[Delivered at St. Bartholomew's Church, New York City]
One of my earliest pop culture memories is that of a friendly faced, slender man taking off his suit coat, hanging it in the closet, and putting on a cardigan. He’d change out of his outside shoes to slippers, and, all the while, sing gently an invitation:
“Would you be mine, could you be mine? Won’t you be my neighbor?”
Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood was a safe place, a place where angry voices were reconciled, where divisions were healed by empathy, where everyone was a neighbor, with a place in the neighborhood. All were welcome.
Race, religion, gender didn't matter, and everyone, person or puppet—everyone was welcome to Mr. Rogers.
That’s what we all called him. In fact, he was the Reverend Fred Rogers, a Presbyterian minister of the Gospel, who from 1968—when I was two—to August 31, 2001 told children throughout the world that they were special, that there's only one person in the whole world that's like you, and that's you. And people can like you just the way you are.”
Nearly two weeks after Mr. Rogers went off the air, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 began what will soon be 18 years of endless war. In this war-forged America, neighborliness is a trait that seems to be harder and harder to find.
Today, the New York Times warns us that ICE is mounting a major operation to seize those who it believes are not lawfully within our borders. On the same page, the President of the United States has told four Congresswomen—all women of color—to go back to the countries they came from. Three of them, of course, were born here, and the fourth came as a refugee, rising to represent her district, and thus her state in the U.S. Congress.
At our southern border, we are caging asylum seekers and their children in facilities that have been described by observers as “concentration camps.” Rather than impel our government to improve the conditions, the a highly technical debate over the name has ensued, over whether the term “concentration camp” can be applied to anything outside of the Third Reich.
Not that it is relevant, but the British created concentration camps, overcrowded, crude facilities that held prisoners without trial, during the Boer War of 1898-1902. We called them internment camps when the United States imprisoned Japanese-American citizens en masse, because their ethnic origin made the government distrust their loyalty (unlike German-Americans, who remained free unless there was evidence that they took action against the United States).
So never mind the nomenclature, look at the reality on the ground. As Judge William Fletcher of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals described our modern-day camps, the children are “cold all night long, lights on all night long, sleeping on concrete and you’ve got an aluminum foil blanket” against the cold. In response to Judge Fletcher, the United States argued that its legal obligation to provide “safe and sanitary conditions” to migrants who are children do not include soap and toothpaste.
Not all those children are held in camps. But the number that have been separated from their families is itself a daunting figure. Something like 3,500 children have been separated from their parents by our Government, with no plan to keep track of the children in place.
The war at home has other casualties beyond those who seek asylum here, though.
Racist and antisemitic violence continued to plague the country, increasing by 30 percent from 2014 to 2017.
The Anti-Defamation League and the SLPC have recently issued reports warning of a new kind of hate group: men who express violent anger toward and loathing for women.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has also documented a rise in hate groups focusing on women as the primary target. Describing misogyny as the “gateway drug” into the world of hate groups, the SLPC has cautioned that violence against women, always rife in abusive relationships, is becoming a cause of its own.
In 2018, a Florida yoga studio was the scene of a mass shooting by an avowed male supremacist. As the Washington Post described his beliefs, “The term encompasses a worrying new array of assaults by men who view women as genetically inferior, inherently treacherous or unwilling to provide them with the sex and submission they see as their birthright."
How far we have fallen from the gentle request of Mr. Rogers to his viewers, “won’t you be my neighbor.”
Jesus would have recognized our world, though. And the familiarity of today’s gospel reading should not blur how radical it was when Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan, and, sadly, how radical it still is in our time.
The original auditors would have been shocked at the events of the parable. That of the priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan, the one who would show mercy would be the hated Samaritan would appall the listeners. That it would be the Samaritan—the hereditary enemy, and not the most holy of the People of God—who would cross over and take care of the injured man, pay for his stay at the inn, and promise more money if it was needed turns the moral order of those listening to Jesus completely upside down. The shocked lawyer—as always, my other profession doesn’t come out well in the Gospel—can’t even simply say “the Samaritan.” He can only answer “the one who showed him mercy.”
Jesus’s truth, even in a parable, is so subversive of the moral order which informs this lawyer’s life, that it is literally unspeakable.
But always, this unspeakable truth has a way of mirroring life. Mercy wells up in the human heart, in the volunteers who offer sanctuary, the lawyers who provide free representation in immigration hearings. The shooter in the yoga studio was stopped by a brave young man who struggled to stope the senseless violence. The families of his victims forgive the racist shooter who in 2015 killed 9 Christians in prayer the American Methodist Episcopal Church of Charleston, South Carolina. Heather Heyer’s father forgives her murderer, yet another white supremacist.
So the parable of the Good Samaritan is not just a moral lesson about mercy over righteousness. It’s a reflection of the deepest wellspring of human nature. It is hope, when our hope fades.
So shines a good deed in a weary world.
Let me tell you a story.
One day, 22 years ago, I was shocked to wake up in a hospital. I was even more shocked when I was discharged later that day. I was newly unemployed, I still had insurance, and, apparently, my blacking out the night before was not going to kill me. The emergency was past, and I could go home.
The sun was beginning to set, and the hospital was not in a good part of town. I couldn’t find a cab, and it was a long walk to my apartment.
I headed downhill, and after a few blocks, I began to get that uneasy sensation that you can get when someone is following you. I sped up, but I was still tired. I heard footsteps behind me, and a man passed me, and turned to face me.
He was African-American, about my age—early thirties, at the time. Taller than I am, and bigger than I was then. An athlete by the look of him.
And I was a tired, washed-out white guy in a neighborhood that wasn’t familiar. So he says to me, and this was just the cap to a perfect weekend, “I just got out of prison today.”
I nodded. Really, what did I have to say to that?
Then he goes on: “I haven’t done anything good for anyone else in a long time. A really long time.”
He paused. Then he said, “You look like you’re having a tough day. Let me walk you home.”
I didn’t want him to. I didn’t trust him. I didn’t want anyone, even if I had trusted him. I just wanted to slip away, alone, get home and forget all about being in that hospital, of having lost consciousness. But I didn’t know any way out. So I said yes.
We didn’t talk much that I remember. We just trailed through the City until we reached my door. I fished out my keys, ready to disappear into my safe bright little box. And the man turned around to face me again.
Here it comes, I thought, expecting—what? Him to ask for money? A mugging? I honestly don’t know that I had any expectation. Just that something was going to happen.
And then it did.
“Thank you,” he said, clearly meaning it, and he took my hand.
“Thank you,” I heard myself say, not really having planned to. And he disappeared from my life.
Who was my neighbor that day? The ex-con, the other. The man who wanted to turn his life around, and wasn't sure if he could.
And was my friend, even though I never knew his name, on the day when I needed one most.
We are all each other’s neighbors, as Mr. Rogers taught us as children, as Jesus taught the young lawyer. Sometimes you’ll be the injured man in the road. Sometimes you have the choice—to be the Samaritan. To pass by on the other side, or to show mercy. To love.
Seize that moment. Trust your kindness. It’s the best of you. And it’s of God.
Showing posts with label Anglocat in the Pulpit; St. Barts; the Diaconate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anglocat in the Pulpit; St. Barts; the Diaconate. Show all posts
Sunday, July 14, 2019
Monday, November 12, 2018
"Widow’s Houses and The Widow’s Mite” A Sermon on Mark 12:38-44
[In lieu of the usual invocation of the Trinity, the Deacon, with the help of the Director of Music, leads the congregation in the hymn Dona Nobis Pacem]
On Friday evening, at the Diocesan Convention, I participated in a Liturgy for Listening and Lamentation in which our bishops played an unusual part for them. They were supplicants, confessing “sinful complicity with the evil actions of sexual harassment, exploitation and abuse within our Church.” Imagine, all our bishops—Andy Dietsche, Mary Glasspool, and Allen Shin—confessing to the laity and the clergy gathered in Convention.
We heard stories of the victims of sexual harassment, abuse, and exploitation, and all three orders of the Church—bishops, clergy and the people of God—lamented and confessed our “arrogance in insisting that our claims to being right outweigh” our duty to build honest relationships, and to acknowledge that we contribute to the injustices within our diocese, the larger church, and—let me add one more category—the world.
And at the end of the Liturgy, we sang, as we just have tonight, Dona Nobis Pacem.
Give us Peace.
Just before that, we had watched a drama with music and movement, and dance, in which the complicity of our diocese, the Diocese of New York, in slavery was laid bare. Using stories of the enslaved, those who enslaved them, the defenses of slavery written by Samuel Seabury, the grandson and namesake of the first Episcopal Bishop in America, and the story of William Jay, the abolitionist son of the first Chief Justice of the United States, we confronted again the shadow side of our beloved Episcopal Church.
