The Necessity Of Starlight In A Land Where Desire Careens Into The Canyon

150 years ago, people came West for a lot of reasons.
Some were running away from troubles back East.
Some were hoping to get rich.
Some were trying to get free.

I don’t know why Ozzie Whittaker came in 1863.
I sometimes joke that he might have been trying to miss
the Battle of Gettysburg.
For whatever reason, he spent two years in Gold Hill,
then went back to Connecticut, married well,
and got a cushy position in a rich, stable church.
But after just two years of the clergy version of the good life,
he struck out for Virginia City.
In a few minutes, I’ll tell you why.

But serving this rowdy Comstock church was not enough.
So he mounted his horse and rode over to Pioche,
where there was no church,
and celebrated the Eucharist in a saloon
using the bar for an altar.
Before long, they made Ozzie the Bishop of Nevada and Arizona.
He spent over a decade here at St. Paul’s
and riding horseback all over the Great Basin.
I just drive from Vegas to Welles in an air-conditioned Ford
with Sirius FM radio.
But Ozzie was the real deal.
It’s a long way from the Comstock
to Tucson, Tombstone, and Nogales.
He didn’t get rich. He wasn’t that free.
And he wasn’t running away from anything back East.
He had another thing in mind.

Some other folks had the same thing in mind.
There was Bishop Daniel Tuttle who began the Episcopal Church
in Utah the same year Ozzie arrived Virginia City.
In Helena, Montana, the Rev. Leigh Brewer founded the church
while his wife Henrietta built the hospital.

Ozzie got to know the West those first two years in Gold Hill.
He knew this to be a lovely but a lonely land
– a place where every desire of the human heart
was set loose but apt to careen into despair.
By the time Ozzie got here, Henry Comstock was busted,
gone to Montana, & would take his own life in under two years.

The missionaries came here because we needed them.
We needed a spiritual compass, a glimpse of the moral order.
We needed the Gospel of Jesus Christ
-- for without it we were like sailors on a starless night
back when they navigated by starlight.

Such was the West in the 1860s.
Such is the world again today.
Last week on the Today Show,
Matt Lauer interviewed the widow of one of the Navy Seals
who recently died in Afghanistan.
He asked her how her husband would want to be remembered,
and what she would tell their children about him.

The first words out of her mouth were “his faith in Jesus Christ.”
But when NBC ran clips from the interview later in the day,
and when they posted it on their website,
they edited out the part about Jesus.

Bethany Hamilton, a young surfer, lost her arm a shark attack.
Her book, Soul Surfer, tells how her Christian faith gave her the courage
to get back in the water and become a champion professional.
It’s now a major motion picture.
But the screenwriter said the problem was this:
The script needed to be spiritual enough to draw
“the faith based market”
but not so Christian as to offend anyone.
So the movie shows she had faith
but tries to feather brush out what she had faith in.

The tattooed pierced young cashier at a bagel shop says to me,
“I really like your cross. They won’t let me wear mine here.”
A woman tells the sales clerk at a jewelry store
that she wants to buy a cross.
The clerk says “Do you want a plain cross or one with the little man on it?”
Brothers and sisters, the stars are not out tonight.
We cannot see lights by which to steer.
So we grasp onto strange things.

Jonathan Kay, in his book Among The Truthers,
examines the growth of increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories
in the United States.
Irrational paranoia is rampant.
Asked to explain why conspiracy theory is on the rise, Kay answers
our society has lost its moral and spiritual compass.
In Christianity, we go away from the devil and toward God.
Kay says, conspiracy theories don’t give people a God,
but they at least provide a devil.

For some, that devil is the government;
for some it is 16-foot tall inter-galactic lizards
who are secretly in charge here.
Those who do not have Christ
are desperate to find a devil
– and most any old devil will do.

Without a moral compass, we cannot know what matters.
The ad for the evening news on one Nevada tv channel says:
“The most important news story is the one that affects you.”
Really? A story about road construction on I-15
is more important than the drought in Kenya.

People who are protected from hearing the name of Christ
spoken by a Navy widow,
protected from the sight of a cross worn by a young cashier,
hear that the story that matters most is the one that affects us.
We have no basis other than our own greed and self-interest
to say that something matters.

