Wash Your Hands And Study

Proper 19.Grace in the Desert
I don’t want to take sides on any political issues
because I don’t want to offend either Fr. Dale or Fr. Sherm.
But sometimes public events are good jumping off places
for religious points.

This week the President gave his welcomed
the nation’s youth and children back to school.
He made two basic points:
Students should wash their hands frequently
and study hard.

His remarks were controversial.
Some commentators were surprised that anyone
such a speech could be divisive.
But, as one who has worked in the church for two decades,
I was not surprised at all.


Just last Spring, during the first wave of swine flu anxiety,
I sent a letter to our priests urging them
to wash their hands.
It immediately sparked a controversy.
Some felt I had gone too far.
Others thought I had not gone nearly far enough.

So I am not going to talk about hand washing today.
For one thing, our Scripture lessons are not about it.
For another, from what we can find about hand washing
in the Bible, it looks like Jesus was against it.

So we will not talk about hand washing.
That leaves us with studying.
Our Old Testament lesson is about study.
There are actually things we need to know
in order to live the Christian life.


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.
But the same summary of the law is in the teachings
of Jesus’ contemporary, Rabbi Hillel.
Someone challenged Hillel to summarize
the entire law while standing on one foot.



The great 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.
So Jews don’t just have the summary of the law.
The rest of the 613 commandments are commentary.
So are the applications in the Mishna
and the interpretations in the Talmud.
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 Lord sends us teachers
because he expects us to be students.

The other lessons are from the Wisdom literature
of the Old Testament.
In Proverbs, “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.”



And in the Wisdom of Solomon we read,
“for wisdom is a reflection of eternal light,
a spotless mirror of the working of God . . . .”

The Jewish 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 a basket can be woven well or badly,
just so, 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.

Scriptures and Tradition
– the lives of the saints are
– 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.

And that’s one of the reasons I am so glad
that the good people of Grace in the Desert
have built your new Parish Hall.
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.
Grace has the critical mass of people
for a first rate adult formation program.
Grace has people with the gift and the passion to teach.
Grace has lacked only one thing:
the place to house the program.
In only a few weeks, you will have then place.
But one thing yet is lacking – the students.
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 earliest theologians taught that each text
must be read on four different level – not literally.


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. Amen.

A Unique, Irreplaceable Word Of God

Proper 16b

In today’s lesson from Ephesians
Paul urges us to gird ourselves for spiritual battle.
He says strap on your gun belt
but you need a different kind of gun
because this is different kind of enemy.

We are not fighting against flesh and blood.//
That means we are not fighting against each other.
We are not fighting the people in our family.
We are not fighting our neighbors
or the members of the other political party.
We are not fighting Iraqis or Afghans.

We are fighting against “the cosmic powers of this present darkness.”
We are fighting against “the spiritual forces of evil.”
That sounds pretty dramatic.
It sounds like Lord of the Rings stuff.

When Paul talks about spiritual warfare,
it can include big cosmic struggles.
But spiritual warfare also happens
in subtle every day ways.
Anyone who has read C. S. Lewis’s classic,
The Screwtape Letters,
knows that evil flourishes in the mundane
habits of everyday life.
A little malice here, an ounce of slot there,
and before you know it,
you’ve got a soul on the path to perdition.

So let’s look at spiritual warfare in ordinary daily life.
As usual, Jesus is our best example.
I stand in awe of his words and actions in today’s lesson.
He has just taught them about the Eucharist.
He has said, “Whoever eats me will live. . . . “


Well the crowd did not understand.
It sounded like cannibalism to them,
and they were repulsed.
Up to now, the Jesus movement had been gaining momentum,
but this was a crisis.
Jesus had offended the crowd.
He was on the verge of losing them.

I have been in that position more than once.
You know what I have usually done.
I have started back pedaling – or explaining.
“No. No,” I would have said,
“I didn’t mean that. It’s just a metaphor.
If that doesn’t work for you,
forget it about it.
Let’s talk about something nice,
like the shepherd knowing all his little sheep by name.”


In the face of conflict,
I would have rushed lickety split
to smooth things out.
But Jesus didn’t do that.
He said, “Does that offend you.
Well wait until you hear this.
And he told them even more astounding things
about himself.
He added “if you don’t believe it,
you just haven’t been blessed by God
with the ability to get these things.”

That’s when most of Jesus’ followers said,
“It’s been real. We’re out of here.”
When Jesus saw that he still had 12 followers left,
He said “What are you guys doing here?
Don’t you want to leave too?”


But Peter said,
“Where would we go?
You have the words of eternal life.
You are the Holy One of God.”

