TWO MARKETPLACES

As I have been working a lot on raising money to help our friends in Kenya this Lent, my mind turns to this sermon I preached at All Souls Cathedral, Machakos, Kenya in Lent of 2012

I bring you greetings from the Episcopal Church in Nevada.

I will share with you today what I believe the Holy Spirit

            is saying to us through our Gospel lesson

                        about Jesus’ cleansing the Temple.

But first I ask you patience.

I want to tell you about my home

            and what it means for me to be here.

Like Kenya, my home is beautiful but it knows suffering.

Nevada is a very large state with not many people in it.

It takes many hours to drive from one church to another.

Our land is a vast desert with hundreds and hundreds of mountains,

            more mountain ranges than any other state in the USA.

In much of Nevada, it is too dry to grow crops or raise cattle.

In the countryside, our main way to make money is mining.

We mine all sorts of things, especially gold.

The only place in the world

            that produces more gold than Nevada is South Africa.

We have one large city, Las Vegas, where there is a lot of entertainment.

Some of it is good, healthy entertainment. Some is bad for people.

You have heard that there is much drunkenness

            and other bad behavior in Nevada.

It is true.

Much of this is caused by loneliness.

Very few of our people grew up there.

Most of us do not have families living near us.

I have no family in Nevada except my wife.

So it can be lonely.

There is more despair than faith in our land.

87% of our people have no connection to any religion.

So it is not surprising that our suicide rate is two times as high

            as the average in the USA.

Many people are addicted to drugs or alcohol.

There is much violence in the families and much divorce. 

Nevada is a beautiful barren place,

            much like parts of  the Holy Land where Jesus lived.

Our people are brave, humorous, strong, and kind.

You have to be strong to live in the desert.

But there is loneliness and despair all around us.

So God has given our Church an important mission.

We are there to proclaim Jesus’ message of hope.

We are there to speak up for the poor and the suffering,

            to reach out to the lonely and the hopeless.

It is a hard mission, but an important one in God’s eyes.

We need your prayers.

I pray for this Diocese of Machakos every day.

Please pray for us in Nevada.

Pray that God will pour out his Spirit on our Church

            like a long steady rain that we may be Christ in our desert.

There are probably many things about the Church in Kenya

            that I cannot understand because I am not Kenyan.

I hope to understand more after this visit.

There may be things about the Church in Nevada or the USA

            you do not understand.

I can tell you this much.

Many people in my home land need Jesus

            but have no idea who Jesus is.

They do not even know the most famous Bible stories.

We are trying our best to bring people to Jesus.

I learned this expression

            from a old political movement 40 years ago.

“By any means necessary.”

It’s basically the same thing St. Paul said,

            “I want to bring people to Jesus

                        by any means necessary.”

That is what we are trying with all our might

            to do in Nevada which is a desert of land

                        and a desert of the spirit.

I am very happy to be here with you today.

I am happy for several reasons.

The first is that there are so many Anglicans here.

There are five times as many Anglicans in Kenya

            as in the USA.

In Nevada, there are very, very few of us

            even compared to the rest of the USA.

We are a small church in a large desert.

So it is a great joy to be here

            where there are so many people

            who worship and pray in the same way I do.

The second reason I am happy to be here

            is that we cannot know who we are

                        unless we know our story,

            and that includes the story of our ancestors.

So I am here to see and to touch the land of my ancestors.

Does it surprise you that a white man would say that?

African-Americans have always looked to Africa

            to learn the ways of their ancestors.

But today, our best scientists believe that the whole human race

            – black, white, brown, or yellow – all of humanity

            began in East Africa, very possibly right here in Kenya.

And they believe that it all began with one human couple

            just as the Bible says,

            that this is Eden and Adam and Eve were East Africans,

                        possibly Kenyans.

You probably already know this.

Most Americans do not.

But the likely fact that this is where human life began

            makes your home a sacred place

                        – a holy place like Jerusalem –

            so I feel blessed and grateful to be here.

My wife Linda and I thank you for welcoming us

            to your beautiful home,

            a place of rich culture and tradition,

            a place of ancient civilization,

                         the place where all our stories began.

