Sermon for 11.8.09

Lessons for this week are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp27_RCL.html

As some of you know, I went to seminary in Berkeley, California. Berkeley is in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the East Bay. It has two seasons: the season of sun and the season of rain. During the winter, it rains and rains for weeks on end. It’s that cold kind of rain that seeps into your bones until you feel like you will never be warm and dry again.

In the Berkeley area, there’s a sizeable homeless population. One day, I was going to the store during the season of rain. I parked my car, put up my umbrella, and walked through the rain toward the store when I saw a homeless man. He was huddled on the sidewalk with a plastic garbage bag over his head. I went into the store and when I came out, he was still there, huddled under his garbage bag in a puddle on the pavement. I walked up to him and asked him, “Would you like my umbrella?” He looked at me as if I were offering him a thousand dollars and said, “I can’t take your umbrella, you’ll get wet!” I said, “Oh no, it’s not a problem, I have another one in the car.” He looked at me very seriously and said, “Thank you.” He took the umbrella as if it were now his most precious possession, and he said, “And now, sister, I will give you a blessing.” Right there in the rain, he put his hands on my forehead, a priest in ragged clothes, and blessed me with a prayer that brought tears to my eyes.

Here I thought I was blessing him. But instead of the one giving a blessing, I was being blessed. Yet this was no sacrifice – I had another umbrella in the car – I gave out of my own abundance. It is the way I have experienced all giving to others – the blessing I receive from giving is far more than the sacrifice I made to give.

This might be one lesson learned by the widow of Zarephath in our Old Testament lesson today. A 3-year famine has spread throughout Israel and surrounding countries, God sends the prophet Elijah to a foreign widow and promises she will feed him. She has enough to make one meager meal for herself and her son – and then she knows she will die. Yet instead of hoarding that last meal for herself, she responds with generosity to this Israelite stranger, giving all she has left to feed him. She finds that her generosity in giving her whole life away is rewarded by life and more life – not only does her meager store of food last until the famine is broken, but also later Elijah miraculously brings her son back from the dead. By doing so, Elijah demonstrates that God of Israel is God of life, whose generosity is the basis of all life, whose gifts to us far outweigh any gifts we could give back, whose overflowing blessing to us is worth more than anything we could hold on to.

Perhaps this is what the widow in our gospel knows too. Jesus is sitting opposite to the temple, watching all that happens there. Note that this is Jesus’ last week of life – one of the last things he does is to watch a widow giving her own life to God – before Jesus does the same, on the cross. It is Passover time, so Jews are making their annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem –bringing their annual offering to temple and putting bags of money into the coffers. He watches rich people, scribes – these are educated people who provide their services to the rich and the elite – these are the lawyers and professionals. It appears that this is a time of economic misfortune among the common people – Jesus speaks about “devouring widows’ houses” – there are bankruptcies and foreclosures (the more things change, the more they stay the same). At Passover time, the scribes bring large sums to the treasury, but Jesus sees that those gifts are no sacrifice; giving to God large amounts but small percentages of their income will not affect how they live the rest of their lives. So Jesus gives a withering critique of religious show they are making – they are not living their faith.

He watches a widow walking quietly up to the treasury and giving two pennies – the last two pennies in her purse – everything she has to live on – and he praises the generosity that caused her to give her entire life to God. He tells his disciples that generosity is measured not by the amount of the gift, but by the abundance that it came from. The problem with the scribes is not that they give large sums, but that they give from their abundance an amount they won’t miss – they give the leftovers. God apparently doesn’t want leftovers we won’t ever miss – God wants what the widow gave. God wants it all.

The Great Commandment is: love God with ALL your heart, ALL your mind, ALL your soul, ALL your strength – God wants it all – your love, your time, your prayers, your energy, your service in every part of your life. God wants not just a pittance of our lives, 10% or any other percentage – God wants our entire lives. One hundred percent.

We can unpack what that means. I don’t think that means God wants most of us to give away everything we own and starve. I think that God intends us to use our gifts for God’s purposes, which include caring for our families, providing a decent home, sending our children to college, having a decent job, etc. But God also intends for us to use our gifts generously for purposes outside our own homes, including caring for the poor and supporting God’s mission. I like to think that the widow was cared for like widow of Zarephath, that Jesus’ disciples took her in and cared for her as one of their own – because this is what Christians do – from beginning, we have cared for the poor.

Bishop Greg Rickel of Seattle tells a story: before he became a bishop, he would often do workshops on the spirituality of money. He would start by asking people to share their first memories of money. Often, he says, someone will share a variation of this story: my grandfather (or grandmother, aunt or uncle) gave me a silver dollar – sometimes once, sometimes every year, for birthday or Christmas. Invariably, sometime in the story the person will say, “I still have that silver dollar” (or dollars). Bishop Rickel continues, ‘Sometimes the same people will later share stories of hard times in their lives when they were barely surviving. And I just want to ask, and sometimes have, "Did you ever think about spending that silver dollar?" The answer is almost always a resounding "NO WAY."’ What that silver dollar has become is the sign of a relationship, which is more precious to the holder than anything they might purchase. The relationship is the treasure, not the dollar.

Stewardship means remembering that the treasure God has given us is the gift of a relationship. Stewardship means understanding that our possessions are personal and relational – they are entrusted to us by one who loves us, with God’s hope that we will care for them and leave this world better than we found it.

Jesus says, you can’t serve two masters, you can’t serve both God and money. When we begin to understand that our money and our possessions, our time and our talents, our families and homes, everything we have and everything we are, are a gift and a trust, then we begin to understand stewardship and our own place in God’s kingdom. And that’s when we begin to develop in our relationship with Jesus Christ, becoming disciples who serve him in every part of our lives – in our families, in our businesses, in our church lives, and in our financial lives too.

This Sunday is the kickoff of our stewardship campaign. Stewardship is so often a euphemism for the annual fundraising campaign – and it is absolutely true that this church asks all members to give what they can from their abundance for God’s work. If I didn’t think that this was a worthy cause, if I didn’t see God’s work being done every day here, lives being transformed, I wouldn’t be working here. I do believe God’s work is done here, and I do believe that contributing to God’s mission is part of the personal mission of every disciple who is part of this church mission.

But at its heart, stewardship is not about contributing to the church to keep it going – stewardship is about each person’s relationship with Jesus. Stewardship is about recognizing everything we have as a gift from God, and treasuring and using every part of our lives as God calls us to do.

