is the ritual shape of our worship,
and we hope that as the years go by,
our worship will more and more shape our lives.
How we understand the Eucharist makes a difference
for how we understand everything.
A deeper, richer understanding of the Eucharist
will deepen and enrich our experience of all our days.
So let’s look at 2 ways to think about our worship.
Let’s consider the meaning of the word, “Eucharist;”
and then let’s look a the meals in the Bible
that the Eucharist calls to mind.

First, the meaning of the word.
Eucharist is a Greek word. Its root is charis
which means gift or grace -- something freely given.
Whatever God has given us is charis.
And what has God given us? Everything.
In the Eucharist, we remember
where everything we have came from.
We remember that our lives, our loves, this whole wonderful world
is God’s free and unconditional gift to us.
We have not earned it. We cannot earn it. It’s all gift.

If charis means gift, then what is Eucharist?
Eucharist in Greek means our response to the Giver.
It is an act of giving thanks.
That’s why the Eucharistic Prayers are called “The Great Thanksgiving.”

We are thanking God for the great gift of “our creation, our redemption,
all the blessings of this life.”
But this Greek word, eucharist, is a specific kind of thanksgiving.
It isn’t just a polite thank you note.
It is a giving back to God – not a repayment, but a gift back
to acknowledge what we have received.
In the Eucharist we give something back to God.
We give our very selves. That is the sacrifice on this altar.

In Rite I, we say,
“Here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord,
our selves, our souls and bodies, to be
a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee.”
St. Ignatius of Loyola put it this way:
“Accept O God my memory, my will, my understanding, my imagination.
All that I am and all that I have you have given me.
I give it all back to be disposed of according to your good pleasure.”

The bread, the wine, and the alms are brought to the table
as symbols of our lives, given back to God,
to be blessed, broken, and shared with the world.
A young student once said to Socrates,
“Master, I have nothing to give you.”
Socrates replied, “Then give me yourself
and I will give it back to you much improved.”
Each Sunday, we give our frail, broken lives to God,
and God gives us our lives back, healed and made holy.

Now what meals in Holy Scripture does this ritual enact?
The first and most obvious answer is the Last Supper.
We remember the solemn meal which began the Passion.
It is a meal to remember that the Lord’s gift to us was costly.
We remember the death of Jesus which purchases our lives,
redeems us from the wages of sin.

But that is only the first of the three meals.
For in the Eucharistic Prayer make three acclamations of faith:
Christ has died.
Christ is raised.
Christ will come again.”
The Last Supper is the meal of his death.
The meal of his resurrection was on the road to Emmaus.
You remember the story.
It was the first Easter.
Two disciples were leaving Jerusalem downhearted
when they met a stranger who told them
the meaning of Jesus’ death.

Then at supper, Luke tells us,
“He took bread, gave thanks -- that’s eucharist in the Greek –
and began to give it to them.
Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him.”
This meal, this Eucharist, is an encounter with the Risen Lord.

We believe in the Real Presence of Christ in this sacrament.
We don’t just remember a dead hero. We encounter a living savior.
This is profoundly important.
I have known so many people
whose religion was stuck in Good Friday,
whose lives were a perpetual grief and a constant remorse.

But that is not our faith.
We meet a Lord of Love, and Power, and Might,
a God of Grace subtly put absolutely present
in the simple act of sharing bread.

And now the third meal:
There is as sense in which this meal has not happened yet,
and another sense in which it has been happening
for all eternity.
It’s called the messianic banquet.
Again and again, Jesus said the kingdom of God is like a dinner party.

Jesus was referring to a meal first described by Isaiah:
“On this mountain, the Lord Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine – the best meat and the finest wines.
On this mountain, he will destroy the shroud
that enfolds all peoples . . . ,
he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
from all their faces . . . .”

The Eucharist is a foretaste of that banquet.
We take this morsel of bread and this sip of wine today
to express our faith that one day
we will sit at the Lord’s table for a rich feast
to celebrate the end of death
and erase of all suffering
with transcendent joy.

We remember is death.
We proclaim his resurrection.
We await his coming in glory.
All our hope is in this simple physical act
with spiritual consequence beyond our imagining.
That’s why Jesus commanded us to do it.
The liturgical scholar, Dom Gregory Dix, said,
“Was ever a command so obeyed?
For century after century, spreading slowly
to every continent and country and among every race on earth.

This action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance,
for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it
to extreme old age and after it,
from the pinnacle of earthly greatness
to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. . . .

And best of all, week by week . . .
on a hundred thousand successive Sundays,
faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom,
the pastors have done just this to make the plebs sancta Dei
– the holy common people of God.”
Amen.

Driving Over Hills

2010-08-08T22:39:00.001-07:00

Today’s lessons are about faith and fear.
Old Abraham was facing death, still childless,
in a world where there was no immortality, no resurrection.
The only hope of survival was to live on through one’s progeny
—and he didn’t have any.
But God told him not to be afraid. Just trust.

In Luke, Jesus gave one of his most famous teachings.
“Have no fear, little flock.
It is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
This passage falls in the middle of a longer speech
about not worrying over worldly needs
but setting our hearts on the kingdom of God.
Jesus is saying, it’s alright, friends.
The only thing that finally matters is yours
already guaranteed.

Such promises would have been hard to believe,
such assurances would have been hard to trust in Galilee
– poor and powerless under Roman rule
– as hard as it was for old Abraham
to believe he would father a nation.
Such promises are hard for us as a society to trust
when our economy is fragile,
terrorists plot atrocities,
and secularists gleefully write the obituary of the Church
with daunting statistics to prove their point.

Such assurances are hard for us individually to trust
when the threats to our personal happiness
are so clear and present.
Illnesses, the fragility of personal relationships,
the jeopardy of those we love keep us awake.

My soldier son-in-law is waiting to find out
whether he will be deployed overseas.
It’s hard to rest easy without knowing that.
All of our lives have question marks.
We all live with so many unknowns.
But Jesus says, “Let not your hearts be troubled.
Neither let them be afraid.”
He’s talking about a way of being in the world.
It’s called faith.

We sometimes get faith mixed up a set of theological opinions.
We think faith is having the right doctrines
clear and tidily arranged in our heads.
But our Epistle lesson says faith is something
entirely different from that.
It says, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for,
the conviction of things not seen.”

Faith isn’t dogma. It isn’t knowing the answers.
It’s trusting the unknown.
Then the Bible describes faith as a kind of bold action.
“By faith Abraham . . . set out,
not knowing where he was going.’

Isn’t that what we do every single day of our lives?
The future is unknown. We can’t see over the hill.
Every time we literally drive over a hill we can’t see past,
we have to trust there is a road on the other side.
I suppose we could stop, get out, and walk slowly up to the top
of each rise in the road and take a look.
But that would make for a pretty tedious drive.

Some folks live just that fearfully
and their lives are just that tedious.
But that isn’t the Christian life.
We live more boldly.
We live boldly because we trust God.

Faith is the courage to take a risk.
It is what theologian Paul Tillich called “the courage to be”
It may be the only way we can live.

Helen Keller said,
“Security is mostly a superstition.
It does not exist in nature,
nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is in the long run no safer than exposure.
Life is a daring adventure or nothing.”

Faith is not a dogmatic assertion of things we know.
It’s an attitude toward what we do not know.
That is our most important attitude
because there is so much we don’t know.

Most 18th Century Enlightenment philosophy
has gone the way of Nehru jackets, bell bottoms,
and the DeLorean.
But the wisdom of Immanuel Kant is still with us.
Kant divided reality into those things that could be known,
and those things that in principle could not be known
– not just that we haven’t figured them out yet,
but things that truly cannot be known.
The 20th Century philosopher Martin Heidegger showed how language
is essntial to thinking but language
limits our capacity for thought and perception
and the physicist Werner Heisenberg proved
that aspects of the physical world simply cannot be known.

Reality is mostly unknown and unknowable.
The part we can know floats in a sea of mystery.
As our Epistle lesson says, “what is seen was made
from things that are not visible.”
Or as Antoine de Saint-Exupery put it,
“It is only with the heart that one sees rightly.
The things which are essential are invisible to the eye.”

Faith is our attitude toward what we do not know.
Faith is driving over a hill top trusting there is a road
on the other side.
But if faith is trusting what we cannot know,
and acting on that trust.
where does the faith come from?
And how can we tell authentic faith from craziness?

There are 3 basic ideas about the foundation for faith:
First, there’s William James who says faith is an act of will.
We just choose to put our existential eggs in this basket.
It’s like the folk hymn “I have decided to follow Jesus.”

Second, there is Karl Barth who disagrees with James.
He says we don’t have the will power for faith.
God has to inject us with it.
That’s like Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven”
where God’s love is just inescapable.

Third, there is Thomas Aquinas for whom faith
is a reasonable extension of what we know.
It’s taking the trajectory of our knowledge out into the mystery.
For example, Anthony Flew, the greatest atheist philosopher of our time
was finally persuaded of God by the Big Bang Theory.
His lifelong commitment was to follow the evidence and the evidence
led him to a reasonable belief in God.
It did not prove God as a fact,
but God was a reasonable explanation
for the facts we know.

I honestly don’t know how faith happens.
It may not work the same way for everyone.
It may take a mix of God planting the seed in us,
our free will choice to water that seed or not,
and some good honest thinking to test
whether the beliefs we use to structure our faith
are reasonable or not
and whether they makes us better people or not.
Thinking may not create faith. But thinking will refine it.

I have more faith some days than others.
That’s why I need the Church to have faith.
I need the Church to have more faith than I do.
I need my family to have faith for me.
This community of hope carries me through my moods of despair
and my spasms of fear.

The Christian life is driving over one hill after another
trusting God to have a road waiting for us on the other side.
It isn’t a guarantee that we won’t have mishaps, even catastrophes.
Those are the hills. Faith trusts God to give us life on the other side.

Such a life leads, as all lives do, to the last hill – death
– “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”
But if we have been flying over hills for decades,
we can fly over the last one too.
A life of faith consists of practicing trust in the unknown.
When faith has been exercised, developed, strengthened enough
to carry us over that final hill,
then all the hills along the way become
much more manageable.

Just as God invited Abraham to a life of adventure,
Jesus invites us, saying,
“Have no fear little flock.
It is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
With those words he invites us to live.
Amen

Strange People, Strange Passions

2010-07-20T16:53:00.000-07:00

Strange People, Strange Passions.

Our lessons are about hospitality
– Abraham and Sarah entertaining God in the guise of 3 men
in their tent under the oaks of Mamre
– Mary and Martha entertaining Jesus at their home in Bethany.

Hospitality wasn’t something we talked about
in the Baptist Church of my childhood.
Hospitality was associated with Southern Living Magazine,
not the Bible.
It was something they taught in home economics.
So as a chauvinistic young Texan, I didn’t respect it.

I still remember the first Episcopal sermon I ever heard
on hospitality.
It was about the mustard seed that grew into a tree,
extending its branches to welcome the birds.
I thought the priest was reducing the gospel to something trivial.

