Sermon for August 21, 2011

Scriptures for this Sunday are Here

What if I told you that something you did tomorrow would change the world? You would probably say, you’re simply living your life in your small corner of the world – it seems pretty unlikely.

But think about this story, told by Andy Andrews, a motivational speaker, in a little book The Butterfly Effect, named after the scientific theory that says that a butterfly flapping its wings in North America can set off a chain of events that causes a hurricane in China:

In April 2004, ABC News named its person of the week – Norman Borlaug. You may never have heard of him, but in the 1940s, Norman Borlaug created a hybrid strain of wheat and corn that could survive in arid climates, making it possible for people in dry climates from America to Africa to grow grain. Norman Borlaug’s hybrid grains are credited with saving over 2 billion lives from famine: one small action that caused a Butterfly Effect that changes the world.

But wait, says Andrews, maybe the chain of events started before that. Maybe it started with Henry Wallace, U.S. Vice-President under Franklin D. Roosevelt, a former Secretary of Agriculture who championed the creation of an office that would develop hybridized wheat and corn, and hired a young man to run it – named Norman Borlaug. So maybe it was Henry Wallace that started the chain of events that saved over 2 billion lives.

But wait, says Andrews, maybe it started even before that – with the man who mentored Henry Wallace as a 6-yr-old boy, took him on long walks and explained agriculture to him, and awakened a love of agriculture that lasted throughout his life. That man was named George Washington Carver, born into slavery in 1864, who became a famous agriculturalist and developed 266 uses for the lowly American peanut. So maybe it was George Washington Carver who started a chain of events that saved 2 billion lives.

But wait, says Andrews, maybe it started even before that, toward the very end of the Civil War, When Mary Washington and her infant son, slaves in Missouri, were kidnapped by a terrorist pro-slavery group called Quantrill’s Raiders from across the border in Arkansas. And a couple named Moses and Susan Carver refused to give up, and kept looking for the kidnappers. It was too late for Mary Washington, who had already been sold into slavery in Kentucky, but Moses met the kidnappers in the middle of the night and took custody of her infant son, naked, cold, and dying, and opened his shirt and placed the baby boy against his skin to warm him up. And Moses Carver took the baby home to his wife, Susan, and they raised him as their own son, made sure he learned to read and write, though that was illegal at the time, and named him – George Washington Carver. So maybe the chain of events that saved 2 billion lives started with Moses and Susan Carver.

Maybe it began with that – or maybe it began with parents even before that who taught the Carvers that the life of a human child, and the love of parents, and the ability to read and write, were values worth risking one’s life for.

Who knows who set in motion the Butterfly Effect that saved 2 billion lives – so far. The point is, we just don’t know how what we do can change the world.

Our Old Testament lesson today tells us a story that set in motion a chain of events that changed the world, without which you and I might not be here today. It’s the story of Moses in the bulrushes, which if you grew up in the church, you probably learned by heart in Sunday school. But what you maybe didn’t learn by heart was the story that put that baby in the basket – the story of two brave midwives who risked their lives to save that baby. Unlike most women in the Old Testament, we know their names.

Shiphrah and Puah ignored the Pharaoh’s command to practice genocide against Hebrew baby boys, made excuses to avoid his command to drown them, and just might have saved numerous lives. One of them grew up to be another man named Moses, who heard God’s call, went to Pharaoh and demanded that he “let my people go.” He led the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt toward the Promised Land, where they would establish a nation that would live a way of life devoted to God until the day when another baby was born, named Jesus of Nazareth.

And that child would grow up to be recognized by Peter as the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, and would live, die and be resurrected for our sake, and would open for us a new way of life.

We live in the Kingdom of Heaven he proclaimed, because he opened the way; because of him, we have committed ourselves to a new way of life in our baptism, and because we worship him, we are here today, getting ready to build a new church to accomplish the mission of Jesus.

All because two midwives stood up to the Pharaoh.