Some people think that money and possessions aren’t things that should be talked about in church because they aren’t spiritual matters. Well, I will promise you not to talk about them any more than Jesus did. Jesus talks about money and possessions more than anything else in the Bible except the kingdom of God itself. And I think he did it because he watched people like the rich scribes and the poor widow in the gospel story, and he realized that for all of those people, money was the biggest spiritual issue in their lives, and how they acted with their money reflected their relationship with God and with their neighbor. He recognized that for the widow, what she gave was a measure of her faith.

He also recognized that for the scribes, what they gave was an indication that they were in spiritual danger of letting their possessions separate them from God. Let’s be clear: Jesus believes that having an abundance of possessions can put a person in grave spiritual danger – he says things like, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

The reason our possessions put us in grave danger is because it is too easy for us to make money our god, to put our trust in our money rather than in our God. Money promises security and comfort – yet ultimately, only God can save us. You can't take it with you!

I think it is quite possible that in America today, our relationship with money and possessions is the most important spiritual question in our lives. Money and possessions can easily become the addiction that drives our whole lives, the thing that takes up all our energy, the passion that takes our energy away from the true calling of our lives, the god that separates us from God. Jesus says, you can’t serve both God and money. Well, our society tells us to serve money, not God – our world has made up its mind which is more important; but it’s up to us to make up our own minds.

I would be astonished if anyone here has ever experienced what widow of Zarephath experienced – enough to eat one meal, knowing death will follow soon after. But we are also in difficult economic times, so I want to say this. If you don’t know where your next meal is coming from or whether you will be able to keep your home – then give to God in other ways – your time, your worship, your prayers, your love. God knows what you have and what you need, and God doesn’t want you to starve. And this church wants to be there for you in your hour of need.

But if you are not in this kind of situation, if you have what you need and more, if you are living with abundance, then the stewardship question is different, and that question is this. How are you serving God with what God has entrusted to you? It may be the most important and most spiritual question you will ever ask.

Sermon for All Saints, 2009

Lessons for this Week:

http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearB_RCL/HolyDays/AllSaints_B_RCL.html

Imagine a November morning in Minnesota, on a wheat farm, flat and wintry, and a small white house standing all alone on the prairie. The wind is blowing, but this early in winter, no snow has fallen yet. The year is 1918, and a world away, men are huddled in trenches in France, but here in Minnesota, another drama is unfolding.

A man is carefully and gingerly helping his wife up into a wagon. They are bundled up against the winter chill, and she is weak, so that he almost has to lift her into the seat. The man is taking his wife to town, where he will put her on a train to Rochester, Minnesota, where she go to the Mayo Clinic to be treated for cancer. He would like to go with her, but someone must return home to be with the three boys, age 12, 10, and 4, and the little girl, Adeline, age 7.

The children wave as the wagon drives off, and their mother turns to wave back at them, and gives one last special smile to her little girl. Late that afternoon, the winter wind changes and begins blowing hard, from a different direction. A blizzard blows up. The father is still not home. The two older boys go out to the barn and do the evening chores. Little Adeline takes out some food from the pantry and serves a cold dinner to her brothers. The children eat and, not knowing when their father can return home in this blizzard, put themselves to bed.

In the night, the blizzard dies down, and in the morning a neighbor comes to their farm. This neighbor is richer than they are, and so he has a telephone. The children’s father has called him to tell him his wife died before he could get her on the train. In the blizzard, he was unable to come home to care for his children, so the neighbor takes them to his house. Quietly, they absorb the news of their mother’s death, and wait for their father to come home.

That little girl, Adeline, never forgot what it meant to have a mother. She grew up, married, had four girls of her own, and devoted her life to caring for her family. She helped her husband run a farm in Oklahoma, taught her children to read and to love each other and take care of their own families, and cared for her father in his old age. Her steady, calm, kind wisdom was the foundation of her family’s life.

Adeline was my grandmother. She taught my own mother how to be a mother, and my mother taught me. My grandmother Adeline died last year at the age of 97, still steady, calm and kind as always. She was a saint of God.

This All Saints weekend is a time when we remember those saints who have gone before us: the famous saints like martyrs Stephen and Agnes, evangelists Paul and Patrick, people who changed the world like Mary, mother of God, and Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King Jr. But this weekend is also a time to remember the ordinary saints who didn’t work miracles but who lived courageously, living out the ordinary virtues of care and concern for others and following Christ in their daily lives. It’s a time to remember the ones who have gone before us. And it is a time to remember that Christ promises us that death does not have the final word: the final word of life belongs to God.

This whole weekend, from Halloween through the Nov. 2 feast of All Souls, is a celebration of the triumph of life over death. Like many Christian holidays, Halloween was originally a pagan holiday that has been baptized – the ancient Celts celebrated a Day of the Dead, when they believed that the spirits of departed loved ones wandered free in the world, often returning to their ancestral homes and visiting descendants.

In celebrating a Day of the Dead, these ancient pagan people recognized the basic, most fundamental questions of human existence: what happens to us when we die? Where have the people gone whom we have loved? Can they still have a relationship with us? Will they live again? Recognizing one basic truth of human life, they knew that their ancestors left more than memories behind – they left whole ways of being and acting, family dynamics, habits of love – they believed that they still had relationships with those who had died. So they would leave doors and windows open for the friendly spirits, leaving fires burning and food out for the spirits to eat – the origin of trick-or-treating.

Early Christians brought Christian faith to bear on this custom, showing a genius for relating God’s truth in the gospel to local customs which, they believed, showed that God’s influence had been at work before them. They followed the Celtic Day of the Dead with a day to celebrate All Saints, the faithful baptized people, famous and not, whose souls rest in hands of God: a day to remember the ones who have made us what we are, to celebrate the love they have given us, and to give thanks for God’s promise of eternal life.

Which is why I got a kick out of the latest from televangelist Pat Robertson. The website of the Christian Broadcasting Network had an article by one Kimberly Daniels, who asserts that demons sneak into bags of Halloween candy at grocery stores. “[M]ost of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches,” Daniels wrote. “I do not buy candy during the Halloween season. Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store. The demons cannot tell the difference.”

“Halloween is much more than a holiday filled with fun and tricks or treats,” she wrote. “It is a time for the gathering of evil that masquerades behind the fictitious characters of Dracula, werewolves, mummies and witches on brooms. The truth is that these demons that have been presented as scary cartoons actually exist. I have prayed for witches who are addicted to drinking blood and howling at the moon.” Well ... if I knew people like that, I would pray for them too.