Today’s Gospel lesson describes one of the most striking moments

            in our Christian story.

It tells us that when Jesus went to the Temple

            for Passover, he found people doing all sorts of business.

He found cattle, sheep, and doves being sold for sacrifice.

He found money changers doing a banking business.

This is the one time when Jesus was violent.

He drove them all out with a whip, turned over their tables.

            scattered their money, and shouted at them,

            “Stop making my Father’s house a market place.”//

Now Jesus did not have anything against market places.

He went to them and through them all the time.

He taught and healed people in the market place.

He used the business of the market place

            to make spiritual points in his stories.

Jesus had nothing against doing business in the marketplace.

What made him angry was using the Temple for a marketplace,

            because the Temple is holy.

Matthew tells us that when Jesus drove the merchants and bankers

            out of the Temple, he said “My house . . . is a house of prayer.”

Business is ok in the business district,

            but not in God’s house.

The Temple is for prayer and prayer alone.

There are two important things we can learn from this story

            – one is important for our private lives

            – the other is important for our mission as the Church.

Let’s start with our private lives.

What does Jesus cleansing them Temple have to do with us?

What does Jesus cleansing the Temple have to do

            with your heart, your spirit?

Everything.

St. Paul said to the Corinthians and he says to us,

            “Do you not know that you are God’s Temple

                        and God’s Spirit dwells in you?”//

Your heart is the Temple of God.

Your heart was created to be a house of prayer.

But often we turn our heart into a marketplace.

The busy thoughts of the world take possession of us.

We plan, we plot, we think “if this happens then I may gain something.

            It that happens I may lose something.”

And our heat beats faster with the hope of gain or the fear of loss.

Our hearts beat faster like the hearts of the gamblers in Las Vegas.

And we think “If I do such and such, I will have a better chance.

            But what if this or that happens? Then what shall I do?”

And our heads do not rest easy in our beds.

We breathe a little too quickly and take in too little air

            with each breath.

We have no peace. We have no serenity.

We are out of balance and we cannot pray.

Jesus said “My house . . . is a house of prayer.”

Your heart was shaped by God to be a house of prayer,

but most of our hearts are often busy and fretful like marketplaces.

Now it is a good thing to do business.

It good to grow food or make things to sell.

The marketplace is part of life.

The market place is human and God loves it.

The marketplace is where justice can happen.

It is where mercy and friendship happen.

The marketplace is good. We belong there.

But we also need a house of prayer.

We need a serene center in our selves, a place of peace.

We need hearts that hear the word of the Lord, saying

            “Be still and know that I am God. . . .

            Search your hearts while you are in bed and be silent.”

It is good to jump into the busy hustle and bustle of life,

            to go to the marketplace to buy and to sell,

            to talk, to tell stories and listen to stories.

But we also need to leave the marketplace a little while each day.

Jesus left the hustle and bustle of his ministry of teaching and healing

            to be alone and to pray.

He withdrew into solitude, withdrew into the temple

            of his own heart.

“Go to away by yourself and shut the door,” Jesus said,

            “pray in secret to your father who is in secret.”

Brothers and sisters, save the very center of your soul

            as a place to be alone with God.

Maybe you have a room in your house where you can pray.

Or maybe you go out walking alone.

Pray while you watch the sunset.

Or get up before dawn and pray while the sun is rising.

Pray as you take your bath.

Pray as you put away your tools at the end of the day.

  

Each of us must choose his own time and his own place.

Because it is a time and place that belongs to you and God alone.

The active life of business and family is a gift from God,     

            but it can be as stormy as a typhoon.

We are often caught up in the busy activity of life

            and it blows us around in circles like a typhoon.

But even in the typhoon there is a still center.

We call it “the eye of the storm.”

I don’t know why we call it that.

Maybe it’s because it is when we step out of the whirling wind

            into the still place, that’s where we can actually see

                        what’s happening.

Brothers and sisters, Jesus invites you to step out of the storm

            into the still center of your own hearts each day.

God says, “Be still and know that I am God.”

Let Jesus drive the fears and ambitions, thoughts and plans

            out of your hearts so that you can be alone with him

                        in prayer, give yourself to him in prayer.

And what shall you do in the solitude?