And when I think about those midwives, I’m pretty sure they didn’t know they were making it possible for the Messiah to come into the world, or for us to be here in this room today. I’m pretty sure that all they knew was that they were committed to a profession, a calling, of bringing life into the world, and they were determined not to let that calling change into a calling of bringing death to innocent children. And they risked their own lives to answer their own calling. They refused to conform to what Pharaoh demanded of them. They stood up to an empire because they saw a power more important – the power of life that they had committed their lives to.

“Do not be conformed to this world,” says Paul in our lesson from Romans today, “but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God-- what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Or, as Martin Luther King translated this passage, live a life of transformed nonconformity. People who live lives conformed to this world, said Dr. King, are like thermometers, who just adjust to the temperature of the air around them. But if you live a life of transformed nonconformity, he said, you are more like a thermostat, that actually measures the temperature of the air – and then changes it.

When we live a life of transformed nonconformity, we look at the climate around us, and we make judgments about what needs to be changed. We become people who are, in the words of French sociologist Jacques Ellul, “positively maladjusted” the world around us. As Dr. King said, he hoped always to remain maladjusted to the evil of segregation. When we are positively maladjusted to evil, then we can work to change it.

And that’s what it means to live in the kingdom of God. Shiphrah and Puah were positively maladjusted to the kingdom of Pharaoh, that demanded the death of children to maintain Pharaoh’s power. And they stood up for life instead, in their own small and domestic way. You and I can be maladjusted to the things we see in this world, that are not the kingdom of God – poverty, disease, famine and suffering. We can devote ourselves instead to the things God calls us to do: to parent our children in positive ways, to teach the young and heal the sick and bring comfort to those who are suffering, to give of ourselves to help the poor. To develop strong businesses that will employ people to manufacture things and serve others and develop new products that will improve lives. To heal a sick person, to mentor a child, to start someone on a new path. Because these are the ordinary, everyday things that regular people like us devote our lives to, and Paul says these things are our spiritual worship.

We may think of worship as these things we do here on Sunday morning: something that involves singing and kneeling and hearing sermons and receiving bread and wine. And if we think that, we’re right – we do these things because we love our Savior Jesus, and we want to conform our lives to him, not to the world. We do these things so that we are constantly renewing our minds in his direction, always remembering that he is the Messiah, Son of Living God.

But Paul says that worship is far more than that. Worship is what we do every single day when we present our bodies, our whole selves, as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. Paul isn’t saying we should sacrifice ourselves in the sense of accepting death, or putting up with mistreatment from others, or giving up everything we love. Paul is using the word “sacrifice” in its original sense: we are setting aside our lives to make them holy, sacred to God.

Paul says that this is exactly what has happened to us in our baptism. We have been set apart as holy – living sacrifices, people who are sacred to God – which means that every single thing we do in our lives, we do for God. God has given us different gifts – one person is a priest, another is a businesswoman, another is an entrepreneur, another is a philanthropist, another is a parent, another is a lawyer, another is a teacher, another is a healer. Every single one of these everyday activities is sacred to God. Each of us can live a life of transformed nonconformity –not just thermometers who just reflect the world around us, but thermostats who take action to change it . Every one of us, every day, can do small things to change the world.

Because we are the church, we are the ones who have staked our lives on our faith in the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. And on the Rock of our faith, Jesus builds his church.

As we let Christ build us into his church, as we live into our identity as members of the Body of Christ, as we live lives of transformed nonconformity, declaring our loyalty not to the kingdoms of this world, but to the kingdom of God, we too can stand up against the evils of this world. We too can become midwives, helping Jesus bring a new kingdom to birth. We too can set events in motion in a Butterfly Effect we may never understand.

What if I told you that something you do tomorrow might turn into a movement that will change the world?

