Strange People, Strange Passions

Strange People, Strange Passions.

Our lessons are about hospitality
– Abraham and Sarah entertaining God in the guise of 3 men
in their tent under the oaks of Mamre
– Mary and Martha entertaining Jesus at their home in Bethany.

Hospitality wasn’t something we talked about
in the Baptist Church of my childhood.
Hospitality was associated with Southern Living Magazine,
not the Bible.
It was something they taught in home economics.
So as a chauvinistic young Texan, I didn’t respect it.

I still remember the first Episcopal sermon I ever heard
on hospitality.
It was about the mustard seed that grew into a tree,
extending its branches to welcome the birds.
I thought the priest was reducing the gospel to something trivial.

But it wasn’t trivial to him. He was Japanese,
and the Japanese make an art of hospitality.
It is a spirituality expressed in the tea ceremony ritual.
In Japan, hospitality isn’t just a nice thing social custom.
It’s a spiritual thing,
.
Later I learned that hospitality was the core
of Benedictine spiritual practice.
Benedictine monasteries were open to anyone.
The monks’ job was to welcome and serve
those who came their way.
They housed and cared for travelers, the sick, and the dying.
Hostels, hospitals, and hospices are all centers of hospitality
born of the Benedictine tradition.
For them too, it was a spiritual thing.

Last of all, I learned that hospitality was the highest moral duty
in Ancient Civilizations like the Greeks
in Homer’s time and before.
It was the highest moral duty of desert dwellers in the Middle East
during the days of Abraham and Jesus.
Hospitality was the path to wholeness and holiness.
So it is important to get it right, both in church and at home.
It is important to get it right,
so let’s see what we can learn from our two stories.

Abraham was sitting at the entrance to his tent
when he saw three strangers,
and immediately asked for the privilege of being their host.
He was not just willing – he was eager
– to serve the stranger at his gate.
So Abraham and Sarah bustled about baking cakes,
butchering beef, pouring milk, setting the table.
It was a busy, scurrying kind of welcome.

There is something good in that.
It is active caring, practical caring, comfort-giving work.
But it can go wrong.

Maybe Martha had read Genesis
because she welcomed Jesus the same way.
She was scurrying about too, fretting over getting it all right.
She was so intent on her practice of hospitality
that she wasn’t paying any attention to her guest.
She was, the Bible says, “distracted by many things.”
Blessed Martha is the patron saint of multi-tasking.

But do you see the problem?
How would you feel if your arrival set your host in a dither?
Her dither says you are a nuisance, a burden.

Now Mary practiced a different kind of hospitality.
The Bible says, “She sat at Jesus’ feet and listened to him.”//

Martha, was in a state, all frustrated and ruffled.
She saw Mary just taking it all in and it made her angry
– so angry that she reprimanded someone.
Notice she didn’t even reprimand her lazy sister.
She reprimanded Jesus. “Lord do you not care . . . .?” she demanded.
She was working so hard at being a host, she went from ignoring her guest
to yelling at him.

We might see it as a problem yelling at the Savior.
But that isn’t the problem Luke wants us to see.
It’s that she’s yelling at her guest.
Hospitality can turn itself inside out.

Jesus said, “Settle down now Martha.
You are worried and distracted by many things.
But only one thing is needed.
Mary has chosen the better part.”

You see Mary paid attention to Jesus.
She sat down and listened to him.
Abraham, after his initial scurrying around, got to that point too.
Once he served the meal, the Bible says,
he stood beside them under the oak tree while they ate.

So what can we learn from these stories?
The heart of hospitality – the part that makes it feel real,
the part that makes it a spiritual discipline,
the path to wholeness and holiness –
the heart of hospitality is an open, kind attention.
It is just being still, looking and listening.
It is acknowledging the other person is present and they matter.

Hospitality is dropping our agenda
to simply see and hear another person.
It is setting aside our agenda so we can see and hear someone
for their own sake, appreciating them as they are,
valuing them for being who they are.
Hospitality isn’t just for guests.
It’s a way of being in the world.
When we were raising our children,
I was like Martha, always fretting,
working too hard at it, parenting too intensely.
It made my kids wonder what was wrong with them
that I was so anxious.
I regret that.

When I was a parish priest,
I was like Martha, always fretting,
working too hard at it,
trying to make the church better, improve it
– which was a sure fire way to tell the people
they weren’t quite good enough.
I regret that too.

I should have known better.
I used to go to an annual workshop in
New York for mental health workers.
The workshop title was “the caring power of unconditional presence.”
The teacher, Dr. John Wellwood, believed that wounded people
heal when other people just sit with them
– just listen to them unconditionally, without an agenda
to change them, fix them, or improve them.
That’s hospitality.

It isn’t easy. It ‘s hard to set aside our judgments,
our projects, our grid of good and bad.
It is hard to just be still and listen.
But that’s hospitality.

When it sinks in we find a spiritual treasure.
If we practice hospitality with other people,
over time we begin to practice it with ourselves.

As all the different feelings ebb and flow in our hearts,
as all the random thoughts scamper through our minds,
we learn to welcome them in a calm, neutral way.
That is very hard. It isn’t what we usually do.
Usually, we latch onto some thoughts and feelings.
We hold onto them until they get a hold on us.
Other thoughts and feelings we try to banish, repress, exile
because we don’t want to think that, don’t want to feel that.

But hospitality just sits with them like Mary sitting with Jesus,
like Abraham standing under the oak tree beside his guests.
Hospitality is not afraid of our thoughts and feelings,
does not pat some on the head and slap others in the face.
When we become serene in the presence of our own inner dramas,
we can become serene with other people.

Hospitality moves from the outside in, then out again.
We start with welcoming others,
then it sinks into our hearts as deep serenity,
then it comes back out as an even more authentic hospitality.