Now, this morning just at the 11:00 service, as I sat in the marble seat reserved for me just to the right of the altar—very nice, really, one of the best seats in the house, if you don’t mind my using the theatrical jargon—I was dressed in this nice long white alb, the richly embroidered green deacon’s stole I’m wearing now, and the heavy but handsome dalmatic—that’s green and gold, with two bands across the front, in case you’re wondering what a dalmatic is—I was mentally rehearsing the Gospel, and—well, actually, I was beginning to wonder just how much trouble I was in. I was, quite frankly, a bit nervous.
Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.
You see, the shadow side of the Church stretches all the way back to before there was a Church. To when the Temple had to be cleansed, to when the scribes leading the synagogues, the priests, the Pharisees and the Saducees all had to be rebuked.
But today it's the scribes' turn. Ah, the scribes. Actually, they’re also referred to as the lawyers. And since deacons are non-stipendiary, did I mention my day job is--you guessed it--a lawyer. My tribe doesn’t get rave reviews in the Gospels. So here I am, wondering why I agreed to preach tonight, anyway.
Bt since we're here: Today, Jesus focuses his righteous indignation on the scribes. He’s in Jerusalem, at the Temple, but he’s not indicting the priests. No, he’s condemning those who made copies by hand of the scriptures, and who taught the law, and interpreted it. Outside of Jerusalem, they often kept the lights on at the synagogues, keeping alive the tradition of prayer and reading of the scriptures for those too far away to go to the Temple.
So, maybe they got a little puffed up, a little arrogant. They liked the distinctive apparel, the prominent seats. Understandable, isn’t it?
Maybe they were showboating with increasingly ornate prayers, and were losing themselves in the part. Is that really so bad?
Yes. Yes it is, Jesus tells us. Because that arrogance brings complacency with the way things are, and institutional thinking, and that in turn leads to entitlement—the kind of entitlement that leads to exploitation and covers up abuses.
The very entitlement to which our bishops, clergy, and laity confessed, and the effects of which we lamented just this past Friday night.
And Jesus levels a charge of just such abuse against the scribes—they “devour widow’s houses,” he says. But what does he mean by that?
As it happens, the question answers itself. Jesus is sitting opposite the Treasury, in front of the trumpet shaped chests into which the members of the congregation throw their offerings to support the Temple. And a widow, comes up, and throws in two copper coins, amounting to the equivalent of a penny. Jesus says to his disciples “this poor widow has put in more than all who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in all she had, all she had to live on.”
Heartwarming, isn’t it? Emphasizing the widow’s devotion to her faith, and to God? On one level, yes, but there’s a deep irony here. The widow is in fact a victim of the scribes’ exploitation of her faith, of their betrayal of her love of God, which they have manipulated through their teaching to the point where her gift is more akin to an act of self-immolation.
Remember the status of widows in Biblical times. Robin Gallagher Branch, in the Biblical Archaeology Review reminds us that a widow is “lacking the protective care of a husband” in the patriarchal society in which that care is often critical for survival.[1] That’s why widows are, as Branch notes, “grouped together with the fatherless, poor, and resident alien,” and “come under God’s protective care,” with God “command[ing] that they not be oppressed.”[2]
Branch evokes the precarious status of widowhood in the Bible by quoting the Book of Lamentations, which uses the word “widow” to describe Jerusalem after Nebuchadnezzar razed the City. “Gone is her resemblance to a queen,” Branch writes, “vanished are her protectors, lovers, friends. Slavery, affliction and harsh labor await her in exile.” [3]
The widow who gives, as Jesus put it, “all she had, all she had to live on,” is not an exemplar of stewardship, but rather a vulnerable woman who is being preyed upon by the scribes, who are literally consuming her household, and her ability to support herself. Jesus acknowledges the sincerity of that love, and the magnitude of her generosity—but as the very next verses, the start of the next chapter, indicate, her self-sacrifice is in vain; every stone of the Temple will be thrown down.[4]
The predation is not sexual in nature, it’s financial, but as Robertson Davies has an investigator say in The Cunning Man, “financial fraud is awfully dull," but it’s awfully cruel. I can tell you this myself from any one of a number of cases my wife has handled in her practice of defending homeowners in foreclosure cases.
And, as we are gathered in a Byzantine style national landmark of extraordinary beauty, well—this passage can’t help but make us ask—ok, make me ask—have we got it wrong? Are we as far from the teachings of Jesus as the false prophets of the Prosperity Gospel—you know the ones, they tell you that if you just give enough and believe enough you’ll be rich yourself. And not just in heavenly wealth that you can’t touch until you die. Oh, no, good solid coin of the realm.
Of course, if it doesn’t work out that way, you’ve only yourself to blame. You just didn’t have enough faith to move that mountain.
That’s how exploitation works: The abuser takes what he wants, and uses his authority to convince the victim that it’s her own fault, that she brought it on herself, or, at a minimum, that the consequences to her fro reporting the abuse will be devastating, and she won’t be believed anyway.
Recent events have shown that those dire promises can come true. Just this past Thursday, NPR reported that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford is still receiving death threats. She had to move four times, has had to pay for a private security detail, and hasn’t been able to return to work.
Dona Nobis Pacem.
Give us Peace.
But how can there be peace without justice?
That’s the question the Diocese is wrestling with, both as to our complicity in slavery and as to the exploitation by clergy of vulnerable lay and clergy members of our church.
What would justice even look like?
Question: What was the crime the scribes committed?
Proposition: to use the language of Friday’s Litany, it was that they failed to honor the indwelling God-given dignity of those entrusted to their care.
More bluntly, they viewed the widow who gave all she had as a means to their end—preservation and glorification of the Temple—and not as an end, a person in her own right. They treated her as a thing, and taught themselves to believe that their treatment of her was justified because it served the Temple.
You can be sure, as Jesus indicated, that she was not alone.
So, in addition to dehumanizing the widow, and those like her, they made an idol of the Temple. It became more important to beautify and honor the thing than to care for the people for whom it was built.
No wonder the thing was torn down.
If we—all of us, clergy and laity—fail to honor the indwelling God-given dignity of those who come to us trusting us to care for them, we too will fall.
And we’ll deserve it.
But we don't have to. We can choose the alternative. We can use this building, our combined treasure and talent, to honor the indwelling, God-given dignity of all who come to us. And when I say we, I mean we--clergy, laity, all of us. We can welcome the stranger, comfort the grieving, be with each there, for each other.
We can meet each other in the love of Christ.
Then we won't fall. And we won't fail, even if, one day, we do fall.
In the Name of God, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.
____________________
[1] Robin Gallagher Branch, “Biblical Views: Biblical Widows—Groveling Grannies or Teaching Tools,” Biblical Archaeology Review 39:1 (Jan/Feb. 2013).
[2] Id., citing Deut. 24:17, Ezek 22:7, James 1:27, Zech 7:10.
[3] Id., paraphrasing Lamentations, 1:1-3.
[4] Mark 13: 1-2.
Sunday, October 14, 2018
"Even When You Fail": A Sermon on Mark 10:17-31
[Delivered at St. Bartholomew’s Church,
October 14, 2018]
Today’s Gospel made me think of that great moment in The Four Musketeers when Charlton Heston—as the villainous Cradinal Richelieu—tells his henchman Rochefort, “I love you, my son—even when you fail.”
Ok—you may not see how that applies, but we’ll get there. Or I’ll just slip out the back door.
The first thing I have to remind you is this:
Don’t let familiarity breed content. Not contempt, content. Just because you’ve heard it over and over again, shouldn’t make it easy.
Today’s Gospel is as tough as it gets, as counter-cultural as you can imagine, not just in Jesus’s time but in our own.
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."
Think about it, hear it fresh—and understand that he means it. He’s not kidding. How do we know this? The shock of the disciples. They “were greatly astounded and said to one another, ‘Then who can be saved?’" And, even though Jesus’s answer brings some reassurance, it isn’t by diminishing the seriousness of what he has just said. Rather, he says to them that “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”
This encounter of Jesus with the young man—traditionally, he was called the “Rich Young Ruler,” suggesting that he enjoyed a position not just of wealth but of power—is one that Christians have long tried to water down, to soften.
A rather charming story was invented, dating to at least the 15th Century, possibly as early as the 9th, which explains that the “Needle’s Eye” was the name of a gate in Jerusalem, and that a camel loaded down with its owner’s many possessions could not get through the gate. No, the owner would have to remove a bag or two, and leave them –for the poor, in some tellings, or just remove them all, and then reload the poor beast after guiding it through the gate in others.
