Sermon for 3.18.12

Scriptures for today are Here

On Valentine’s Day, 2011, a group of people was out on the ocean in a small boat, when they ran across a very strange sight – a young female humpback whale, lying still in the ocean, with her breathing hole just barely above water. As they got closer to her, they saw what had happened. She had gotten tangled in a mass of nylon fishing line and crab traps, and couldn’t get free. She was in the process of slowly dying. The group radioed the Coast Guard for help, but the Coast Guard said they couldn’t get there for another hour. So they got out some small knives and began to cut. You can watch what happened here.

When the whale was finally free, she swam a little way from the boat and suddenly jumped for joy – a full breach out of the water. And for the next hour, the group watched as this young whale made full breaches, time after time, about 40 breaches while they watched. It was a dance of freedom and joy by a young creature of God.

That is a beautiful story of freedom – but freedom is sometimes a bit more complex for human beings. Here’s a very different story.

At 6:15 a.m. last Wednesday, Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs in London, sent an email to his boss resigning from the company. What his boss didn’t know as he read that email over his morning tea was that 15 minutes later, at 6:30 a.m., a different resignation letter by Greg Smith would hit the website of the New York Times. It was the kind of resignation letter that is reminiscent of some fiery exits from other jobs in the past. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as the resignation of Steven Slater, the flight attendant who in 2010 cursed out a passenger over the intercom, grabbed a beer, deployed the inflatable slide, and slid to freedom.

But it was still dramatic. In an op-ed, Greg Smith began, “Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs.” He went on to skewer the firm’s business ethics, client service and culture, in a sort of shot heard round the world – and the business pages have not stopped talking about it since. Among the many serious questions this spectacular exit has raised, are some more personal questions about Greg Smith, including the question of whether any employer on Wall Street will ever hire him again. Employers don’t like to take a risk that a person who made a spectacular exit once, throwing bombshells back at the office he was leaving, might do it again. Which is an example of a way an unhealthy system protects itself: unhealthy systems will guard against taking their bad behavior public by providing safeguards, enlisting everyone involved, including competitors who share in the profits of the system, in making sure things like this don’t happen. The threat, “You’ll never work in this town again,” becomes a very real one in a system like that.

This is just one example of a very serious human truth: if you are trapped in an unhealthy system – an abusive relationship, an bad work environment, an addiction, a personal set of poor habits – it is really hard to set yourself free.

Which brings us to our Old Testament reading today: a very weird story of snakes. And we may ask ourselves, why in the world did the lectionary people decide to include this weird story in our Lent readings? The other weeks in Lent have brought us stories of major covenants: Noah, Abraham, Moses. But this week – snakes? I’m with Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark – Why does it have to be snakes? I hate snakes!

The easy answer is, this story is referred to in the gospel, so our Old Testament lesson is selected to give us the background for the gospel reading. The more complicated answer is, this story, in a very real way, tells us something very important about the development of our Biblical tradition and how that tradition speaks of freedom in new ways to new ages and new people.

When you look at this story of the snakes, you can see layers of theological development, new ways of looking at the world and God’s relationship to us. At the most basic level, we have the story of a people, wandering in the desert after being freed from slavery in Egypt, encountering a snakepit and many getting bitten. The people ask Moses, their leader, for help, and Moses creates a symbol of God’s presence, a snake on a pole, to reassure them. People look at this symbol and are healed – perhaps of snakebite, perhaps of fear; at any rate, this symbol allows them to continue their wilderness journey.

So that’s the first level of theological development here: fearful former slaves run into danger and need a tangible sign of God’s protection. The second level of development is this: people begin to ask why the snakes were there. They can’t think of another explanation than that God must have sent them, and they attribute the snakes to God’s punishment for their complaining. Unfortunately, this makes God look temperamental and arbitrary – having a temper tantrum, sending snakes, then instead of removing the snakes, sending this snake on a pole. And it also raises other questions: do we have God to blame for all our misfortunes? Does God send tornadoes, does God send cancer, does God send automobile accidents? If so, God has a lot of ‘splaining to do. And I don’t believe that God operates this way.

Bible editors help us address this question with the third level of development in this story, by setting it in a particular context. The people of Israel begin to understand this event as part of a larger movement from slavery to freedom. Look at what’s going on in this story – the people of Israel are wandering in the desert, not sure where they’re going or when they will get there, and they start to yearn for the old familiar days of slavery. In their slave days, they were oppressed, they were beaten, their children were murdered, and they had nothing of their own. But at least things were settled and predictable. It takes courage to be free.