But it wasn’t trivial to him. He was Japanese,
and the Japanese make an art of hospitality.
It is a spirituality expressed in the tea ceremony ritual.
In Japan, hospitality isn’t just a nice thing social custom.
It’s a spiritual thing,
.
Later I learned that hospitality was the core
of Benedictine spiritual practice.
Benedictine monasteries were open to anyone.
The monks’ job was to welcome and serve
those who came their way.
They housed and cared for travelers, the sick, and the dying.
Hostels, hospitals, and hospices are all centers of hospitality
born of the Benedictine tradition.
For them too, it was a spiritual thing.

Last of all, I learned that hospitality was the highest moral duty
in Ancient Civilizations like the Greeks
in Homer’s time and before.
It was the highest moral duty of desert dwellers in the Middle East
during the days of Abraham and Jesus.
Hospitality was the path to wholeness and holiness.
So it is important to get it right, both in church and at home.
It is important to get it right,
so let’s see what we can learn from our two stories.

Abraham was sitting at the entrance to his tent
when he saw three strangers,
and immediately asked for the privilege of being their host.
He was not just willing – he was eager
– to serve the stranger at his gate.
So Abraham and Sarah bustled about baking cakes,
butchering beef, pouring milk, setting the table.
It was a busy, scurrying kind of welcome.

There is something good in that.
It is active caring, practical caring, comfort-giving work.
But it can go wrong.

Maybe Martha had read Genesis
because she welcomed Jesus the same way.
She was scurrying about too, fretting over getting it all right.
She was so intent on her practice of hospitality
that she wasn’t paying any attention to her guest.
She was, the Bible says, “distracted by many things.”
Blessed Martha is the patron saint of multi-tasking.

But do you see the problem?
How would you feel if your arrival set your host in a dither?
Her dither says you are a nuisance, a burden.

Now Mary practiced a different kind of hospitality.
The Bible says, “She sat at Jesus’ feet and listened to him.”//

Martha, was in a state, all frustrated and ruffled.
She saw Mary just taking it all in and it made her angry
– so angry that she reprimanded someone.
Notice she didn’t even reprimand her lazy sister.
She reprimanded Jesus. “Lord do you not care . . . .?” she demanded.
She was working so hard at being a host, she went from ignoring her guest
to yelling at him.

We might see it as a problem yelling at the Savior.
But that isn’t the problem Luke wants us to see.
It’s that she’s yelling at her guest.
Hospitality can turn itself inside out.

Jesus said, “Settle down now Martha.
You are worried and distracted by many things.
But only one thing is needed.
Mary has chosen the better part.”

You see Mary paid attention to Jesus.
She sat down and listened to him.
Abraham, after his initial scurrying around, got to that point too.
Once he served the meal, the Bible says,
he stood beside them under the oak tree while they ate.

So what can we learn from these stories?
The heart of hospitality – the part that makes it feel real,
the part that makes it a spiritual discipline,
the path to wholeness and holiness –
the heart of hospitality is an open, kind attention.
It is just being still, looking and listening.
It is acknowledging the other person is present and they matter.

Hospitality is dropping our agenda
to simply see and hear another person.
It is setting aside our agenda so we can see and hear someone
for their own sake, appreciating them as they are,
valuing them for being who they are.
Hospitality isn’t just for guests.
It’s a way of being in the world.
When we were raising our children,
I was like Martha, always fretting,
working too hard at it, parenting too intensely.
It made my kids wonder what was wrong with them
that I was so anxious.
I regret that.

When I was a parish priest,
I was like Martha, always fretting,
working too hard at it,
trying to make the church better, improve it
– which was a sure fire way to tell the people
they weren’t quite good enough.
I regret that too.

I should have known better.
I used to go to an annual workshop in
New York for mental health workers.
The workshop title was “the caring power of unconditional presence.”
The teacher, Dr. John Wellwood, believed that wounded people
heal when other people just sit with them
– just listen to them unconditionally, without an agenda
to change them, fix them, or improve them.
That’s hospitality.

It isn’t easy. It ‘s hard to set aside our judgments,
our projects, our grid of good and bad.
It is hard to just be still and listen.
But that’s hospitality.

When it sinks in we find a spiritual treasure.
If we practice hospitality with other people,
over time we begin to practice it with ourselves.

As all the different feelings ebb and flow in our hearts,
as all the random thoughts scamper through our minds,
we learn to welcome them in a calm, neutral way.
That is very hard. It isn’t what we usually do.
Usually, we latch onto some thoughts and feelings.
We hold onto them until they get a hold on us.
Other thoughts and feelings we try to banish, repress, exile
because we don’t want to think that, don’t want to feel that.

But hospitality just sits with them like Mary sitting with Jesus,
like Abraham standing under the oak tree beside his guests.
Hospitality is not afraid of our thoughts and feelings,
does not pat some on the head and slap others in the face.
When we become serene in the presence of our own inner dramas,
we can become serene with other people.

Hospitality moves from the outside in, then out again.
We start with welcoming others,
then it sinks into our hearts as deep serenity,
then it comes back out as an even more authentic hospitality.

So, brothers and sisters, whether the stranger that come to us
are strange people or strange passions,
“Never neglect to show hospitality to strangers,
for by doing so, many have welcomed angels unawares.”
Amen.

The Action Figure Meets The Great Silence

2010-06-20T20:38:00.001-07:00

Elijah was the original action hero – dispensing justice
with lots of violence, explosions, and drama.
His God was a lot like himself.
Nothing surprising in that in those days.

In Elijah’s day, the human race was still quite primitive.
Their idea of God was primitive.
So Elijah’s God was an action hero too.

In today’s lesson, things had been really tough for Elijah.
So, like most of us, that’s when he ratcheted up his religion
and went looking for God.
Elijah looked for God at the place where God lived
– Mt. Horeb, sometimes called Mt. Sinai.
We may not think of God as living in a particular place.
But in Elijah’s time, God had an address.
It was Mt. Horeb.

Moses had met God there, received the law there.
It’s easy to see how they thought God lived on a mountain.
The Greek gods lived on Olympus.
El Capitan overwhelms me with awe,
and I hear from friends who have visited Horeb
it’s an impressive place – holy and mysterious.

Biblical scholars think the earliest Jewish experiences of God
were shaped by the even more primitive religion of their ancestors.
The ancestors probably worshiped a mountain,
before they worshiped El Shaddai, the God of the Mountain.
They also worshiped powerful forces of nature like the desert storm,
the earthquake, and the forest fire.

The Psalms are full of that imagery. Psalm 97:
“Clouds and thick darkness surround him . . . .
Fire goes before him . . . .
His lightning lights up the world.
The earth sees and trembles.”
That’s what a religious experience was – God doing dramatic stuff.
When nothing spectacular was happening, they felt cut off.
So they prayed in Psalm 83:
“O God, do not keep silent,
be not quiet O God, be not still.”
A silent God was an absent God – a God who did not care.

That was Elijah’s religion when he went looking for God
on Mt. Horeb.
And the dramatic stuff happened.
There was a windstorm, then an earthquake, and a fire.
Bryon described a storm like that in the Alps.
“O storm and wind and night, thou art wondrous strong!”
Elijah had always met God in those spectacles.
But this time he did not discern God’s presence.
The wind was just wind; the earthquake, just an earthquake;
the fire, just a fire.
And he thought, “Is that all there is?”

Then after the powerful forces of nature passed,
there was a silence, a profound palpable silence
-- like the silence of Ubehebe Crater in Death Valley.
It was precisely the kind of moment that meant God was absent.

But instead of praying,
“O God, do not keep silent,
be not quiet O God,”
Elijah wrapped his face in his mantle as a sign of reverence,
because God was there.
Precisely in the absence of religious experience,
Elijah believed in God’s presence.

Different cultures, different faith traditions,
and different people define religious experience differently.
So which one is right?
Is God really in the wind, in the earthquake, or in the fire?

Do we meet God in the born again experience of forgiveness,
the ecstatic experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit,
or the mystical experience of unity?
And where is God when we are not having whatever kind of feeling
we think of as spiritual?

God is infinitely greater than our capacity for religious experience.
He is in our religious experience. We do meet God there.
But God is vastly bigger than our feelings.
Theologians from Dionysius in the 6th Century
to Karl Barth in the 20th Century to John Hick today
caution us not to limit God to what we think of
as religion or spirituality.
At those times when God seems utterly silent, totally absent
– at those times we do not feel the least bit spiritual
and have no sense of God whatsoever --
God is there.

Carl Jung had these words inscribed over his door
and on his tombstone,
“Bidden or unbidden God is present.”
And so God is – seen or unseen, felt or unfelt, God is here.

Carlyle Marney, a great Baptist preacher, told the story
of a little boy was trapped by a fire
in his second story bedroom.
In the yard below, his father called to him,
“Jump son, jump. I’ll catch you.”
The child cried, “Daddy, I’m afraid to jump. I can’t see you.”
“That’s alright,” the father answered.
“Go ahead and jump. I can see you.”

Just so, the silent God is present – watching, caring.
The very silence of God is an invitation to faith,
the very absence of spiritual experience,
invites us to a deeper encounter with God
– just as Elijah met God more profoundly
in the silence than in the storm.

Most of us want religious experience. I do.
But if we cultivate trust in God
without the aid of religious experience
the God we trust will be vastly bigger.

One of my theology professors, Francis Fiorenza,
asked us a question that changed my religion forever.
He asked, “Do you want to have a religious experience,
or do you want to experience everything religiously?”//
I have been pondering that question for 8 years,
and it has finally begun to form into an insight.

We start by trusting in God’s presence all the time.
It’s like that saying, “I believe the sun is shining even on a cloudy day.”
Faith removes the fear that blocks our contact with God.

Then we can look inside ourselves and find God there.
We don’t see God or feel God.
Instead we look at everything through God’s eyes.

We just watch without judging.
We observe the world around us with a serene compassion.
We do the same with the world inside us.
We watch the thoughts rushing through our minds,
the emotions passing through our hearts,
the very physical sensations of our bodies.
We meet God not be seeing God
but by seeing as God sees.

God is light, pure and perfect light.
We don’t really see perfect full spectrum light.
We see things illumined by the light.
Just so, we don’t see God.
We see the world differently because God illumines it.
We see ourselves differently in the light of God’s grace.

We still have religious experiences.
They are the divine light refracted into various colors.
That’s why we have different experiences – all valid.

But the rest of the time, God is still with us
– not as storm, quake, or fire, but silently watching –
and we can know God then by joining him in the watch
– by doing nothing – dropping our efforts to be action heroes
-- just watching with the infinite patience of God.
Amen.

The Inferiority Of Goodness

2010-06-18T09:35:00.000-07:00

Our Old Testament lesson about Elijah cursing Ahab
is gratifying in the same way a Die Hard movie is gratifying.
We like to see the bad guy get his comeuppance.

But theologically, it is a real problem.
It says that if we commit sin we will suffer misfortune
for it here in this earthly life as punishment.
The implied corrolary is that if we suffer misfortune,
it’s a punishment for our sins.
God gives us cancer or wipes out our savings
and may even afflict our children just to punish us.