Sermon for August 14, 2011

Scriptures for this Sunday are Here

Earlier this year, Rob Bell, the pastor of an evangelical megachurch in Minneapolis, ignited a firestorm of controversy in the Christian world. He didn’t do anything wrong except to write a book – and the firestorm of controversy erupted even before the book was published, based on a 3-minute promotional video that he posted on his website. In the video, he tells a story of an art exhibit at his church; one artwork that really touched a lot of people was an exhibit that had a quote by Gandhi. The piece caused a lot of discussion in the church until one day, someone left a handwritten note on the piece saying: “Reality Check: He’s in Hell.”

In his video, Rob Bell stops, and says “Really? Gandhi’s in Hell? And someone knows this for sure, and felt the need to let us all know?” And he goes on to ask the question that many of us have asked: is God going to select just a few of us for salvation, and let billions of others burn eternally? Or, stated more simply – Who’s In, and Who’s Out? Who’s on God’s side, and who’s on the other side, and how do we tell the difference?

If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that the question of Who’s In and Who’s Out occupies a lot of energy in the human mind. We human beings are constant boundary-setters, always wanting to define our borders, delineate who’s on our side (the good side) and who’s not. And while setting personal boundaries is a healthy thing, enabling us to enter into strong, equal, adult relationships with people around us, in our communal lives, the boundaries we draw can quickly become excuses for conflicts and wars, like the Berlin Wall (whose 50^th anniversary we observed on Friday). And when we start defining our world in terms of what we think God thinks about who’s in and who’s out, things can become very frightening very fast.

We saw an example a few weeks ago in Norway, where Anders Breivik, a self-described Christian, murdered almost 80 people, mostly teenagers and young adults at a summer camp, because he felt that there were too many non-Christian outsiders being allowed to flourish in Norway. Since the society around him was not willing to answer the question of Who’s In and Who’s Out in a way that satisfied him, he decided to answer it himself. This is far from an isolated example – world history is full of terrible stories of In-groups destroying Out-Groups for religious reasons, believing God to be on their side – from 9/11 to the Holocaust (in recent history alone).

What is it in human nature that causes us to want to define in-groups and out-groups, and more importantly, does our tendency to draw these boundaries between people groups, our tendency to exclude the outsider – does this reflect the character of God? Our Old Testament lesson is the conclusion of a sad story where Joseph’s brothers get jealous of him, gang up on him and sell him into slavery. But he is so talented that he rises to the top and becomes Pharaoh’s right-hand man; years later his brothers, suffering from famine in Israel, come to Egypt to ask for help, and find themselves standing before brother they had wronged. Joseph, instead of defining the brothers who betrayed him as “outsiders,” recognizes God’s hand at work in his life, and displays the character of God in what he does next – extends the hand of forgiveness, welcomes his brothers with joy, and promises them everything that they need, they’ll have in Egypt. And from this extended family in Egypt, God creates the people of Israel.

God does not define outsiders based on our past mistakes, the wrongs we have done to others; God works with the situations we get ourselves into and, if we let him, can bring good even out of the worst evil in our lives. And God, like Joseph, extends the hand of forgiveness and welcomes us home. So if we are addressing Rob Bell’s question of who is an outsider to God – we can’t say that God defines outsiders based on sinfulness. God is on the side of reconciliation. God works with who we are, wherever God finds us – at whatever stage of life we’re in, whatever we have done – God welcomes us home.

Our gospel narrows down our question a bit more, because it is very specifically addressing the question of whether God defines insiders or outsiders based on what religious group people belong to. To understand the questions being asked here, we need to understand the fact that Christianity arose in the Jewish world. Jews were different than the other people around them – they worshiped one God, who was greater than all other gods, and who called them to be different.

As a mark of their difference and their loyalty to one God, they lived differently; they ate certain foods defined as clean (kosher), the men were circumcised; they did not eat or associate with Gentiles (pagans). And to the Jews, their status as God’s chosen ones, God’s Insiders, was easily visible in their careful observance of those laws – so that defining insiders and outsiders was a religious obligation, and a way of being faithful.