What shall you say to the Lord?

You can recite a prayer from the Prayer Book.

Or you can speak to Jesus of your deepest desires.

You can tell him what you truly want in life.

Or you can just imagine his face.

St. Francis used to sit in silence and pray for hours.

Someone said, “Francis, tell us how you pray.”

Francis answered, “I look at him and he looks at me.”

It can be as simple as that.

There is no one else who can love you so perfectly as Jesus,

            no one else who accepts you so completely just as you are.

It is a sacred duty to spend time with Jesus in prayer.

But it is also the deepest joy, the quietest peace we can know.

St. Augustine, the greatest African saint,

            regretting how much of his life was wasted in busy ambition,

                        prayed these words,

            “So late I came to love you, O Beauty so Ancient and so new.

            So late I came to love you . . .

            I ran after . . . the things you have made.

            But you were inside me. And I was not with you. . .

            You called, you cried, you shone through my blindness. . . .

            You touched me, and (now) I ardently desire your peace.”

If we turn away from the things of the world a little while each day,

            then our hearts will prepared to worship together

                        when come to church on Sunday.

Our prayer and our singing, our taste of the Holy Communion,

            will be so much deeper than if we have spent the whole

                        week lost in the ways of the world.

If we have spent time with Jesus in the solitude and silence,         

            we will bring a larger soul to the Church on Sunday.

And we will bring a larger soul into our acts of kindness

            for one another and our work for justice and peace.

We cannot bring peace to a war torn world

            unless we first have peace inside ourselves.

Now we have arrived at the second point we can learn

            from the story about Jesus’ cleansing the Temple.

This point is about the mission of the Church.

I do not know how this is in Kenya.

But we have a challenge in the America.

There are other Churches there

            that preach a different message from ours.

Their religion is all about prosperity.

They say that if you believe in Jesus,

            he will make you rich, healthy, and successful.

Their religion does not have the cross in it.

They would never observe the season of Lent.

Their religion is all about becoming rich and powerful

            in this world.

They have nothing to say about justice, mercy, and compassion.

They have nothing to say about the duty and joy of helping each other.

It’s all about how to get God to serve us,

            not how we serve God’s mission of peace and love.

Naturally, those churches are popular and they are growing.

It is a candy-coated gospel. It is a sweet poison.

But it is popular because it promises people  

            what they want in their pockets,

            not what they need in their souls.

So our people in the Anglican churches

            say “Look how they are growing.

            Their message is popular.

            Why don’t we do that in our Church?”

I have heard that other religions in Africa

            and even some other Christian churches

                        are doing the same thing.

I have heard that other religions promise

            all sorts of worldly rewards

                        for people who will join them.

This may not be an issue for you yet.

But if you have not already been tempted,

            you may someday be tempted to become like them.

But I beg you in the name of Jesus, do not be led astray.

I beg you in the name of Jesus, do not turn the Church

            into a marketplace.

Each human heart is a little Temple of God.

When we bring our hearts together in the Church,

            when we unite our hearts in the Holy Communion, 

                        this is God’s Temple.

God is here.

And Jesus said, “My house is a house of prayer.

            Do not make it into a market place.”

Brothers and sisters we are not here to sell our religion.

We are not here to twist our sacred truths

            to fit what the market demands,

            we are not here to sell whatever people are most likely to buy.

We are here to proclaim Christ crucified.

Our Jesus did not turn the stones to bread,

            did not accept political and military power over the whole world,

            and did not  perform his miracles in public to make himself a hero.

He was born in a stable,

            wandered without a home to teach God’s truth,

            and went to the cross to suffer and die

                        – all out of love for us.

Our faith in Christ crucified calls us to help one another,

            not use God to help us get ahead of our neighbor.

Our faith calls us to share what we have in love.

Our faith calls us to befriend the outcast,

            to stand up for justice against power,

            to give ourselves to Jesus who gave his life or us.

It is a costly faith.

But it offers so much more in return

            than worldly wealth and power.

It offers the peace of God which surpasses all understanding.

I know the Anglican Church of Kenya helps people

            to have better, happier lives.

I know of your work in clinics, orphanages, and schools.

