Sermon for 5.13.12

Scriptures for today are Here

My mother grew up on a wheat farm in northwestern Oklahoma.  It’s the flattest land you can imagine.  If you flew over it in a crop-duster plane, you would see below you a patchwork quilt made up of wheat and alfalfa fields in colors of green and gold, dotted with small white farmhouses, and roads forming the seams, running arrow-straight along the dividing lines between sections, half-sections and quarter-sections – measures of acreage in Oklahoma.  There, the roads run so straight that every now and then, you might be driving north, and suddenly the road jogs to the west for a few hundred yards, then turns north again.  That’s what they call a correction line – it's intended to make up for the curvature of the earth.  They’re serious about keeping the roads running straight around there. 

In that part of the country, everyone has a long memory.  So my mother recently inherited a quarter section of land called the “Strange Place.”  It’s called that not because it’s weird or unusual, but because in the first Oklahoma land rush, it was settled by a family named Strange – and though my Grandfather bought it in the 1950s, it’s still called the Strange Place. 

In a place like that, things don’t change very fast, and there are traditions.  My mother grew up there, the way girls are supposed to, raising lambs for 4H Club and taking Home Economics in high school.  But when she married my father, she became a city girl and a world traveler.  It wasn’t till many years later, after I was grown up, that she found something in those Oklahoma farm roots to make her own. 

She began watching her own mother making beautiful quilts – hand-piecing the colors together, all cut from material that used to be Grandpa’s work shirts or Grandma’s Sunday dresses, repurposed memories of days gone by.  My mother realized that this quilting was an art form that went back for generations – mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers all cutting up the remnants of old memories to make beautiful, practical covers for their beds, creating more memories, a patchwork collage of memories for their families.

Each quilt made carries deep within its seams the love of woman who made it and the memories of the family whose lives are sewn into it, and my mother has followed her own mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, a whole line of women stretching back to the old countries they came from, in making beautiful hand-sewn quilts and other artwork, created with love.

This is why I have the privilege of wearing such beautiful vestments each week:  all my vestments were made by my mother.  Often people tell me how beautiful they are, and tell me that my mother should go into business to make clergy vestments.  And my answer is always the same:  she isn’t interested in doing it for money.  She only does it for love.  It never occurs to me to wonder whether my mother loves me – I can tell she loves me by the things she makes and does – they are love, lovingly put into tangible form.

I think love is like a patchwork quilt for all of us – a life full of patchwork memories, lovingly created out of pieces of events, small things from our beloved past.  Relationships with anyone we love are formed out of many small moments:  midnight feedings, evenings doing homework, laughter at the dinner table, things said and things left unsaid: the love that is lived out in carpools, shopping trips, meals together, late nights staying up and talking about the things that are important. 

For every relationship that is important to us, I think we create it not out of whole cloth, not out of a beautiful story with a magical plot like Cinderella, but rather out of a patchwork of these kinds of small moments, all pieced together in our minds to make up a picture of love.  By the love of those who first loved us, our mothers, fathers, other strong role models if we didn’t grow up in a traditional family, we learned how to love.  It is a basic truth of both psychology and Christianity:  we learn to love because we were first loved – before we were worthy, before we were deserving, before we had achievements to our credit and praises to our names, someone loved us, taught us what love is, and pieced us together out of love.

I think for most of us, learning about love is a patchwork quilt composed of many small events; all those small actions add up to a lifelong education about love.  Learning to love means abiding in love, living in the same house with love, loving and being loved day in and day out, through the most ordinary of activities, learning to love by letting love form us, transform us, piece us together.

The apostle John in 1 John today continues teaching us about what love is.  Last week he said you can tell if someone loves God, because they love other people.  This week he turns around and makes the same claim in reverse:  You can tell that someone loves other people, because they love God.  By this he means they believe in Christ, and do what Christ has commanded.  And what has Christ commanded? What we see in today’s gospel: to love one another as he has loved us. 

It may seem like a circular argument: God loves us, we love God, God loves Christ, Christ loves us, we love other people, and all of those things are evidence of all the others; yet it is not circular.  It describes the truth of life and of Christianity, that our love for God is inextricably bound up with our love for other people. 

