The Luck Of The Irish?

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

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!

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.