Jesus pointedly addresses the things that Jews did to stay pure and separate in the gospel today when he talks about the food they ate (marking them as holy). It is not what goes into a person that defiles them, he says – it’s not the food you eat – it’s what comes out – it’s the things that you believe in your heart, that become actions you take in relationship to others, that mark you as holy. Religious observance is all very well, he says, but our hearts are where we know God, and if we know God, we will live as God wants us to live.

Jesus, the Jewish rabbi, is challenging the purity laws God had given the Jewish people, challenging the wall that kept them separate from outsider groups. As disciples point out to him, this is very offensive to the Pharisees. But Jesus is insistent that God looks at our hearts, not our outward actions.

Well, this is difficult for human beings – we want our boundaries to be clear. If the life of following Jesus is going to mean we can’t use obvious markers like what religious group someone belongs to, to judge whether people are on God’s side or not, but have to look more deeply at their hearts, life as a human being has suddenly gotten more difficult.

And, as if to underline just how difficult this will be, Matthew immediately tells us a story that lets us know that it was a challenge even for Jesus. Jesus is the Son of God, fully divine, but he is also fully human. And in a moment of full humanity, Jesus has to decide whether to open up his ministry to an outsider – a non-Jewish, Canaanite woman. She recognizes who he is – the Son of David, sent by God, the one who has the power to heal her daughter – but he does not immediately recognize who she is. He believes he’s been sent only to the lost sheep of Israel – not to the “dogs” outside Israel (and by the way, calling her a “dog” is a huge insult).

Yet it turns out that this dog, this outsider, is someone unexpected: she is a messenger sent by God to let Jesus know that it is time to open up God’s word, God’s healing power, beyond the Jewish people, to people everywhere. God’s love extends to all religious groups, apparently. Jesus has to listen for God’s call in the voice of the outsider – and hearing God’s call, Jesus changes his mind: because he understands what Joseph understood in the OT lesson – God is on the side of reconciliation.

In this moment in Matthew’s gospel, we watch Jesus’ whole ministry shift, from being a renewal movement inside Judaism to a movement of reconciliation and discipleship that will reach out to the whole world – till at the end of Matthew, the resurrected Jesus will tell the disciples to go, and make disciples of all nations – to bring Christ’s presence to the world.

God is the one who wants to bring us together, not keep us apart. God is not a maker of boundary lines; God transcends all boundaries.

Paul speaks about that in the Epistle today. For 3 chapters in Romans, he has gone round and round about the question of whether God still loves the Jewish people who have not accepted Christ – are they insiders, or outsiders? Finally he gives in. He doesn’t exactly reason his way to a conclusion. He simply decides that he can trust God – God has made a covenant with God’s people, and God is faithful to his covenants. God is merciful to all. God doesn’t make outsiders; God’s mercy wins.

Which is more or less where Rob Bell ends up, in the book I opened this sermon with, the book that has caused all the controversy in the Christian world. The book is called Love Wins: Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Rob Bell doesn’t know the fate of every person, any more than you or I do – in the end, we simply can’t know the mind of God. What we can do is trust God’s faithfulness.

The God we worship is a God who came in the person of Jesus to all of us when we were outsiders, separated from God by our own disobedience. This is a God who does not hold our sins against us, but like Joseph, holds out the hand of reconciliation when we deserved condemnation. This is a God who knows no outsiders. This is a God of mercy. This is a God of Love. And in the words of Rob Bell, Love Wins.

Sermon for 8.7.11

Scriptures for this week are Here

I recently returned from vacation, and if you’re new here, you should know that these guys don’t let me come back from vacation unless I have a story to tell. So let me tell you about the wondrous, beautiful, complex city of Prague. Wherever you go in Prague, you can peel back another layer of history. We landed in Prague to discover (not for the first time) that our luggage did not make it there with us. So our first full day there, I found myself without decent shoes, tripping over the ancient cobblestones of Prague in flimsy sandals, and it became a priority to find a place where I could buy some decent tennis shoes.

