The Inferiority Of Goodness

Our Old Testament lesson about Elijah cursing Ahab
is gratifying in the same way a Die Hard movie is gratifying.
We like to see the bad guy get his comeuppance.

But theologically, it is a real problem.
It says that if we commit sin we will suffer misfortune
for it here in this earthly life as punishment.
The implied corrolary is that if we suffer misfortune,
it’s a punishment for our sins.
God gives us cancer or wipes out our savings
and may even afflict our children just to punish us.

It did not take the Jewish people long
to recognize that things don’t really work that way.
The world is not that rational or that fair.
Good people suffer hardships while bad people often flourish.
The idea of God punishing sin with suffering
fell apart and was rejected in the Hebrew Scriptures
long before the birth of Jesus.
Jesus said his Father caused the sun to shine
and the rain to fall on good and evil alike.

God is not in the business of retribution.
But sin nonetheless has its weight and its consequences.
There is a moral order to the universe.
Great philosophers like Kant proved it through logic.
Even atheists like Greg Epstein insist that there is
a moral order we need to obey.

We may argue about whether some things are right or wrong.
But we all know there is such a thing as right and wrong.
Otherwise we couldn’t be having the argument.

When we violate that moral order,
we put ourselves out of step, out of synch.
Something gets twisted inside us
and in our relationships with others.
God may not be lurking around to zap us with a disease
or an accident if we do something wrong.
But the very nature of things gives sin a consequence.


Buddhists call it karma.
Secularists say “what goes around comes around.”
If nothing else, we suffer a wound in ourselves.
We want to think we are good people.
When we do wrong, one of two things happens:
Our self-respect is broken; or
We preserve our self-respect by lying to ourselves,
or devising false justifications.
So we cut ourselves off from the truth.

You know what I miss about being young?
It isn’t so much being stronger, better looking,
and having more hair.
It isn’t even having so much life to look forward to.
It’s that I was so sure of my own righteousness.
I miss being morally sure of myself.

Just one example from many possible examples:
Before I was a parent, I saw what a lousy job
most parents were doing and knew how much better
I would be.
When my children were born, I set out to be so much better
a father than my father had been.
But I was not.

Knowing there were worse fathers doesn’t help much.
Sometimes I was too angry. Sometimes I was too neglectful.
Other times I was too attentive in an anxious unhelpful way.
Often I was too ready to push my children
to succeed at what I wanted so they’d make me proud.
I was in short, pretty bad at parenting.
It is only by the grace of God my children came out
to be the good people they are today.

With the passing years, moral and spiritual failures add up.
Regrets add up.
They add up in every relationship and in every part of our lives.

For those who are comfortable in their righteousness,
the gospel of Jesus Christ may not have much appeal.
They have constructed a self that they are proud of.
They may not feel the need of Jesus.
When I was a recycling vegetarian politically correct young man
I didn’t feel the need of Jesus either.

But I don’t honestly believe we can live without guilt.
I don’t believe even the strongest and best of us can do that
for two reasons.
First, we have to live in human society
and the structures of society are unjust.
The greatest American theologian of the 20th Century,
Reinhold Niebuhr, taught us that we cannot be moral people
in an immoral society.
For example, if the whole world were given the chance
to consume what North America and Western Europe consume,
it would take 5 planets with the earth’s resources
to meet the demand.
How can we justify that?

The second reason we can’t dodge guilt
is that life is morally complicated.
Often the choices we face are not between right and wrong,
but between wrong and worse.
Even if we do our best in those situations,
we come out with a moral remainder.
I don’t know how we can get through life with clean hands.
So a lot of us live with regret.

For us, the gospel is not just good news
– it’s the best news we can imagine.
That brings us to our lesson about the sinner woman
and Simon the Pharisee.
The woman is a forgiven sinner who loves Jesus more than her own life.
Simon is a righteous man, sure enough of himself
to judge the woman as sinner and Jesus as a false prophet.
– sneering at them both from his morally superior seat.

So Jesus tells Simon the parable of the two debtors,
which concludes that he, who has been forgiven much, loves much.
He, who has been forgiven little, loves little.