This fable, which you can find used in biblical commentaries, in sermons across denominational lines (I won’t cite any, because there are far too many to single out just one or two of those who have fallen into the trap), was known to be false as long ago as the 19th Century.
Sources from The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, [Brown, Fitzmeyer & Murphy, 1990) at 618] to Vincent Taylor’s Gospel According to Mark, agree with the Mormon scholar Hugh Nibley, that there was no such gate.
Oh, there’s one now, if you go to Jerusalem. Of course the City was razed by the Romans in 70 AD, so the City was rebuilt by the Cusaders when they took Jerusalem. They added a Needle’s Eye Gate then, which means they went to a lot of trouble to convince themselves that it wasn’t that hard for the rich to get to heaven.
The medieval roots of the fable disprove Nibley’s almost too perfect suggestion this gate idea was “invented by an obliging nineteenth-century minister for the comfort of his well-heeled congregation.”
Which could have been describing the St. Barts of his time. It may even apply to our own time.
In fact, the 19th Century clergy debated the topic vigorously, with the Rev. Edmund Tew rather neatly dismissing the notion of such an ancient gate as it “falls short in one important desideratum, the support of any authority which recommends itself to the acceptance of those most competent to form a true and impartial estimate of its worth.”
Which is a very oblique, proper Victorian way of saying “They made it up.”
In the same exchange, he rejects the notion that the camel isn’t an error for the ancient Greek term for “cable”, which at least you could try to find a bigger eye to pass it through, say, tethering a boat to an eyehook. But I trust Reverend Tew; he’s pretty thorough.
So, no. We are stuck with an actual camel and an ordinary sewing needle. What can we do with them?
Well, there’s one last way to try to escape—maybe we can treat the story as being one of the stories attributed to Jesus for which the evidence is thin.
Trying to know when the Gospel of the day is closest to the Jesus of history is not an easy thing to do. John P. Meier, a Catholic priest who has written five volumes—so far—trying to do just that--and is pretty much the gold standard on the subject-- gives us several criteria that suggest a story or saying in the Gospel is more likely to be authentic.
By all of Meier’s criteria, we are looking at what is very likely an authentic story of Jesus—it appears in all of the synoptic gospels, today in chapter 10 of Mark’s Gospel, in Chapter 19 of Matthew, and in Chapter 18 of Luke, so it passes the multiple source test.
Jesus’s indictment of the wealthy would certainly help get him into trouble with the authorities, especially in an imperial domination system, in which the religious and Temple authorities were profiting from their collaboration. So that’s another test passed—it helps explain why the authorities wanted to kill Jesus.
It’s consistent with a plethora of other scriptural passages about money. The Hebrew Scriptures as well as the New Testament have 15 separate conemnations of usiry—lending money out at any amount of interest, nit just an unreasonable rate, which is the biblical definition. In the Beatitudes as described in Luke’s Gospel, after the blessings on the poor are pronounced, Jesus warns the rich, the well-fed, and those who laugh, that they have received their comfort now, and will not receive the Kingdom.
And it certainly fits what Meier calls the criteria of embarrassment and of discontinuity—far from claiming the titles attributed in the Gospels, titles like Lord, Son of Man, Son of God, or Christ, Jesus will not even let the rich young man call him good.
Let’s think about that for a second. When the rich young man approaches him, he addresses Jesus as “Good Teacher.” Jesus brings him up short: “Why do you call me good? There is no one who is good but God.”
So what are we to do with this teaching, in such close proximity to Jesus’s refusal to be called “good”?
Is there no way to come to terms with this difficult gospel?
Maybe. Maybe if we start by asking the question the other way around. Instead of trying to domesticate this gospel, and make it easier, let’s try admitting that it’s uncomfortable. In fact, it’s impossible.
This is a pretty familiar scene in the Gospels, actually. Every time some well-meaning type goes to Jesus for affirmation, it goes down this way: Jesus praises what they’re doing right, and then ups the ante. Hey, Jesus, someone will say to him, I’m following the law, and then he’ll tell them that if they have felt lust, it’s just as if they’ve committed adultery, and broken the law.
The rich young man seems on pretty solid footing at first—he knows and has kept all of the commandments.
And then Jesus puts his finger on the weak spot: Jesus “loved him and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’"
And when the rich young man hears this, “he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.”
And from there, Jesus castigates the rich—who were considered the favorites of God in traditional Judaism—look at Job both before and after Satan’s bet with God. Today we also tend to venerate the rich and the famous, to equate wealth and good fortune with virtue.
But Jesus says not once but twice how hard it will be for them to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, as hard as it would be for a camel to go through the eye of a needle
The heresy of the Prosperity Gospel brushes aside Jesus’s words to valorize wealth as a sign of God’s favor, a linkage that Max Weber traced Max Weber traced back to Calvinism and the insecurity it instilled in believers who were left of wondering if they were among those lost forever or among the elect—the saved. Success in their calling became a way of validating their faith. We look to money for reassurance, for security, even though Jesus reminds us in the parable of the foolish rich man who is plotting how to enjoy his wealth, while his life will be required of him that very day, that we can try to protect ourselves from life’s hardships with our money and possessions—but they will not save us from grief, or death.
So what is it about wealth that makes it especially dangerous? Maybe that very sense of security, that temptation that we stand right with God—or worse, do not even need God, because we are cushioned by wealth and the comforts it can bring us.
It’s one form of idolatry, isn’t it? Finding something other than God to worship—that is, to honor at the fire of our hearts. Politics, sex, the quest for increased physical fitness—anything can become an idol, even things that are good in themselves, if they become ways to wall us off from our own need for God.
And we tend to want to worship idols, like the Israelites and the Golden Calf, and the Baals, and all their “whoring after idols” as the Hebrew Scriptures remind us again, and again. Why?
Maybe because idols don’t ask anything from us but our worship. But God asks more. God wants us to be in loving relationship with each other, as well as with God.
When the rich young man leaves sorrowing at the thought of losing his possessions, the disciples, stunned at the notion that the Kingdom may be inaccessible to the wealthy, the privileged, exclaim: Then who can be saved? Jesus answers, “With men, this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
In other words, we can’t solve this; only God can.
Like Jesus, maybe we should not worry about being called good, and focus instead on doing the good works we are called to. And not presume to think that those works make us good, since only God is good.
In my training as a deacon, I served for an academic year—only one day a week—on the chaplaincy staff at New York Presbyterian Hospital. A large part of my days there was going from room to room on my assigned floor or floors, introducing myself as part of the pastoral care team. We were strictly told that when people declined our company, we had to accept it with good grace.
And lots of people did just that—most kindly, some gruffly, a very few with annoyance or even anger. Lots with comments about why they didn't have any interest. But they all perked up just a little bit in asking me to leave.
After a few days, I realized that patients had almost no control over who came into their rooms and what they did there, and I realized that giving them that control was one gift I had to offer. So I took to introducing myself as “the one person you can throw out.” And once I did that, even those who took me up on it, usually did so with a smile.
And that offer to be of service, or to be a companion with no strings attached, was the opposite of idolatry—it wasn’t about me at all. I just took “no” for an answer, and learned not to mind if the barrage of refusals made me look a bit ridiculous. The smiles more than made up for it.
And maybe that is our answer. To just show up and do our part. Answer the call. Try not to be afraid of rejection. Open our hearts to being hurt. Don’t mind looking a little ridiculous.
Because we’re not good. Only God is good, and that’s just fine.
There’s a reason that the Lord’s Prayer has us ask God to forgive us our sins, while reminding us to forgive those who have sinned against us. So that we can remember to act as lovingly as we can, and trust God—who’s a much better employer than Cardinal Richelieu—to love us—even when we fail.
In the Name of God, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.
October 14, 2018]
Today’s Gospel made me think of that great moment in The Four Musketeers when Charlton Heston—as the villainous Cradinal Richelieu—tells his henchman Rochefort, “I love you, my son—even when you fail.”
Ok—you may not see how that applies, but we’ll get there. Or I’ll just slip out the back door.
The first thing I have to remind you is this:
Don’t let familiarity breed content. Not contempt, content. Just because you’ve heard it over and over again, shouldn’t make it easy.
Today’s Gospel is as tough as it gets, as counter-cultural as you can imagine, not just in Jesus’s time but in our own.
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."