Well, maybe that’s right.
It is right if we know that the story that affects us most
is the story of salvation,
the story of God who created the world out of love,
sustains us every breath we take out of love,
and redeems us from our brokenness and spiritual failure
– all out of love.

Then the most important story is the one that affects all of us
– the story of Jesus going to the cross
because that’s where he could forgive us all
and that’s how he could show the depth of divine love.

The 1st Century A.D. was a lot like today.
The old order was coming apart
and the new order had not yet come into view.
In the 1st Century A.D.,
the world had lost its moral and spiritual compass
-- especially in the old seats of power.

So somebody back then did the same thing
in Turkey, Greece, and Rome
that Ozzie Whittaker, Daniel Sylvester Tuttle, and Leigh Brewer
did out here in the 1860’s.
I hope you know who that was.
It was your patron saint, Paul of Tarsus.

Paul travelled the known world to tell the most important story,
the one that affects everybody.
Ozzie Whitaker left his cushy life in Connecticut
to tell the most important story to Virginia City.

Who is going to tell that story today?
Who is going to speak the name of Christ
in spite of the censors who find it offensive?
Who is going to reveal the love of God
as a living rebuttal to the so-called Christians
who proclaim a God of violence and hate?
I can think of no one better for the job
than the spiritual off-spring and heirs of Ozzie Whittaker.

Do you know why you are here?
You are not here to enjoy the ambience of a historic building.
You are not here to enjoy the congenial company
of other nice people.
You are not here to listen to pious words
that helps you get through the week.

You are here to learn the most important story
so you can tell it to a world that is dying to hear it.
You are here to polish your spirits until they shine,
so you can be “the light of the world” that Jesus said you are,
so you can provide some star shine to all the people lost at sea.

That is why it is so important that you study, pray, and serve.
Study, pray, and serve every day.
Study, pray, and serve in the church and in the world.

Be the change. Light the light. Keep the faith.
Do it for the broken, bleeding world.
Do it for Paul and Ozzie.
Do it for Jesus.
Do it now. Do it tomorrow. Do it for the rest of your life.

What The Young Priest Said That Got Him Slapped

Paul was on his way to meet the Romans,
but he had not yet laid eyes on them
when he wrote his famous letter.
Paul had heard that they were having some troubles.
The church dispute was so bad that Emperor Claudius
threw half the congregation out of Rome for awhile.

The hymn “They’ll know we are Christians by our love”
had not been written yet
– but it’s a pretty good capsule version of everything Paul
had to say in the New Testament.
But if visible love is how you recognize a Christian community,
the Church in Rome was not likely to be busted.

I imagine that Paul was worried about all the turmoil
for two reasons:
First, a community that divided could not
work together for God’s mission of spreading the good news.
Second, they didn’t seem to have understood the Gospel themselves.


As Paul understood it and taught it,
the good news is all about grace.
The good news is that everything depends on God’s free gift.
Our life is a gift. Our salvation is a gift. Heaven is a gift.
That utterly and completely reversed the old time religion
of having to bribe God with sacrifices, do the right rituals,
follow all the right rules to win God’s favor.
Paul said, “You’ve already got God’s favor.
You don’t earn it. You don’t buy it.
God’s love is a gift.”

The Gospel message is just that truth
and an invitation to live in it.
The Romans hadn’t gotten the truth part straight,
and they were a long way from living in it.
So Paul writes several chapters on the truth:
everything worth having is a gift from God.
Then in today’s lesson he explains how to live in that truth.
It is really a matter of being like God.
The word God means our highest ideal.
God is who we honor most, admire most, want most to be like.
So if we think God is a harsh judge,
we go about judging each other harshly.
If we think God is an angry tyrant,
we go about barking angry orders.
If we think God is an assembly line supervisor with a clip board,
examining our lives for errors and indiscretions,
we’ll keep a close watch on each other
to see what fault we can find.
Over the course of a lifetime,
everyone becomes more and more like the God he believes in.

The good news is that God isn’t like that.
God created the universe out of love
and God created each of us out of love.
God loves us – as we are.
It’s a gift because God is the unconditional Giver.

Paul invites us to believe that and rejoice.
But believing isn’t as easy as just saying
“Oh ok, that works for me.”
Spiritual truth only sinks in; it only goes to the heart,
when we don’t just say it – we have to live it.