So, brothers and sisters, whether the stranger that come to us
are strange people or strange passions,
“Never neglect to show hospitality to strangers,
for by doing so, many have welcomed angels unawares.”
Amen.

The Action Figure Meets The Great Silence

Elijah was the original action hero – dispensing justice
with lots of violence, explosions, and drama.
His God was a lot like himself.
Nothing surprising in that in those days.

In Elijah’s day, the human race was still quite primitive.
Their idea of God was primitive.
So Elijah’s God was an action hero too.

In today’s lesson, things had been really tough for Elijah.
So, like most of us, that’s when he ratcheted up his religion
and went looking for God.
Elijah looked for God at the place where God lived
– Mt. Horeb, sometimes called Mt. Sinai.
We may not think of God as living in a particular place.
But in Elijah’s time, God had an address.
It was Mt. Horeb.

Moses had met God there, received the law there.
It’s easy to see how they thought God lived on a mountain.
The Greek gods lived on Olympus.
El Capitan overwhelms me with awe,
and I hear from friends who have visited Horeb
it’s an impressive place – holy and mysterious.

Biblical scholars think the earliest Jewish experiences of God
were shaped by the even more primitive religion of their ancestors.
The ancestors probably worshiped a mountain,
before they worshiped El Shaddai, the God of the Mountain.
They also worshiped powerful forces of nature like the desert storm,
the earthquake, and the forest fire.

The Psalms are full of that imagery. Psalm 97:
“Clouds and thick darkness surround him . . . .
Fire goes before him . . . .
His lightning lights up the world.
The earth sees and trembles.”
That’s what a religious experience was – God doing dramatic stuff.
When nothing spectacular was happening, they felt cut off.
So they prayed in Psalm 83:
“O God, do not keep silent,
be not quiet O God, be not still.”
A silent God was an absent God – a God who did not care.

That was Elijah’s religion when he went looking for God
on Mt. Horeb.
And the dramatic stuff happened.
There was a windstorm, then an earthquake, and a fire.
Bryon described a storm like that in the Alps.
“O storm and wind and night, thou art wondrous strong!”
Elijah had always met God in those spectacles.
But this time he did not discern God’s presence.
The wind was just wind; the earthquake, just an earthquake;
the fire, just a fire.
And he thought, “Is that all there is?”

Then after the powerful forces of nature passed,
there was a silence, a profound palpable silence
-- like the silence of Ubehebe Crater in Death Valley.
It was precisely the kind of moment that meant God was absent.

But instead of praying,
“O God, do not keep silent,
be not quiet O God,”
Elijah wrapped his face in his mantle as a sign of reverence,
because God was there.
Precisely in the absence of religious experience,
Elijah believed in God’s presence.

Different cultures, different faith traditions,
and different people define religious experience differently.
So which one is right?
Is God really in the wind, in the earthquake, or in the fire?


Do we meet God in the born again experience of forgiveness,
the ecstatic experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit,
or the mystical experience of unity?
And where is God when we are not having whatever kind of feeling
we think of as spiritual?

God is infinitely greater than our capacity for religious experience.
He is in our religious experience. We do meet God there.
But God is vastly bigger than our feelings.
Theologians from Dionysius in the 6th Century
to Karl Barth in the 20th Century to John Hick today
caution us not to limit God to what we think of
as religion or spirituality.
At those times when God seems utterly silent, totally absent
– at those times we do not feel the least bit spiritual
and have no sense of God whatsoever --
God is there.


Carl Jung had these words inscribed over his door
and on his tombstone,
“Bidden or unbidden God is present.”
And so God is – seen or unseen, felt or unfelt, God is here.

Carlyle Marney, a great Baptist preacher, told the story
of a little boy was trapped by a fire
in his second story bedroom.
In the yard below, his father called to him,
“Jump son, jump. I’ll catch you.”
The child cried, “Daddy, I’m afraid to jump. I can’t see you.”
“That’s alright,” the father answered.
“Go ahead and jump. I can see you.”






Just so, the silent God is present – watching, caring.
The very silence of God is an invitation to faith,
the very absence of spiritual experience,
invites us to a deeper encounter with God
– just as Elijah met God more profoundly
in the silence than in the storm.

Most of us want religious experience. I do.
But if we cultivate trust in God
without the aid of religious experience
the God we trust will be vastly bigger.

One of my theology professors, Francis Fiorenza,
asked us a question that changed my religion forever.
He asked, “Do you want to have a religious experience,
or do you want to experience everything religiously?”//
I have been pondering that question for 8 years,
and it has finally begun to form into an insight.

We start by trusting in God’s presence all the time.
It’s like that saying, “I believe the sun is shining even on a cloudy day.”
Faith removes the fear that blocks our contact with God.

Then we can look inside ourselves and find God there.
We don’t see God or feel God.
Instead we look at everything through God’s eyes.

We just watch without judging.
We observe the world around us with a serene compassion.
We do the same with the world inside us.
We watch the thoughts rushing through our minds,
the emotions passing through our hearts,
the very physical sensations of our bodies.
We meet God not be seeing God
but by seeing as God sees.



God is light, pure and perfect light.
We don’t really see perfect full spectrum light.
We see things illumined by the light.
Just so, we don’t see God.
We see the world differently because God illumines it.
We see ourselves differently in the light of God’s grace.

We still have religious experiences.
They are the divine light refracted into various colors.
That’s why we have different experiences – all valid.

But the rest of the time, God is still with us
– not as storm, quake, or fire, but silently watching –
and we can know God then by joining him in the watch
– by doing nothing – dropping our efforts to be action heroes
-- just watching with the infinite patience of God.
Amen.

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.