The most striking thing about this story
isn’t Jesus’ shocking teaching.
It’s how solid Jesus was in himself,
how ready he was to tell the truth,
the pure unvarnished truth
without regard to how it would play in the press.

Jesus was the human dwelling place of God
because he was pure 100% unadulterated Jesus.
In the presence of the Pharisees, he was Jesus.
In the presence of the Sadducees, he was Jesus.
In the presence of Galilean fishermen, King Herod,
Pontius Pilate or his own best friends, he was always Jesus.
He didn’t need anyone’s approval or permission to be Jesus.

So what’s that got to do with Christianity in general
and spiritual warfare in particular?
Just this. God made us to be ourselves.
Theologian Karl Rahner said,
“Each of us is a unique irreplaceable word of God.”
That means we speak God,
we reveal God precisely by being ourselves.
If we are not ourselves, then who will be us?

If we are not ourselves, a unique irreplaceable word of God
will never be spoken. Never.
St. Ignatius Loyola said,
“All things glorify God by being themselves.”
To the extent we fail to be ourselves,
God is not glorified.



St. Ireneaus of Lyons said,
“The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”
To the extent, we are not fully alive,
God is not glorified.

Do you see how this leads to spiritual warfare?
We rarely kill, steal, or worship idols.
But the struggle to be oneself – that’s a challenge.

Why is it so hard to be our unique selves?
Paul says, we have enemies standing in our way.
He calls them “the cosmic powers of this present darkness . . . .
the spiritual forces of evil.”

How do comic power and spiritual forces
work to keep us from being ourselves?
Let’s start with all the cultural messages that tell us
what men and women are supposed to be.
Let’s start with all the social definitions of success.
I spent the first 40 year of my life
mad at God for making me who I am
instead of a movie star hero.
I let Hollywood and Madison Avenue
tell me what I was supposed to be
instead of seeing myself through God’s eyes.

Hollywood and Madison Avenue were the cosmic powers
and spiritual forces – or at least their agents.
They made me ashamed and afraid to be myself.

Then there is all the negative feedback
we get from family and even friends,
telling us lies about who we are.
We see ourselves through their eyes,
not God’s eyes.
That keeps us from even knowing ourselves accurately.


So how do we fight against the spiritual powers
that want more than anything to prevent us
from being who we are?
Where do we get the grace to be ourselves,
to live out of our true selves,
to glorify God by being fully alive?

Paul says we must “take the shield of faith
which will quench the arrows of the evil one.”//
Faith means trusting that God has made us
precisely the way God wants us to be.
Faith comes from discovering that God loves us,
not in a pitying tolerating way,
but God enjoys us just the way we are.





The courage to be ourselves
comes from knowing that the world
has no jurisdiction over us.
The judgments of the world don’t count.
God’s judgment counts,
and God has judged us good.
God has declared us worthy.

God is greater than Hollywood, Madison Avenue,
our families, and social definitions of success.
“If God is for us,
who can be against us?” Paul asked.
The answer is: Nobody.
Thanks be to God. Amen.

A Life Worthy Of Your Calling

Proper 12b.09/ St. Peter’s
The gospel message is too big for any one generation.
That’s why each generation of Christians discovers
more good news, more grace in the New Testament.
Sometimes a forgotten part of the tradition
is suddenly remembered or rediscovered,
and takes on new life with a renewed meanng
for a new day.
That’s what has happened with MOAB,
the Ministry of All the Baptized.

In the 1940’s, there were major discoveries in archaeology
– the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library,
for example.
We learned a lot about how the first Christians
went about being the Church.
We discovered that the first Christians were all ministers,
not spiritual consumers sitting at the feet of an elite clergy.
They were all ministers and their ministry is what made them whole.



Mutual ministry gave meaning to their lives.
Shared service taught them wisdom.
It exercised their characters so that they grew in virtue.
They become stronger, healthier, saner, holier people.

In the 1960’s, the movement to bring back that kind of vitality
in the life of the laity took off.
Ministry of All Baptized was especially strong in the West,
thanks to the Western School of Ministry
founded by Bill Spofford of Idaho,
Dean of St. Michael’s Cathedral in Boise,
and by the Dean of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Salt Lake,
a guy named Wes Frensdorff.

But the Ministry of All Baptized wasn’t just a local fad.
It was the driving force in Vatican II.
It dramatically changed our ecumenical theology of Baptism
in a major agreement in Lima, Peru in 1968.




After the Lima Statement,
Baptism ceased to be a private rite, a family bonding moment.
Instead Baptism became the central event in the life of the congregation,
and an initiation into the largest and most important
order of ministry.