Think about it, hear it fresh—and understand that he means it. He’s not kidding. How do we know this? The shock of the disciples. They “were greatly astounded and said to one another, ‘Then who can be saved?’" And, even though Jesus’s answer brings some reassurance, it isn’t by diminishing the seriousness of what he has just said. Rather, he says to them that “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”
This encounter of Jesus with the young man—traditionally, he was called the “Rich Young Ruler,” suggesting that he enjoyed a position not just of wealth but of power—is one that Christians have long tried to water down, to soften.
A rather charming story was invented, dating to at least the 15th Century, possibly as early as the 9th, which explains that the “Needle’s Eye” was the name of a gate in Jerusalem, and that a camel loaded down with its owner’s many possessions could not get through the gate. No, the owner would have to remove a bag or two, and leave them –for the poor, in some tellings, or just remove them all, and then reload the poor beast after guiding it through the gate in others.
This fable, which you can find used in biblical commentaries, in sermons across denominational lines (I won’t cite any, because there are far too many to single out just one or two of those who have fallen into the trap), was known to be false as long ago as the 19th Century.
Sources from The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, [Brown, Fitzmeyer & Murphy, 1990) at 618] to Vincent Taylor’s Gospel According to Mark, agree with the Mormon scholar Hugh Nibley, that there was no such gate.
Oh, there’s one now, if you go to Jerusalem. Of course the City was razed by the Romans in 70 AD, so the City was rebuilt by the Cusaders when they took Jerusalem. They added a Needle’s Eye Gate then, which means they went to a lot of trouble to convince themselves that it wasn’t that hard for the rich to get to heaven.
The medieval roots of the fable disprove Nibley’s almost too perfect suggestion this gate idea was “invented by an obliging nineteenth-century minister for the comfort of his well-heeled congregation.”
Which could have been describing the St. Barts of his time. It may even apply to our own time.
In fact, the 19th Century clergy debated the topic vigorously, with the Rev. Edmund Tew rather neatly dismissing the notion of such an ancient gate as it “falls short in one important desideratum, the support of any authority which recommends itself to the acceptance of those most competent to form a true and impartial estimate of its worth.”
Which is a very oblique, proper Victorian way of saying “They made it up.”
In the same exchange, he rejects the notion that the camel isn’t an error for the ancient Greek term for “cable”, which at least you could try to find a bigger eye to pass it through, say, tethering a boat to an eyehook. But I trust Reverend Tew; he’s pretty thorough.
So, no. We are stuck with an actual camel and an ordinary sewing needle. What can we do with them?
Well, there’s one last way to try to escape—maybe we can treat the story as being one of the stories attributed to Jesus for which the evidence is thin.
Trying to know when the Gospel of the day is closest to the Jesus of history is not an easy thing to do. John P. Meier, a Catholic priest who has written five volumes—so far—trying to do just that--and is pretty much the gold standard on the subject-- gives us several criteria that suggest a story or saying in the Gospel is more likely to be authentic.
By all of Meier’s criteria, we are looking at what is very likely an authentic story of Jesus—it appears in all of the synoptic gospels, today in chapter 10 of Mark’s Gospel, in Chapter 19 of Matthew, and in Chapter 18 of Luke, so it passes the multiple source test.
Jesus’s indictment of the wealthy would certainly help get him into trouble with the authorities, especially in an imperial domination system, in which the religious and Temple authorities were profiting from their collaboration. So that’s another test passed—it helps explain why the authorities wanted to kill Jesus.
It’s consistent with a plethora of other scriptural passages about money. The Hebrew Scriptures as well as the New Testament have 15 separate conemnations of usiry—lending money out at any amount of interest, nit just an unreasonable rate, which is the biblical definition. In the Beatitudes as described in Luke’s Gospel, after the blessings on the poor are pronounced, Jesus warns the rich, the well-fed, and those who laugh, that they have received their comfort now, and will not receive the Kingdom.
And it certainly fits what Meier calls the criteria of embarrassment and of discontinuity—far from claiming the titles attributed in the Gospels, titles like Lord, Son of Man, Son of God, or Christ, Jesus will not even let the rich young man call him good.
Let’s think about that for a second. When the rich young man approaches him, he addresses Jesus as “Good Teacher.” Jesus brings him up short: “Why do you call me good? There is no one who is good but God.”
So what are we to do with this teaching, in such close proximity to Jesus’s refusal to be called “good”?
Is there no way to come to terms with this difficult gospel?
Maybe. Maybe if we start by asking the question the other way around. Instead of trying to domesticate this gospel, and make it easier, let’s try admitting that it’s uncomfortable. In fact, it’s impossible.
This is a pretty familiar scene in the Gospels, actually. Every time some well-meaning type goes to Jesus for affirmation, it goes down this way: Jesus praises what they’re doing right, and then ups the ante. Hey, Jesus, someone will say to him, I’m following the law, and then he’ll tell them that if they have felt lust, it’s just as if they’ve committed adultery, and broken the law.
The rich young man seems on pretty solid footing at first—he knows and has kept all of the commandments.
And then Jesus puts his finger on the weak spot: Jesus “loved him and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’"
And when the rich young man hears this, “he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.”
And from there, Jesus castigates the rich—who were considered the favorites of God in traditional Judaism—look at Job both before and after Satan’s bet with God. Today we also tend to venerate the rich and the famous, to equate wealth and good fortune with virtue.
But Jesus says not once but twice how hard it will be for them to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, as hard as it would be for a camel to go through the eye of a needle
The heresy of the Prosperity Gospel brushes aside Jesus’s words to valorize wealth as a sign of God’s favor, a linkage that Max Weber traced Max Weber traced back to Calvinism and the insecurity it instilled in believers who were left of wondering if they were among those lost forever or among the elect—the saved. Success in their calling became a way of validating their faith. We look to money for reassurance, for security, even though Jesus reminds us in the parable of the foolish rich man who is plotting how to enjoy his wealth, while his life will be required of him that very day, that we can try to protect ourselves from life’s hardships with our money and possessions—but they will not save us from grief, or death.
So what is it about wealth that makes it especially dangerous? Maybe that very sense of security, that temptation that we stand right with God—or worse, do not even need God, because we are cushioned by wealth and the comforts it can bring us.
It’s one form of idolatry, isn’t it? Finding something other than God to worship—that is, to honor at the fire of our hearts. Politics, sex, the quest for increased physical fitness—anything can become an idol, even things that are good in themselves, if they become ways to wall us off from our own need for God.
And we tend to want to worship idols, like the Israelites and the Golden Calf, and the Baals, and all their “whoring after idols” as the Hebrew Scriptures remind us again, and again. Why?
Maybe because idols don’t ask anything from us but our worship. But God asks more. God wants us to be in loving relationship with each other, as well as with God.
When the rich young man leaves sorrowing at the thought of losing his possessions, the disciples, stunned at the notion that the Kingdom may be inaccessible to the wealthy, the privileged, exclaim: Then who can be saved? Jesus answers, “With men, this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
In other words, we can’t solve this; only God can.
Like Jesus, maybe we should not worry about being called good, and focus instead on doing the good works we are called to. And not presume to think that those works make us good, since only God is good.
In my training as a deacon, I served for an academic year—only one day a week—on the chaplaincy staff at New York Presbyterian Hospital. A large part of my days there was going from room to room on my assigned floor or floors, introducing myself as part of the pastoral care team. We were strictly told that when people declined our company, we had to accept it with good grace.
And lots of people did just that—most kindly, some gruffly, a very few with annoyance or even anger. Lots with comments about why they didn't have any interest. But they all perked up just a little bit in asking me to leave.
After a few days, I realized that patients had almost no control over who came into their rooms and what they did there, and I realized that giving them that control was one gift I had to offer. So I took to introducing myself as “the one person you can throw out.” And once I did that, even those who took me up on it, usually did so with a smile.
And that offer to be of service, or to be a companion with no strings attached, was the opposite of idolatry—it wasn’t about me at all. I just took “no” for an answer, and learned not to mind if the barrage of refusals made me look a bit ridiculous. The smiles more than made up for it.
And maybe that is our answer. To just show up and do our part. Answer the call. Try not to be afraid of rejection. Open our hearts to being hurt. Don’t mind looking a little ridiculous.
Because we’re not good. Only God is good, and that’s just fine.
There’s a reason that the Lord’s Prayer has us ask God to forgive us our sins, while reminding us to forgive those who have sinned against us. So that we can remember to act as lovingly as we can, and trust God—who’s a much better employer than Cardinal Richelieu—to love us—even when we fail.
In the Name of God, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.