It did not take the Jewish people long
to recognize that things don’t really work that way.
The world is not that rational or that fair.
Good people suffer hardships while bad people often flourish.
The idea of God punishing sin with suffering
fell apart and was rejected in the Hebrew Scriptures
long before the birth of Jesus.
Jesus said his Father caused the sun to shine
and the rain to fall on good and evil alike.

God is not in the business of retribution.
But sin nonetheless has its weight and its consequences.
There is a moral order to the universe.
Great philosophers like Kant proved it through logic.
Even atheists like Greg Epstein insist that there is
a moral order we need to obey.

We may argue about whether some things are right or wrong.
But we all know there is such a thing as right and wrong.
Otherwise we couldn’t be having the argument.

When we violate that moral order,
we put ourselves out of step, out of synch.
Something gets twisted inside us
and in our relationships with others.
God may not be lurking around to zap us with a disease
or an accident if we do something wrong.
But the very nature of things gives sin a consequence.

Buddhists call it karma.
Secularists say “what goes around comes around.”
If nothing else, we suffer a wound in ourselves.
We want to think we are good people.
When we do wrong, one of two things happens:
Our self-respect is broken; or
We preserve our self-respect by lying to ourselves,
or devising false justifications.
So we cut ourselves off from the truth.

You know what I miss about being young?
It isn’t so much being stronger, better looking,
and having more hair.
It isn’t even having so much life to look forward to.
It’s that I was so sure of my own righteousness.
I miss being morally sure of myself.

Just one example from many possible examples:
Before I was a parent, I saw what a lousy job
most parents were doing and knew how much better
I would be.
When my children were born, I set out to be so much better
a father than my father had been.
But I was not.

Knowing there were worse fathers doesn’t help much.
Sometimes I was too angry. Sometimes I was too neglectful.
Other times I was too attentive in an anxious unhelpful way.
Often I was too ready to push my children
to succeed at what I wanted so they’d make me proud.
I was in short, pretty bad at parenting.
It is only by the grace of God my children came out
to be the good people they are today.

With the passing years, moral and spiritual failures add up.
Regrets add up.
They add up in every relationship and in every part of our lives.

For those who are comfortable in their righteousness,
the gospel of Jesus Christ may not have much appeal.
They have constructed a self that they are proud of.
They may not feel the need of Jesus.
When I was a recycling vegetarian politically correct young man
I didn’t feel the need of Jesus either.

But I don’t honestly believe we can live without guilt.
I don’t believe even the strongest and best of us can do that
for two reasons.
First, we have to live in human society
and the structures of society are unjust.
The greatest American theologian of the 20th Century,
Reinhold Niebuhr, taught us that we cannot be moral people
in an immoral society.
For example, if the whole world were given the chance
to consume what North America and Western Europe consume,
it would take 5 planets with the earth’s resources
to meet the demand.
How can we justify that?

The second reason we can’t dodge guilt
is that life is morally complicated.
Often the choices we face are not between right and wrong,
but between wrong and worse.
Even if we do our best in those situations,
we come out with a moral remainder.
I don’t know how we can get through life with clean hands.
So a lot of us live with regret.

For us, the gospel is not just good news
– it’s the best news we can imagine.
That brings us to our lesson about the sinner woman
and Simon the Pharisee.
The woman is a forgiven sinner who loves Jesus more than her own life.
Simon is a righteous man, sure enough of himself
to judge the woman as sinner and Jesus as a false prophet.
– sneering at them both from his morally superior seat.

So Jesus tells Simon the parable of the two debtors,
which concludes that he, who has been forgiven much, loves much.
He, who has been forgiven little, loves little.

Jesus does not say Simon has sinned.
He does not accuse Simon of being morally numb to his own failings.
He lets Simon’s self-assessment stand. So we must do the same.
Simon is innocent.
But because he is innocent, he has only his pride to keep him warm.
He has been forgiven little; and so he loves little.

The sinner woman has lost her pride but gained her Savior.
Contrition has broken her heart open to Jesus.
Being forgiven has healed her wounds and more:
It has given her with the capacity to love.
So what is life about anyway – a zero defects score
on some spiritual foreman’s clipboard?
William Blake said “we are put on earth a little space
that we might learn to bear the beams of love.”
That’s what life is about.

We “bear the beams of love” when we can endure them,
when we accept the love of Christ who does not set standards
we have to meet to win his approval
but rather loves us as we are.
We “bear the beams of love” when we carry them
to each other as merciful compassion.

That’s what happens when we give up measuring our worth
by our righteousness.
We stop living in pride and start living in love.

The love of Jesus is better than being blameless,
better than moral confidence.
The point of the gospel is just this:
It is better to be forgiven than innocent.

Every time we come to the communion rail,
we surrender our claims to righteousness
and accept his mercy.
God open our hearts to receive his grace
that it may flower in us as the love of Christ.
God grant us the gift to forgive as we have been forgiven
and love each other as we have been loved.

Amen.

Survival Mentality

2010-06-06T17:34:00.000-07:00

Some stories become New York Times best sellers,
but we forget them two years later.
Some stories become blockbuster movies,
but 2 years later we cannot remember the plot.
Then there are stories like Elijah and the widow of Zarephath
that were being told hundreds of years before Jesus
– and here we are, thousands of year later
on the other side of the world, listening to it again today.

Some stories keep our attention through the ages because
they are deep and universal.
They say something about important about us.

The widow had no earthly means of support.
Even in a good economy, she would have been poor.
But a terrible drought had stricken the land; so things were even worse.

She had just enough food left
to make one last paltry meal for herself and her child.
She planned to make that meal, then die.

If you asked the widow what she was trying to do,
it was just to survive.
All she could think of keeping body and soul together another day.

That may not sound like it applies to most of us.
But for reasons having to do with how our brains work,
it actually does.
Whenever we feel devalued by others,
it indirectly triggers the same survival anxiety
in our brain stem as a threat to our life.
It goes back to the way our brains got wired
when we were still in the crib.
We need to know we are loved, valued, and respected.

Stretching our paycheck to make ends meet is not enough.
We need to know we are well thought of,
that people want us here.
If they want us here on condition that we measure up to their standards,
well, we aren’t all that secure, are we?
What if we slip? What if we fail to measure up someday?
Or what if they change the standards?

Great psychologists like Otto Rank, Ernst Becker, and Roberto Asagioli
all agreed that fear of rejection is a kind of death fear.
Our lives get trapped in trying to fit in so we will survive
– not just physically, but emotionally.
We all get caught in that trap either because
other people don’t value us
or they value us on condition that we measure up
to their standards.
So we are all a bit like the widow of Zarephath, trying to survive.

The problem is that isn’t much of a life.
It isn’t our real self that people value
because they never see it.
We live a false life, a constricted life, watching our steps.

I don’t read the men’s magazines like GQ and Esquire anymore
but from what I see on the covers,
they are still about how to get women to love you
and men to admire you.
The covers of the women’s magazines look the same.
It’s all a list of desperate strategies for emotional survival.

There is only one cure for that, only one way out.
It is the unconditional love of God.
It’s God who created us as we are because he loves us this way.
When the Bible says God is loves
or that God loves the world,
the word it uses for love doesn’t mean our kind of affection.

It doesn’t mean the warm feeling we have for someone
who meets our needs or conforms to our standards of lovability.
It means delight in someone for being their own unique self.

God’s love is absolute and unlimited.
If we didn’t measure up to God’s standard of lovability,
we wouldn’t be here, because it’s God’s love
that keeps us here.
Without the love of God, we’d blink out of existence
like dying fireflies.

God’s love keeps us here.
Faith in God’s love sets us free.
But it’s hard to have faith in that kind of love
unless we have caught a little glimpse of it.

That’s where the Church comes in.
We are agents of divine love, ambassadors of divine love,
conduits of God’s grace.
We are here to be the place that doesn’t judge,
the family that takes people in
whether they are the pillar of the community
or the derelict off the street.

We are here to look at people with God’s eyes
delighting in them, caring for them,
valuing their presence on this earth.
That’s what Elijah did for the widow of Zarephath.
He told her she didn’t need her survival strategies.
She didn’t even need the makings of her last meal.
Just trust God because God loves you.
It was a radical message – a crazy message.
But she believed it and she lived.

That’s what the Church is here to do for people.
But there’s a problem, isn’t there?

You take a lot of people with survival mentality,
put ‘em together and what have you got?
A church with survival mentality.

Sometimes when I talk with congregation’s about their mission,
they say straight out, it’s “survival.”
We are just trying to keep the doors open.
It’s easy to understand that feeling.
It’s a natural response to the world we are in.

But there are some downsides to a survivalist mission.
The first is that the survivalist mission is the proven fastest way
to extinction.
Jesus said it plain and simple,
“Whoever tries to save his live will lose it.”
That applies to churches too.

But the real problem with a survivalist mentality
for either a church or an individual
is that it makes us look at people in a bad way.
We are here to see people through God’s eyes.
But if we are fretting over getting our own needs met,
then we look at people in terms of how they can help us
with our agenda.

Instead of seeing a beloved child of God broken and in pain,
we see a potential Sunday School teacher,
a potential junior warden,
or worst of all a potential pledge unit.
Once we look at someone that way,
we fail in our mission to be a channel of blessing,
agents of God’s unconditional love.
That pushes the people we look at even deeper
Into their own survival mentalities.

So what are we to do?
We all have a streak of survivalist personality in us.
It comes with the way our brain stem is shaped.
It comes with the world having failed to love us
with God’s kind of love.
We are all broken this way.

The only way out, brothers and sisters, is faith.
The only way out is to practice trust in God’s boundless mercy
and the unbelievably good news that God loves us,
right now, as we are -- even with our survival personalities.

God loves us whether we believe it or not,
but to the extent we truly believe it, truly trust it,
we are free to be our authentic selves.
And we are free to enjoy other people for who they are.

In our burial rite, we recite St. Paul’s words that set us free from the trap.
“If we live, we live unto the Lord.
If we die, we die unto the Lord.
Whether we live, therefore, or whether we die,
we are the Lord’s.”
That’s what matters. It means we are alright already.
Amen.

Still Here

2010-05-16T19:07:00.000-07:00

John’s Gospel is impossible to really understand.
That’s because he didn’t write it to explain things.
He wrote it to blow our minds with strange and wonderful ways
of imagining God, ourselves, and our relationship with God.

In today’s lesson, Jesus says that he and the Father are one,
that he lives in the Father and the Father lives in him.
Right away that’s hard to grasp.
Then he prays that we -- that’s you and me --
that we may be one just like Jesus and the Father.

Obviously we are not the same.
We live in different bodies and different places.
We each have our own different life story.
We have different thoughts and feelings.
We look different.

But Jesus prays that, underneath all the differences,
we might be connected by something we have down deep
in common.
The way that happens, he says, is that he lives in us,
and the Father lives in him.
So we all have the same Christ – not just ruling over us,
but living inside us.

That is the most amazing thing of all – the idea that Christ
should live in us just as God lives in Jesus.
We cannot begin to understand such a thing;
yet in Baptism, we welcome Christ into our lives,
and in Holy Communion we experience that bond
each week.

We cannot wrap our minds around this holy mystery.
But there may be little part of it
we might be able to understand in a way
that will help us live each day.