And the best picture we can find of what that love means is the life of Jesus.  John’s whole gospel has described Jesus lovingly patching together a quilt, through signs, events, relationships, that create a picture of God’s love.  The disciples who watched Jesus came to believe that Jesus was the truest manifestation of God; that to understand God, you only have to look at Jesus.  And when they looked at Jesus, they saw love.  Not love spelled out in beautiful poetry or happily-ever-after fairy tales, but love displayed in the patchwork ministry of healing the sick, helping the poor, forgiving the fallen, inspiring the hopeless, giving life to the dying, and giving his own life for us.

John makes two audacious claims in this gospel, and the first is this: that God is love, that the reason anyone loves is because God has first poured God’s love into us.  God loves us before we deserve to be loved, just as a mother loves an infant, and by loving us God makes us worthy of love; the love itself transforms us, pieces us together into a beautiful new, beloved creation.  Don’t underestimate how revolutionary this claim is: you only have to look at Greek gods and their jealousies and spats and manipulation of humans to serve their own ends, to understand that Christians believed something revolutionary in the ancient world: that God is love.

How do we know God is love? Not by thinking up abstract philosophies about love; we learn to love by watching love in action.  We don’t have to guess what God is like.  We can see God’s love in Jesus.  And as we abide in Jesus through our worship and prayer, as we live in the same house with Jesus, let Jesus pour his love into us through the ordinary everyday activities of our lives, Jesus’ love begins to transform us, and we become capable of letting that love of God flow through us and transform others around us into God’s beautiful patchwork quilts of love.

Which is the second important point John wants us to understand.  Because God loves us, we are called to love others; again, this is a revolutionary claim, especially in our individualistic world.  Christianity is fundamentally a religion lived in community: people can say, I can worship God on the golf course, or I can pray on my own, and these things are true, as far as they go: but the most fundamental truth of our faith is that God loved us, and therefore – therefore – God calls us to love each other.  Christianity is not a religion whose sole focus is developing our inner spiritual wisdom or gaining personal enlightenment or cultivating calm in a chaotic world or living the virtuous life – these things are important and good.  But Christianity is a practical, realistic faith that is lived out in a community, where we have the opportunity to learn to love each other through good times and bad times, and where we form ourselves into a multi-colored, many-faceted, patchwork community that reaches out in love to the world.

And if we are truly doing what Jesus commanded, people should be able to see that picture of God’s love in our lives.  Someone asked Mother Theresa:  how can anyone love all the people in the world?  Mother Theresa answered:  you can’t love everyone in the world, but you can love the person standing right in front of you.

Love is not an idea: it is something you can see, and touch, and feel.  And the fundamental truth of our Christian faith is that we worship a God of love, best seen in Jesus, and therefore – therefore – we must be a people of love.

How do others know that God is love?  They know because they have seen that love carefully pieced together in our lives, in the many small moments that display who we are, and they can see through us to the life of Jesus.  And through us, God’s love pieces together out of the worn-out, discarded, unloved remnants of our world, a new community of love.

Sermon for Easter 2012

Scriptures for today are Here (using gospel reading Mark 16:1-8)

Were you there when they crucified my Lord? The song we sing on Good Friday recognizes that we were there as Jesus died. Because the life-and-death story that happened that astounding week in Jerusalem is the central story of our lives, all of us were there with Jesus. But something new happens on Easter morning, something unprecedented, something so far beyond the boundaries of what we know and expect, that the very questions we ask are transformed.

Were we there when God raised him from the tomb? asks the song’s last verse. And we have to answer, no, we weren’t there – because no one was there – no one but the angels, and God, saw the Resurrection at the moment it happened, no human being saw Jesus throw off that shroud that was covering him and stand up. We only see what happened later, the next morning. Mark shows us the women slipping through dark and empty streets – Mary Magdalene, the other Mary and Salome – hearts bursting with grief, eyes red and swollen from weeping, going to the tomb to anoint the body. We see them arriving at the tomb, wondering how to roll back the stone from the tomb so they can slip inside and give honor to death. And they find that God has done something absolutely inexplicable, that the stone that was blocking their way is already gone, and that Jesus is alive and free and on the loose.

And you and I, all these centuries later, know the proper response to resurrection, don’t we? We know that in the face of resurrection, the only thing to do is shout Alleluia! Christ is risen! [The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!]