Sunday, August 12, 2018
Flesh and Blood: A Sermon on John 6: 41-51 (et seq)
(Delivered at St. Bartholomew's Church, NYC, August 12, 2018)
It doesn’t look like bread, does it, the little wafer we hand out? It is, of course, but it looks almost like a simple disc of some unknown substance. Not quite cardboard, certainly not bread you’d get a sandwich on. More like a Necco wafer, if your remember those, than what you think of when you think of bread.
But it is bread.
It’s made from unleavened wheat flour and water. The bread most Episcopal churches use is made by Cavanagh Altar Breads, a secular baker out of Rhode Island that provides altar bread to C.M. Almy, which sells it to Catholics, Protestants, and those of us in between.
Apparently, Cavanagh’s bread has something like 80% market share, and its popularity was enough to put the Poor Clare Nuns of Bernham, Texas, out of the business. A few orders of nuns have stopped competing and started distributing as retailers, so there’s a whole distribution chain in which these wafers travel.
When we give it to you, we remind you what it is: “The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven.”
But how can something that barely qualifies as bread be the Body of Christ? And does the recurring liturgical formula, “The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven,” become so rote that we don’t hear it, don’t take it in?
Because if you think about it, “the Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven” is not an easy teaching. The Eucharist, which we share, which is central to this service, is one we don’t reflect on often.
[That’s strange because, in breaking with Roman Catholicism, the Church of England in the Thirty-nine Articles rejected the traditional 7 sacraments taught in that faith, holding instead in Article 25 that “[t]here are two Sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel, that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord. The other five were denied the status of sacraments on the ground that they were more properly viewed as “states of life allowed in the Scriptures”, such as marriage, or holy orders, or else they are the result of “corrupt following of the Apostles”—extreme unction, Penance, or Confirmation.
Now, we’ve moved away from the 39 Articles and, since the success of the Anglo-Catholic movements of the 19th Century, we have welcomed back confirmation, anointing of the sick, and Confession.] (Bracketed paragraphs omitted in delivery).
But, for all the quarrels about the sacraments that have marred Anglican Church, the two sacraments on which the most Low Church and High Church partisans have always agreed on are baptism and “the Supper of the Lord.”
So the Eucharist—the eating of bread and drinking of wine in commemoration of the death of Jesus—is at the core of our liturgy, at the core of our worship.
Normally, we just do it, and don’t grapple with the language Jesus uses. But today, I don’t think we have a choice in the matter—we have to listen to what Jesus says, and try to understand the emotionally-laden language he uses.
Which means that this week and next, we’ll be facing some of the harder to bear language in the Fourth Gospel, in which Jesus talks at length about what it means to say that Jesus himself is the Bread of Life.
So it’s our duty to wrestle with this Gospel and next week’s, each part of the same conversation, but broken up in our weekly reading so that this week we get to think of Jesus as the bread that comes down from heaven, so that whoever eats of it shall not die, and not just let it sail over our heads.
A nice metaphor. Jesus is like manna from heaven—a phrase that nowadays can mean simply a great gift, unexpected and welcome, life-enhancing.
Not too threatening yet, right?
We feed on Jesus, and, since we are still in the more abstract part of the Gospel today, we can think of it as Jesus nourishing us with the Spirit, or by his teachings.
But then this Gospel reading has a sting in its tail. Jesus then tells is that “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
And we, like the crowd, do a double take. He can’t mean it literally, can he?
Next week it gets a little frighteningly concrete. The crowd is murmuring “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
And here’s where Jesus really does an un-Episcopalian thing: crosses the line of good taste and discretion. Jesus says to them
“Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”
Archbishop William Temple in his Readings in St. John's Gospel (First and Second Series) reminds us that these words were especially shocking to Jesus’s Jewish audience because to consume the blood of sacrifices was a grave offense under the Law.
Not to mention what Raymond Brown, the great scholar of the Fourth Gospel, calls “the Jewish repugnance at the cannibalistic thought of eating his flesh.” Brown asserts that these words led to claims that the early Christians were in fact cannibals and blood-drinkers, and the Roman historian Tacitus says that Nero “fastened the guilt” for the great fire of Rome “on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace.” (Annals, 15:4)
Even today these words can draw strong reactions when they aren’t cushioned by routine, safe in a church. These last few verses disturbed the writer Alan Ryan enough that he wrote a story, called “Following the Way,” about a young man who, over a period of years, keeps meeting a Jesuit priest who repeatedly invites him into the order, only for him to discover at the end that the chalice which promises eternal life is not filled with wine.
Mind you, I graduated from a Jesuit college, and I’m not taking any bets about their induction ceremonies.
But just as Ryan found in these lines fuel for a Gothic fantasia, the Gospel itself tells us that “because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” In fact, only the Twelve remained—and one of them, as Jesus rather pointedly observes, is a devil.
So why did Jesus choose such provocative, such offensive, language?
Quite possibly because it was the only language that came close to doing the job. Temple reminds us that to eat something is to take it into ourselves and to use it as the basic building blocks assembling our bodies; we make Jesus’s full humanity—his flesh—his mortality—a constituent element of who we are. We make our own the dying of Jesus.
Likewise, the book of Deuteronomy tells us, “The blood is the Life”; (No, I didn’t recognize Count Dracula was quoting Scripture until I read Temple either. Apparently Shakespeare was right to warn us that the “Devil can quote Scripture for his purpose”).
By drinking from the cup, Archbishop Temple tells us, we accept the life of Jesus into ourselves, the resurrected life.
Temple urges us to see a synergy in the eating of the Bread and the drinking from the cup, that each requires the other.
Or, as Temple puts it, by eating the bread, we receive the power of self giving and self-sacrifice; by drinking the cup, we receive, through that self-giving and that self-sacrifice, the life that is triumphant over death and united to God.
Which is beautiful and eloquent Eucharistic theology—but what does it mean here, today, this minute?
Let me try a translation:
We Christians believe that we are called to lives of service, not of selfishness. By eating the bread, we make part of our very physical being a perpetual reminder of that calling. We literally take it into ourselves and let it become a part of our anatomy.
By drinking of the cup, we claim that the love of God, the deathless and unkillable love of God is so much a part of the redemption of Creation that that love flows through our very arteries and veins. We acknowledge that we are called to love, and that love literally pervades our being—again, our physical being.
We ourselves claim the blessing and assert that the love of God surges through us, is that of which we are made.
So how can we refuse to love, to forgive, to care for others? How can we allow ourselves to let that love become just a dry routine, instead of a call to arms?
But not to literal arms, not to violence, or triumphalism. We are called to the much harder task of building bridges to those with whom we disagree. To those who have hurt us, or, even harder, to those whom we have hurt.
We are called to a life in which we pray and try to live the beautiful words of St Francis:
Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon,
Where there is doubt, faith,
Where there is despair, joy;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.
And how can we, knowing our own faults and weaknesses, our own moments of anger and unkindness, even hope to achieve this?
We eat the bread of life, we drink from the cup of love.
It’s in our muscle memories, our own sinews, our very DNA.
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
It doesn’t look like bread, does it, the little wafer we hand out? It is, of course, but it looks almost like a simple disc of some unknown substance. Not quite cardboard, certainly not bread you’d get a sandwich on. More like a Necco wafer, if your remember those, than what you think of when you think of bread.
But it is bread.
It’s made from unleavened wheat flour and water. The bread most Episcopal churches use is made by Cavanagh Altar Breads, a secular baker out of Rhode Island that provides altar bread to C.M. Almy, which sells it to Catholics, Protestants, and those of us in between.
Apparently, Cavanagh’s bread has something like 80% market share, and its popularity was enough to put the Poor Clare Nuns of Bernham, Texas, out of the business. A few orders of nuns have stopped competing and started distributing as retailers, so there’s a whole distribution chain in which these wafers travel.
When we give it to you, we remind you what it is: “The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven.”
But how can something that barely qualifies as bread be the Body of Christ? And does the recurring liturgical formula, “The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven,” become so rote that we don’t hear it, don’t take it in?
Because if you think about it, “the Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven” is not an easy teaching. The Eucharist, which we share, which is central to this service, is one we don’t reflect on often.
[That’s strange because, in breaking with Roman Catholicism, the Church of England in the Thirty-nine Articles rejected the traditional 7 sacraments taught in that faith, holding instead in Article 25 that “[t]here are two Sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel, that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord. The other five were denied the status of sacraments on the ground that they were more properly viewed as “states of life allowed in the Scriptures”, such as marriage, or holy orders, or else they are the result of “corrupt following of the Apostles”—extreme unction, Penance, or Confirmation.