Jesus does not say Simon has sinned.
He does not accuse Simon of being morally numb to his own failings.
He lets Simon’s self-assessment stand. So we must do the same.
Simon is innocent.
But because he is innocent, he has only his pride to keep him warm.
He has been forgiven little; and so he loves little.

The sinner woman has lost her pride but gained her Savior.
Contrition has broken her heart open to Jesus.
Being forgiven has healed her wounds and more:
It has given her with the capacity to love.
So what is life about anyway – a zero defects score
on some spiritual foreman’s clipboard?
William Blake said “we are put on earth a little space
that we might learn to bear the beams of love.”
That’s what life is about.

We “bear the beams of love” when we can endure them,
when we accept the love of Christ who does not set standards
we have to meet to win his approval
but rather loves us as we are.
We “bear the beams of love” when we carry them
to each other as merciful compassion.

That’s what happens when we give up measuring our worth
by our righteousness.
We stop living in pride and start living in love.

The love of Jesus is better than being blameless,
better than moral confidence.
The point of the gospel is just this:
It is better to be forgiven than innocent.

Every time we come to the communion rail,
we surrender our claims to righteousness
and accept his mercy.
God open our hearts to receive his grace
that it may flower in us as the love of Christ.
God grant us the gift to forgive as we have been forgiven
and love each other as we have been loved.

Amen.

Survival Mentality

Some stories become New York Times best sellers,
but we forget them two years later.
Some stories become blockbuster movies,
but 2 years later we cannot remember the plot.
Then there are stories like Elijah and the widow of Zarephath
that were being told hundreds of years before Jesus
– and here we are, thousands of year later
on the other side of the world, listening to it again today.

Some stories keep our attention through the ages because
they are deep and universal.
They say something about important about us.

The widow had no earthly means of support.
Even in a good economy, she would have been poor.
But a terrible drought had stricken the land; so things were even worse.


She had just enough food left
to make one last paltry meal for herself and her child.
She planned to make that meal, then die.

If you asked the widow what she was trying to do,
it was just to survive.
All she could think of keeping body and soul together another day.

That may not sound like it applies to most of us.
But for reasons having to do with how our brains work,
it actually does.
Whenever we feel devalued by others,
it indirectly triggers the same survival anxiety
in our brain stem as a threat to our life.
It goes back to the way our brains got wired
when we were still in the crib.
We need to know we are loved, valued, and respected.


Stretching our paycheck to make ends meet is not enough.
We need to know we are well thought of,
that people want us here.
If they want us here on condition that we measure up to their standards,
well, we aren’t all that secure, are we?
What if we slip? What if we fail to measure up someday?
Or what if they change the standards?

Great psychologists like Otto Rank, Ernst Becker, and Roberto Asagioli
all agreed that fear of rejection is a kind of death fear.
Our lives get trapped in trying to fit in so we will survive
– not just physically, but emotionally.
We all get caught in that trap either because
other people don’t value us
or they value us on condition that we measure up
to their standards.
So we are all a bit like the widow of Zarephath, trying to survive.


The problem is that isn’t much of a life.
It isn’t our real self that people value
because they never see it.
We live a false life, a constricted life, watching our steps.

I don’t read the men’s magazines like GQ and Esquire anymore
but from what I see on the covers,
they are still about how to get women to love you
and men to admire you.
The covers of the women’s magazines look the same.
It’s all a list of desperate strategies for emotional survival.

There is only one cure for that, only one way out.
It is the unconditional love of God.
It’s God who created us as we are because he loves us this way.
When the Bible says God is loves
or that God loves the world,
the word it uses for love doesn’t mean our kind of affection.

It doesn’t mean the warm feeling we have for someone
who meets our needs or conforms to our standards of lovability.
It means delight in someone for being their own unique self.

God’s love is absolute and unlimited.
If we didn’t measure up to God’s standard of lovability,
we wouldn’t be here, because it’s God’s love
that keeps us here.
Without the love of God, we’d blink out of existence
like dying fireflies.