We wandered for several miles until – the first layer of history, current history – Tom finally Googled “Prague shoe stores” on his Blackberry, and we discovered that in the center of the city, right on Wenceslas Square, was surely the largest shoe store I had ever seen, 5 stories of every imaginable brand of men’s women’s, and children’s shoes. Now you can peel back the history of Prague just one layer to appreciate the amazing irony of a 5-story shoe store right on Wenceslas Square. Because 22 years ago, at the height of communism, we would hear of people waiting in lines for hours just to buy ugly black shoes that didn’t even fit, but under communism they were lucky to have something, anything, on their feet. Now, there on Wenceslas Square, where 600,000 people crowded in November 1989 to hear Vaclav Havel speak, and gently bring down communism in the Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia, now you can buy a pair of Nikes, or any kind of shoe you want, in air-conditioned comfort, from a sales clerk who speaks fluent English, and not wait in line at all.

Peel back more layers of history in Prague, and you begin to find a searing history of religious conflict in the Protestant-Catholic violence of the 17^th century – which I will tell you about another time.

Peel back another layer of history in Prague, and you might find yourself in one of the most fascinating sights I’ve seen. In the old Jewish quarter, there is a 13^th century synagogue, the oldest synagogue in continuous operation as a synagogue in Europe. It doesn’t take much peeling to know how unusual this is – most synagogues in Europe did not survive WWII – but in Prague, Hitler preserved the Jewish Quarter because he intended to open a museum there to the extinct Jewish race.

The tour guide in the synagogue told us how 3 Jewish men worked through WWII to catalog priceless Jewish treasures brought there from looted synagogues all over Europe. Among the many treasures were numerous Torah scrolls brought from destroyed synagogues. If you don’t know, the Torah scroll is the most precious possession of any synagogue. It is the hand-lettered, illuminated scroll on which the Hebrew Bible is written, and each Sabbath the members carry it out, touch it and kiss it, and read from it in the synagogue. The Torah scroll is so precious that if a synagogue catches on fire, it is the one thing people will run into a burning building to rescue. When a scroll finally wears out after centuries of use, it is not thrown away – it is buried in a graveyard, like a person.

After the war, the treasures that were catalogued in the old synagogue in Prague were dispersed all over the world, because the synagogues they had come from were destroyed, along with their people. The tour guide in the synagogue told us of one Torah scroll from a small Czech town that was saved from the war and ended up in a synagogue in New Zealand. The woman rabbi from the New Zealand synagogue brought the Torah to its ancestral home in the small Czech town (with its destroyed synagogue) for a visit, and Jewish leaders from all over the country came for the occasion to celebrate the Torah’s visit to its home village. The tour guide owns a DVD of the Torah’s visit, and she got tears in her eyes as she told us about it.

Hitler is gone, but the old synagogue in Prague is still there; you can still see its plaster walls, its worn-down stairs; its outer room for women, its inner sanctum for men at prayer. And most fascinating to me, its ancient Torah scroll, carefully stored in an inscribed tabernacle on the wall, with an eternal flame burning next to it. Just as we have a flame burning here behind our altar to show that God’s presence is here in the bread and wine we have reserved in our tabernacle, the Jews keep an eternal flame burning next to the Torah.

Why is the Torah such a precious thing to the Jews? It is because the Torah is the closest the Jewish people believe God comes to them. When Paul quotes the Hebrew Scriptures (in today’s epistle lesson) as saying “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart,” he is reflecting the Hebrew belief that the word of God that we hear in the Bible is the same power of God that spoke the universe into being. God’s presence is with them in the words of Torah. The word of God carries the power of God, and it is more precious than gold.

For Christians, we treasure the words of God in the Bible; but we believe that the Word of God that spoke the universe into being has gone further than words; it has come into human flesh in Jesus. (Which, incidentally, is why we in the Episcopal Church are not Biblical literalists. The words in the Bible are mediated to us through imperfect human authors, though they are divinely inspired. Only Jesus is a perfect reflection of God – Jesus is the Word of God made flesh.)