So I start by asking: where do we find Christ inside ourselves?
In the midst of all the thoughts and feelings
racing, chattering, and swirling in the chaos of myself,
where do I find Christ?

It’s John’s Gospel that says Christ lives in us;
so it helps to see how John describes Christ.
In John, our Lord is not an angry prophet.
He is always the serene, balanced, observer and interpreter.
He is the embodiment of wisdom.

Remember when they brought him the woman caught in adultery
and demanded to know whether she should be stoned.
He did not jump up and shout “you hypocrites.”
Instead he sat in silence writing in the dust with his finger
then said, “Let the one of you who is without sin
cast the first stone.”

In the Garden of Gethsemene, the mob came to arrest him.
Jesus went out to meet them and calmly said,
“Who are you looking for?”
They replied “Jesus.” He said, “You’ve found him.”
And that threw the mob into complete confusion.
Even at his trial and crucifixion, Jesus remained balanced.

In John’s Gospel, Christ is the eye of the storm,
or as T. S. Eliot put it, “the still point of the turning world.”
There is something stable at the center of reality.
So much is constantly shifting and changing
inside us and around us.
Things always seem to be falling apart.

And yet 14 billion years after the Big Bang,
we still have an orderly cosmos.
Something holds it together.
There is something in the universe preserving a balance,
holding things together.
It is a sane center inside the madness,
a calm compassion inside the violence.
That is what John means by Christ
– the Christ who became flesh in Jesus.

This serene center, this wisdom, this Christ also lives in us.
He lives in us deeper than our conscious minds.
The late psychologist, John Firman, said that there is in each of us
“a deeper source of wisdom and guidance,
a source that operates beyond the control
of the conscious personality. . . .”

There is something in us deeper than our thoughts and feelings,
something that holds us together no matter
what kind of experience we are having at the moment.
This center of our souls is so connected to the center of the universe
that they are truly the same thing.

In the 14th Century, the German mystic, Meister Eckhart, said,
“there is something in the soul so closely akin to God
that it is already one with him.”
And Lady Julian of Norwich, said that the soul and Christ
are already bound to each other.

Parts of our personalities split away from our souls.
We are not always true to ourselves,
and that’s where we get into trouble.
John Firman said that our psychological distress
comes from disregarding that deep wisdom
we already have inside.
But a part of us, the central part of us,
the most important part of us
is already one with Christ.

When St. Paul found that he had lost all the other things
that he had counted on to make him secure and important,
he said, “I have been crucified with Christ, and yet I live --
No not I -- It is Christ who lives in me.”

The wisdom and serenity of Christ depend
on his capacity for a special kind of love.
We usually think of love as an emotionally intense approval
of someone who is what we need them to be
or they are how we think they ought to be.
That kind of love can flip in the blink of an eye
when the person does not live up to our expectations.

But Christ – both in the universe and in us – has a different kind of love.
John used a special word for it. Agape.
It means appreciating someone for just for being here.
It does not judge. It accepts unconditionally.
That love is the force that keeps this world turning.
That love sustains our life.
Because Christ lives in us, we can love like that.
We can love people the world rejects.
We can love ourselves – each and every part of ourselves.
We can forgive ourselves and each other.
We can be the still point for ourselves and each other.

It’s like in our lesson from Acts, when after the earthquake,
the jailer is about to kill himself.
Paul calls out to him, “Calm down. We’re still here.”
That’s the voice of Christ and we can say it to ourselves
and to each other in any situation,
“Calm down. We’re still here.”

When we are true to the core of our being,
when we are true to Christ,
that is precisely what we do.
Oh, we forget more often than we remember.
We forget who we are, forget Our Lord.
We judge and condemn each other.
We judge and condemn ourselves ever more harshly.

But Christ is still there, still the center.
And we can still choose to remember,
still choose to look at ourselves and each other
through his eyes.
We can love the whole creation the way the Father loves Christ,
the way Christ loves us -- unconditionally.
There is such peace in that, such balance,
to be rooted in a love that does not shift,
in which, as it says in James,
“there is no variableness, no shadow of turning.”

In Baptism, we welcome the Christ who is already here.
We promise to live out of that center,
to let deep wisdom guide us
instead of our passing moods.
With every Holy Communion, we deepen that connection
opening our hearts to his mercy
and our minds to his sanity.

Glory to God whose power working in us
can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.
Amen.

The Whence And The Whither: A Night Bird's Flight From And Into Mystery

2010-05-05T11:35:00.000-07:00

During the Dark Ages in England,
Anglo-Saxons would gather at night in a mead hall
to keep safe and warm by the hearth.
The halls were large one-room stone buildings with windows
high up for ventilation.

In those days, one Anglo Saxon said,
“Our life is like a bird that flies in through one window
of the hall and then through another
back out into the night.
For that brief moment, we see it.
It comes and just as suddenly it is gone.
We do not know where it comes from or where it goes.”

Such is a life. For a short time, we see it.
It flies in from the darkness of the unknown,
then back out into that darkness.

The Anglo Saxon who compared life to the night bird said
that if this new Christian religion can tell us something more,
give us some sense of things, some hope,
then we should listen to them.

Where do we come from? Where do we go?
The German theologian, Karl Rahner, said
these are the two great questions:
the whence and the whither?
“Whence comest thou? Whither goest thou?”

Where did the universe come from?
“The Big Bang,” we say.
But where did the matter and energy that blew up come from?
And where is the universe going?
It has a story. It has evolved into an orderly cosmos,
produced life, intelligence, creativity, art -- even religion.
What is the universe becoming?
What are we becoming?
The ultimate source of things, the ultimate source of our lives,
is as mysterious as a moonless midnight
on the moors of 7th Century England
– the darkness from which the night bird came.
The ultimate destiny of our lives and of this universe
is just as unknown and unknowable.
The great whence and the great whither.

Our reason can give us hints about our origin and our destiny.
The miraculous and wonderful order of creation
tell us that there is some rhyme and reason to it all.
The direction of evolution from inanimate slime to amoebas
and on to greater and greater complexity, creativity,
and intelligence
– that trajectory says something about our destiny.

But we cannot prove our origin or our destiny with facts.
When it comes to the big questions, the whence and the whither,
all answers are matters of faith.
Faith is a belief we choose to accept.
It’s a decision we make in our hearts.
It’s the attitude we take toward the mystery
from which we come and to which we are going.

Karl Rahner said that our name
for the whence and the whither of life is “God.”
Calling the mystery “God” is a way of saying we trust it.
We believe the mystery is friendly,
that the unknown which made all this
will not abandon its creation.
We believe the mystery loves what it has made
and will bring the universe to a good end,
will bring us to a good end.

As wonderful as this world is,
we know it isn’t what it ought to be.
There’s so much disappointment, so much sorrow,
so much pain.
Most of all there is death.
We lose the ones we love
and knowing our own death is sure as the sunset
makes us wonder if our brief lives even matter,
wonder if we will be forgotten
so we might as well have never lived.

If we think that our destiny is death,
then we are apt to feel despair.
St. John the Divine lived in a time of despair.
Christians were being slaughtered wholesale
by the Emperor Domitian.
Even Nero had not done anything like this.
The Christians who survived were selling out the faith
to save their skins.
So the religion, to which John had devoted his life,
stood on the brink of extinction.
Now he had been exiled to the lonely island of Patmos
where he lived as a hermit in a cave.
John was likely on the verge of despair
when he had a series of visions.
His visions swept through his consciousness
like a night bird flying through an Anglo Saxon Hall.

His visions were images and words from the Hebrew Bible.
They were a mix of something old and something new.
They weren’t all happy thoughts.
Many of his visions were nightmares.
Who wouldn’t have nightmares given the horror
of the persecution?
He had dreams of war, famine, and disaster.

But then came the final vision he describes in today’s lesson.
After all the death and destruction, John saw a new heaven and a new earth.
The God who created heaven and earth in the first book of the Bible
did it again in the last book.
Only this time he made it better.

The creator had not forgotten the blueprint of life.
He had not forgotten the design of beauty.
He had not forgotten us.

“See the home of God is among mortals.”John heard a voice say.
“He will dwell with them. . . and . . . be with them.
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain
will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”

“The first things have passed away.”
This life we are living is a rough draft.
This world is rough draft.
The real life is yet to come.
That is our destiny.

Then in John’s vision, the Lord says,
“It is done. I am he Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.”
God is the whence and the whither, our source and our destiny.
We came from God. We return to God.
And what is the God?

We must not say too much because God is a mystery
dark as a moonless midnight on the English moors.
But God is not a cold and barren darkness.
God is not a lifeless or a killing darkness.
The God John met in his visions
is the same God revealed in the man Jesus
– a God of life and love, of healing and mercy
– a God who does not cast us out,
but redeems and embraces his children.

Brothers and sisters, we have to pay attention to the things of today.
As one of our closing prayers says, we have to do
the work God has given us to do.
But as we live in the here and now,
we need to know where we come from
and where we are going.

It’s like driving through Ely.
To know which way to turn,
it makes a difference
whether you are coming from Caliente or Lund,
and whether you are heading for Elko or Tonopah.
To live well in the here and now,
we need to know where we come from
and where we are going.
We believe the God of love, hope, light, and beauty
is our Alpha and our Omega,
the beginning and the end.

Glory to God whose power working in us
can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.
Amen.

The Luck Of The Irish?

2010-04-27T11:51:00.001-07:00

Easter is the season of miracle and resurrection.
Acts tells us the miracle story how Peter raised Tabitha from the dead.
Do we believe such a thing could happen?
Some people refuse to believe in miracles
because they are unscientific.
They think science says miracles are impossible.
But since the early 20th Century, science has not been so arrogant.
Science today tells us that hardly anything is impossible.
Some things are just extraordinarily unlikely.

Miracles are unlikely but can we still believe in them?
It is extraordinarily unlikely that an explosion like the Big Bang
would sort itself into an orderly cosmos.
It is super unlikely that such a cosmos would generate life.
That such life should evolve to become sentient, aware, self-aware,
intelligent, creative, and spiritual is beyond belief.
The fact that we are here this morning is so amazing
we should not raise an eyebrow at the miracles on scripture.

A miracle is – an extraordinarily unlikely moment of grace.
Unlikely, yes, but I have experienced such moments – not often, but sometimes.
You may have experienced them too.
When all hope seems lost, things miraculously come round right.

We may call it luck.
We may just shake our heads and think the situation was not
as grim as we had thought.
Or we may say, “thanks be to God.”

Whether we call those extraordinary moments of grace
gifts from a loving God
or just the luck of the Irish is up to us.

The problem with miracles isn’t really science.
The problem with miracles is theological.
If miracles happen sometimes,
then why don’t they happen all the time?

I did my pastoral internship one summer at a hospital in Boise.
Every summer there,
a child will drown while playing in an irrigation ditch.
My greatest fear was being on call
for the emergency room when that happened.
In August, it did.
I sat with the young father while the doctors tried
to resuscitate his 12 year old daughter.
It seemed like forever.
I went with him to see her body.
I held him as he cried.
And all I could think of was the words of Jesus,
“Talitha cum. Little girl, rise up.”
But she did not rise up.
There was no miracle.