OK, time to take a deep breath – let’s calm down about Halloween. Far from a day for demons and werewolves, the feast of All Saints, including the eve of All Saints, Halloween, celebrates the greatest Christian hope. We believe that in Jesus Christ, God has overcome death with life; that Jesus’ own resurrection was the sign of that victory; and that the resurrection of Lazarus demonstrates that resurrection was not just something that happened long ago and far away to the Son of God, but it is something promised to every saint of God, every member of Christ’s Body, to you and to me. The original Halloween sight must have been the sight of the body of Lazarus, wrapped in grave clothes, emerging from the tomb, blinking in the sunlight, to the wails and astonishment of all those who loved him. But Lazarus was no zombie, no demon, no walking creature of horror. Lazarus was a person, called from death into life by God’s cry of love.

Our scriptures tell us that Lazarus’ story is our story too. Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans that we are baptized into Christ’s death – as we entered the baptismal waters, we died with him, and as we emerged, dripping, into the sunlight, we were also raised with him. We have already been reborn into the promise of eternal life. We are already saints, baptized people who live in truth of Christ’s salvation.

And so on All Saints’ weekend, we remember those heroes of the faith, heroes of history and heroes in our own personal lives, whose souls are already in the hands of God. In their stories, we celebrate our own origins, the things that have made us who we are, like a young motherless girl who never forgot what it meant to have and be a mother, and passed that knowledge down through generations.

And we celebrate the fact that the ordinary and extraordinary saints of our past have made us their heirs – we celebrate the fact that we are saints too. In the rather quaint words of our closing hymn today, “You can meet them in shops, or in lanes, or at tea … and I mean to be one too.” In our baptism, we are raised with Christ, and in our baptismal covenant, we make promises about how we will act because of that salvation. We will renew our baptismal covenant in a moment, and you will have a chance to see those promises we have all made. What those promises tell us is that in Christ, we are all saints – baptized members of the body of Christ who promise to live according to Christ’s call.

My grandmother Adeline is with God now, along with the communion of saints, and I remember and honor her today. In their stories, the famous ones we have heard of and the not-so-famous ones we have loved, we remember our past. But in their stories, we also celebrate our destiny – not just things past or things present, but things yet to come. In Jesus, God makes us a promise that is eternal. Our Christian faith gives us a hope beyond hope, and a promise beyond promises. Lazarus was only the first to rise from the dead – but we will rise also. And if this is true, then there is nothing left to fear. Halloween is a time to laugh, because Jesus has already entered into death and conquered it. And All Saints is a time to celebrate the joy of eternal life, through Jesus Christ.

Sermon for 10.11.09

Scriptures for Today:

http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp23_RCL.html

Annie Dillard in “Teaching a Stone to Talk” writes this about faith: “Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews."

If we thought for a moment that Jesus was nothing more than “Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild,” – this week’s gospel should put that notion to rest. Because if we’re paying attention, this has to be one of the scariest gospel stories there is. Even in a recession, those of us who have 2 or 3 meals a day, solid roofs over our heads and electricity and running water that won’t make us sick to drink – we are unimaginably wealthy by the world’s standards. And here is a young man with many possessions – and let’s be honest, even most of us who are anxious about our financial state have many possessions – so here is someone like us who comes to Jesus, only to have Jesus tell him that to have eternal life, he must sell everything he owns, give it to the poor and come, follow Jesus. And Jesus follows it up with a bombshell: it is harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone like him to enter the kingdom of heaven.

As my Oklahoma grandpa would say, “Jesus has quit preachin’ and gone to meddlin’.”

Now let’s explore a little what happens in this story. Jesus is traveling around the countryside, accompanied by a whole entourage of disciples and others who have left everything to follow him. The disciples include people who have left families and thriving businesses at least one tax collector who gave away all his ill-gotten wealth; and some wealthy women who travel with Jesus and provide for the crowd out of their personal funds. These people have had a deep conversion experience that makes them believe that no matter what else the world holds, it is nothing compared to the treasure that Jesus holds out to them: so they leave everything and follow him.

In one town, a rich young man approaches him. This man has done everything right in life – a good man – an upstanding citizen – a law-abiding churchgoer – he has everything going for him. But there is something in him that says that life is incomplete – something in him that yearns for more – something that says that there should be a deeper, more fulfilling, more spiritual dimension to life, and he wants to find it. Paul Wadell writes: “He is restless, and unsatisfied, and in spite of his riches, he is needy, for he stands in need of what matters most, the thing that he can't count or accumulate or achieve or take credit for. And yet the treasure he needs and hungers for is the one thing that matters most, the one thing that is secure in this life: God's grace.”

Unlike Jesus’ other questioners, there’s no hint that he wants to trap Jesus or trip him up or oppose him – you might say he is a genuine seeker. And you could say that he is like a lot of churchgoing people – good people who do everything right – but who wonder if there isn’t something more – people like us, people searching for a deeper connection to God. After all, that’s why we come to church – we come hoping to meet Jesus.

But look what happens when this man meets Jesus: Jesus, looking at him, loves him. So Jesus, in his love, tells him the truth. Jesus says, put on your crash helmet, lash yourself to your seat, because this solid law-abiding churchgoing lifestyle isn’t enough. If you really want to find the kingdom of God, if you really have a deep hunger for spiritual connection, if you really want a relationship with the Lord of life and the Creator of heaven and earth, if what you’re after is this thing called “eternal life” – being good isn’t enough of an answer. What is required is a radical transformation, an upending of all your priorities, a reversal of everything you have ever put your trust in – possessions, family, social status, education – everything. And he tells the man to sell everything, give it to the poor, and follow him.

Jesus, in his love for the man, looks at him and sees exactly what the problem is: he is possessed by his possessions; he is a prisoner of his own lifestyle; and it will take God’s love to free him, because he is unable to free himself. But the man goes away grieving – he can’t do what Jesus is asking – so he goes back to the possessions that hold him captive, the very life that he has found unsatisfying up till now. Grief indeed, to be sentenced to a lifetime of emptiness, chained to his riches.

Put on your crash helmets, find a life preserver, Jesus is here.

Now I have to tell you that this gospel troubles me, and it always has. Because I haven’t sold all my possessions and left my family behind to follow Jesus, and I’m not going to take the responsibility of telling you to do that either. But I also am not going to be able to give you a reason why that command applies to that man but not to us – I’m not going to try to justify it or explain it away – because what Jesus is doing here applies in some way to all of us. All I’m going to be able to do is talk about it with you, and help all of us to begin to think about what Jesus is asking of us.