The Romans weren’t getting the gospel
because they weren’t living the gospel.
So Paul gives them some instruction.
It isn’t that we have to do any of this to earn God’s love.
But we can’t experience God’s love,
we can’t know the freedom of being loved like that,
until we live our way into it.

So here’s what Paul says.
“Love one another with mutual affection . . . .
Outdo one another in showing honor . . . .
Bless those who persecute you;
bless and do not curse them.
Rejoice with those who rejoice.
Weep with those who weep.
Live in harmony with one another.
Do not be haughty but associate with the lowly.
Do not claim to be wiser than you are. . . .”
Paul teaches us to be godly so that we can know God.

It’s the same thing John says in his first Epistle,
“Since God loved us, we ought to love one another . . . .
No one has seen God,
But if we love one another, God lives in us
and his love is perfectly expressed in us.”

Do you see how this makes Christianity a team sport?
We can’t do it on our own.
We can only experience the truth of God’s love
by showing it to others – not telling them about it,
but showing it to them.
We love people with God’s own love so they can see it,
and that’s how we come to experience it.

John Stone Jenkins was a wise old priest in Louisiana.
But when he was a young priest,
he was once attending a birth.
As it was done in those days, the young father to be
was in the waiting room and the priest was with him.

Then a nurse came out from the delivery room
and said the mother
was having a hard time in transition.
So she wanted the father to come in.
John Stone Jenkins patted the young man on the shoulder
and said “Go on in. I’ll be out here praying.”But the nurse looked at John Stone Jenkins and said,
“No Father, she means you.”

With a gulp and prayer, he went into the delivery room.
Seeing the mother in the worst pains of labor,
he had no idea what to do,
so he leaned over her and said, “Jesus loves you.”She swore, and slapped him.
The she said, “I know that. How do you feel about me?”

It doesn’t do much good to talk about God’s love
unless we live it, unless we show people what it looks like.
How do we show people God’s love?
“Rejoice with those who rejoice.
Weep with those who weep.
Live in harmony with one another.”

In all my years in the church, 21 of them as a clergyman,
I’ve heard church folks fretting about all sorts of things.
There’s not enough money.
The building needs fixing.
There aren’t enough young people
or the young people are taking over.
We don’t have any children or the children make too much noise.
The hymns are too slow or too fast.
The ritual is too Catholic or not Catholic enough.

98% of the things people fret over in the Church
cannot be found in the Bible
because they don’t really matter.
What matters is the relationships.
Where the relationships are full of love,
the money is enough, the building is enough,
the right people are there and anyone new
is right too.
It’s about the relationships because that’s where the gospel is.
That’s where we live the gospel so that we can know the gospel.

It’s a beautiful and joyful truth Jesus showed us
and Paul taught us.
All we have to do is live it -- together.

Which Dream Will You Choose?

Just a few basic insights can crack the Bible open
and make it into a fascinating book.
Biblical scholar Walter Bruegemann’s
two-dream thesis may be
the most valuable of them all.
He sees the whole Bible as a struggle between
Pharaoh’s dream of scarcity and Moses’ dream of freedom.

Pharaoh, you will recall, had a dream of famine.
A later Pharaoh had fantasies of a different kind
of scarcity or weakness.
He was afraid of being invaded by Assyria, now known as Iraq.
It wasn’t very likely. They were a long way off and not that powerful.

But he was afraid.
It is a bit reminiscent of when our government
thought that Iraq was going to come after us
with their non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Well, Pharaoh couldn’t do much about the Assyrians.
They were too far off --
so he shifted his anxiety to the Jews
living inside his borders.

He was afraid that when the Assyrians invaded Egypt,
the Jews might rise up to support the Assyrians.
Not that there was any reason for that paranoid delusion,
but, as I said, he was afraid.
So Pharaoh did the ancient equivalent
of detaining the Jews at Guantanamo Bay.
He rounded them up in Goshen, pressed them into forced labor,
and eventually he took the next step.
He instituted a program of genocide
by killing the male babies.

All of this would be hard to believe if it didn’t keep happening.
Egypt was the most powerful empire on earth,
the most powerful empire the world had ever known.
Pharaoh was not a mere king.
He was a god. He held life and death in his hand.
His power was supreme and unlimited.
No one had ever been this powerful.

But all the power the world has to offer
cannot deliver us from fear.