But somehow, the women, that Easter dawn, didn’t know to shout Alleluia. They didn’t know what to say at all. The angel tells them what has happened, tells them Jesus will meet them in Galilee, instructs them to go back to Peter and the other disciples and tell the good news. But they don’t – they are struck mute – they are silent – and more than silent – they are terrified.

The passage we read today is probably the original ending of Mark’s gospel, scholars believe. But it has a very sudden ending, an ending that leaves us dangling, this sentence that we translate as “And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” In Greek, it’s even stranger – the literal translation is something like “They didn’t say nothing to nobody” – a triple negative to emphasize just how silent they were. And then the last part of the sentence even ends with a dangling preposition, the word “for”: “they said nothing to anyone, they were afraid for…” As the preacher Thomas Long says, even in Greek this is an odd way to end a sentence, not to mention a book – it’s as if Mark had been dragged away from his desk in middle of a sentence. Is this any way to run a resurrection? The end just hangs there: they were afraid for … for … what?

It’s a good question, for on Easter morning what are we afraid for? Surrounded by Easter flowers, hearing glorious music, smiling with joy on this high holy day, surely we are not afraid for … for anything. But perhaps we will go home after this service, perhaps we will eat Easter dinner with our families and relax the rest of the day, perhaps tomorrow we will not be thinking of Jesus and his resurrection at all, and perhaps we will remember reasons to be afraid for … Perhaps there are troubles on our minds, a health crisis in our family, tax returns to finish, retirement accounts to obsess over, the security of our jobs to worry about; perhaps we are concerned about relationships with those we love, the conflicts in our world, the future of our children, the health of our parents, perhaps we are holding all this in and saying nothing to anyone, because we are afraid for …

And on Monday morning, perhaps it won’t occur to us that the resurrection of Jesus Christ has anything to say about those things that make us afraid for, perhaps we will think that Jesus Christ was only someone a long time ago and far away who has nothing to do with our world now, maybe we will think that the only reason to think about his resurrection will come in the long time future, when we begin to be afraid for our own death. Perhaps we are slipping through our own dark and empty streets, determined to take control of the next task ahead of us, and yet afraid for … what?

The terror and amazement of these women tells us something about ourselves. These are the brave ones. These are the ones who stayed with Jesus while all the male disciples ran away, the ones who followed him to the foot of the cross and who weren’t even willing to abandon him to the grave without caring for him first. Living with him dead, grieving his loss, mourning the end of his beautiful, hopeful, thrilling ministry – these things they understand how to do, bravely. And yet, confronted with Resurrection, their courage fails them.

And maybe we’re not so different from these silent, fearful women. Because the Resurrection shatters everything we’ve ever believed: the impermanence of life, the finality of death. Resurrection means we have to re-think our entire lives, re-orient our fears to something new. All our resignation to the evil of this world, our determination to live courageously in the face of heartbreak, our worries over the challenges of our lives, our stresses about how to roll away the stones that stand in our way – all these things are not enough to fend off death – but God is enough.

Into our human darkness comes God’s Resurrection light, and the fabric of our universe is torn in two. And we now have to learn to live in a new, amazing, terrifying world: a world in which the ultimate triumph belongs not to familiar, fearsome, inevitable death, but to thrilling, astonishing, resurrection life. We now have to adjust to living in a world where God loves us so much he will never, ever let us go. We have to learn to live as Easter people in a Good Friday world.

Fifteen years ago I had a small glimpse of what it means to live as Easter person. That year, on Maundy Thursday, I took my 5-year-old daughter Sarah to church. Maundy Thursday is the day we remember Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, his gift of bread and wine to them as a way to remember him, to bring his true, living, resurrected presence into our lives here and now, through the Eucharist. Maundy Thursday is the day also that we remember what that supper means, because in John’s gospel, Jesus demonstrates its meaning by washing feet, commanding us to wash each other’s feet as a sign that we love each other as he loved us.

At that Maundy Thursday service 15 years ago, we washed each other’s feet, so everyone had their own feet washed and everyone washed someone else’s feet. I sat down to have my feet washed and then realized that the person who was in line to wash my feet was my own 5-year-old daughter, Sarah.

And as she sweetly took my feet, one at a time, carefully poured water over them, tenderly rubbed them dry with a towel, I found myself unaccountably weeping – because I was remembering the countless times I had done these same things for her: tenderly caring for her infant body, washing, feeding, nurturing my child. And here, she had somehow learned to do these things for me.