I think it’s important for us to recognize what we have in common with this man. We have possessions, we have position in the community, we are good people who generally do the right thing, and we are here to meet Jesus. And Jesus, looking at us, loves us. Jesus loves us. It is the most important thing that any of us will ever know about Jesus.

So let’s look at what Jesus does here; a man comes asking about eternal life. But Jesus turns his attention away from eternal life – the issue for this man’s soul is not eternal life but temporal life: Jesus tells him he needs to think about this life right here and now. Give everything to the poor, says Jesus, and come follow me right here and now.

Jesus basically says: Love God and love your neighbor in practical, tangible ways: with your possessions, with your time, with your heart and your hands. Eternal life isn’t only some spiritual thing far away in the sky, for him or us. Eternal life begins right here and now, with practical, tangible things we do.

Does that mean that we’re supposed to sell all our possessions and give to the poor?

There are some very prominent Christians who have done just that. We like to think of St. Francis of Assisi as a gentle sort of man who spent all his time talking to animals. But we conveniently forget that he started his ministry by taking off all the expensive clothes his wealthy father had given him and leaving them, and everything else he owned, behind as he started a new life, and changed the world.

Of course, that was in the 13^th century: what about now? Well, there’s an Australian couple who run an orphanage in Veracruz. They came for a short-term mission trip and found that they couldn’t leave – so they left their life in Australia behind and moved to Veracruz to minister to the orphans.

Does that mean we are all required to do this? I hope not – I haven’t done it. But does it mean that God is asking a lot of us? I think it absolutely does. I think God asks nothing less from us than radical transformation of life, turning things upside down, committing ourselves totally to the way of Jesus.

We’re luckier than the man in the story – we maybe have more time. Jesus isn’t standing in front of us, ready to walk on to next village without us. If we come back to church next week, Jesus will still be here, so we can afford to respond to his call with small steps. But I do think Jesus is asking each of us for a response. I do think Jesus wants us to start asking ourselves some questions.

What is separating us from our commitment to him? What is holding us prisoner in our lives? Is it possessions, job security, status, lack of time? Whatever is holding us back, Jesus is looking at us, loving us. And Jesus is doing more than loving us as Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild. This is Crash Helmet Jesus, who is also challenging us to let go of the things that are holding us back, and to come and follow him.

This means that we have to examine every part of our lives:

· how we spend our time – is God an add-on extra if we don’t have something else scheduled for Sunday morning, or is God the center from which all the rest of our life radiates out?

· What we look for in our occupations – are we spending our lives on something that deepens us spiritually, allows us to use God’s gifts to enrich the world, love God and love our neighbor (which, by the way, you can do in any occupation) – or is it something that actually deadens us spiritually and makes the wrong things our top priorities?

· How we use our possessions – are we holding on so tightly to our possessions that they possess us? Or are we using them to love God and love our neighbor, contributing to the mission of the church and the care of the needy in our world?

I am not making this up – it’s in the gospel – and it’s what Jesus asks of us – head-to-toe transformation that affects every part of our life.

There’s nothing I can do to make this an easy or comfortable gospel, and there’s nothing I can do to make Jesus any less than what he is. Jesus is the savior who claims every part of us. Jesus is the one who loves us, deeply and personally, and knows what it will take to set us free from the things that imprison us. And Jesus is the one who calls us to eternal life, through life transformation that begins right here and now.

Put on your life preservers, lash yourself down and commit yourself to eternal life: With God all things are possible – even for us. Thanks be to God.

Sermon for 10.4.09

This week's lessons are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp22_RCL.html

SERMON NOTES FOR 10.4.09

For all the arguing we do in the church about sexuality, you would think that Jesus spent all his time talking about it. Actually, today’s gospel is one of the few times he addresses questions of sexuality. But he does it in a way that throws a bombshell into our culture, where so many Christians have been divorced and remarried. Looking at what is going on in this gospel helps us figure out how to approach social issues, and it helps us learn how to do Biblical interpretation.

I burned dinner the other night. In Jesus’ time, this could have been grounds for divorce.

That is, according to one school of thought (the conservative view – follows the letter of the law in Deuteronomy 24:1). The other school of thought said that divorce was allowed only for adultery (modifies the literal interpretation of Scripture, therefore this is the liberal view).

The Pharisees really aren’t interested in Jesus’ opinion on divorce. What the Pharisees are interested in is catching Jesus expressing an opinion. Whatever he answers – it’s sure to make enemies. Jesus is now on the road to Jerusalem – on the way to the cross. All that’s left is for his enemies to come up with an excuse for the cross.

Set this story in context and see the clever way Jesus avoids the trap. The Pharisees ask about divorce and Jesus turns the question around and talks about marriage instead. He explains the ideal of God’s hope for human marriage: faithful, monogamous, lifelong commitment. Yet the fact is that that ideal did not persist for long given the realities of how humans relate to each other – polygamy and divorce were common by the time of the Old Testament patriarchs and matriarchs.

Jesus understands this reality, and says the reason for the law in Deuteronomy is hardness of heart – human sin – and watch what Jesus does here. He appeals to an older, broader Scripture – the creation stories in Genesis 1 & 2. He puts scripture in conversation with scripture. In a conflict in interpretation between two Scriptures, Jesus says the broader ones carry more weight. The way Jesus reads it, scripture is far more than a narrow book of laws and regulations; scripture is a narrative of God’s true, lived relationship with people who are continually imperfect, continually falling short of the ideal for which God has created them.

To understand why Jesus would have answered the question the way he did, we need to ask ourselves: What was the context of divorce in Jesus’ time? Only men could decide to divorce – women had no such option. Men could divorce on a whim, and send their wives away. Children were left behind as property of the father– mothers had no rights. Women whose birth families wouldn’t take them back were left to begging or prostitution to keep themselves alive. Divorce was therefore an injustice perpetrated against the weak by the powerful. Jesus speaks against this injustice by appealing to the broader purposes of God: respect, equality, love that honors the other above oneself, a marriage covenant that means a lifetime commitment.

Therefore, this story gives us a picture of Jesus making the first move in Bible interpretation: understand the context of the time.