I know a little of your work in economic development.

These are acts of justice and mercy.

They are God’s mission.

But God’s mission must be done from the heart

            which is God’s Temple.

All of our good works in the world depend on prayer.

“Unless the Lord builds the house,

            its builders labor in vain.”

So I beg you, Brothers and sisters,

            make each of your hearts a house of prayer

                        where you give yourselves to Jesus;

            preserve this Cathedral as a house of prayer

                        where we give our common life to Jesus.

Then we can go out into the world to do the work

            God has given us to do.

We can go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

DEER WHISTLES, RUMI, & THE NEURO-SCIENCE OF SIN

Jesus went out into the desert, a desert a lot like ours,

            to get his heart straight with God.

I have been on long desert retreats,

            but these days mostly I just drive through the desert

                        on my way from church to church.

The office staff always feel sorry for me

because of all the hours of driving alone in the desert.

They don’t believe me when I tell them that I like it.

There’s a lot of geology out there – biology too.

And the light falls at different angles at different times of day

            and in the different seasons.

It is a spiritual retreat for me to drive all day in the desert

            “in solitude, where we are least alone” to quote Lord Byron.

I find God out there.

My family worries about me though.

That’s partly my fault.

I have told them stories of terrorist attacks on my car

            by kamikaze deer,

            aerial assaults by suicide bomber hawks,

            and -- worst of all – bovine roadblocks

                        by three cows standing stolidly

                        broadside across both lanes.

Like Jesus I am with the wild beasts.

I’ve actually never had a serious mishap.

The only wild beast that ever damaged my car

            enough to go to the body shop was not a deer, cow, elk, or bear.

It was an enormous mutant jackrabbit.

Still they worry.

One year, my elder daughter sent me a set of deer whistles,

            to scare the wild beasts out of my path.

There’s a hot controversy about whether they work or not.

I don’t know, but my daughter gave them to me so I installed them

            as directed on the front of my Ford.

The premise of the deer whistle is that the wind blows through it

            to make the sound that scares the animals.

The interesting thing was the maintenance instructions.

The maintenance issue is about smaller wild beasts, to wit: bugs

            – the same ones that splatter our windshields and grills

                        are apt to die in the deer whistle and clog it up,

                                    block the wind tunnel.

No wind – no whistle.

So it is necessary, from time to time, to clean the bugs

            out of the whistle.

And that brings us to this first Sunday of Lent.

The Persian poet Rumi said the human being is a flute

            which makes divine music when the breath of God

                        blows through.

God breathes through us so that we speak, act, and move

            with a grace like music – music that attracts people,

                        that draws them – not to our personalities – but to God.

Spirit means breath or wind.

Spirit isn’t a feeling we have or something we hold onto.

Spirit is God blowing through our hearts.

All of which brings us back to deer whistles, bugs, and Lent.

Like the deer whistle, the spiritual passageway in us can get blocked.

The bugs that choke off our spiritual air passage, we call sin.

Sins are not just bad decisions.

Sin is something that blocks God out of our souls

            and keeps us from sharing God out into our world.

Sin blocks the flow of God’s spirit through us

            like bugs block the wind from a deer whistle.

That’s a poetic way to put it. Let me explain.

Sin is a pattern or habit of feeling, thinking, or acting

            that keeps us from attuning our lives to God.

Each new situation is a fresh encounter with God.

But fixed habits of feeling, thinking, and acting        

            make us oblivious to the wonder of God new in each moment.

Every feeling, thought, and action happens in the brain

            when an electrical impulse fires from one nerve cell to the next.

  Neuro-scientists say,

            “What fires together wires together.”

That means repeating the same patterns over and over

            can trap us in a rat maze inside our own heads.

We get patterns of feeling, thinking, and acting

            hardwired into our very bodies.

New things happen all the time,

            but we keep having the same old experiences.

We are deaf, numb, and blind to anything new.

We are deaf, numb, and blind to God.

These habits that shut God out are the bugs.

Lent is the time for a spring-cleaning of our hearts,

            to open up a passageway for God.

There are as many kinds of sin as there are bugs

            along the highway.

But you can group them in categories.

In the 4^th Century, Evagrius of Pontus

became an expert on sin the same way Jesus did.