Human beings sometimes find predictable slavery easier to bear than frightening freedom, with decisions that have to be made, dangers that must be met, limitless possibilities, promises for the future – and we constantly have to fight our temptation to run back into our familiar, comfortable lives as slaves. In slavery, the suffering is known and expected; in freedom, you run across dangers you don’t know how to deal with – like, symbolically, snakes.

Greg Smith declared his independence from Goldman Sachs – now he faces the “snakes” of unemployment. An abused wife leaves her husband; now she is going to have to deal with the job market and the legal system and a custody battle and her own guilt and love for the man she left behind.

Freedom is hard: and what the people of Israel came to understand is that on the hard journey to freedom, the only way they would get there was to rely on God. Not just in the initial act of leading them across the Red Sea, but every single step of the way, from Egypt to the Promised Land. Because every step of way, their temptation was to fall back into slavery once more. Finally arriving at a place of freedom was an amazing act of courage.

Which is a truth that every one of us can look around and understand today. I mentioned last week that the Ten Commandments are not limits to our freedom: they are God’s way of life that save us from our own temptation to fall back into slavery – slavery to our possessions, to our passions, to our work, to false gods. We are always tempted into comfortable slavery instead f frightening freedom.

Just ask any member of Alcoholics Anonymous – people become slaves to alcohol, they are owned by alcohol, and they can’t just decide to be free. It takes reliance on a higher power to free them from that slavery – it takes God. They have to take a journey through a wilderness of healing, and every single day of that journey, they will be tempted to fall back into slavery. To be freed, they have to keep sight of that higher power before them.

Comfortable slavery is sometimes much easier than exhausting freedom. Now, one caveat: personal covenants we make, like marriage, can sometimes feel binding and limiting. In a marriage that is not abusive, the path to freedom lies through that covenant, not around it. God works through that marriage to teach us the way to love another human being. But in many other areas of life, there are many things that try to enslave us – unhealthy ways of life, bad work environments, our possessions and our debts that hold us in bondage, unhealthy systems we are trapped in. To get to a place of freedom, you have to have strength, you have to have courage, you have to have other people supporting you, and most of all, you have to have God. Because we humans can’t free ourselves on our own.

Which brings us back to our gospel for today. Right before the most famous passage in the New Testament, John 3:16, we hear a reference to this story about snakes, as Jesus speaks about being “lifted up” like Moses’ bronze serpent. When the Jesus we see in John’s gospel talks about being “lifted up,” he means being lifted up on the cross. John is telling us that looking at Jesus lifted up on the cross provides healing like Moses’ bronze serpent did. And what kind of healing does he provide? This kind:

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Jesus on the cross provides healing of body, mind, and spirit. The word that Jesus uses for “believe” here is not the same kind of “believe” that you would use if you said, “I believe in evolution” – that is, you have looked at the scientific evidence and decided that it makes logical sense. This is the kind of belief that you would use if you say, “I believe in peace.” It’s not a question of whether peace is factual, it’s a question of whether you put your trust in it, work for it – whether you live according to that belief.

Jesus tells us that for us, looking at Jesus lifted up on the cross is how we are healed, because in him God frees us from slavery to sin and death, and leads us to freedom and life – and we can put our trust in him. The healing happens for us because on the cross, what we see is this: God’s love for us, so strong that Jesus gave his life for the sake of that love; and God’s utter involvement in our own struggles for freedom.

When we were slaves to sin and death, God entered our slavery, took our sin and death upon himself, and led us out of slavery into freedom. And Freedom is not an easy task: but day by day, we can put our trust in Jesus to give us strength, to give us courage, to help set us free from all the things that enslave us – so that we may not perish, but have everlasting life. And then, knowing that we are free, we can, like a young and beautiful humpback whale, a beloved creature of God, dance in joy and celebration.

Sermon for 3.11.12

Scriptures for Today are Here

It’s the time of year when you start seeing a lot of green. This coming Saturday, there will be an inordinate number of people wearing Kelly green. There will be leprechaun hats, shamrocks, parades, and green beer. In Fountain Hills, where I live, at noon on March 17, the fountain will turn green. All for a festival known as St. Patrick’s Day.