The second move in Biblical interpretation is to understand our own context and how the Scripture might apply. In our time, divorce is all too common, and divorce happens for a variety of reasons. There are divorces that happen for good reasons, such as abuse or infidelity that can’t be repaired or differences that are truly irreconcilable. And there are divorces that happen for not-so-good reasons, partly because people don’t take the commitment seriously when they make it. The course of an all-too-typical American romance is what I call a “Cinderella” story: we feel romantic, like it is a quarter to midnight and we’re dancing at the ball with the prince or with Cinderella. But the minute that feeling of romance fades, the minute we’re confronted with the daily reality of sharing your life with someone else, we think that something is wrong. If we’re not careful, we read that loss of the romantic, “Cinderella” feeling as a loss of love.

Which begs the question: what is love, really? The Christian answer is, love is not a feeling but an action – day in and day out. In the movie Fiddler on the Roof: Tevye asks his wife, “Do you love me?” – and she answers, “For 25 years, I’ve washed your clothes, cared for your children, etc. – if that’s not love, what is? Well, yes, that IS what love is! Love is a series of actions, day in and day out, that put the welfare of the other person in front of your own.

Understanding more about what love is helps us understand marriage. Christian marriage is a covenant, not a contract. A contract is a legal thing, and it is null and void if one provision is not met. A person enters into a contract for his or her own benefit. And if marriage were a contract, it would mean when we lose that pleasant infatuated feeling, we might as well leave. From a legal sense, our society sees marriage as a contract.

But from a Christian standpoint, marriage is not a contract but a covenant. A covenant is unconditional, entered for the other’s benefit. In a covenant, we commit to love the other more than we love ourselves. This is the covenant God has made with us (which the Scriptures call a marriage covenant!); this is why Jesus lived and died for us; this is the love he asks us for in marriage – a love that puts the other first.

Does this mean that divorce is not allowed for Christians? No – Christian tradition is about release from bondage to sin – not trapping people in lifelong bondage to sin. Here are the Episcopal church requirements:

CANON 19: Sec. 1. When marital unity is imperiled by dissension, it shall be the duty, if possible, of either or both parties, before taking legal action, to lay the matter before a Member of the Clergy; it shall be the duty of such Member of the Clergy to act first to protect and promote the physical and emotional safety of those involved and only then, if it be possible, to labor that the parties may be reconciled.

We also recognize the validity of remarriage after divorce; one overarching theme of Christian tradition is the possibility of forgiveness and grace. If a divorced person comes to me wanting to be remarried in the church, my responsibility is to make sure they have learned from their previous mistakes, provided for former spouses and children, and healed enough to make a serious recommitment; then I can remarry them with permission of the bishop.

Christian marriage commitment does not require a person to put up with a lifetime of abuse–physical, verbal, addictions, infidelity; and it allows forgiveness, healing. But it does require a high standard of grace, forgiveness and commitment. Dear Abby’s question: “Are you better off with him or without him?” is not a high enough standard: a covenant relationship requires us to ask: is this relationship fulfilling God’s purpose for us as human beings?

So … what is God’s purpose for us as human beings? Look at how Jesus interprets Scripture here. Faced with a text that some people of his time interpret literally, with devastating consequences for the weak and powerless in society – Jesus appeals to an older and broader Biblical tradition. Jesus here treats Scripture not as a collection of hard-and-fast rules to be taken literally, but as a narrative of God’s relationships with human beings and a revelation of God’s desire for how humans should live. He looks God’s desire in creation: God looks at creation and says it is good (Gen. 1). But immediately: God looks at the human creature and sees that something is not good – not good for the earthling to be alone. (Gen. 2).

To grow in full humanness, human beings must grow in relationship. Learning to love another person, over a long period of time, with the opportunity to experience each other’s flaws, to be in conflict and to reconcile, to compromise and to learn to put the other’s welfare before our own – this is the single most difficult challenge that any of us will ever face – and it is the single most important thing that any of us can learn to do as Christians. There is a good reason that the letter to the Ephesians describes God’s relationship with us as a marital relationship. The love we experience in a lifelong, monogamous, covenantal commitment to another human being is the closest personal experience many of us will ever have with the kind of love God offers us. It is certainly not true that each person must be married (Jesus was single). But we must live in covenant community, and we must struggle together to overcome our sinfulness and brokenness – our hardness of heart – to become the full human beings God created and willed us to be.

In the case of divorce: is forgiveness available? Of course – this is the good news that Jesus brings to us. Is new life, new hope, new beginning possible? Yes, God can bring joy and hope out of despair and failure (the message of the cross!), and we rejoice in the healing that remarriage after divorce can bring.

Interpreting the Bible on Social Issues

• Understand the original context
• Understand our own context and how the principles might apply
• Discover what our own hardness of heart inclines us to believe
• Consider whether there is a broader purpose or design revealed in Scripture
• Give enormous respect to the place of Scripture and its authority
• Spirit-driven interpretation of Scripture is only undertaken with respect for the text, respect for differing opinions, and a long process of consensus-building on the part of the whole church – Christ’s body on earth

Sermon for 9.6.09

This week's scriptures are here:  http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp18_RCL.html

Methodist preacher Thomas Long tells the story of a friend of his who “decided to put [today’s Scriptures] to the test. A well-respected leader in her congregation, she chose to appear at church one Sunday in the guise of a homeless person…. Now [Long’s] friend is by no means a “minks and gold rings” kind of woman, but it nevertheless took a great deal of effort, theatrical makeup and thrift-store clothing to transform her into a person whose appearance showed the ravages of the streets.  Her experience at church was remarkable, transforming. Church friends who would normally have greeted her cheerily in the hallway turned their heads and would not make eye contact. When she was not being ignored, she was glared at, and, as she made her way toward the worship space, she could sense the ushers tensing for a possible confrontation. They seated her as far way from others as possible.  There was an anxious moment when my friend stood up to speak during the joys and concerns. When she revealed who she was, this turned rapidly to astonishment, then embarrassment, and finally to many apologies after the service.” (Blog of the Christian Century, 8/31/09)

 

I imagine that church had a lot of soul-searching to do after that day, and this is nothing unusual.  Numerous churches have had to readjust, question themselves and readjust again when confronted with new, unfamiliar, less attractive populations.  And this is not just a modern problem – in our epistle today, James writes to a first-century church that was ingratiating itself with rich while ignoring the poor.  We humans are very talented at sizing people up quickly and deciding whether they belong in our group or not – not just on the basis of wealth and social class, the subject of James’ epistle, but also on the basis of race, education, nationality, religion, family configuration, age, and a myriad of other ways we categorize ourselves and close ourselves off from other people.  It seems to be part of human nature that we organize ourselves into tribes and clans, and close ourselves off from those in outsider groups.  What I find fascinating about today’s scriptures is not that they state what is obvious to anyone who has paid attention to the gospel (everyone is welcome).  It’s how common it is for human beings to close themselves off from others; not just ordinary, flawed human beings like us – but Jesus himself,