He spent years as a hermit in the desert

            and found every sin imaginable right inside himself.

He grouped the sins into three categories

            corresponding to Jesus’ 3 temptations in the desert.

Turning stones into bread he called appetitive sin.

There are several in that file. One of them is gluttony.

 But gluttony isn’t just about food.

Its’ the anxious craving to have more and more – of anything.

It’s the fear that we can never have enough.

 Do you see how the mindset of constant craving

            could keep us from seeing what we’ve got

                        because our eyes are scanning the horizon?

Psalm 78 tells how the people complained of hunger in the desert

            and blamed God for their trouble,

            so God miraculously fed them with meat and the bread of angels.

The Psalmist then writes this brilliant line,

            “But they did not stop their craving

             though the food was still in their mouths.”

The habit of craving denies us the peace of ever saying,

            “This is enough. Thank you.”

Evagrius said the temptation to rule the world

            represents the category of relational sins.

These are habits of feeling about others like sadness or anger.

Having the feelings is natural.

Getting stuck in them is the danger.

I find the spiritual airshafts of many a church

            clogged with old grudges,  grievances, and nostalgias.

Having feelings is human and good.

When the feelings have us, they turn into bugs.

  

The temptation to work impressive miracles

            Evagrius said represents the sins he called athletic.

He meant they had to do with achievements.

His personal favorite sin was “vainglory.”

Dr. Samuel Johnson defined “vainglory” as

            “the vain attempt to fill the minds of others with oneself.”

It is an extremely frustrating sin,

            because no matter what we do

            we can never occupy as much space in someone else’s mind

                        as they occupy in it themselves.

We will always be playing second fiddle.

They are just three examples to invite your reflection

on what it is in you that keeps God’s breath

from blowing through you like Rumi’s flute,

                        the way it blew through Jesus.

Is it a grudge, an addiction, a fear, or a shame?

Lent is the time to find it, name it, and give it over to God.

This calls for a shift in our prayer.

Many of us usually pray that God will change our outer circumstances

            or that God will change other people.

In Lent, we ask God to change us.

Invite Jesus to cast out whatever is in you

            that is less than your true heart, less than your very soul.

Invite Jesus to set you free to be who God made you to be,

            a perfect flute playing a divine melody

                        to delight the world.

            

LOWER YOUR WEAPONS

On Ash Wednesday we talk about sin and death.

We prefer not to think about such things.

The word for that is denial.

Ernest Becker’s 1974 book, The Denial of Death,

            won the Pulitzer Prize for showing how

            most of our human nuttiness can be traced

                        to our efforts to pretend we will never die.

We start by denying death, then get in the habit of denying

            all sorts of things.

Last week I ran across several people furiously denying

they were racist though no one had hinted that they were.

Back in Georgia we used to say, “A hit dog hollers.”

I am not a racist.

I am not an alcoholic.

I am not anti-Muslim. I am not homophobic.

I am not this. I am not that. I am not mortal.

Some people accuse religion of existing precisely for denial.

They say religion is escapist.

It’s a pie in the sky fantasy for hiding our eyes from hard truths.

Sometimes they are right.

A lot of our clergy say “We are an Easter People”

            and so violate the rubrics to add parts of the Easter service

                        all year long.

Many an Ash Wednesday sermon will be reassurance

            that we don’t mean you should think about anything unpleasant.

All sorts of cute variations on the imposition ashes will be done

            to hide the message.

I fully expect some priest somewhere to change the words to:

            “Remember that you may get an occasional virus

             but with Occicillium and Thera-flu you will feel better soon.”

There is a lot of escapist religion.

But the most formative theologian in history, St. Augustine,

defined sin as precisely this kind of escape.

Sin is disengagement, he said. Sin is denial.

Sin is hiding our eyes from the truth. Religion can be sin.

In our Old Testament lesson,

Isaiah listed the religious pieties and self-mortifications

of ancient Judaism.

They were jumping through the religious hoops

            to get God on their side so they could bypass the hard stuff.

But Isaiah said God was not impressed. According to Isaiah,

God says, “On the day of your fasting . .  . you exploit your workers.

