You Got To Know When To Hold 'Em; Know When To Fold 'Em

When one of our priests, Fr. Vince O’Neil,

         was in the second grade, his teacher was a nun.

She would make little Vince stand at his desk

         and grill him on his catechism.

“Vince,” she would say, “Why did God make you?”

And Vince would answer “To know, love, and serve him.”

She would say, “That is correct. Now notice what comes first.

         Knowledge. Knowledge is the basis.

         So study, Vince, study."

Sometimes in the Eucharist we recite the summary of the law.

It comes from an exchange between Jesus and a lawyer.

The lawyer asks Jesus the greatest commandment.

Jesus answers,

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your mind,

with all your heart, and all your strength,

and . . . you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

The same summary of the law is in the teachings

         of Jesus’ contemporary, Rabbi Hillel.

Someone challenged Hillel to sum up

         the entire law while standing on one foot.

The Rabbi said, “Love the Lord your God with all your mind,

         all your soul, and all your strength.

         And love your neighbor as yourself.

         The rest is commentary. Go study.”

Rabbi Hillel said the central point is simple.

But how we live it in a complex world is complicated.

That’s why we have to start with the mind.

Jews don’t just have the summary of the law.

They don’t just have the 10 Commandments

They have 613 commandments

which amount to a lot of commentary.

The applications of those commandments

in the Mishna  and the interpretations in the Talmud

are further commentary.

So to be a good Jew, you have to study.

It is the same for Christians.

There is a lot to know.

And it all adds up to Wisdom.

The lectionary actually gives us a choice

         of three Old Testament lessons for today.

One is from Isaiah, “the Lord has given me the tongue

         of a teacher.”

Jesus was a teacher too. The apostles were teachers.

The first two spiritual gifts Paul listed in 1^st Corinthians

         were the gifts of teaching wisdom and knowledge.

The Lord sends us teachers

         because he expects us to be students.

Another possible lessons for today

 is from Proverbs.

It says, “Wisdom cries out in the street;

         In the squares she raises her voice.

         At the busiest corner she cries out . . .

         ‘How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? . . .

         I will pour out my thoughts to you.

         I will make my words known to you.”

In our third choice, the Wisdom of Solomon, we read,

         “for wisdom is a reflection of eternal light,

         a spotless mirror of the working of God . . . .”

The Jewish folk idea of Wisdom, hachma, in the Hebrew,

         evolved into a philosophy of God.

At first hachma meant knowing how to do your craft well.

There was a wisdom of the farmer,

a wisdom of the basket weaver,

         a wisdom of the camel trader.

We might say there is a wisdom of the gambler,

         that is “to know when to hold ‘em,

                  know when to fold ‘em,

                  know when to walk away,

                  know when to run.”

The writers of Scripture eventually realized

         what Wisdom teacher Kenny Rogers makes so clear.

The ways of a craft can be expanded into a way of life.

Just as a basket can be woven well or badly,

         a life can be lived well or badly.

Just as you must know certain things

         to be a good farmer, camel trader, or gambler,

         you must know certain things in order

                  to be a good human being.

By the time today’s lessons were written,

         Wisdom had come to mean a very part of God.

 Wisdom is the order of things, the pattern of the cosmos.

Wisdom is the mind of God expressed in the world.

We learn Wisdom by keeping alert to the world.

But we also learn Wisdom from the past.

Scripture and Tradition

         – the lives of the saints

         – the teachings of theologians

         – the insights of mystics

all these together are a rich storehouse of Wisdom.

We can’t learn all that in Vacation Bible School

         as children.

It’s a lifelong project.

That’s why the Episcopal Church has adopted

         the Charter for Lifelong Christian Formation

         calling on each diocese to keep educating our people

                  all their lives long.

That’s why Nevada has created

         the Frensdorff School for Christian Formation

                  to teach the teachers.

A church is a worshiping community,

         a praying community,

                  and a caring community.

But it is also a learning community.

This is a wonderful diocese.

We do lots of good ministry here.

But the adult education programs

         of all but a few of our congregations

                  are woefully behind.

We have to change that,

         and we need a few strong parishes to lead the way.

All Saints has the critical mass of people

         for a first rate adult formation program.

All Saints has people with the gift and the passion to teach.

That brings us to the point.

“Wisdom cries out in the street;

         In the squares she raises her voice.

         At the busiest corner she cries out . . . “

God invites us to learn Wisdom’s ways

         so that we can live better, fuller lives.

In our Baptismal vows we promise

         “to continue in the Apostle’s teaching.”

There are two ways we can do that.

We can teach or we can study.

We need to know the Bible.

We need to know that fundamentalism

         is not the old way of reading the Bible.

It was invented between 1910 and 1915.

The first theologians taught that each text

         must be read on four different levels – not literally.

Fundamentalism is neither orthodox nor mainstream.

Did you know that the idea that whatever happens

         is part of God’s plan is a highly debated point

                  in Christianity?

Do you know why we bring the bread and wine

         from the back of the Church to the altar?

It means something – something profoundly important.

Most of the divisions in the Church today

         come from the failure to study and to think.

So, study, brothers and sisters.

It is fascinating stuff we have to teach.

It will touch your hearts as well as your minds.

It will change your life.

Wisdom’s ways are the Way of Christ.

Thanks be to God.    

St. James On Why We Are Here

This weekend, we will welcome several new people

         into our community of faith.

They will become part of us and share our identity.

So today is a good time to consider who we are.

Just what is our shared identity?

The bottom line is we believe in Jesus.

We trust in Jesus.

We follow Jesus.