 

Today’s gospel gives us one of the strangest, most troubling stories of Jesus’ whole career.  Jesus crosses the Sea of Galilee into Gentile country, apparently for a short vacation, but a desperate Gentile woman with a sick child approaches Jesus for healing, and he rebuffs her with the insult, “You don’t take the children’s food and give it to the dogs.”  Jesus is willing to heal Jews, but not Gentiles.  Now we could say that calling a woman a dog wouldn’t be the same kind of insult in Jesus’ time as it is today – and we would be right – it would be much worse – in Jesus’ time and place, dogs were not considered friendly, loveable house pets – they were considered dirty, disease-ridden scavengers.  So insulting this woman in this way was an even worse insult then than now.

Jesus seems to be telling her that she is too low and insignificant even to come to God’s notice, that she is beyond the reach of the salvation Christ brings, and that God’s healing is just not available to her daughter or her people.  Yet she persists, and Jesus changes his mind.  Jesus changes his mind, and heals the daughter, and more than that, he keeps his word, and expands his mission to include the Gentiles.  And apparently, realizing the significance of the fact that he has learned to open his ears to an outsider, the next thing he does is open the ears of a deaf Gentile.  Something big has changed.

 

Now this story causes a lot of trouble for a lot of people who just don’t see how the Lord of love can insult and exclude a woman the way Jesus does.  Commentators have tried to account for this story in a variety of ways, from saying that Jesus was obviously just testing woman’s faith (or the disciples’), to saying that this probably didn’t happen at all.  But I have trouble with these ways of interpreting the story – I don’t see anything in the story that says that Jesus was just putting on a cruel act, insulting the woman to test someone; and I don’t think you can just throw out troubling Bible stories when they don’t fit what you already believe.  I think the Bible is something you have to wrestle with on its own terms.  The Bible has given us this account of Jesus, and we have to deal with it.

 

And here, this Bible story seems to say clearly that Jesus started out excluding and insulting a woman, and then he changed his mind.  Jesus changed his mind – and what a bewildering thought this is.  If Jesus could be so wrong about his own mission, and could change his mind, opening up a whole new direction for the church, what does that say about us?

 

Church tradition tells us that Jesus was fully divine and fully human.  We tend to concentrate on the divine part, I think, and forget what it means that Jesus was human.  And yet if we look at Jesus in this gospel story, I think we can begin to understand some things about his humanity, and about our own.  Here we see a Jesus who is in a process of change and growth, who isn’t perfectly wise and all-knowing at all times, but who truly learns and responds at a deep and heartfelt level to the people around him.  It is a Jesus who, in a very human way, allows his human upbringing to make up his mind about someone who is outside of his own social group, who closes his ears to the pleas of someone in need.  Yet he listens, and allows her to move him to a different place, a place where his own ears are opened and he begins to believe something new about who he is and what he is called to do. 

 

It is a picture of the Son of God changing in response to a human, opening his mind and his heart to the outsider, and learning something new about himself.  So Jesus can change – and this, to me, is where hope lies.  If Jesus is fully human, and finds that for him, life is a learning process, a time to constantly discern and re-discern his call, a time to pray and change and grow and respond differently to the world around him; if God can change his whole mission to the world in response to us – then that tells us that we need to be ready to do the same thing. 

 

It is human temptation to close ourselves off from change and growth, to believe that we know truth, close our ears to new ideas; and yet this story tells us that the path to growth is through opening ourselves to the outsider.  Rabbi Edwin Friedman, who wrote one of the most important works about how family systems work, and applied family system theories to congregations and other systems, says that healthy functioning within human organisms depends on people’s ability to do two things:  To define ourselves – say honestly who we are and what we believe; While remaining connected – respecting the humanity and the good faith of those who disagree, and remaining in respectful relationship. 

 

These two skills – defining oneself in a non-threatening way, while remaining connected with those who disagree, are skills that allow for mature and respectful functioning within all human systems.  They allow us to state what we believe, while remaining open to learning and growth in relationship with others who might surprise us, change us, give us a new mission and new outlook on life.  Because it is in relationship, ultimately, that all human beings learn everything they need to survive – relationship with others and relationship with God. 

 

And, if Jesus can change and grow, fully human and fully divine as he was, then maybe we can too.  We can open our ears to the cries of the poor and those who need our help, we can open our minds to new ways of thinking and being and worshiping, we can allow God to speak to our hearts and call us to new missions and ministries.  We can open our church to new relationships and people who will change us.  We can reach out our hands to those who need us.  We can teach and preach and sing and worship and know that God is with us, marveling with us at the unpredictable and amazing things that are happening; we can transform lives and we can be transformed ourselves with the love of Jesus Christ.

 

Sermon for 8.30.09

This Week's Lessons:

http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp17_RCL.html

Gregory Peck, not long before he died, said that if you’re going to play the part of the devil you have to look for the angel in him, and if you’re going to play an angel you have to look for the devil in him.  One great example is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off , directed by the recently deceased John Hughes. 

 

Ferris Bueller, HS student and devilish angel, wakes up on a perfect sunny day and decides to ditch school – convinces his loving parents he is sick and takes off on comic adventures with his best friend, Cameron, and his girlfriend, Sloane.  Now Ferris is a slick liar and a manipulator who can get anyone to do what he wants.  But Ferris is also a kid whom everybody likes (by the time he gets home, his home is full of flowers, balloons and candy from well-wishers who heard he was sick).  He can get away with anything because, well, he’s Ferris Bueller.

 

The iconic image of this movie happens as a German parade goes through downtown.  Ferris talks his way onto one of the floats and lip-synchs “Danke Schoen”, then leads the whole dancing, cheering crowd in a rousing rendition of “Twist and Shout” – because that’s just the kind of thing Ferris Bueller does.

 

Ferris has a younger sister who resents him and an officious school administrator who’s on to him.  So a big part of the movie is Ferris weaseling his way out of being discovered. 