Fear drives us to garner power for our own security,
but the more power we acquire,
the more afraid we become.
It may even make us bigger targets.

So the almighty Pharaohs always dreamed of famine,
lived in dead of invasion by weaker,
distant weaker neighbors.
Today’s lesson tells how, during a level orange terror alert,
they enslaved the ethnic minority of their own nation,
and finally resorted to genocide.

Such is the world into which Moses was born.
I trust you know the story of how he escaped death
through the stealth of his mother
and the subterfuge of midwives,
how he grew up as a Prince of Egypt,
discovered his roots, killed an Egyptian slave driver,
then fled to Midian where he became a shepherd.

There, while tending his father-in-law’s flock,
Moses had his dream – a vision of a burning bush --
from which the voice of God spoke to him,
saying “I have heard the cry of my people . . . .
Go therefore to Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go.”//

Moses’ vision is so simple, a vision of freedom,
as direct and straightforward
as Pharaoh’s fearful dream of scarcity.
That simple vision of freedom will grow into a richer vision
of equality, justice, and inclusion.
It will become the Law as we find it in Exodus and Deuteronomy.
This vision will command the Jews to shelter the homeless sojourners,
remembering that they were once sojourners in Egypt.
It will require those who have wealth
to share it with those who do not.
It will forbid the charging of interest on loans
and will protect debtors from foreclosure.

The law of Moses is designed– not like so many legal codes
which protect the wealth of the wealthy
and impose the power of the powerful
– but rather a law to share wealth and defend the powerless.
Such was the dream which gave birth to Israel.
Perhaps it sounds familiar.
I doubt that the deist Thomas Jefferson
would admit it, but his dream for America
was lifted right out of Moses’ vision
which became the Law of Israel.

Regrettably Israel was not exempt from the fear
that corrupted Egypt.
Having been oppressed once,
even having fought for freedom once,
is no guarantee of perpetual virtue.
A freedom fighter can turn into a tyrant,
and a nation like Zimbabwe can find
it has rid itself of Ian Smith
only to suffer at the hands of Robert Mugabe.

Moses himself was never corrupted.
He remained a defender of freedom and justice all his life.
But Israel began to remember how great Egypt had been.
They began to fear the Philistines.
And they thought, “Why can’t we be like the Egyptians?”
More wealth, power, land, and a standing army would protect us.

So hierarchy and a caste system arose.
New laws were added, to protect ethnic purity, social structures,
the privileges of a priestly caste, an aristocracy, and a royalty.
In Bruegemann’s book, Solomon, he demonstrates how
David’s son became the Jewish personification of Pharaoh,
complete with forced labor and wars of conquest.

Throughout the Bible, we hear two voices arguing.
One voice is that of Pharaoh, a voice of fearful, rigid rules.
It comes out of the mouths of priests as the book of Leviticus
and of the royal spin masters as the books of Chronicles.
Against that voice cries the voice of Moses,
out of the mouths of prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos.

If we did not have the voice of Pharaoh in our Scripture,
we would have no idea what Moses was talking about.
But when people quote Scripture,
we must always listen very closely
to see whose voice is speaking
– Pharaoh or Moses,
Ahab or Elijah,
Caiaphas or Jesus.

Ah yes, Jesus. It all leads to him.
You see this is what the fight
in the New Testament is about.
People wanted a messiah alright,
a messiah in the tradition
of Solomon, of David, and of Pharaoh.
But Jesus spoke with the voice of Moses,
the voice of freedom, justice, equality, and inclusion.
After Jesus, the Church carried on the conversation.
Peter spoke too often with the voice of Pharaoh.
He will speak with that voice in next week’s Gospel lesson.
Paul replied with the voice of Moses.
“For freedom Christ has set us free,” he said.

And the struggle continues in the world today.
Bruegemann calls the voice of Pharaoh “the Empire.”
It may manifest as one nation or another.
But it is always the Empire,
and against it stands the Gospel.

We read our religion and we read the world,
we read the Bible and we read the newspaper,
though the same set of bifocals.
We look reality either through the dream of Pharaoh
or the dream of Moses.
Moses’ way lives by a certain trust in life. We call it faith.
Pharaoh’s way lives by fear of death. We call is despair.
“I set before you life and death,” Moses said. “Choose life.”