            Your fasting ends in quarrelling and strife. . .

             Is this what you call a fast? . . . .

             Is this not the fast I have chosen:

                        to loose the chains of injustice

                        and untie the cords of the yoke,

                        to set the oppressed free. . .  .?”

Isaiah wouldn’t stand for a religion that ignored our part in social injustice.

He had no use for escapist petty pieties like giving up

coffee, candy, or Face Book for 40 days

                        and pretending that makes it all ok.

He thought we had some real issues to deal with.

Escapist religion is just smoke and mirrors

            to distract us from the violence and injustice of our lives.

Isaiah’s God won’t stand for it.

His God says “Let’s get real.”

This is what I believe is real.

We are awash in unspoken repressed grief

            that life is not living up to our expectations.

In a fragmented, alienating society, we are lonely.

The state orders us; the market manipulates us,

and we are angry.

When things seem to be skidding out of control, we are afraid.

We are not who we want to be, so we are ashamed.

That adds up to a load of grief and anger,

            none of which we dare to express.

Episcopal theologian Luke Bretherton says grief and repentance

are not respectable in our society,

            so we avoid them with a clever two-part strategy

            of denial and projection.

The denial piece includes escapist religion.

But there’s more. Upbeat psychologies, pop philosophies,

 chemical mood enhancers, and various entertainments

                        all help us escape our situation.

These escapist strategies take us farther and farther away

            from each other and shrivel the social skills we need

                        to connect with care and appreciation.

Escapism flees from the common life

            of family, church, and civic engagement where hard things

like sacrifice and compromise are essential.  

Escapism alone, however, isn’t enough to anesthetize our unhappiness

with the world and with ourselves.

We need to project all that negative feeling out somewhere,

so we practice denunciation.

We find scapegoats for all that is wrong with life.

Bretherton calls it the politics of denunciation.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks calls it theological dualism. Same thing.

It means finding someone to blame for our grief,

            someone to serve as a screen on which to project

            the parts of ourselves we don’t want to admit.

I am not a racist. I am not Islamophobic.

I am not angry and I’ll fight the man who says I am.

I am not violent or lustful.

I do not have any of the psychological baggage

            that Freud and Gerard say afflicts everyone else.

No not me.

It’s the Syrians, the Mexicans, the gays,

            the homophobes, the bigots, or the banks.

We are like the Pharisee in Luke 18 verse 11.

Jesus said,

            “The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed,

            ‘God I thank you that I am not like other people –

             robbers, evildoers, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.

   I fast twice a week (and tithe).”

The Pharisee stood /by himself. // Escapism and projection.

But the tax collector he was condemning prayed,

            “God have mercy on me a sinner.”

Jesus said it was the tax collector who went home justified.

He didn’t escape. He didn’t project.

He owned his grief, his disappointment with himself, and repented.

So if you want a spiritual discipline for Lent, try this one:

Lower your weapons, by which I mean withdraw your projections.

Many psychotherapists tell us that the road to personal wholeness

            begins when we withdraw our projections.

So, whoever you are demonizing, stop it – at least for 40 days.

In an election year, maybe you are demonizing Barak Obama

            or Donald Trump or some public figure.

A cool rational disagreement is good sense.

But a passionate personal animosity is probably fueled by projection.

Maybe it’s someone in your family or church or neighborhood

            who is supposedly the reason

for your anger or unhappiness.

Lower your weapons and withdraw your projections.

Maybe it’s Syrians you fear may be terrorists

            or Mexicans you think are after your job.

Maybe it’s gay people redefining your marriage

or homophobes curtailing your freedom.

Lower your weapons and withdraw your projections.

Then we’ll be ready to spend the coming 40 days

            doing some serious soul-searching,

            cultivating a healthy self-awareness.

We may find stuff in ourselves that isn’t pretty.

But we may also find the capacity to forgive ourselves

            for the shameful sin of being human.

If we practice the gentle art of forgiving ourselves,

            we will find it a lot easier to forgive someone else.

Eventually we may even forgive life itself for disappointing us,

            and set ourselves free to actually live it.  

Wouldn’t that be an Easter!

Wouldn’t that be a Resurrection! Amen.