Robert Schuler, the television preacher of positive thinking
used to say, “Expect a miracle.”
But the very nature of a miracle is that it is unexpected.
It’s what usually doesn’t happen.
He thought we could make our own miracles
by having an optimistic attitude,
that we could conjure up the power of God
to do our bidding if we just think happy thoughts.

But that is a shallow way to think about God,
it isn’t psychologically healthy to live in that kind of denial,
and it usually doesn’t work
because miracles usually don’t happen
– except when they do – and that’s the problem.

If we could say God doesn’t get involved in our lives
or there is nothing God can do about sickness, death, and disaster,
then we could just write God off and get on with it.
We might believe God exists.
We might even go to church.
But we wouldn’t expect God to actually do anything.
God might be God but he wouldn’t be good for much.
Problem solved.

Then in desperation we pray anyway -- or someone prays for us --
and grace breaks into our lives in some unforeseen way
at some unforeseen time.
What are we to do with that?//

The Bible does not try to make the world simpler than it really is.
It does not say that whatever happens is God’s will.
If we assume everything that happens is God’s will,
we are not talking about the God of the Bible.

Throughout Scripture, we hear over and over
that God is not at all pleased
with the way things are going on earth.
If God’s will is already happening,
how come Jesus teaches us to pray “thy will be done”?
If this is already God’s kingdom where things are God’s way,
then why do we pray “thy kingdom come”?
Isn’t God’s kingdom, God’s will what we are waiting for in the final act?

So as C. S. Lewis says, for now our world is “in enemy hands.”
How it came to be this way is another story,
but what matters is that’s the way it is now.
God is not yet making the decisions in this world.
A lot that happens is painful, tragic, and wrong.

But the Bible also says God is involved in our lives.
God is always present, always caring, always tugging things
in the direction of the good.

It’s a lot like being the parent of a teenager or a young adult.
Do you as a parent have influence? Yes, some.
Are you in control? No you are not.
We are involved – hopefully in a good way
– but that is not the same as being in charge.

God is involved now.
And we can open the door to let God be even more involved.
We can open the door to allow God into our lives
to do more of the good things God already longs to do.
That’ s what prayer is for.
That’s what hope is for.
That’s what faith and trust and working for God’s cause
are all for.

We can align our lives with God’s will
and that helps.
We can be God’s agents behind enemy lines.
We can give God more of an opportunity to work.

But we cannot turn over the whole world to God.
We don’t have that much authority.
So God’s grace breaking into the world remains a miracle.
It remains what we don’t expect.
It surprises us.
But it happens sometimes
and because it happens sometimes,
there is always hope.

There is no situation in which we cannot hope for a miracle.
But hope that God will do a specific good thing
at a specific time isn’t something we can count on.

We have a bigger hope than the kind of miracle
that happened when Peter prayed for Tabitha.
We have the hope of resurrection in our lesson from Revelation.
That is more than hope. It is you can take it the bank assurance
because of one simple fact.
God alone is eternal.
Only God and the things that are of God last forever.

We are of God. All that is good and beautiful and true is of God.
But pain, suffering, injustice, and evil are not of God
so they do not last forever.
Death does not last forever.
Death itself will die.

Then comes the resurrection.
All that is of God comes back from the grave like Jesus
and with Jesus.
All that is beautiful, good, and decent comes back.
God who made it to begin with can raise it up.
That little girl in the Boise hospital will live
and her father’s grief will end.

We will not be raised back to this life like Tabitha in Acts
– not to this life with its endless frustrations and disappointments.
We will be raised into the presence of God
where we “will hunger no more and thirst no more
and the sun will not strike (us) or any scorching heat
. . . He will guide us to the waters of life
and . . . wipe away every tear . . . .”
Amen.

The Places That Scare Us

2010-03-04T16:32:00.001-08:00

Mark’s story of the temptation in the desert
is fast moving and concise.
After Jesus’ grace-filled experience at the River Jordan
where he heard God call him the beloved,
and the Holy Spirit descended on him like a dove,
things took a quick turn in another direction.
Mark says, “the Spirit immediately drove him into the wilderness.”
“Here is no sweet dove,” Barbara Brown Taylor observes.
Another preacher says “The Spirit morphs (from a sweet dove)
into a . . . pecking, beating bird nightmare that sends Jesus
fleeing into the desert.”

Shift the image from the dove on your Christmas tree
to something by Alfred Hitchcock
with Jesus in the place of Tippy Hedren.

Wrestling demons in the desert for 40 days
wasn’t Jesus’ idea.
In fact, he was against it.
And the experience probably did not change his mind.
He went on to author the prayer,
“Lead us not into temptation”
– in other words, let’s not do that again.

Since Jesus’ time in the desert corresponds
to our observance of Lent,
we may take comfort in noting
that he wasn’t thrilled about the idea himself.

In a progressive young church I know
– not in this diocese; it’s back East –
on Ash Wednesday, the priest imposes the ashes
then immediately washes them off
to remind the people they live in the Resurrection.
On the day for reflection on our mortality,
she reduces that reflection to about 5 seconds,
and rushes back to the happy thoughts.
In another church I once heard the priest say that rather than
giving up anything for Lent,
people should just take some quite time
enjoying God.

Some of us don’t want to observe Lent.
That’ s ok. Jesus didn’t want to go there either.
As much as we love the Mojave,
in Scripture, the desert means the place
we do not want to go.
But immediately after his baptism,
his life changing encounter with God’s love,
that’s precisely where Jesus was compelled to go.

Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron titled one of her books,
“Go to the places that scare you.”
That’s what the Spirit made Jesus do,
and that is what the Spirit presses us to do as well
– to go to the places we would rather avoid
because something essential happens there.
That’ s where our religion gets real.

The danger in religion is that it so easily becomes escapist.
It so easily becomes a flight into pleasant fantasies.
That kind of religion is fragile, unstable, and undependable
because reality keeps breaking in on us.

Some years ago, Paul Simon wrote the song lyrics,
“And so I’ll continue to continue to pretend
my life will never end
and flowers never bend
with the rainfall.”
Shallow optimistic religion continues to continue to pretend
and then we get the shadow on the x-ray,
the “something amiss” on the MRI,
or our self-image as one of the good guys
is marred by a moral lapse.

Reality insistently intrudes on a false faith.
The Holy Spirit turns on a dime from a happy feeling
into reality forcing us to confront the demons.
And that’s a good thing.

Psychologist William James called the false faith
of optimistic denial “the religion of happy mindedness.”
He said two world religions are particularly effective
at getting people through life
precisely because they are not “happy minded”
-- because they acknowledge what we try to deny.
Those two religions are Buddhism and Christianity.

We observe penitential seasons to make room for the minor key,
to paint with the darker tone.
That keeps our faith true enough, deep enough,
rich enough to help us through all kinds of times.
Our faith isn’t about living in an oasis.
It’s about living in the desert with wild beasts
but that’s where we meet the ministering angels.
Psalm 84 says when we pass through the desert valley,
that’s where we find springs.
Ours is a faith for the hard times – not a naïve promise
that if we get our minds right
everything will be just fine.

Observing a penitential season runs counter to our culture.
Secular society and some brands of Christianity assume
that it’s all about feeling good all the time.

Feminist theologian Dorothee Soelle writes:
“. . . (W)hat will become of a society in which
. . . suffering (is) avoided . . .; . . . in which a marriage
. . . smoothly ends in divorce; . . .
relationships between generations are dissolved as
quickly as possible, without a struggle, without a trace;
periods of mourning are “sensibly” short;
with haste the handicapped . . . are removed from the house
and the dead from the mind . . .”

Soelle says that in such a society
“even joy and happiness can no longer be experienced . . .”
Suffering and joy are two sides of one coin.
To anesthetize ourselves against one
is to anesthetize ourselves against the other.
“No cross, no crown,” Spurgeon used to say.
We might say, “No Lent, no Easter.”

Yet much so-called “spirituality” tries to insulate us from pain.
Meditation is reduced to relaxation exercises.
Contemplation is pretending we are in a pleasant place
instead of the mixed reality of our actual life.
Prayer is an incantation to drive away our hardships;
and faith is positive thinking.

Today’s lesson teaches us a very different kind of spirituality.
Liberation theologian Jon Sobrino defines spirituality as
“a fundamental willingness to face what is real”
– including the realities of pain and injustice.
Archbishop Rowan Williams says,
“the Spirit connects us to reality in a way that bridge[s] . . .
the gulf between suffering and hope . . . confronting suffering
without illusion but also without despair.”

Our brand of spirituality dares to see things straight on,
to face the joy and the sorrow alike,
to acknowledge our failings and celebrate God’s love.

Lent is the time of the desert,
the time to go to the places that scare us.
We can do that.
We can do what Jesus did in our Gospel lesson
because of the rainbow in Genesis.

We can face anything – even what is disappointing in our own characters --
we can face our own mortality, and the overwhelming demands
of our lives because of that rainbow.
The rainbow means God is faithful.
God is present in every situation to help.

When we are in the desert with the ravenous beasts, as Jesus was,
the ministering angels will be there too.
And when that hard situation has passed --
when all situations have passed –
God will still be there and God is faithful.

So I invite you to the observance of a holy Lent.
I invite you to a deeper awareness of life.
And I invite you to a quiet confidence
that God is with you –
always there to strengthen and sustain you –
always there to love, forgive, empower, or console –
always at your side.
Amen.

Priest Sermon.5.Holy Incongruity, Batman!

2010-02-14T17:37:00.000-08:00

Holy Inconcruity, Batman!
We used to say that ordination was an “ontological change”
meaning that there was a basic shift
in who someone was.
The ordinary humanity was extracted
and something extraordinary replaced it.

I don’t know if that ever made much sense.
It certainly doesn’t now.
But there is a change – a real change.
The nature of it though is largely beyond our understanding.

Today, I want to describe a piece of it.
Kim, when you look at yourself in the mirror tomorrow,
you’ll see the same person you were yesterday.
In your heart, you will feel the same feelings.
In your mind, you will think the same thoughts.
But before long, you will notice that other people
look at you differently.

They will attribute to you ideas that you do not hold,
beliefs you do not believe, pieties that you do not feel.
Some will see you as considerably better than you are.
Others will see you as considerably worse.
It is disconcerting.
It makes you keep looking in the mirror
to see if you are still yourself.
When you see that you are in fact the person you always were,
you will try to say to others,
“No, no, you have made a mistake.
I am me.”

But they will not believe you.
Your efforts to deny their projections will only irritate them
and cause them to all the more suspicious of you.
“Why,” they will wonder, “is she trying to pull a hoax on us,
pretending to be a person when we know full well,
she is a priest.”

Ordination is a division of things.
It separates who you are in your own eyes
from what you represent to the world.
Kim, we are about to impress upon you a symbolic meaning
that will often be different from your experience of yourself
– as far from your experience of yourself
as the Christ is from a piece of bread.

But having two perspectives on one reality
can be quite helpful.
It takes the vision of two eyes to give depth perception.

Seeing things in a simple one-eyed way
keeps them flat.
Seeing them with two-eyed complexity
adds depth.
It is the very incongruity of priestly vocation
that gives it depth.

