On Such A Winter's Day

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

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

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.