And I realized that this is the natural order of things. First we are loved and cared for ourselves; then we learn to love and care for others. The love that we are given becomes the love we have to give away. Which surely is a very deep meaning of the cross and the resurrection – Jesus dies in an outpouring of love for us, so we can turn and pour out that same love for others. And as long as that love lives in us, we have nothing to be afraid for …

Why does Mark’s gospel and Mark’s Easter story end with a dangling preposition that leaves us dangling, this odd non-ending? I think it’s because the story hasn’t ended – the story continues with us. The women are silent because we are the ones who are given the story to tell. We are the ones who are given the love of Christ to share with others.

Go and tell the disciples that he is risen, and will meet you in Galilee, the angel says. Who are the disciples? We are.

Mark’s story doesn’t end because the story didn’t end with Mark. The story continues all through human history, the story continues with us. And that means that it’s to us that the angel is speaking.

Go into all the places of your lives, the angel tells us, all the Galilees we came here from, all the places where we make our everyday life, all the places we are afraid for… and we will find Jesus there ahead of us, waiting for us, waiting to lead us into new life and new hope. Go into the places of worry and fear, says the angel, and we will find him there. Go into the places of silence and amazement, and we will find him there. Go into the places God is leading us, places we never would have thought of on our own, places of surprise and discovery, and we will find him there. There, with us, to help us tell the story of his love.

Because, to all of us who are afraid for …, Mark’s gospel has good news today. The tomb is empty, the place of death can’t contain the living Lord. Resurrection has changed the rules of the game, and the world has been remade. We weren’t there when God raised him, but he is here with us now. The Resurrected One is truly present in our midst, teaching us to love and serve each other.

And although the women are silent, we know what to say: Alleluia! Christ is Risen! [The Lord is Risen Indeed! Alleluia!]

Sermon for Palm Sunday 2012

Scriptures for today are Here

Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Rabbi Micah Caplan said when he was at Nativity a couple of weeks ago that there is a tradition that we were all present in the central story of the Jewish people, the story of Moses receiving the law on Sinai. If that’s true, then, in a very real sense, the story we read today, of Jesus’ last tumultuous week in Jerusalem, is our central story – and we were all there, somewhere.

We recognize this fact liturgically by taking the roles of the people in the story, shouting “Hosanna” and also shouting “Crucify him”– it’s our story, we’re there. It’s the story of the human race – our hunger for power, the instinct of powerful people to scapegoat the weak in order to maintain their power, the self-interest that leads to human judges condemning the Son of God to death. We are all present as the Word of God falls silent, an event which puts the entire human race on trial.

But, though we are proved guilty of death of Jesus, there is hope for us. We call it Atonement, a word that means “at-one-ment.” In Jesus, God became at-one with human beings so that in Jesus, we might become at-one with God. In his death, we see the final act of the pageant that began at Christmas. In his cry of forsakenness, Jesus shows how completely he has entered into our separation from God – in death, he completes God’s offering of life to us. And because it is his offering to us, we are all present with him on Golgotha. We were there when they crucified our Lord.

So, where are you in this story, in your life, today? Maybe some of us are in the crowds that gather around Jesus as he walks toward Jerusalem, in a carefully stage-managed procession he arranged. There was nothing unusual about people entering Jerusalem for Passover. The reason he got attention was because he took some very specific and calculated steps – marching toward Jerusalem, healing and teaching and gathering crowds in towns, who all understood that this would be no ordinary Passover, because Jesus is walking in the footsteps of David, the first “Messiah.” You can imagine the people in each town Jesus walks through on the way to Jerusalem, getting intrigued and excited by the possibility that here, finally, was a new Messiah who would step into David’s shoes, throw off the Roman oppressors and establish a new Jewish kingdom. And at every town, dozens or hundreds more people would join his entourage, until it’s a huge crowd, marching to Jerusalem for the Passover, the feast of freedom.

Imagine the anticipation that is building as they approach the holy city – imagine what they are picturing – Rome will be overthrown, injustice and the oppression of the ordinary people of Israel will be stopped, a new day will dawn.

But if that is what they are hoping for, they will be disappointed. The last line of the opening gospel tells us what Jesus did when he arrived. The people are expecting an armed takeover of the holy city – and all he does is he goes to the temple and looks around, then leaves quietly, to come back just as quietly the next day.