Now, we’ve moved away from the 39 Articles and, since the success of the Anglo-Catholic movements of the 19th Century, we have welcomed back confirmation, anointing of the sick, and Confession.] (Bracketed paragraphs omitted in delivery).
But, for all the quarrels about the sacraments that have marred Anglican Church, the two sacraments on which the most Low Church and High Church partisans have always agreed on are baptism and “the Supper of the Lord.”
So the Eucharist—the eating of bread and drinking of wine in commemoration of the death of Jesus—is at the core of our liturgy, at the core of our worship.
Normally, we just do it, and don’t grapple with the language Jesus uses. But today, I don’t think we have a choice in the matter—we have to listen to what Jesus says, and try to understand the emotionally-laden language he uses.
Which means that this week and next, we’ll be facing some of the harder to bear language in the Fourth Gospel, in which Jesus talks at length about what it means to say that Jesus himself is the Bread of Life.
So it’s our duty to wrestle with this Gospel and next week’s, each part of the same conversation, but broken up in our weekly reading so that this week we get to think of Jesus as the bread that comes down from heaven, so that whoever eats of it shall not die, and not just let it sail over our heads.
A nice metaphor. Jesus is like manna from heaven—a phrase that nowadays can mean simply a great gift, unexpected and welcome, life-enhancing.
Not too threatening yet, right?
We feed on Jesus, and, since we are still in the more abstract part of the Gospel today, we can think of it as Jesus nourishing us with the Spirit, or by his teachings.
But then this Gospel reading has a sting in its tail. Jesus then tells is that “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
And we, like the crowd, do a double take. He can’t mean it literally, can he?
Next week it gets a little frighteningly concrete. The crowd is murmuring “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
And here’s where Jesus really does an un-Episcopalian thing: crosses the line of good taste and discretion. Jesus says to them
“Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”
Archbishop William Temple in his Readings in St. John's Gospel (First and Second Series) reminds us that these words were especially shocking to Jesus’s Jewish audience because to consume the blood of sacrifices was a grave offense under the Law.
Not to mention what Raymond Brown, the great scholar of the Fourth Gospel, calls “the Jewish repugnance at the cannibalistic thought of eating his flesh.” Brown asserts that these words led to claims that the early Christians were in fact cannibals and blood-drinkers, and the Roman historian Tacitus says that Nero “fastened the guilt” for the great fire of Rome “on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace.” (Annals, 15:4)
Even today these words can draw strong reactions when they aren’t cushioned by routine, safe in a church. These last few verses disturbed the writer Alan Ryan enough that he wrote a story, called “Following the Way,” about a young man who, over a period of years, keeps meeting a Jesuit priest who repeatedly invites him into the order, only for him to discover at the end that the chalice which promises eternal life is not filled with wine.
Mind you, I graduated from a Jesuit college, and I’m not taking any bets about their induction ceremonies.
But just as Ryan found in these lines fuel for a Gothic fantasia, the Gospel itself tells us that “because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” In fact, only the Twelve remained—and one of them, as Jesus rather pointedly observes, is a devil.
So why did Jesus choose such provocative, such offensive, language?
Quite possibly because it was the only language that came close to doing the job. Temple reminds us that to eat something is to take it into ourselves and to use it as the basic building blocks assembling our bodies; we make Jesus’s full humanity—his flesh—his mortality—a constituent element of who we are. We make our own the dying of Jesus.
Likewise, the book of Deuteronomy tells us, “The blood is the Life”; (No, I didn’t recognize Count Dracula was quoting Scripture until I read Temple either. Apparently Shakespeare was right to warn us that the “Devil can quote Scripture for his purpose”).
By drinking from the cup, Archbishop Temple tells us, we accept the life of Jesus into ourselves, the resurrected life.
Temple urges us to see a synergy in the eating of the Bread and the drinking from the cup, that each requires the other.
Or, as Temple puts it, by eating the bread, we receive the power of self giving and self-sacrifice; by drinking the cup, we receive, through that self-giving and that self-sacrifice, the life that is triumphant over death and united to God.
Which is beautiful and eloquent Eucharistic theology—but what does it mean here, today, this minute?
Let me try a translation:
We Christians believe that we are called to lives of service, not of selfishness. By eating the bread, we make part of our very physical being a perpetual reminder of that calling. We literally take it into ourselves and let it become a part of our anatomy.
By drinking of the cup, we claim that the love of God, the deathless and unkillable love of God is so much a part of the redemption of Creation that that love flows through our very arteries and veins. We acknowledge that we are called to love, and that love literally pervades our being—again, our physical being.
We ourselves claim the blessing and assert that the love of God surges through us, is that of which we are made.
So how can we refuse to love, to forgive, to care for others? How can we allow ourselves to let that love become just a dry routine, instead of a call to arms?
But not to literal arms, not to violence, or triumphalism. We are called to the much harder task of building bridges to those with whom we disagree. To those who have hurt us, or, even harder, to those whom we have hurt.
We are called to a life in which we pray and try to live the beautiful words of St Francis:
Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon,
Where there is doubt, faith,
Where there is despair, joy;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.
And how can we, knowing our own faults and weaknesses, our own moments of anger and unkindness, even hope to achieve this?
We eat the bread of life, we drink from the cup of love.
It’s in our muscle memories, our own sinews, our very DNA.
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Sunday, July 8, 2018
Power Failure: A Sermon on Mark 6: 1-13, 2 Cor. 12:2-10
[Delivered on July 8, 2018, at St. Bartholomew's Church, NYC at 5:00 pm]
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
What is more disorienting than the seeming failure of something you have always believed in?
This past Wednesday, the Fourth of July, the Washington Post published an article by Anna Lührmann and Matthew Wilson summarizing the 2018 report of the Varieties of Democracy Project of the University of Gothenburg, known as V-Dem. V-Dem calls itself “the largest-ever social-science effort to measure democracy around the world.”
Those results, disturbingly, described the United States as a “declining democracy.” Lührmann and Wilson write that “[t]he United States fell 24 places in the country ranking on liberal democracy over the past two years, from seventh in 2015 to 31st in 2017,” adding that “When we compare the United States’ score in 2017 with its average score over the past 10 years, the drop is precipitous and unprecedented.”
Meanwhile, the Washington Post also as a polling team, and an article by Emily Guskin, reports that the polling team found that, as of July 2018, “Americans are less proud of their country and the way its democracy works, and they show persistently weak trust in government and many major institutions.“
By now, you must be wondering if this is a civics lesson or a sermon, but we’ve just finished commemorating Independence Day, so let me bring it to a point:
Normally, when the institutions we place our trust in seem to be failing, we criticize. And that’s fair enough, as long as we try to ground our criticisms in fact, and reasonable expectations. But one thing we don’t do: look inward.
Cynicism and mutual distrust rot institutions from within, just as they fray what Abraham Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address called “our bonds of affection.” In a relationship, in any relationship, distrust and anger can bring those bonds to the point of snapping.
That's true within a church, within a country, or within a family.
And that includes our relationship with God.
What do we see when Jesus returns to Nazareth in today’s Gospel?
When Jesus returns to Nazareth, his home town, he teaches in the synagogue, and the people marvel at what they've heard about his wisdom, at the deeds of power being done by his hands, only to swiftly pivot and cut him down to size as “the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon.”
And Jesus finds that can “do no deed of power there,” other than laying his hands upon a few of the sick, and curing them. Yet as soon as he leaves Nazareth, he sends out the Twelve, and they cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.”
What happened?
Jesus, whose ability to feed thousands of people with a few loaves and fishes, cure the sick, and even raise the dead is known far and wide—is suddenly rendered essentially without power. Jesus himself is amazed at the unbelief of those who have known him longest, and attributes his inability to do any work of power in Nazareth to their unbelief. He wryly adds that “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.”
And sure enough, as soon as he leaves Nazareth, he is able to be the Jesus we usually think of, not only able to do great deeds of power again himself, but able to deputize the Twelve to perform them in his name.
Again, what happened?
The clue came to me from an unusual place: C.S. Lewis’s little fantasia, The Great Divorce, in which he imagines Hell as a dreary little suburb, where it’s always raining, and always twilight. Periodically, the ghosts who live there are able to journey in a bus to heaven and interact with the saved. If they choose to stay, they can, and grow into the fullness of love and light. Some do. But most cling to their own perceptions of themselves—as victims, as tragic figures, as the misunderstood, and so voluntarily take the bus back down to the little town of the damned.
Lewis’s guide in this fantasia is the Scottish writer George MacDonald, whose writings opened his youthful mind. In explaining the interactions Lewis is observing, MacDonald tells him that:
But Grace can be refused; Grace can be rejected.