 

The funniest thing to me about this movie is that suburban teen adventure movies from Risky Business to Mean Girls have certain conventions.  There are popular kids, who turn out to be foolish and self-centered and have all the wrong priorities; and there are regular, average kids who triumph.  There’s a huge party, things get broken, the parents and teachers find out and there’s major trouble in store, and it all results in a transforming growing-up process for main character, who becomes an adult.

 

This movie doesn’t fit the pattern – first of all, Ferris is hugely popular not because he’s foolish and self-centered, but apparently because he’s sweet, kind and helpful.  His priorities may be mixed up from an adult perspective, but he is truly kind, to everyone from a freshman who he promises to get out of summer school, to his tightly-wound best friend, whose punishment he offers to take.

 

And at the end, everyone around Ferris has had some sort of spiritual awakening – from his sister, who meets a strung-out-looking Emilio Estevez in a police station, and he tells her, “Your problem is you.  You oughta spend a little more time worrying about yourself, and a little less time worrying about your brother.”  To his best friend, who finally gets up the nerve to face his harsh, unloving father; to the officious school administrator who gets his comeuppance by basically falling into the trap he has set for Ferris.  In fact, the only person unchanged at the end of the movie is Ferris, who has had a very pleasant day getting away with all kinds of shenanigans, and ends it untouched.  He doesn’t need to be transformed himself – he is sort of a catalyst, who helps all the people around him grow and blossom.  It’s like, anyone as devilishly sweet as Ferris doesn’t need to grow up – he is already perfect, and perfectly endearing – no need for a spiritual awakening.

 

Strangely enough, in real life, most of us aren’t like Ferris Bueller – so perfectly sweet that we don’t need to grow up and experience a spiritual awakening.  Most of us find that we need spiritual awakening and growth, nearly constantly.  Life isn’t really a matter of getting through high school and then being free to do whatever we want to.  True life presents one challenge after another, which most of us meet with varying degrees of success throughout our lives.  And the biggest challenge of life for most people ultimately comes down to this:  how do we live a peaceful, joyful, fulfilling life in the company of other people? 

 

This is the challenge that individuals, families, communities and nations face.  And it’s one challenge that I think becomes especially important for churches.  Because we are God’s beloved community, the sign of God’s love to the world, and we are called to make that love apparent in the way we interact with each other and with the world around us.  And if there is anything in life that requires spiritual awakening and growth, it is the challenge of loving our neighbors in the church and the wider community.  Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner suggested that our lifelong hope is to "become" Christians, not "be" Christians, as if such a transformation could happen in an instant.  We are all in a process of growth and “becoming,” learning day by day how to live in love with God, and with our neighbors – learning how to live as Christians.

 

Our scriptures have talked about wisdom for 3 weeks now – which is not same thing as knowledge.  We are way better at knowledge in the age of the internet than we are at wisdom.  All the websites in all the world don’t carry the same wisdom as the ancient Scriptures – they may not have had instantaneous worldwide communication, but they understood that the major challenge of life is interacting with others.  Eugene Peterson says, "Wisdom is not primarily knowing the truth, although it certainly includes that; it is skill in living. For what good is a truth if we don't know how to live it? What good is an intention if we can't sustain it?"

 

All 3 of our readings today tell us about wise living.  In Deuteronomy, we hear part of  Moses’ farewell speech as the Israelites are preparing to enter the Promised Land without him.  God has given Israelites the Jewish law – a standard of moral and ethical living – not  in order to earn God’s love or be saved, but to provide evidence of God’s salvation and be a witness to the world.  Observing the law is evidence to the world of the wisdom of Israel, and it becomes a powerful demonstration to the world of who God is. 

 

In Mark, we see what happens when people begin to forget the original purpose of the law.  The law can become only outward observance without the involvement of the heart.  Jesus makes very clever remark about what defiles a person: not what comes in from outside, but what goes out from inside.  We carry our own devilishness within us, says Jesus, and we can poison the world around us by allowing our own evil intentions to spill out.  True wisdom, says Jesus, lies in allowing God to transform, to cleanse, our insides, so that what spills out of our hearts into the human community is transforming love that in turn helps cleanse others.  Jesus wants us each to become a catalyst for world transformation – like Ferris Bueller.

 

Our lesson from James tells us something very similar:  God gave us truth and life by planting the word within us.  This seed takes root so that we ourselves become the fruit/harvest.  Then he explains how we become the harvest, how we ourselves become God’s gift to the world.  It may sound like a list of behavior rules, but it is truly a picture of God’s wisdom, lived out in community.  James tells us how to live as the beloved community, including rules for relating to others – listen, speak, be slow to anger; anger does not help the seed grow; only God’s word has the power to save.  James counsels patience, listening, open communication, choosing not to get angry, but valuing each other and treating each other with respect.  James gives us a picture of how we can live out God’s wisdom – letting it transform us in every part of our lives. 

 

James says it comes down to this:  Be doers, not hearers, of the word.  Becoming doers of the word is evidence to the world that God loves us.  The best evidence of true religion is reaching out with love to each other and to outsiders – helping orphans and widows (the most disadvantaged people in James’ world).  For us, evidence that (unlike Ferris Bueller) we have been transformed by God is our willingness to be constantly transformed, constantly undergoing process of spiritual growth, learning how to live transformed lives with each other, and focusing on helping those whose lives can be changed by our help.

 

We have talked about wisdom for 3 weeks straight now, and we’ve talked about gaining God’s wisdom through prayer, through worship, and through living as God’s beloved community, extending love to each other and to the world around us.  And it’s a great time for us to talk about wisdom, as we embark on a journey of discovering God’s wisdom for this congregation, in our visioning process.  In this process, we will be praying for wisdom, and we will be talking and thinking together about it.  But in the quest for wisdom, the most important thing of all is for us to live wisely, to treat each other lovingly, to realize that the caring community we are creating in this congregation is itself the proclamation of God’s wisdom to the world- we are the gift.  And as we allow God’s gifts of kindness, generosity, open communication, valuing each other, and love, to blossom in each one of us and in our Church, our prayer is that our church, living out God’s transforming love, like Ferris Bueller, will become a catalyst that will inspire transformation in all the people around us.  And in our life of transforming love, we will fulfill our mission of transforming lives with the love of Jesus Christ.