Perhaps that’s the moment when the crowds lose heart, when some of them change from people shouting Hosanna to people hoping for crucifixion. When their dreams of takeover and power are shattered, when their leader proves to be a disappointment – that’s when they lose their faith in him.

And that’s the place some of us might find ourselves in today: disappointed in God, wanting God to change the world, relieve oppression, end poverty, stop the world’s hurt, fix our lives, wanting God to use all that divine power to set things right for us. But if God governed through power, God wouldn’t be any different from us. God is going to take a different path – not the path of power, but the path of love, the path of atonement – and love will ask us to look at the world differently. Love will ask us to give ourselves for the sake of those we love.

Today, love might disappoint us, with its lack of satisfying power. And blessed are we in our disappointment, as we share that loving path with God; because God will use his love to share power with us, and to give us power to change things in our world, with God’s help.

Or maybe, we find ourselves in the person who owns the donkey. Jesus has apparently set this up in advance, in his carefully calculated scheme to fit the people’s hopes for the Messiah. He plans to fulfill the prophecy of Zechariah that the king of peace will come to Jerusalem riding on a donkey. So he has arranged a code word with the donkey’s owner – “The Lord needs it.” It’s a code word – like Holmes saying to Watson, “The game’s afoot,” it means the time is now, God’s plan is underway.

So maybe that’s where some of us find ourselves today – waiting, hoping for a sign, wondering when God will call us into service –wondering what the next thing is in our lives, trying to make important decisions. And praying that God will come to us with a call – listening for something that will tell us what that call will be.

And blessed are we in our waiting, because the waiting time is the time God uses to speak into our hearts about God’s true hopes for us. And God’s call will come for us, to tell us when it’s time to join Jesus, to give what we have to give, to join him with what we have, even if it seems small, insignificant, symbolic, like a donkey. Whatever it is you have to offer, Jesus will say that is exactly what he needs.

But perhaps some of us find ourselves in the young man who runs off naked – it’s odd little story in the garden that appears in Mark but in no other gospel, and it doesn’t seem important. Many scholars think this young man is Mark himself, who wrote this gospel. We don’t know much about Mark, but in this story he seems to be an obscure young man, perhaps not a disciple, just caught up in the excitement, curious, following the disciples to the garden to see what will happen, and escaping naked, with nothing but his life.

And he might seem like an insignificant part of the story, but without him we might not have the story – because Mark goes on to write this story, to invent the whole concept of a gospel, to bring this story home to us, 20 centuries later.

And maybe that’s where we are today – obscure, vulnerable, but with a story of how Jesus has touched our lives, has changed us, has given us a mission. And God might be building in our hearts and minds a way to share that story. And blessed are we in our story-telling, because there are so many people in our world who need to hear this story we’ve heard today – the story of love.

Perhaps that’s not where you find yourself today. Perhaps you see yourself in Peter. Peter, the blunt, the outspoken, Peter, who always makes mistakes, Peter, the brave disciple who suddenly loses his courage. Peter, who denies ever knowing Jesus, and in denying it, somehow ends up telling the truth after all – saying the heartbreaking words, “I do not know this man you are talking about” – and it turns out it’s true: Peter never knew Jesus. Peter never believed Jesus when he said he was going to die. Peter always, to the end, hoped that Jesus would be the Messiah of victory, not of defeat on the cross – and Peter misunderstands, denies, disappoints, Jesus, and Peter breaks down and weeps.

And maybe some of us find ourselves there today – in a dark place, knowing that we have denied Jesus, that we have disappointed him, that we may never have known him at all, wishing that somehow, some way, he could forgive us. And blessed are we in our denial – for in our own failure, our recognition of our own weakness, we open up space for the Messiah first to forgive us, and then to work through us in a way we never expected. Like Peter, we have the potential to become true disciples, rocks on which Jesus builds his church.

And maybe there are many of us here who see ourselves in the women at the cross. They are powerless to change what is happening to the savior they love, powerless to change much about their world, but what they have, they give – their presence, and their love. At the end, when Jesus feels forsaken even by God, he is not forsaken by these women, who suffer themselves so they can be with him and comfort him.

And maybe some of us are those women, suffering ourselves, suffering alongside others we love, walking with them through the most difficult time. And blessed are we in our suffering, for we are doing for others what Jesus has done for us – and for those who suffer, yours is the kingdom of heaven.