Jesus cannot force us to be well; we must want it. It’s not that His power is gone in Nazareth, not at all. It’s far simpler than that. The people who knew Him as a boy, a young carpenter, who know His family—these people are simply unwilling to open their hearts and discard their long-standing image of who Jesus is, and His role in their lives.
And because of this, they cannot accept help from Him. It’s literally inconceivable to his former neighbors that all these stories they’ve heard about Jesus are true. They don’t fit the boy they knew, the apprentice carpenter, the member of a local family. And because they cannot conceive of Jesus as being anything other than what they knew, they reject the gift. And God says to them, “Thy will be done.”
Conversely, St. Paul. He describes a mystical experience attributed to “a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven.” Now let’s get something straight; this person is Paul himself . How do we know this? Later in the reading he flatly admits it, telling us that he “refrain[s] from [boasting], so that no one may think better of me than what is seen in me or heard from me, even considering the exceptional character of the revelations.” So Paul himself is caught up into Paradise where he “heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.” Fourteen years after the event, the wonder and awe are fresh.
And yet: in the very next line, Paul tells us that, “[t]herefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated.” When he appeals three times to the Lord to be freed from this torment, the response is simply, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”
The nature of this torment is unclear—physical pain, disease, epilepsy have all been suggested, but while the nature of this thorn is elusive, its purpose is repeated twice—that he “should not be too elated.”
Why not? Why shouldn’t Paul be elated?
Perhaps because, like the ghosts in The Great Divorce, Paul is all too capable of losing sight of his own limitations, and could fall into the trap of no longer seeing himself as he is, faults and all. And instead of sharing the joy this vision had brought him, he could view this free gift of God as something that marks him as special, as superior. Paul, who is inclined to self-assertion—look at all the times he insists on his apostolic rank—is being protected, by being reminded that he is a flawed human being, just as those he seeks to serve are.
Just as we are.
Which brings us back to our beginning. Jesus tells us to “love one another, as I have loved you,” and even to love our enemies. As we look on in this summer of discontent, we must remember that however easy it is fall on one side or another in this time of division and uneasiness, we must not do so with hatred. We are not enemies, Abraham Lincoln warned us, we must not be enemies.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t express our beliefs. We must, as you have often heard in this Church, make no peace with injustice. But it does mean that in our struggle, we remember that those who choose to are oppose us us are as precious in the sight of God as we are. That we fight not in enmity, but constantly reminding ourselves that those who we find ourselves estranged from are in very truth our brothers and our sisters, and that when this struggle is over, we must have conducted ourselves so that we can reach out to them—and they to us, may it be so—in love.
In the Name of God, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
What is more disorienting than the seeming failure of something you have always believed in?
This past Wednesday, the Fourth of July, the Washington Post published an article by Anna Lührmann and Matthew Wilson summarizing the 2018 report of the Varieties of Democracy Project of the University of Gothenburg, known as V-Dem. V-Dem calls itself “the largest-ever social-science effort to measure democracy around the world.”
Those results, disturbingly, described the United States as a “declining democracy.” Lührmann and Wilson write that “[t]he United States fell 24 places in the country ranking on liberal democracy over the past two years, from seventh in 2015 to 31st in 2017,” adding that “When we compare the United States’ score in 2017 with its average score over the past 10 years, the drop is precipitous and unprecedented.”
Meanwhile, the Washington Post also as a polling team, and an article by Emily Guskin, reports that the polling team found that, as of July 2018, “Americans are less proud of their country and the way its democracy works, and they show persistently weak trust in government and many major institutions.“
By now, you must be wondering if this is a civics lesson or a sermon, but we’ve just finished commemorating Independence Day, so let me bring it to a point:
Normally, when the institutions we place our trust in seem to be failing, we criticize. And that’s fair enough, as long as we try to ground our criticisms in fact, and reasonable expectations. But one thing we don’t do: look inward.
Cynicism and mutual distrust rot institutions from within, just as they fray what Abraham Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address called “our bonds of affection.” In a relationship, in any relationship, distrust and anger can bring those bonds to the point of snapping.
That's true within a church, within a country, or within a family.
And that includes our relationship with God.
What do we see when Jesus returns to Nazareth in today’s Gospel?
When Jesus returns to Nazareth, his home town, he teaches in the synagogue, and the people marvel at what they've heard about his wisdom, at the deeds of power being done by his hands, only to swiftly pivot and cut him down to size as “the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon.”
And Jesus finds that can “do no deed of power there,” other than laying his hands upon a few of the sick, and curing them. Yet as soon as he leaves Nazareth, he sends out the Twelve, and they cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.”
What happened?
Jesus, whose ability to feed thousands of people with a few loaves and fishes, cure the sick, and even raise the dead is known far and wide—is suddenly rendered essentially without power. Jesus himself is amazed at the unbelief of those who have known him longest, and attributes his inability to do any work of power in Nazareth to their unbelief. He wryly adds that “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.”
And sure enough, as soon as he leaves Nazareth, he is able to be the Jesus we usually think of, not only able to do great deeds of power again himself, but able to deputize the Twelve to perform them in his name.
Again, what happened?
The clue came to me from an unusual place: C.S. Lewis’s little fantasia, The Great Divorce, in which he imagines Hell as a dreary little suburb, where it’s always raining, and always twilight. Periodically, the ghosts who live there are able to journey in a bus to heaven and interact with the saved. If they choose to stay, they can, and grow into the fullness of love and light. Some do. But most cling to their own perceptions of themselves—as victims, as tragic figures, as the misunderstood, and so voluntarily take the bus back down to the little town of the damned.
Lewis’s guide in this fantasia is the Scottish writer George MacDonald, whose writings opened his youthful mind. In explaining the interactions Lewis is observing, MacDonald tells him that:
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end: Thy will be done. All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice, there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.Nadia Bolz-Weber, in her book Pastrix, explains Grace. She says that:
God’s grace is a gift that is freely given to us. We don’t earn a thing when it comes to God’s love, and we only try to live in response to the gift. No one is climbing the spiritual ladder. We don’t continually improve until we are so spiritual we no longer need God. We die and are made new, but that’s different from spiritual self-improvement. We are simultaneously sinner and saint, 100 percent of both, all the time.Grace is offered, regardless.
But Grace can be refused; Grace can be rejected.
Jesus cannot force us to be well; we must want it. It’s not that His power is gone in Nazareth, not at all. It’s far simpler than that. The people who knew Him as a boy, a young carpenter, who know His family—these people are simply unwilling to open their hearts and discard their long-standing image of who Jesus is, and His role in their lives.
And because of this, they cannot accept help from Him. It’s literally inconceivable to his former neighbors that all these stories they’ve heard about Jesus are true. They don’t fit the boy they knew, the apprentice carpenter, the member of a local family. And because they cannot conceive of Jesus as being anything other than what they knew, they reject the gift. And God says to them, “Thy will be done.”
Conversely, St. Paul. He describes a mystical experience attributed to “a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven.” Now let’s get something straight; this person is Paul himself . How do we know this? Later in the reading he flatly admits it, telling us that he “refrain[s] from [boasting], so that no one may think better of me than what is seen in me or heard from me, even considering the exceptional character of the revelations.” So Paul himself is caught up into Paradise where he “heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.” Fourteen years after the event, the wonder and awe are fresh.
And yet: in the very next line, Paul tells us that, “[t]herefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated.” When he appeals three times to the Lord to be freed from this torment, the response is simply, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”
The nature of this torment is unclear—physical pain, disease, epilepsy have all been suggested, but while the nature of this thorn is elusive, its purpose is repeated twice—that he “should not be too elated.”
Why not? Why shouldn’t Paul be elated?
Perhaps because, like the ghosts in The Great Divorce, Paul is all too capable of losing sight of his own limitations, and could fall into the trap of no longer seeing himself as he is, faults and all. And instead of sharing the joy this vision had brought him, he could view this free gift of God as something that marks him as special, as superior. Paul, who is inclined to self-assertion—look at all the times he insists on his apostolic rank—is being protected, by being reminded that he is a flawed human being, just as those he seeks to serve are.
Just as we are.
Which brings us back to our beginning. Jesus tells us to “love one another, as I have loved you,” and even to love our enemies. As we look on in this summer of discontent, we must remember that however easy it is fall on one side or another in this time of division and uneasiness, we must not do so with hatred. We are not enemies, Abraham Lincoln warned us, we must not be enemies.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t express our beliefs. We must, as you have often heard in this Church, make no peace with injustice. But it does mean that in our struggle, we remember that those who choose to are oppose us us are as precious in the sight of God as we are. That we fight not in enmity, but constantly reminding ourselves that those who we find ourselves estranged from are in very truth our brothers and our sisters, and that when this struggle is over, we must have conducted ourselves so that we can reach out to them—and they to us, may it be so—in love.