 

 

Sermon for 8.16.09

This week's scriptures are here:

http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp15_RCL.html

On my recent vacation in Austria, I took a tour of the old salt mine outside of Salzburg.  To get into the mine, you go the same way the miners used to go.  You get on a little train which is really just a rail on wheels, so you straddle it, hold on tight to the person in front of you, and take a ride downhill.  After a while, you get off and start walking through small, dark tunnels.  Then comes the fun part:  you slide down a slide.  Like the train, the slide is nothing more than a rail that you straddle.  Nothing to hold onto, and just a dark tunnel stretching downward in front of you, so you can’t see where you are going.  They have you slide two at a time so you can hold onto each other.  I held onto my daughter and we went sliding into the darkness, whooping and hollering.

 

If we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit that all of life feels like that sometimes:  sliding a little too fast in dark, nothing to hold onto, not sure where we’re going.  I sometimes hear people quote the book of Jeremiah: I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Jeremiah 29:11.  And yet, if it’s true that God knows God’s plans for us, nevertheless it’s one of the challenges of life to figure out what they are, what direction we should be going in, and not to feel like we are sliding into an unknown darkness.

 

And unlike sliding on a slide, life is not something you ride on a predetermined course.  Life is unpredictable and surprising, takes unexpected twists, and presents lots of decisions we have to make – what job to take, what relationship to enter into, what place to live, what is God’s will for us.  If we are Christian people, part of our faith is that the best way to live is in accordance with God’s will – this is the truest path to fulfillment and spiritual growth, even if it leads us to make sacrifices on behalf of others.  To begin to understand God’s will is the Christian definition of wisdom.

 

There’s a lot in scriptures about wisdom today: Psalm, Ephesians, story of Solomon.  Solomon is famous for being wise enough to understand that true wisdom is necessary to govern God’s people, and true wisdom comes only from God.  And Ephesians says that wisdom is knowing God’s will, and living any other way is foolishness; and it counsels us to cultivate wisdom through worship, being filled with the Spirit, singing and praying in community.  

 

So our scriptures today tell us some important things about life.  Living wisely is a matter of being attuned to God’s will through our personal prayer life and relationship with God (how Solomon was in touch with God).  And it is also a matter of living and worshipping in community (Ephesians).  

 

So if we are living a human existence, trying our best to see in the darkness and make the best decisions for our lives, we need to understand how to incorporate these two dimensions of wisdom:  individual wisdom, cultivated in personal relationship with God; and community wisdom, gained by sharing worship with a group of Christians who cultivate wisdom together.

 

The first thing to understand in thinking about wisdom is that wisdom is not the same thing as knowledge.  We’ve all known people with huge stores of knowledge who didn’t know how to function in the world, and we’ve all known very wise people who didn’t have much education.  Wisdom is not a matter of storing up facts– wisdom is a matter of relationship.  A truly wise person knows how to read other people and knows how to manage relationships.  And in Christian terms, ultimately we believe that true wisdom comes when we are in close enough relationship with God to hear God’s voice and understand God’s will for us and others around us. 

 

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”, says today’s Psalm.  I once had to write an entire 3-page essay on that verse on a final exam in seminary– what does it mean that the fear of the Lord is beginning of wisdom.  So I have lots of useful knowledge about this.  First, scripture is not recommending that we quake in our boots at the thought of God – it is not telling us to be afraid of the Lord in the usual sense.  When Israel talked about “fear of the Lord,” it meant something like “awe.”  It meant standing in the presence of the Lord, recognizing “there is something here that is mysterious and unexplainable and infinitely powerful, and it is not the same as me – it is something I have no name for other than God.”  And the beginning of wisdom, the very root of all true understanding of the world, flows out of that knowledge that I am ultimately not in control, that I am not the one who has wisdom, and that true wisdom flows out of my relationship with the source of all wisdom – God.

 

These days, we have lots of technology that makes it easy to stay in touch with each other.  But we don’t have a lot of knowledge about staying in touch with God – staying in touch with our old best frend from 5^th grade who now lives in Shanghai is a lot easier.  The way that Christians stay in touch with God is through prayer, and prayer is a matter of both speaking and listening, cultivating times of quiet. 

 

One truth of the Christian life is that we are in a relationship with a God who is always more ready to communicate with us than we are to listen, says Christian writer Roy Oswald.  This God is also willing to offer us direction and perspective if and when we are ready to surrender our own ideas and be ready to receive God’s.  But, he says, a lot of our difficulty in discerning God’s will comes from the fact that God will rarely overwhelm us with a message so clear and blatant that our freedom to choose is eliminated – which is why we sometimes feel like we’re sliding into darkness, with nothing to hold onto and no idea of where we’ll end up. 

 

God does speak to us in many ways, through Scripture, tradition, community, relationships, and events and experiences.  But we have to be ready to listen for God’s voice, and we have to seek out a very important gift:  the gift of discernment.  Discernment is gift that allows us to distinguish between our voice and God’s voice.  In any conversation, we always hear our own voice loudest, because we spend most of our time thinking up what we’re going to say next instead of listening, and because it comes to our ears from inside our own head, making it sometimes difficult for us to hear anything else.  In the same way, when we try to pray, it is easy to hear only our own voice and not the voice of the God who is always trying to speak to us.  As humans, Oswald says, it is very easy to think we have a “word from the Lord,” when in fact the word comes from our desire, our hubris, our dark side, or the shadow side of other people and community.  And when we listen to our own voice rather than God’s, we can often find ourselves choosing the easiest path, the path of most immediate benefit, but not necessarily the path of spiritual growth, and not necessarily God’s path for the world.

 

That is why prayer must become a lifelong habit for us, not simply something to resort to in times of trouble – we must tune our ears to hear God’s voice and not our own.  We are well-trained in our Western Christian tradition to pray in words – we know how to talk so that God will listen.  The harder task is to listen so that God will talk, opening ourselves to the presence of God, perhaps putting a prayer or a problem before God, and then quieting ourselves to listen for God’s direction.  There are ancient Christian spiritual techniques to help us do this, many of which are outlined in the “Prayer and Spirituality” section of our website, so you have a chance to try different methods and see which is the best for you.  The main thing is to set aside some quiet time for God each day and begin to cultivate a habit of relationship with God so we recognize God’s voice.  This is how we begin to cultivate personal wisdom.

 

At its foundation, scriptures tell us that wisdom flows out of worship.  Ephesians tells us today that wisdom comes from being filled with God’s Spirit, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.  And Jesus tells us that true nourishment comes from the soul food he gives us in the sacrament of his body and blood, the act we do in community that makes his own sacrifice present and real for us.  This worship is at the core of who we are as Christians and it is the way that Christ transforms us into his own likeness.  And through our worship, God pours into us his wisdom and his life, and empowers us to transform the world.