And I think most of us, almost every week, every time we come to worship, can find ourselves in the disciples, at supper the night before Jesus dies – stretching out our hands to receive the bread and wine, the body and blood of Jesus. We don’t understand what Jesus is giving us, perhaps – not sure what he is about or what this gift of bread and wine means, but willing to accept it because he is the one who is giving it. We are willing to take the bread of life from the one who is the bread of life, willing to let him nourish us with his love, feed us with his life, inspire us with his death, become at-one with us in our own body and blood, so that we can be at-one with him, on the cross and in the resurrection to come.

And blessed are we as we accept in our hands the love of the savior who lives, and dies, for us. Blessed are we as we become at-one with the Body of Christ. Blessed are we who come here, today, in the name of the Lord.

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.

Sermon for 1 Lent 2012

Scriptures for today are Here

Remember back to the last time the power went out in your house. There you are, doing whatever you do in the evening, reading or watching TV or messing around on the computer or talking with your family. And suddenly there is a big shudder, and a click, and the lights go out, and the whole house seems to give a great sigh, and fall into silence. And you frantically jump up and start rustling through drawers looking for that flashlight you last saw a year ago, and you poke your head out the door and look up and down the street to see if the neighbors’ power is out too, and you call the power company to report the outage. And if the power outage lasts, eventually you fumble around finding your pajamas, switch off all the light switches, and go to bed in the darkness.

When this happens, when I finally settle down, the thing I notice most is the silence. The mechanical hums of the air conditioner and the refrigerator and the other machines in the house are things my ears don’t hear any more, normally. But when they lapse into silence, I notice their absence; and I can hear a different kind of silence than what I normally think of as silence. It’s a silence punctuated by the sound of the breeze outside, and maybe a bird chirping, or a coyote howling, and maybe a car driving by now and then.

And maybe another sound too, a deeper sound I never stop to listen for.

John Cage, an avant-garde composer of the mid-20^th century, composed a work he called “4 minutes 33 seconds” in 1952. This work was on NPR’s list of the 100 most important compositions of the 20^th century. It is a work that can be performed by any instrument or set of instruments, and it is played in three movements of 30 seconds, two minutes twenty-three seconds, and one minute 40 seconds. During these three movements, what the musicians are instructed to do is to put down their instruments and sit in complete silence. The music becomes the sounds that the listeners hear during that silence.

John Cage has written about the experience that inspired this composition. It happened on a visit to Harvard, where he spent some time in an anechoic chamber, a chamber that is completely sealed on the outside, so no sound comes in, and on the inside the walls are built so that they do not echo – no sound comes back to your ears. In other words, it is as silent a place as you can be, without actually being in the vacuum of space. Inside, his perfect ears picked up two distinct sounds – one high, one low. When he described them to the engineer in charge, Cage learned that the high sound was his nervous system in operation, and the low one was his blood in circulation. “Until I die there will be sounds,” he wrote afterward. “And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.” Somehow, for John Cage, it took the profound induced silence of the anechoic chamber for him to hear the music of his own heart.

How do we listen for the music of our own hearts? For Jesus, it seemed that he looked for a place of silence in order to hear. In the gospel today, we see Jesus in his own wilderness experience of silence – leaving the busyness of the company of other people and even leaving behind the lingering echoes of God’s voice at his baptism, declaring him Beloved, and going out into the silent wilderness for a deeper experience of that Voice.

Mark’s version, which we read this year, is admirably terse, leaving out the details that Matthew and Luke give us about the temptations and fasting. Because Mark is so short, we also get a wider perspective: we see what happens before and after Jesus’ time in the wilderness: before, Jesus is baptized and hears the words: “You are my Son, the Beloved: with you I am well pleased.” Afterwards, fortified by his wilderness experience, Jesus goes to Galilee and begins to proclaim the heart of his message: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near: repent, and believe in the good news.”

In the middle, he spends 40 days in the wilderness, living without the sounds of other people, listening to the beat of his own heart. And listening also to the sound of other voices that come to him in the silence. Because of Mark’s terseness, we can’t tell exactly what happened to Jesus in the wilderness. We only know that he came out of the wilderness understanding who he was and what he was called to do: fully formed and ready for his ministry. Something about that wilderness experience, that time of quietness and emptiness, helped Jesus to begin to understand the purpose of his life. Something about the experience of temptation, fasting, emptiness, silence, something about the harshness of the desert environment, with its thorns and snakes, helped Jesus to hear the voice of God, helped that voice to meld and harmonize with his own heartbeat, helped him co-create with God a new kind of music.