God’s love keeps us here.
Faith in God’s love sets us free.
But it’s hard to have faith in that kind of love
unless we have caught a little glimpse of it.

That’s where the Church comes in.
We are agents of divine love, ambassadors of divine love,
conduits of God’s grace.
We are here to be the place that doesn’t judge,
the family that takes people in
whether they are the pillar of the community
or the derelict off the street.

We are here to look at people with God’s eyes
delighting in them, caring for them,
valuing their presence on this earth.
That’s what Elijah did for the widow of Zarephath.
He told her she didn’t need her survival strategies.
She didn’t even need the makings of her last meal.
Just trust God because God loves you.
It was a radical message – a crazy message.
But she believed it and she lived.

That’s what the Church is here to do for people.
But there’s a problem, isn’t there?


You take a lot of people with survival mentality,
put ‘em together and what have you got?
A church with survival mentality.

Sometimes when I talk with congregation’s about their mission,
they say straight out, it’s “survival.”
We are just trying to keep the doors open.
It’s easy to understand that feeling.
It’s a natural response to the world we are in.

But there are some downsides to a survivalist mission.
The first is that the survivalist mission is the proven fastest way
to extinction.
Jesus said it plain and simple,
“Whoever tries to save his live will lose it.”
That applies to churches too.



But the real problem with a survivalist mentality
for either a church or an individual
is that it makes us look at people in a bad way.
We are here to see people through God’s eyes.
But if we are fretting over getting our own needs met,
then we look at people in terms of how they can help us
with our agenda.

Instead of seeing a beloved child of God broken and in pain,
we see a potential Sunday School teacher,
a potential junior warden,
or worst of all a potential pledge unit.
Once we look at someone that way,
we fail in our mission to be a channel of blessing,
agents of God’s unconditional love.
That pushes the people we look at even deeper
Into their own survival mentalities.


So what are we to do?
We all have a streak of survivalist personality in us.
It comes with the way our brain stem is shaped.
It comes with the world having failed to love us
with God’s kind of love.
We are all broken this way.

The only way out, brothers and sisters, is faith.
The only way out is to practice trust in God’s boundless mercy
and the unbelievably good news that God loves us,
right now, as we are -- even with our survival personalities.

God loves us whether we believe it or not,
but to the extent we truly believe it, truly trust it,
we are free to be our authentic selves.
And we are free to enjoy other people for who they are.



In our burial rite, we recite St. Paul’s words that set us free from the trap.
“If we live, we live unto the Lord.
If we die, we die unto the Lord.
Whether we live, therefore, or whether we die,
we are the Lord’s.”
That’s what matters. It means we are alright already.
Amen.

Still Here

John’s Gospel is impossible to really understand.
That’s because he didn’t write it to explain things.
He wrote it to blow our minds with strange and wonderful ways
of imagining God, ourselves, and our relationship with God.

In today’s lesson, Jesus says that he and the Father are one,
that he lives in the Father and the Father lives in him.
Right away that’s hard to grasp.
Then he prays that we -- that’s you and me --
that we may be one just like Jesus and the Father.

Obviously we are not the same.
We live in different bodies and different places.
We each have our own different life story.
We have different thoughts and feelings.
We look different.


But Jesus prays that, underneath all the differences,
we might be connected by something we have down deep
in common.
The way that happens, he says, is that he lives in us,
and the Father lives in him.
So we all have the same Christ – not just ruling over us,
but living inside us.

That is the most amazing thing of all – the idea that Christ
should live in us just as God lives in Jesus.
We cannot begin to understand such a thing;
yet in Baptism, we welcome Christ into our lives,
and in Holy Communion we experience that bond
each week.

We cannot wrap our minds around this holy mystery.
But there may be little part of it
we might be able to understand in a way
that will help us live each day.

So I start by asking: where do we find Christ inside ourselves?
In the midst of all the thoughts and feelings
racing, chattering, and swirling in the chaos of myself,
where do I find Christ?

It’s John’s Gospel that says Christ lives in us;
so it helps to see how John describes Christ.
In John, our Lord is not an angry prophet.
He is always the serene, balanced, observer and interpreter.
He is the embodiment of wisdom.