We think of this day as a cute little folk festival, beloved by Irish-Americans. But what is almost never talked about is St. Patrick himself, who was a real human being, a dedicated Christian, who changed the lives of millions of people, including, incidentally, yours and mine.

To understand this, you need to know Patrick’s story. To begin with, he was not Irish, but British. He was born around the year 400 in Roman-occupied Britain (at a time when the Roman Empire was on its last legs), and was raised in a Christian family but never took the faith seriously. But at age 16, he was kidnapped by Irish pirates and sold as a slave in Ireland. Ireland in those days was a wild and dangerous country, outside the Roman Empire and therefore not civilized in the same way as the rest of Europe at the time. It was a land full of marauding bands of warriors, landowners who terrorized slaves, and religious leaders who performed human sacrifices to appease gods. As a slave, Patrick was mistreated, beaten and starved, and suffered from fear and desperate loneliness and homesickness.

In his loneliness, Patrick rediscovered the Christian God of his childhood and began to pray. He wrote in his memoirs: “After I came to Ireland, every day I had to tend the sheep, and many times a day I prayed – the love of God and his fear came to me more and more, and my faith was strengthened. And my spirit was moved so that in a single day I would say as many as a hundred prayers, and almost as many as night, and this even when I was staying in the woods and on the mountains; I used to get up for prayer before daylight, through snow, through frost, through rain, and felt no harm, and there was no sloth in me.”

After 6 years as a slave, God came to Patrick in a dream and said it’s time to go home, your boat is waiting for you. Patrick walked 200 miles to the eastern coast of Ireland and found a boat waiting there, as God had promised. He went home to Britain, then to France where he studied to become a priest, then home to Britain again, where he assumed he would spend the rest of his life. But then he had a second dream, in which he heard the voice of the Irish people: 'We beg you, young man, come and walk among us once more.’” He heard it as God’s call to return to Ireland.

He obeyed that call and went to Tara in Ireland, the seat of the great high king of Ireland, and confronted the king on the feast of Beltine, the Spring Equinox. The king had forbidden anyone to light the first fire of Beltine before him. But the feast coincided with Easter that year, and in the darkness before the dawn, standing on a hillside opposite the king’s castle, Patrick lit the first fire of Easter ever lit in Ireland, and called down God’s protection with these words:

At Tara today in this fateful hour

I place all Heaven with its power,

And the Sun with its brightness,

And the snow with its whiteness,

And Fire with all the strength it hath,

And lightning with its rapid wrath,

And the winds with their swiftness along the path,

And the sea with its deepness,

And the rocks with their steepness,

And the Earth with its starkness:

All these I place,

By God’s almighty help and grace,

Between myself and the powers of Darkness.

It’s not clear exactly what happened next (it’s lost in the clouds of myth and legend), but by the end of the confrontation, the king of Ireland had become a Christian. It was St. Patrick’s first conversion in Ireland – but in 30 years, he converted most of Ireland to Christianity, put an end to human sacrifice in Ireland, abolished slavery, and founded dozens of monasteries that went on to “save civilization” by preserving it in Ireland when the Roman Empire fell, bringing the Dark Ages to Europe – meaning he has a continuing influence today that touches all our lives.

The reason Patrick succeeded in converting an entire nation was this: he would look around him at the people of Ireland, and try discover where God had been there already working, and join in. Patrick looked for and found common elements between Christian and native Irish beliefs.

Christian love for creation was one reason Patrick found Irish receptive. The ancient Celtic peoples had a deep and abiding love for nature; they saw God as profoundly immanent, deeply present with every living thing. Our Judeo-Christian tradition has always revered creation, as we see in Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God.” We do not worship nature, but we believe that nature points to God and proclaims God’s glory, and we honor it as the work of God’s hands.

The ancient Irish believed that holy things came in threes, and Patrick found that this belief paved the way for him to explain the Trinity, three in one. The Irish native plant, the shamrock, with its three leaves, was not just a decoration on a leprechaun’s hat – it was how Patrick demonstrated the idea of the Trinity to the Irish – one being, expressed in three persons.