As I think back on the wilderness experiences of my own life, and the wilderness experiences that so many people have told me about over the years – times of sorrow and grief, times of anger and bewilderment, times when people have felt assaulted by the voice of Satan and abandoned by God – the common theme that strikes me in all those experiences is opportunity, new beginnings, new understandings. Some people, like Jesus, choose to go to the wilderness, to listen for the voice of God. Emptying themselves out through their Lenten fast, to hear that voice clearly.

Many others find themselves in an unwanted wilderness, an emptiness in their lives through no fault of own – the loss of a job or a relationship or some other devastating event. And when people come to me and tell me about their wilderness experience, I listen, and eventually I almost always ask them this question, and some of you will recognize this question: What in this wilderness experience, this difficult and challenging time you’re going through – what about this experience is a gift for you?

We don’t normally think of wilderness experiences, those power outages that cause everything around us to collapse into silence with a great sigh, those times when we are left, panicking, with sound of our own heartbeat, as gifts. But if we didn’t have the wilderness, we might never hear that sound. I know for me, it has been the times when I was restless and discontent, when I was unhappy and searching for something new, when I was disgusted with my own behavior and questioning my own character – those have been the times when God has found ways to speak to me with a new voice.

If we’re happy all the time, we may never hear that music. As St. Augustine said: You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless till they find their home in you. It is that very restlessness that drives us out into the wilderness and that opens our hearts to recognize our yearning for God, our desire to turn toward God. It’s not our perfections, but our imperfections, that open our ears and our hearts. We may think of Lent disciplines as something good, religious people do; but that’s not what Lent is – Lent is made for imperfect, messy, confused people, people who have no time for God, people who don’t know where God is in their lives. That is to say, Lent is made for all of us.

Because it’s the wilderness, the suffering, the questioning, the emptiness, the silence, that teaches us to listen for the beat of our own hearts. And to listen for the sound of another voice we rarely hear. The Jesuit Gerald Fagin has said, ‎"It is not just our hearts that are restless until they rest in God. God's heart is also restless. God's longing for us knows no bounds." People who allow themselves to fully experience the wilderness and the silence learn to listen for the voice of God’s longing, and have a chance to come out of the wilderness healed, reconciled, with a better understanding of the music their own hearts are yearning to play.

Sometimes it takes going into the wilderness, of body or of soul, to find out who we truly are. Traveling toward where the familiar contours of our lives disappear. Leaving the landmarks behind, the people and patterns and possessions that orient us. Which is why the church gives us the season of Lent. Lent is the wilderness time, the time that so well reflects the contours of our human lives, which are not always feasting and singing, but sometimes include fasting and silence. Lent is the wilderness time when we are all called to empty ourselves in certain ways, to silence ourselves so that we can hear the beat of our hearts, to allow God to speak into the silence with a new voice. Jesus’ time in the wilderness tells me that when we find ourselves in a wilderness place, that we can open ourselves to God’s redemptive love, and allow God to transform that experience into a gift.

When you find yourself in that wilderness place, ask: what is the gift in this? If you are fasting from something for Lent, or adding something – what is the gift of that discipline? It may not be evident now, but keep your ears and your heart open to receive the gift God has in this discipline, for you.

And, if you are in an unintentional wilderness, a fast you did not seek out – what is the gift in that for you? If you are lonely – what is the gift of the loneliness? If you are angry – what is the gift of the anger? If you are depressed – what is it in your spirit that is begging to be set free? How can that dark and wilderness place of depression become a gift for you?

I do not mean to say that these terrible experiences are things God sends to us on purpose, because I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that God sends illness and suffering to teach us lessons. But I do believe that God can bring good out of any situation – because after all, that is what God did with the cross.

On the cross, the Word of God gave a great cry, and a shudder, and a sigh, and lapsed into silence – yet even in the tomb, the voice of God would not be silent. Into the silence of the wilderness, the silence of death, God breathes new life, sings a new song. And the Word of God sings, across the centuries, into our hearts.

So listen.