And so, today when we consecrate this building,
to house St. Patrick’s Church,
we read our lessons in a new light.
These are the perfect lessons to mark this day
in your parish life
because St. Patrick’s is shifting its spiritual gears.
St. Patrick’s is making a spiritual shift directly parallel
to the spiritual shift today’s lessons
invite us to make in our personal lives.
The dedication and generosity of so many of you
have set this Church free from struggling
to maintain itself for itself.
You have set this Church free
to grow up spiritually,
and so become a center of transformation
where each of the members can grow up.
That’s s what today’s lessons are about.
Last week, we heard how hungry people flocked to Jesus,
and he miraculously fed them.
Today, we see them back again, hoping for more food.
Jesus is manifestly frustrated.

They hadn’t gotten the point.
He didn’t intend to transform bread just to up their calorie intake.
He was showing them what transformation looks like,
so they could be transformed themselves,
so they could manifest the power of God in their lives.
But they just kept trying to manipulate him
into meeting their needs.

We shouldn’t be too hard on them.
Most of us begin the spiritual life as consumers.
It may not be literal food we are after.
It’s more likely to be peace of mind, serenity,
a sense of being unconditionally accepted.
Most of us begin the spiritual life
trying to get our needs met.

At first, we get what we want.
Christ meets us where we are,
gives us graces and consolations,
heals our wounds and feeds our hunger.

But it isn’t quite enough.
Our spiritual needs come back.
We find ourselves once again restless.
And that’s a good thing.
This is the point for a crucial transition in the spiritual life.
Many people never make it.
They stay stuck at the consumer level of faith,
even though it isn’t really working for them anymore.
To move on, it takes a paradoxical shift.

The paradox is that our spiritual needs
get met far more deeply when we forget about them,
and go to work doing something for someone else.
The wounds in our souls heal while we aren’t looking.
Our weakened spirits grow strong
while we aren’t working on our spirituality.

A simple example:
If we want to learn a little something about a subject,
we can learn a little by attending a class on it.
If we want to really learn a subject all the way,
we volunteer to teach the class.
That’s how the Ministry of All Baptized
makes us all stronger, wiser, healthier, and holier.

This is what St. Paul pleads for in our Epistle lesson.
Invoking the language of baptism,
“one Lord, one Faith, one baptism”, he says,
“I . . . beg you to live a life worthy of your calling . . . . “
(W)e must grow up in every way.”

How do we grow up? He answers that each of us
is called by God to a special form of ministry.
Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel were called to be prophets.
Paul, himself, was called to be the apostle to the gentiles.
Just so, every Christian, at baptism, is called to a ministry.



Paul says,
The gifts (God) gave were that some would be apostles,
some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers,
to equip the saints for the work of ministry.
That list covers some of the most common ministries in the Church.
But there are others.
In 1st Corinthians, he gives a different list.
Different places need different ministries.

What do you suppose would be on Paul’s list
if he were writing to St. Patrick’s, Incline Village?
In the mysterious Providence of God,
the ministries that are needed here
are aligned with the gifts and talents
of this community of faith.

I don’t know what they are.
Do you need spiritual directors, pastoral care givers,
health care ministers, ministers of healing prayer?



Is there anyone who gets the notices from
Episcopal Public Policy Network
and organizes this congregation to advocate
on behalf of the social justice issues
where our Church has made a stand?
Do you need a minister to visit the elderly?

Do you need a visual arts ministry to make grace
visible as beauty?
Van Gogh and Caravaggio have told me more about God
than any sermon.
Or do you need mentors to companion new members?

The General Convention has just created
the new licensed ministry of lay evangelist?
So I know that every one of our parishes needs that lay minister,
and none of us have one yet.

I don’t know what ministries are needed here.
I certainly don’t know what particular ministry
is your calling.

But I do know this,
if you are baptized, you are called
– called to serve God by serving God’s people
in your own special way.
And I know your calling, your form of services,
is unique.

Theologian, Karl Rahner, said,
“Each of us is a unique irreplaceable word of God.”
Brothers and sisters, each of you
is “a unique irreplaceable word of God.”
If you do not live into your calling,
that word of God will never be spoken.
Only you can speak it.

So I implore you to discern and then to act.
“I . . . beg you to live a life worthy of your calling . . . .”





We dedicate this building to be a holy place.
But it will take more than rituals to make it holy
It will take personal transformation – it will take spiritual growth
from just being recipients of grace
to being agents of grace.
This Church becomes holy by becoming
what Fr. Jim calls a “Church for others.”

This will not be a sacrifice of our own spiritual life,
but a fulfillment of it.
Rabbi Hillel said,
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
But if I am only for myself, who am I?
If not now, when?”

So when will we plunge out into the life for others?
“Now” is the best possible time.
It is in fact, the only time.
Amen.