Ancient Celtic peoples believed in the power of place – that there were certain places in the world that were “thin places”, where the boundary between heaven and earth was stretched so thin that heaven could break through at any moment. And so they found a kindred belief in the traditions of Jews and Christians, and our ancient stories of mountaintop experiences, like the story of Moses, who stood in a “thin place” on the mountain of God, as he received the 10 Commandments in our Old Testament lesson today. As Rabbi Caplan told us last week, there is an ancient Jewish tradition that not just Moses, but all humans were present at that holy moment – Jews, Christians, pagans, and all peoples who have ever lived. And therefore we, with the ancient Jews, with Jews of all times, with the wild Irish and the Celtic Christians who are our spiritual ancestors - all of us stood in that thin place on Mount Sinai. All of us heard the God of Israel say: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of slavery; you shall have no other gods but me.

Patrick understood at a deep and personal level that God had brought him out of slavery, and out of gratitude he devoted his life to living God’s way. Which is the pattern the Ten Commandments, and that moment on the mountain, lay out for us as the life of the people of God: the Jews were already free from slavery before they arrived at Sinai.

First God leads us out of slavery into freedom, then we devote our lives, every day, every moment, waking, sleeping, working, loving – to living God’s way. If we look at the 10 Commandments and set aside the notion that they are simply a set of “thou shalt nots,” a prison to limit our freedom, we can begin to understand that the whole of the law that Moses received on that holy mountain is built on the foundation of a relationship with a God of freedom, a God who reminds us that freedom is God’s divine gift to us. And we can begin to understand that living in freedom means living in life-giving ways, refusing to fall back into slavery, which is our constant temptation. It means refusing to become slaves to material possessions by stealing or coveting. It means refusing to become slaves to false gods who want to keep us small by forgetting the true God. It means refusing to become slaves to our own self-interest and our hurtful passions by committing murder or adultery. It means refusing to become slaves to our work by insisting on a day of rest, Sabbath peace.

In farming, a “demonstration plot” is where new ideas are tried, farmers can watch crops grow using new seeds or new methods and see how they work. The 10 Commandments became the foundation of the Jewish law, the way of life that formed Israel into a “demonstration plot” for the world. The Jews became a people who lived differently from the world around them, who saw every part of their lives as grounded in their relationship with the God who set them free. Christians understand this too: Our ability to accomplish things for God rests not on our abilities, but the foundation of our relationship with God, who has set us free in Jesus Christ and given us the gift of life-giving love.

The ancient Celts believed that the gods were intimately involved with everyday life, that every moment of the day was holy. Imagine a woman getting up and lighting her hearth fire in a dark, damp Irish morning, and praying, “I will kindle my fire this morning in the presence of all the holy angels of heaven.” They had similar prayers for everything they did during the course of a day. Christians believe every moment is holy too, which makes sense for a religion whose God took human form, knew what it felt like to hold a tool in his hand, what it felt like to fall in bed after a long day’s work, or to take a drink of water when he was thirsty.

This belief in the godly nature of everyday life came to life in Irish monasticism. Patrick’s method of conversion was to establish Christian monasteries, colonies of Christian men, women, and children, lay and ordained, married and unmarried, throughout Ireland. In the daily monastic life of prayer and work, study and sleep, worship, hospitality and community life, every moment was considered holy.. Monasteries became “demonstration plots” for the truth of Christianity. Monasteries were the visible fruit of the Christian life, and people found them attractive reflections of God’s hope for humans.

As a new church, we at Nativity, maybe more than most churches, are called to a ministry of evangelism – helping others to know the good news of Christ’s love for us. And evangelism can be a scary word: but we can take heart from the example of Patrick: who was not a silly little leprechaun with the gift of blarney, but a man who had an abiding sense of the personal care and comfort of God in affliction, that a slave led to freedom by God must feel as few others can.

Patrick’s life, dedicated to following Christ and proclaiming the good news, gives us an example of what our own calling as Christians should be. Evangelism for us, as for Patrick, is not a matter of arguing people out of one set of logical propositions and into another, or of telling people they’re going to hell. We too, like the people of Israel, like the Christian monastics of Ireland, are a “demonstration plot” for Christian truth. We are people who are called to live day to day with our lives demonstrating the truth of God’s love in Christ.

By our love of God, and love of neighbor, we make God’s love visible. Evangelism is living the good news of Christ, in such a way that we become a “demonstration plot” for the way of life that is a gift to us from the God who leads us out of slavery to sin into a new land of freedom to love.