Like Beethoven called upon to make music
even when he was deaf,
you will be called upon to preach the gospel
even when you cannot hear it.
If you do, you will feel like a hypocrite.
If you don’t, you will feel like an apostate.
There is no way out but through,
no way through but to serve faithfully
out of your vows and not the fleeting feelings of the moment.

No priest is ever so good or so bad
as people think.
But the complexity of a human person
undertaking a holy role
creates depth.
The tension between your call
to a devout and holy life on the one hand,
and your natural human existence on the other,
the tension between them is charged and challenging.
That’s where the growth happens.

A parallel tension happens in the principal sacrament
at which the priest presides.
In the Holy Communion there are two compelling ways
to see what is going on.

One of them is a family meal.
By coming together, singing together, praying together,
finally eating and drinking together,
we form and celebrate our human bonds.
“Blest be the tie that binds.”
That is the horizontal level of communion.
It is people joining hands in their shared humanity.

That is part of it.
Last week, I heard a seminary professor say that was all of it.
Last month, I heard a neighboring bishop say
he would not ordain anyone who thought
that was all of it
-- because the horizontal communion alone
has no depth.

Something cosmic is afoot.
When we gather as a community,
we surrender some of our ego to the community.
We surrender enough of our individualism
to sing the same song, to say the same prayer,
to affirm the same Creed.

Then at the offertory, the community gives itself to God.
The alms, the bread, and the wine represent the people.
We place our lives on the altar.
As one of our prayers puts it,
“And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord,
our selves, our souls, and bodies . . . .”

But this is more even than our own group spiritual practice.
In the Eucharist, we act on behalf of the whole creation.
We put the cosmos on the altar.
We give back to God the whole Reality God has given us.
We give it back to be blessed, broken, and shared again.

The Eucharist is the cosmic gift exchange,
in which God gives everything,
which we give back in gratitude,
that God may give anew in grace.
That is the vertical dimension of communion,
the bond of earth and heaven, human and divine,
the temporal realm with eternity.

Yet, the Eucharist is also our family meal,
our ritual of caring for one another.
The Eucharist is our relationships, however flawed they may be.
W. H. Auden called our fumbling attempts
at love “all the failed caresses.”
That is communion too.
The great cosmic communion is absolutely bogus
unless it arises out of the family meal.

So you see there is a parallel between the Eucharist and the priest,
a fitting parallel.
For each, there is division between the direct experience
and a vastly more profound meaning
– a meaning rooted in faith.

That is the way it is with all sacraments, including ordination.
For years, I tried to live into my vocation as a priest
by vigorously employing the things I knew.
They taught me things in the course of my formation.
I knew them. I still know them. And I thought that must be
what I am for – to be the go to guy, the one who knows.

After 20 years, I am gradually coming to accept
that nobody much cares what I know,
that my knowledge won’t heal broken relationships,
broken bodies, or broken hearts.
Being a priest isn’t about what you know.
It has something to do with who you are.
It has something to do with what you represent.
It has mostly to do with the tension between the two.

The first wrong way is to forget who you are
and identify with being a priest.
The second wrong way is to deny your priesthood
and try to persuade people to you are just yourself.
You are not just yourself. You are yourself in holy orders.
The incongruity is intolerable without a mountain of faith,
a well of hope, and treasure trove of love.

Now just a word for the congregation
on your part in the care and feeding of priests.
You will sometimes see through their meaning
to their true humanity.
That is an occasion for connection.
Connection is good.

But mostly we see priests
as better or worse than they are.
That is fine. It is part of the process.

But whenever your priest seems gilded in glory,
wise, compassionate, and holy,
remember what you are seeing
is actually a reflection of your own soul.
That’s the good news.

The bad news is that when your priest seems
monstrous, controlling, oppressive, hypocritical,
spiritually lax or fanatical,
these images too are reflections.

Good priests can serve us well if we remember to own the goodness.
Bad priests can serve us well if we remember to own the badness.
Always the challenge and the opportunity is to see each other
through the eyes of faith.

When we look at each other through worldly eyes,
we see two dimensional cartoon heroes and villains.
But through the eyes of faith, we see depth.
We see children of God, beautiful and broken,
saints and sinners by turns and all at once.
We see mixtures of dust and light, divine in origin and destiny,
all too human in process.

Thomas Merton said that the saints are not saints
by virtue of their own sanctity but by their capacity
to appreciate the sanctity of others.
May God sanctify us all with the grace of appreciation,
the grace to see each other in our depth,
the grace to live in the tension between
who we are and what we mean and are meant to be.
Amen.

M.O.A.B. And Differentiation

2010-01-24T22:21:00.000-08:00

Today’s lessons tell us how the Christian life works.
In Nehemiah, the people of Israel gathered
– as we have gathered this morning.
The busy pace of life is a centrifugal force
that hurls us away into isolation.
We think inside our heads about our own projects and worries.
We become prisoners,
in the solitary confinement of our own lives.

The first thing the people did was gather.
Then they asked to hear the book of the law read out loud.
It wasn’t like reading the Nevada Revised Statutes.
For one thing, they had a better legislator.
Besides the law wasn't just statutes.
“The law” means the first 5 books of the Bible.
It’s a mix of story and rules for life.
The rules are the moral of the story.

When they heard the story, the people worshiped the Lord
with their faces to the ground.
They met God in the ancient story of his actions
and in the moral order that God established.
They met God and were overwhelmed by his majesty.
The greatness of God set their lives in context.
They felt small -- not in a bad way -- but like a child at rest.

Some say they can find God
better in nature than in Church.
It is absolutely true we can meet God in nature.
But nature won’t tell us the story of God’s redeeming love.
It won’t tell us how God confronted Pharaoh.
Nature doesn’t tell a story.
We can meet God in nature,
but we also need to hear the story;
and discern the moral,
the way of life God has teaches us,
if we are to be transformed in our souls.

That kind of story listening, moral discerning, and worship
are the core of Christian life.
They provide the spiritual renewal that makes life meaningful.

But the Christian life isn’t all in Church.
There’s more to it than prayer and worship.
The difference between the Church and a secular club
is that the Church is filled with the Holy Spirit.
The Church continues the Incarnation.
The Church is Christ for the world today
because the same Spirit that enlivened him
inspires what we do now.

In Luke, Jesus said,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

That’s our mission in the world.
If we are not doing that,
if the Spirit is not inspiring us to act
for the poor and hurting, the outcast and lost,
then we are not the Church.

St. Paul taught us to judge spirits by their fruits.
We know what spirit enlivens a group of people
by their action.
We know the Spirit of God is at work,
and we know a group of people truly is the Church,
when they engage the world with healing in their hands.

We call that part of the Christian life
“the apostolate.”
Apostles are sent out into the world with a mission.
Do you see the two movements of Christian life?
First we gather to hear the old, old story of Jesus and his love.
We discern the moral of it, we learn how to live.
We worship the God we meet in the story and its moral.
Then God sends us into the world to make something happen.

The apostolic mission has three parts:
mercy, justice, and evangelism.
In mercy, we tend the broken in a kindly way.
In justice, we stand for the weak against the strong.
In evangelism, we open the eyes of a blinded people
to see the good news of God.

The church does two basic things:
spiritual renewal and ministry to a broken world.
That is what Christ does,
and as St. Paul says in our Epistle lesson,
we are the body of Christ.
When it comes to mercy, justice, and telling the good news,
God entrusts that mission to us.
St. Augustine said,
"Christ died so that the Church might be born."
St. Theresa of Avila said,
“Christ has no body now but yours,
no hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now but yours.”

Together we are the Body, Paul says,
and individually, we are members of it.
Paul says each of us has a different kind of ministry.
The eye should function as an eye.
The ear should function as the ear.
His point is that each of us serves in our own way,
and all the ways are equal in God’s eyes.
The Pope and the person who cleans the toilets
are equal in Christ.

Paul says God has set it up so that
that each of has our own way to serve,
but none of us can do it on our own.
We need each other.
We can carry out Christ’s mission only
by working together.
We are a team of interdependent specialists.
We are each called to do our own work
and to let other people do their work.

The greatest teacher about congregational life
in our time was Rabbi Edwin Friedman.
He used to say that healthy cells in the human body
are specialized.
A skin cell is a skin cell.
A bone cell is a bone cell.
They work together in one body,
but they do their own job and not someone else’s.
Only cancer cells are not specialized.
That’s why they metastasize and take over organs
where they do not belong.

The church and the body are like a baseball team.
We need the second baseman covering second base,
the catcher catching, and left fielder in left field.
Teamwork is people doing their own jobs.

I am very impressed with your charts of the different ministries
at St. Paul’s.
I am impressed to see how many people are signed up
to do different jobs.
And I know that there are other people doing other jobs.
This is the model of a healthy lively church.

The challenge in any church
is to trust each other and work together.
That can be hard.
To use St. Paul’s metaphor,
sometimes the eye thinks it could do a better job
of hearing than the ear is doing.
At any given point, some parts of the church will be working
better than others.
But the long term health of the church
depends on each person doing their part,
not someone else’s.

Psychologists call that differentiation.
It is an exercise in personal growth.
If we practice it in church,
we’ll have healthier families,
we’ll do our jobs better at work,
and we’ll get along better with our friends.
Most importantly, we’ll do a better job of being
the Body of Christ.

Psychologists call it differentiation.
In Church, we call it the Ministry of All Baptized.
We don’t expect the priest to be the Church for us.
We are the Church together.
If we want to field a full team,
if we want to cover all the bases,
we need a lot of people taking on a lot of jobs.
But that’s ok. Many hands make light work.

We need a lay person to spearhead evangelism,
just as you already have someone for stewardship.
We need a lay person to coordinate adult education,
just as you now have someone to teach Sunday School.
The list goes on.

You are doing a splendid job of being the Body of Christ in Elko.
You have resumed budgeting money for community ministries.
You have formed a partnership with Communities in Schools
to support education of Elko’s children.
Your worship is intelligent and inspiring.

The direction in which you are growing
gives me hope for the gospel in Nevada.
“Glory to God whose power working in us
can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.”
Amen.

Pat Robertson, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God, and Haiti

2010-01-17T12:48:00.000-08:00

Pat Robertson, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God, and Haiti

The deepest faith, the most vibrant hope
I have ever seen was in Haiti,
our largest and poorest Episcopal diocese.
The massive earthquake there killed thousands
including the Roman Catholic Archbishop.
Our Episcopal cathedral and diocesan offices, two of our schools,
St. Margaret’s convent, the Jubilee Center,
and our bishop’s home were destroyed.

The next day, televangelist Pat Robertson
said this earthquake was God’s vengeance
for a pact Haitians made with the devil in 1791
as part of the revolution that ended slavery
and French domination.
Pat Robertson thinks God was on the side of France
and slavery while Satan was on the side
of Haitian freedom fighters led by a devout Christian,
Toussaint L’Ouverture.
He claims that God punishes the acts of people
who died 200 years ago by killing 50,000 people
including 4 Episcopalians to whom
I have given communion with my own hands.