So, when we read the gospel from Matthew today, about Jesus walking on water, we should not get distracted by tangential questions – such as: did Jesus really walk on water, and how could he transcend the laws of physics if he was truly human? Or, questions of what Peter did or shouldn’t have done – is this a story about Peter’s faith or lack of faith? (I personally think Peter shows amazing faith here – I’ve tried to walk on water, and I haven’t succeeded yet!)

I think about all those questions, and they are all good ones, but I don’t believe that those are the points Matthew wants us to understand in this story. This is a story with one point, and the punch line is this: “Those in the boat worshipped him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’”

Over the 14 chapters of his gospel to this point, Matthew has been carefully unfolding a narrative that asks one question: who is this Jesus? He tells us things like, this is someone who threatens earthly authorities and people in power, who teaches about love and lives it out, who has authority to heal and forgive, who ensures (in last week’s gospel) that God’s creation means that everyone has enough to eat in abundance, in whom God’s kingdom has come to Israel, but who has also come for the healing of the whole world. Now, for the first time in Matthew, we understand: This is the Son of God.

Which means that in Jesus, the fullness of God’s presence has come to us. Torah is no longer only holy words on a beloved, cherished page. Torah, God’s law, God’s word, God’s power, is human flesh and blood in Jesus – human life that lived, died and was resurrected, and who has changed the very nature of human life as a result.

Our eternal flame burns next to the consecrated bread and wine because these elements mediate the real presence of God to us in Christ’s human body. Jesus said he personally is the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, the completion of the Torah that is held in such reverence by Jews. In Jesus, God’s presence dwelled, not symbolically in words, but completely enfleshed in a human body, lived out in a human life from birth to death.

Which means that our life, our Christian way of life, is more than just reading, understanding, and believing a set of words or doctrines. Too often, Christians have lived as if believing certain propositions about Jesus is enough, and we could live however we want to as long as we believe. Like the Jews, we are called to live by the Torah. But for us, that means we are called to live a life transformed by encountering Jesus in all the ways he comes walking toward us, recognized or not.

Christian author Kurt Willems wrote an online article this week, in which he made the shocking statement that he was done living like Jesus – he was done serving the poor, going the extra mile, being a husband who loves his wife as Christ loves the church, visiting the sick, loving his neighbor, living with integrity. Instead of living like Jesus, he said, he wants to start being like Jesus.

As we encounter Jesus through prayer, worship, spiritual disciplines, reading the Bible and sharing the Eucharist, he said, we become like Jesus. As we encounter Jesus in other ways - walking toward us, recognized or not, in times of fear and trouble; challenging our way of life, urging us to ask ourselves if we are truly living the law of love, we come to know Jesus. As we come to know Jesus through all the ways he encounters us, we don’t just do the things Jesus commanded us to do. Through knowing Jesus we become the kind of people who can’t help but do those things. We become people for whom the hard thing is not loving our enemies, but failing to love them; the hard thing is not helping our neighbor, but turning him away; the hard thing is not working for healing, but allowing unhealthy behavior to flourish. Through daily encounters with Jesus, we become people for whom the only safe and happy thing to do is to love God and love our neighbor. We become like Jesus.

So Kurt Willems wants to stop mechanically doing what Jesus would do and simply start being like Jesus: “So, yes, I’m done with living like a Christian. I’m trading that in for living in a deeper relationship with Christ. I want to know Jesus. I want to hear Jesus. I want to be empowered by Jesus. Not simply in theory as I do the good things that he calls us to do, but as the natural outflow of intimacy with God. The former way “gets the job done.” The latter way changes the world.”

When we open our hearts to being like Jesus, it is the Word of God who lives and breathes through Jesus that takes flesh in us.

When we encounter Jesus, become like Jesus, it is God’s Word that begins to breathe through words we speak to others who have not encountered Jesus.

And as we are transformed by Jesus, it is God’s own Son who reaches out his hand to us, and empowers us to change the world.