Remember when they brought him the woman caught in adultery
and demanded to know whether she should be stoned.
He did not jump up and shout “you hypocrites.”
Instead he sat in silence writing in the dust with his finger
then said, “Let the one of you who is without sin
cast the first stone.”


In the Garden of Gethsemene, the mob came to arrest him.
Jesus went out to meet them and calmly said,
“Who are you looking for?”
They replied “Jesus.” He said, “You’ve found him.”
And that threw the mob into complete confusion.
Even at his trial and crucifixion, Jesus remained balanced.

In John’s Gospel, Christ is the eye of the storm,
or as T. S. Eliot put it, “the still point of the turning world.”
There is something stable at the center of reality.
So much is constantly shifting and changing
inside us and around us.
Things always seem to be falling apart.

And yet 14 billion years after the Big Bang,
we still have an orderly cosmos.
Something holds it together.
There is something in the universe preserving a balance,
holding things together.
It is a sane center inside the madness,
a calm compassion inside the violence.
That is what John means by Christ
– the Christ who became flesh in Jesus.

This serene center, this wisdom, this Christ also lives in us.
He lives in us deeper than our conscious minds.
The late psychologist, John Firman, said that there is in each of us
“a deeper source of wisdom and guidance,
a source that operates beyond the control
of the conscious personality. . . .”

There is something in us deeper than our thoughts and feelings,
something that holds us together no matter
what kind of experience we are having at the moment.
This center of our souls is so connected to the center of the universe
that they are truly the same thing.


In the 14th Century, the German mystic, Meister Eckhart, said,
“there is something in the soul so closely akin to God
that it is already one with him.”
And Lady Julian of Norwich, said that the soul and Christ
are already bound to each other.

Parts of our personalities split away from our souls.
We are not always true to ourselves,
and that’s where we get into trouble.
John Firman said that our psychological distress
comes from disregarding that deep wisdom
we already have inside.
But a part of us, the central part of us,
the most important part of us
is already one with Christ.

When St. Paul found that he had lost all the other things
that he had counted on to make him secure and important,
he said, “I have been crucified with Christ, and yet I live --
No not I -- It is Christ who lives in me.”

The wisdom and serenity of Christ depend
on his capacity for a special kind of love.
We usually think of love as an emotionally intense approval
of someone who is what we need them to be
or they are how we think they ought to be.
That kind of love can flip in the blink of an eye
when the person does not live up to our expectations.

But Christ – both in the universe and in us – has a different kind of love.
John used a special word for it. Agape.
It means appreciating someone for just for being here.
It does not judge. It accepts unconditionally.
That love is the force that keeps this world turning.
That love sustains our life.
Because Christ lives in us, we can love like that.
We can love people the world rejects.
We can love ourselves – each and every part of ourselves.
We can forgive ourselves and each other.
We can be the still point for ourselves and each other.

It’s like in our lesson from Acts, when after the earthquake,
the jailer is about to kill himself.
Paul calls out to him, “Calm down. We’re still here.”
That’s the voice of Christ and we can say it to ourselves
and to each other in any situation,
“Calm down. We’re still here.”

When we are true to the core of our being,
when we are true to Christ,
that is precisely what we do.
Oh, we forget more often than we remember.
We forget who we are, forget Our Lord.
We judge and condemn each other.
We judge and condemn ourselves ever more harshly.

But Christ is still there, still the center.
And we can still choose to remember,
still choose to look at ourselves and each other
through his eyes.
We can love the whole creation the way the Father loves Christ,
the way Christ loves us -- unconditionally.
There is such peace in that, such balance,
to be rooted in a love that does not shift,
in which, as it says in James,
“there is no variableness, no shadow of turning.”

In Baptism, we welcome the Christ who is already here.
We promise to live out of that center,
to let deep wisdom guide us
instead of our passing moods.
With every Holy Communion, we deepen that connection
opening our hearts to his mercy
and our minds to his sanity.

Glory to God whose power working in us
can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.
Amen.