Rev. Robertson also said the deaths in the World Trade Center
on 9-11were God’s judgment on America.
Robertson and Osama bin Laden
both understood that tragedy the same way.
I have several words to describe Pat Robertson’s theology:
false, blasphemous, heretical, diabolical, and evil.
Christians must not tolerate such slanderous lies
about our God.

But after we reject Pat Robertson’s lies,
we are left with hard questions:
Does God cause natural disasters?
Why would a good God allow such suffering?
Is God wicked? Or is God powerless?
I have been struggling with these questions for years
and I don’t have perfect answers.
But I believe I have cleared away some mistakes
in the questions.

If we assume everything that happens is God’s will,
we are not talking about the God of the Bible.
Throughout Scripture, we hear over and over
that God is not at all pleased
with the way things are going on earth.

So how did we get the idea that whatever happens
is God’s will?
Theologians in the 4th century made a few little mistakes,
and people took those mistakes in a bad direction.
Over the centuries,
those mistakes eventually grew into the idea
that God is the puppet master of the universe.
Whatever happens, God did it – especially if it’s something bad.
So let’s ask ourselves: who is this God we worship?
What makes him God?
Why do we trust him with our very souls?
Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall asks,
“Where (God) is concerned is our foundational assumption
that of power or of love?
(W)hen we think of “God” do we think the last word
in sheer might, authority, supremacy, potency?
Or do we think compassion, mercy, . . . grace?”

God is powerful alright,
but the thing that makes God God is love.
The Godness of God is not dominance over everything,
but infinite mercy.
The God revealed in Jesus isn’t in the business
of destruction and death.
Our God is in the business of healing and resurrection.
That’s why I have no use for the cruel theology of Pat Robertson.

Other religious voices give us better ways of thinking
about God in the face of suffering
– better but not good enough.
One is Rabbi Kushner.
His book, Why Bad Things Happen To Good People
is much better than Pat Robertson.
It has a lot of good and kindly truth.
But in the end it doesn’t quite work.
It defends the goodness of God by saying
God is not really involved in the world.
God does not have the power to affect real life.
Robertson’s God is a sadistic monster.
Kushner’s God is an innocent bystander,
a nice guy but not someone who can help.

Another idea that we hear a lot is true,
but it’s only half the truth.
This is the idea of God as “the fellow sufferer who cares.”It is Martin Luther’s idea of the “crucified God.”
Great Christians like Dietrich Bonheoffer say
God is not power, but compassion.
God feels what we feel, suffers what we suffer,
and cares for us.
That, brothers and sisters, is absolutely true.

That is the God we see in Jesus on the cross,
the God who is so present with the hungry
that his stomach cramps –
so present with the lonely that his throat constricts
and cannot call out for comfort.

We must be very careful what we believe about God
because we always become like the God we believe in.
Believing in Pat Robertson’s God will make us cruel and vengeful.
Believing in Dietrich Bonheoffer’s God, believing in Jesus
changes us in the opposite way.
We relate to suffering, our own and that of others,
in a different way.
We acknowledge our own pain, then notice
that we aren’t the only ones who feel this way.
We dare to look at the suffering of others
– the abject poverty in Haiti and Zimbabwe,
the loneliness, shame, and remorse in the people right next to us.
We see that all forms of suffering are essentially the same.
Life hurts. We all hurt. We all go to the cross.
But we do not go to the cross without hope
if we go to the cross together with Christ and with each other.
When we bleed together, that’s Communion.
Martin Luther called that the theology of the cross
and it’s all true.

But it’s only half the truth.
It comforts us with a God who cares
but it doesn’t offer hope in a God who can save.
There is more to God than a fellow sufferer.
The eternal God who is and was and ever shall be
has a power to save.
But it isn’t the kind of power we understand.
We think of power as domination.
We think of power as Rambo breaking down the door
and shooting all the bad guys.
We think of power as imposing our way on someone else.
When God doesn’t do that,
we don’t recognize his power.
That’s why people didn’t recognize Jesus as King.
He didn’t act like an earthly king.

God’s power is his love.
God’s’ power is the love that created the universe,
brought life out of inanimate matter,
raised life up into consciousness,
and consciousness into art and spirituality.
God’s power did not kick in the door
to kill Pilate and the Roman soldiers.
But it did raise Jesus Christ from the dead
and make him Lord of All.
God’s love power works in two ways.
The first is right here and now in this world.
But 99% of what God does in this world,
God does through us.
St. Theresa of Avila said,
“Christ has no body now but yours,
no hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now but yours.”

Martin Luther King, Jr did not say poverty and segregation
were God’s will.
He called on God’s power working through God’s people
to overcome them.
God is not interested is convincing us
the suffering in Haiti is just or right.
He is interested in healing it, through our action.

But not everything can be set right in this life.
Here is the key to God’s love-power in the age to come.
God alone is eternal.
God is the highest good, the truest truth, the most beautiful beauty.
That was true before the Big Bang
and it will be true when this universe is no more.
God is forever.

Everything against God will pass away.
Death, disease, sin, injustice
– whatever is opposed to God –
is mortal and futile.
God wins by persistently being God forever.

Human souls are of God.
Love is of God.
Beauty, justice, kindness, and mercy are of God.
These things endure.
No earthquake, hurricane, or genocide can erase them.
In this life, we have suffering,
but God does not abandon us.
God joins us in it, shares our pain,
and calls us to help each other.
Then at the last day, God will redeem us,
each and every one of us
with infinite mercy and grace.

St. Paul said, “our sufferings in this present age
are not worthy to be compared to the joy
God has waiting for us.”
God will dry every tear, mend every broken heart,
and raise the least of us from the grave.
Glory to God forever.
Amen.

A Cold Time We Had Of It

2010-01-03T17:05:00.000-08:00

One of the best things about being an Episcopalian
is that we celebrate the whole season of Christmas
– not just the first day.
The story is too rich, the meaning is too deep,
to capture in just one worship service.
So on Christmas Eve, we hear Luke’s story of the birth
in the days of Caesar Augustus.
Later, we hear John’s operatic, celestial poem
about the spiritual meaning of the Word becoming flesh.
Now we hear from Matthew about the 3 Wise men.
But Matthew only tells us the bare bones of the story.

Anglicans base our beliefs on three sources
– Scripture, Tradition, and Reason.
Sacred tradition tells the rest of the story.
The Bible doesn’t tell us how many Wise Men there were,
where they came from, or what their names may have been.

If we had nothing more than Matthew’s account,
it would be hard to interpret the significance of this visit.
But Christian Tradition around the Wise Men
is long, deep, wide, and rich.

Three of the world’s greatest religious paintings
– one by Fra Angelico, one by Esteban Murillo,
and one by Leonardo DaVinci –
all portray The Adoration of the Magi.

Anyone who sees these paintings knows they too are divinely inspired.
Around 500 A.D., an anonymous artist in Ravenna, Italy
crafted just as inspiring a mosaic of the wise men’s journey,
and 1,400 years later, T. S. Eliot gave that mosaic words
in his poem The Journey of the Magi.

When we sing We Three Kings, the symbolic meaning of each gift
set out in the verses goes back to a Spanish poem
written by Prudentius in the 4th Century.
That’s as old as parts of the Nicene Creed.

The Wise Men’s visit is a lovely old story, we have been telling
in sermons, songs, paintings, and poems
for many centuries because it is true
in the deepest and most important sense.
We have cherished this story not because we are certain
of the historical accuracy of each detail,
but because it teaches us
the way to peace and holiness.

We believe that three Wise Men came from the East.
Different strands of the tradition give them different names
but we know them as Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar.
Certainly they came a great distance.
And certainly they were astrologers.

At least one of them would have been
from Persia or thereabout.
There is a tradition that one made a round about route
from Africa.
And there is actually some evidence to support
the idea that one came from China.

Now let us be clear, these pilgrims were not Christians.
They did not subscribe to our Creed or our religious practice.
They were not Jews.
St. Matthew says that they were astrologers.
And astrology was strictly forbidden in Jewish law
and condemned by Jewish prophets.

The Persian was a Zoroastrian worshiper of Ahura-Mazda.
The one from China lived by the analects of Confucius.
The African may have followed a traditional African religion,
or perhaps the established paganism of the Roman Empire.
Most likely, he followed one of the new mystery cults.
But none of them were Christians.
None of them were Jews.

And they would not have agreed with each other
about much of anything.
They could not have agreed on what it was they were looking for.
But they were all looking for something, all seeking something.
When their search brought them to the humble stable
in the little town of Bethlehem,
they knew they had found it.
So Matthew tells us, they fell down before the child Jesus
and they worshiped him.

I regret the modern translators’ choice to soften the language
to say they “paid him homage.”
To say they worshiped him is a perfectly good translation
of the original Greek.
To fall down and do prostrations or to kneel is an act of worship.

St. John Chrysostom’s 6th Century Epiphany sermon
emphasizes that the Wise Men did not give Jesus
the gifts due to a great man.
Nor did they give him things of practical value.
Their gifts were traditional sacrifices offered to God.
So let us not draw back from the clear truth of this text.
They worshiped him.

Therein lie the beauty and the sacred truth of this story.
Therein lie the beauty and the sacred truth
of this moment so loved by artists through the ages.
These wise men who were so utterly and completely different
from each other – different in race, religion, and nationality –
forgot their differences and knelt together
in awestruck reverence before a mystery
they could not begin to understand.

Brothers and sisters, the Adoration of the Magi
is not window dressing on the faith.
It is not a quaint tale we can take or leave.
It is essential because it teaches us what we are here to do.
We are here to kneel in awestruck reverence
before the holiness of Christ.

Our Gospel lesson is crystal clear that
the stable was not a debating hall
and neither is the church.
Like the Wise Men, we have our differences.
Human beings are entitled to their opinions.
The fact we have so many of them is part
of what keeps life interesting.

But the church is not a town meeting
or a popular news program
with a point and counterpoint
exchange of verbal barbs.
The Church is not a talk show
for controversial celebrities to rant at each other.
The church exists to kneel before the holiness of Christ,
a mystery we cannot begin to understand.

Like the Wise Men,
we are different from each other as we can be.
Some are liberal. Some are conservative.
Some like incense and sanctus bells.
Others prefer their Sunday morning casual and simple.
Some like one kind of music.
Some prefer a different style.
Others don’t want any music at all.
Some like a priest. Others can’t stand him.
And that’s all fine.

It’s human to have opinions and preferences.
The thing that holds us together isn’t agreeing
about any of those things.
It is our shared willingness
to lay aside our opinions, tastes, and preferences
to kneel before the holiness of God.

The truth revealed by the Wise Men’s journey
is that, despite their differences, they traveled together.
And that probably wasn’t always easy.
T. S. Eliot attributes these words to one of them,
"A cold time we had of it
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey . . . "

The cold may not have been just the weather
and the length may not have been just the miles.
The Wise Men probably exchanged an opinion or two
along the road.
Their differences must have made the trip even colder
and even longer.
But they stayed on the road and they stayed together,
until at last, together, they worshiped the Lord
in the beauty of holiness.
They came to Christ without coming to an agreement.