We are people who want to be like Jesus.

That’s basic.

But sometimes we get it wrong.

We think believing in Jesus is just having an opinion.

We say, “Jesus is Lord,” and think that’s the end of it.

James wrote his letter to a church

      that thought the same thing.

They wanted to just believe in Jesus

          without letting it change anything.

But James said, “That isn’t possible.”

“Do you,” he asked, “with your acts of favoritism

        really believe in . . . Jesus. . .?”

The church folks had their doctrine straight,

         but they didn’t care much about the poor.

Well, James thought they ought to care about the poor.

But it’s more than that.

James says you can’t believe in Jesus

       without being seriously committed to the poor.

It isn’t just a nice thing to do.

It is constitutive of our very identity.

It’s what it means to be a Christian.

That’s because of who Jesus is.

First of all, Jesus was poor.

The Biblical evidence is abundant

       – the poor person’s temple offering

         when he was a baby,

         the holy family’s flight to Egypt with no belongings,

         Jesus saying he had no home,

         his burial in another man’s tomb.

If that evidence were not enough,

         St. Paul writes, “He became poor.”

If you are amused by people doing mental gymnastics

         to avoid the obvious,

         it’s fun to read fundamentalists like Oral Roberts

         trying to prove that Jesus was rich.

The Scriptures about his poverty, unlike all other Scriptures,

are not to be taken literally.

Jesus identified with the poor.

He said how we treat the poor is how we treat him.

Matthew 25: “I was hungry and you fed me,

         I was thirsty and you gave me drink.

         I was an alien and your sheltered me. . . .

         Whenever you did such things for the least

                  of these, you did it for me.”

The Christian moral lodestar is what would Jesus do?

What did he do when people were hungry?

He fed them.

Today, Sept. 9, 2012, 16,000 children will die of malnutrition.

16,000 more children will die tomorrow,

        and 16,000 more the day after that.

What would Jesus do?

When people were sick, he healed them.

When people were paralyzed by guilt, he forgave them.

When they were shut out from the group,

he befriended them and invited them in.

When they lacked knowledge, he taught them.

If we believe in Jesus, we follow him.

We do what he did.

This isn’t just for the Outreach Committee.

It’s what Christians do.

To sign on as a member of the Episcopal Church

         is to enlist in God’s mission

                  as our Church understands it.

There’s a simple checklist for what we do.

It’s the 5 Marks of Mission

adopted for the worldwide Anglican Communion

in 1984 and reaffirmed in 1990.

The Episcopal Church adopted them officially in 2009.

It’s simple:

1.   Evangelism: proclaim the good news of the Kingdom.

2.   Formation: teach, baptize, and nurture new believers.

3.   Benevolence: respond to human need with loving service.

4.   Advocacy; transform unjust structures in society

5.   Environmental stewardship: sustain and renew the life

of the earth.

I warn you there’s a 6^th Mark in the pipeline:

         Reconciliation: making peace in a war torn world.

 That is what we exist to do.

I recently heard a parish leader say our purpose

         Is to offer familiar rituals to provide a “comfort zone.”

I heard another parish leader say she comes to church

         because the beautiful setting makes her

                  “feel so spiritual.”

 I understand the need to reduce our stress.

But the Church is not here to provide an escape

         from the world.

The Church is here to be Christ in the world.

In Communion, we take Christ’s life into us

         so that we can live his life in the world.

 But many of us feel cut off from our mission.

Modern culture has redefined religion.

We have constricted faith to narrower and narrower

         fields of concern until Christianity

                  has become irrelevant to real life.

Matters of money and power are not our concern.

Matters of peace and justice are not our concern.

Real issues are the exclusive province of secular authority.

Faith is limited to people’s private feelings

         and now that jurisdiction

has been entrusted to psychiatry.

The remaining pallid ghost of Christianity is irrelevant

to anything people care about – like jobs and education.

No wonder so many young people have lost interest.

We aren’t interesting because we are not in the game.

Christians feel eviscerated by the separation of Church & State.

That separation is a theological principle taught

by a Baptist preacher Roger Williams

of colonial Rhode Island.

But let me tell you something:

Roger Williams never intended to exclude the voice

         of faith from issues of justice and mercy in society.

He was engaged in those issues  

up to his eyeballs his whole life.

In 1908 his Baptist follower, Walter Rauschenbusch,

         began a Social Gospel movement in Hell’s Kitchen

         that spread all over this country applying Christian ethics

                  to schools, child labor, racism, alcoholism,

                  and a host of social ills.

In 1955 a young black Baptist preacher

in Montgomery, Alabama got the idea

that Jesus cared whether the city buses were segregated.

That would be Jesus the Jew who healed the Gentile child

In today’s lesson and desegregated Jacob’s well

In the story of the Samaritan woman.

 Across the waters,

Victorian England was divided by an argument  

         between two rival moral visions.

One was the heartless Social Darwinism

of English agnostic philosopher Herbert Spencer.

It was the philosophical defense of industrial tycoons’

         exploitation of the poor in sweat shops.

The opposing vision came from a Christian,

an Anglican novelist, Charles Dickens,

supported by our greatest theologian,

                  Frederick Dennison Maurice.

The voices of Dickens and Maurice echo

         in the Five Marks of Mission.

The voices of Moses, Amos, Isaiah, and Joel

         echo in the Five Marks of Mission.

 The voices of Roger Williams, Walter Rauschenbusch,

         and Dr. King echo in the Five Marks of Mission.

But most importantly, the life of Jesus echoes today

         In the Five Marks of Mission.

That’s who we are.

That’s why we’re here.