They did not adopt a common creed or moral code.
But they knelt and prayed as one.
They followed the light as best they saw the light,
and when they met the Christ,
they fell silent and worshiped him.
God grant us the grace to do likewise.
Amen.

Hostages, Holiness, and a Navy Seal

2009-11-02T20:41:00.000-08:00

All Saints Day.-09 All Saints Church
When Thomas Merton was a young man,
he lived an undisciplined, aimless life
in New York City.
That life left him lonely and empty.
So he started reading about Christianity.
It fascinated him, attracted him, puzzled him.
It was like something from another place and time.
But he knew it was going to change his life.

One day he was talking with his best friend.
Merton described his sense of being called to something different
– not just to do something new, but be someone new.
His friend said, “Tom why don’t you just say it?
You want to be a saint.”

Merton immediately disagreed and tried to dismiss the idea.
But it wouldn’t go away.
Years later he admitted his friend was right.
Once we accept the gospel of Jesus,
we are called to become saints.
Did Merton become a saint?
He became a monk.
But he was a grouchy monk with irritable bowel syndrome.
He wrote books that changed countless lives.
But he struggled with pride in his writing.
He was a bold voice for peace and justice.
But he struggled with rigidity and moralism.

Thomas Merton wasn’t perfect.
But he was entranced by the perfection of God,
and he longed to be made whole.
He wanted to become who God intended him to be.
I believe he was a saint.

None of the saints have been perfect.
Paul was overbearing and tempestuous.
Peter was a unstable.
The list of saints includes masochists, misogynists, and misanthropes.
St. Bernard was a war monger obsessed
with destroying the career of Peter Abelard,
the greatest theologian of his time.
So what makes a saint?
Thomas Mann wrote a novel based
on an epic poem from the 12th Century.
It’s called The Holy Sinner.
The title tells the story.

It’s about Gregory, a young man born
of an incestuous relationship and given away
to hide his parents’ shame.
When he learned his origins,
he set out to overcome his birth
by doing good in the world.
He tried to do good out of his own good will.

He not only failed.
He repeated his parents’ mistake
by engaging in incest himself.
That’s when he gave himself over to God,
and wound up as a great Pope.

The author’s point is that Gregory was holy
not because he was without sin,
but because of how God turned his sin
into humility, wisdom, and gratitude.

There are two lessons for us here.
First, holiness is not for a few super heroes of the faith.
It’s for all of us.
We are all called to holiness of life.
The name of this Holy Day and this Church
reminds us that we are all called to be saints.

The second point is that holiness isn’t something we do.
It’s what God does in us if we just allow it.
God finds us in our broken state
and makes us new people.
As one of our prayers says, “God works in us that which
is well pleasing in his sight.”
God does it. We just do our best to stay out of the way.

God makes us into better people than we could have been
if we had not been morally and spiritually broken.
When we consecrate the bread, when we make it holy,
we break it.
The breaking is a part of the act of making holy.
Our brokenness is part of how God makes us holy.
God does that by joining us in it.

In his book, Blue Like Jazz, Don Miller repeats a story
he heard from a folk singer.
Miller doesn’t know if the story is true.
It really doesn’t matter.
What matters is the point.

It’s about a hostage rescue.
A commando team of Navy Seals were sent to rescue
hostages who had been held captive
by terrorists for a long time.
The Seals broke into the dark, filthy basement
where the hostages were cowering in a corner,
huddled together, shaking.
The sounds of gunfire had not given them hope.
They were sure they were about to die.

The Seals broke open the door.
They had to hurry to evacuate the hostages.
So they stood there in commando gear
carrying semi-automatic rifles
and shouted orders to the hostages
“We’re here to rescue you.
Come with us. Now!”

But the hostages did not move.
The Seals shouted louder. “Come with us now. Hurry.”
The hostages did not move.
They thought the commandos were just more terrorists.

So one of the Navy Seals took off his helmet.
He put down his rife.
He went over to the hostages and sat down with them.
He huddled together with them in the darkness and the dirt.

No terrorist had ever done that.
No terrorist would ever do that.
After awhile he said, “It’s ok. We can go now.”
Then they followed him to safety and to freedom.

Brothers and sisters, we are not heroes.
Saints are not heroes.
Saints start out as hostages to sin, addiction, fear,
and all the pain that makes being human so hard.
Is there anyone here who is not such a hostage?
I know I am.

But then Jesus comes into our prison.
Jesus joins us in the darkness and the dirt.
Then after a little while, he says,
“It’s ok. We can go now.”

So we get up and follow him.
He doesn’t bark the order “Follow me.”
He says it gently, as an invitation.
He says it kindly as you might say it to a child, “Follow me.”
Saints are just hostages who have followed Jesus.
The prison he leads us out of is not just a situation.
He leads us out of the smallest, darkest prison of all.
He leads us out of the prison of our own darkened selves.
He lifts us up from our guilt and our shame.
He makes us new.
Who would not want that?

We are our own worst enemies, you know.
Mohandas Ghandi once said.
“I have three enemies.
First, is the British Empire.
But I can handle them easily.
Second, is the Indian people.
They are considerably more difficult.
Third, is a man named Mohandas Ghandi.
With him I can do nothing at all.”

Self-improvement does not work.
It’s a dead end.

For 40 years, the bookstore shelves have been filled
with self-improvement books.
We keep buying them because the last dozen we read
didn’t change anything.
We can’t do it. The self cannot fix the self
anymore than a broken car can fix itself.

But Jesus can change us.
God gave us his solemn promise in Ezekiel.
“I shall sprinkle clean water upon you
and you shall be clean . . . .
A new heart I will give you
and a new spirit I will put within you.
I will remove from your body the heart of stone
and give you a heart of flesh.
I will put my spirit in you . . . .”

God puts the Holy Spirit in us if we let him.
That’s what a saint is – an ordinary person
with the Spirit of God inside,
a hostage who has followed Jesus
out of the prison.
He says it to us gently, mercifully, every day,
“Follow me.”
Amen.

Every Breath I Take

2009-11-02T20:40:00.000-08:00

Convention Sermon.09
The deep truth of things is like the Amargosa River.
It flows along mostly unseen, underground.
But once in awhile it bubbles us as a spring or a stream.

We can’t conjure up the deep truth at will.
It emerges into our consciousness whenever it chooses.
Our part is to keep an eye out for it;
then remember and be faithful.

Some truth has been especially clear to me
these past few weeks.
It has been clear and on my heart in a good way.
The truth is that every breath I take is a gift of God.
I have no claim on this life of mine.
I have not earned it. I have no right to it.
If anything, I have failed to use my life
to God’s glory so often,
that it is only by God’s compassion and mercy,
that I have been given this new day.

I have no right to this life.
I have no guarantee of a future.
But, God’s generous heart keeps giving me
sunrise after sunrise, sunset after sunset,
and people to share it all with.
I have not a clue why God does this.
All I know is that God is like that.
God does this sort of thing.
God does it for me. God does it for you.

“I am the vine and you are the branches,” Jesus said.
Our life comes from him.
Without our connection to Jesus,
we wither inside.
We may keep putting one foot in front of another,
but it isn’t real life.
The loving energy, the creative spark, isn’t there.

But when we put our trust -- not in our own power --
but in his generosity and mercy,
then we are strong.
Then we can work wonders in the name of Jesus
by the power of the Holy Spirit.
“I am the vine. You are the branches,” he says,
Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.”

To abide in Jesus means to trust in his love,
not our own cleverness, charm, and hard work,
to sustain us in life.
Do we own real estate and mutual funds?
Their value goes up and down.
We can own it but we can’t count on it because it isn’t grace.
But the steadfast love of the Lord abides forever.
“Though the mountains fall and the hills turn to dust” Isaiah says,
“the love of the Lord endures.”

“Surely it is God who saves me.
I will trust in him and not be afraid.
for that Lord is my stronghold and my sure defense
and he will be my Savior.”
There is nothing subtle about this.
Without God’s grace, we can do nothing.
With God’s grace,
there is no limit to what we can do.
“Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.”

Bearing fruit means living a life that counts,
a life that means something.
Different people bear different fruit.
For one person it is making art that doesn’t just decorate a room,
it touches someone’s soul.
For someone else, it is saving lives by sending
mosquito nets to Kenya.
For someone else, it may be teaching a child to read,
or keeping a neighborhood safe from crime
or helping a person in recovery stay sober.

God is the life force behind anything we do that is worth doing.
Sometimes we know that. Sometimes we forget it.
Sometimes we are blessed as I have been recently
by a heartfelt awareness that we are floating in grace.
But we lose that sense of grace. It slips out of our minds.
The first mission of the church is to help us remember.
The church is the tangible place we abide in Jesus’ love.
We hold out our hands for his body and blood.
We kneel and pray for his blessing.

The church holds each of us in the awareness of grace
so that we can bear much fruit
in our daily life and work,
so that we can live lives that count
each in our own unique way.

But the church can only hold each of us in the awareness of grace,
if the church itself lives by grace,
if the church itself trusts God to empower us for mission.
That’s why Bishop Wes and Bishop Katharine
insisted that we are about mission, not maintenance.
We do not exist to keep church doors open,
but to “bear fruit,” as Mother Theresa put it,
to “do something beautiful for God.”

If we do that, God will keep the doors open.
If we don’t bear fruit, if we don’t live boldly for the gospel,
keeping the doors open isn’t worth our effort.

Paul says in our Epistle lesson,
“Since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry,
we do not lose heart . . . .”
We do not lose heart. Our wills are not weak. We are not timid.
We do not fret over keeping doors open.
We dare to save souls from addiction and despair.
If we trust in God’s mercy, we take risks.
We move from maintenance to mission.
We do something beautiful for God.

His grace abounds, Brothers and Sisters.
Otherwise we would not be here.
Grace abounds. Look at our Old Testament lesson:
“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
and do not return until they have watered the ground
making it bring forth and sprout
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater;

so shall my word be that goes out of my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and succeed in that for which I sent it.”

Who do we think planted the church in Nevada?
It was God.
And God put us here for a purpose.
It isn’t just keeping doors open.

In a place where despair is a deadly epidemic,
by God’s grace, we offer hope.
Where addiction holds our people captive,
by God’s grace, we offer freedom.
Where the school dropout rate is one of the nation’s worst,
by God’s grace, we give children a future.
We are the word sent forth from God’s mouth.
We will accomplish the purpose for which God sent us.

It will not be by our own power or our own merit,
but by the grace of God
remembered and received in the sacraments.
It will not be with our own resources
but with God’s gifts received and yet to come.

All we have to do is abide in the love of Jesus.
Sometimes we cringe in fear of the future.
Sometimes we dwell in old hurts and grievances.
Neither fear of the future nor replaying old wars
will glorify God, save a child,
or make a meaningful life.

Abiding in the love of Jesus will do all that and more.
Brothers and sisters, I tell you this from my heart.
Do not take your next breath for granted.
It is a divine gift. It is a miracle and a wonder.
It is a sign of God’s love.

Live a life worthy of the grace you have received.
Just so, this diocese and each congregation in it
is a gift, a miracle, and wonder.
If we remember that every day,
we will live a life that counts.
We will bear fruit.
We will do something beautiful for God.
Amen.