In the Name of God, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.
Sunday, June 3, 2018
Lord of the Sabbath: A Sermon on Deut 5:12-15; 2 Cor. 4: 5-12; Mark 22: 3-6
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
We live, in case you haven’t noticed, in unsettled times.
We’re all living in an era where there’s constantly too much to do, working longer hours with more projects.
Or hourly workers, who have to cobble together several jobs to put together a living wage. Minimum wage workers in big box stores, but college professors, too.
I know an adjunct professor who managed to pay the rent on her little Jersey City basement flat by teaching at three different colleges, in three different boroughs of New York City. She’d get home, and pick up a novel, unable to read it, because the page would blur.
She told me that she was one of the lucky ones—she was making rent, unlike one of her colleagues who had to sleep in her car.
And let’s not mention politics and the twenty-four hour news cycle.
OK, we have to. Sorry.
But the Friday night news dump has become such a reliable flood of shock and outrage that you can get so worked up that getting a good night’s sleep is out of the question.
We want to be educated voters. We want to be efficient, hard-working members of our booming economy, each of us chasing Gatsby’s green light, the symbol of having arrived, of success.
And so, for all of our abundance, American workers are the most overworked in the developed world. Maybe it’s a secularized version of the Protestant work ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism described by Max Weber—trying to overcome the fear that we are unworthy by achieving spectacular concrete success in our callings.
Which would explain the McMansion, at least.
We even work to hard at distracting ourselves, at amusement.
Pop culture is popping all around us. Blink, and you’ll miss the new Star Wars film—what are we up to now? Solo's come, but has it gone yet?-- or The Death of Stalin in the arthouse, or the newest, bingeable TV show.
We want to be in the loop—to get everybody’s cultural references, to impress with being current. The Crown is so last year, and now we’re past Vanessa Kirby's sympathetic romantic Princess Margaret. Now we're watching Harriet Walter's icy, cruel Princess Margaret, while Benedict Cumberbatch's recovering addict tries to find a little kindness in himself. Patrick Melrose, not Melrose Place.
The Blacklist is passé, but Billions is still cool, I think. Right? [1]
It’s all a little like Brave New World, where fun was compulsory, and if you don’t enjoy yourself hard enough—well, maybe you just need more.
This is what Henry Higgins meant in My Fair Lady when he yearns to be free from “humanity’s mad, inhuman noise.”
And that’s just the up side. The luxury problems. The fortunate ones whose distractions are relatively benign.
I haven’t mentioned the burn out that people who care for stricken family members have to shake off, the fatigue of caring for a spouse or a child who just doesn’t seem to get better, and yet who you can’t give up on. Those caregivers who are a little more depleted, day after day, a little more exhausted, a little more depressed. And yet who still push on, out of kindness, out of loyalty. Most of all, out of love.
I’ve seen that in surprising places. In my pre-ordination training, making rounds at New York Presbyterian Hospital. On sick calls. Long ago, in visiting a relative who had had a stroke years before, and whose wife kept on loving him, kept on coaxing him to eat, to talk, to stay rooted in his own life. I think her love bought him a decade. But at a price—her own fatigue and exhaustion.
We live in a world that expects us to always be on the move, hustling.
We live in a world where sometimes we need to keep pouring out love, caring for those who need us, despite the strain.
And—you might be surprised to know—that’s always been the case.
Paul, in today’s reading from Second Corinthians certainly seems to be flagging. He writes:
“We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair. Persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed;Remember, too, that it is Paul who takes pride in earning his living while he evangelizes, on not taking support from the communities he visits. He describes himself and his companions as “your slaves, for Jesus’s sake.” He’s almost American in his work ethic!
Always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, he concludes, but life in you.”
But on reading this passage for today, I thought of a point well made made by the American cultural critic, Elizabeth Sandifer.
“The heart of classic tragedy,” she writes, “is generally that the hero is put into a position where their virtues become flaws. Othello, a brilliant soldier known for his decisiveness, is put into a position where the one thing he needs to do is slow down and think; Hamlet, a thoughtful and meticulous scholar, finds himself in one where delaying constantly makes things worse.”
So, here, I would suggest, Paul. His virtues—his need to prove himself a true apostle, to atone for his complicity in the death of St. Stephen, and in the persecution of Christians before his conversion, earnestness, persistence, endurance, a doggedness that won’t let him rest—all of these are leading him toward exhaustion.
Because nobody is called to live a death-in-life. Not even Paul.
He’s lost sight of the words of Jesus, as reported in Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus invites us, “Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
And that’s perfectly consistent with today’s reading from Leviticus.
We are told that “God made it a decree in Joseph, when he went out over the land of Egypt. I hear a voice I had not known: I relieved your shoulder of the burden; your hands were freed from the basket. In distress you called, and I rescued you.”
We’re not meant to prove our worth by imitating the ants as perpetual work machines, and we’re certainly not meant to so lose ourselves in the work, in the roles we play, that we go on and on until we shatter. We are not just expected to rest, we’re required to.
That’s why we are reminded today in Leviticus that the Sabbath is not an option; it’s a law. A statute for Israel. An ordinance of the God of Jacob.
And, like the Pharisees in today’s Gospel, we have the knack for turning things that are meant to be good for us, healthy for us, into burdens.
So often, we turn Sabbath-time into a chore—if we take vacation at all. It’s not the same as time to do the projects at home that we can’t get to because of our busy work lives.
And it’s not compelled fun.
Anything—even the Sabbath—can be made into an idol, abused. Look at today’s Gospel, where Jesus so offends the Pharisees that they join with their enemies, the Herodians, to conspire to kill him.
Why?
Because he healed someone on the Sabbath. He didn’t observe the ban on all work on that set aside day of the week.
Jesus’s answer is so self-evidently true that it’s hard to understand why the Pharisees aren’t satisfied with it: “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath.”
It’s not a law meant to oppress, it’s a law meant to create space for everyone, whatever their place in society, to breathe. It’s valuable because we need to rest, to step back and regain perspective. To just be.
To recharge and revitalize.
It’s easy to lose sight of that. In fact, William Ralph Inge, in his book Christian Mysticism, points out that religious doctrines—like the need for a Sabbath—start as fresh, life-enhancing insights taught by the person who has the flash of awareness, but as they are passed on again and again, they tend to decay from insight into rules, losing their connection to the values they serve. What was once a fresh idea becomes rigid, fixed, and with no obvious point other than obedience.
That’s what’s happened to the Pharisees here. They have forgotten the underlying purpose of the Sabbath and are enforcing a rigid rule the purpose of which is forgotten. It’s a test of conformity, nothing more.
Whereas the apostles, happily munching grain as they stroll through the fields with Jesus, enjoying their friendship and fellowship, have the right idea. That's sabbath done right.
So make time in your life for yourselves. Cultivate a space where you can be you, a time when you can push aside your cares, and enjoy what makes you happy. Because there’s always more work and worry, but that’s not what life is for.
It’s what we work for, those moments with friends, with loved ones, even with just ourselves and whatever it is that centers you.
Cheaper By the Dozen, a memoir about the family of the first efficiency experts, engineers Frank Gilbreth and his wife Lillian Moller Gilbreth, was written by two of their twelve children. The book ends this way:
Someone once asked Dad: "But what do you want to save time for? What are you going to do with it?" "For work, if you love that best," said Dad. "For education, for beauty, for art, for pleasure." He looked over the top of his pince-nez. "For mumblety-peg, if that's where your heart lies."Only you can find your own Sabbath. I’d suggest you get on it, if you haven’t already. It’s wherever your heart lies.
In the Name of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.
[1] After the service, a departing parishioner kindly assured me that Billions is still delicious. I am relieved to hear it.
Saturday, June 2, 2018
“When the Fall is All That’s Left, It Matters”: A Sermon on 1 Sam. 3:1-20
[This Sermon was not delivered, because I wrote it unaware that we would not be using the reading that inspired it, but rather a complementary reading to the others from the Revised Common Lectionary. Still, I think it has some merit, and did not want simply discard it.]
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Today’s reading from the First Book of Samuel is usually a great opportunity for a rallying sermon about God’s call to us. And we may get there yet.
But, I confess, my attention was diverted from the story of the repeated call of God to the young boy Samuel.
Because today, I am drawn to the tragedy interwoven with the call of Samuel, the first of the great prophets.
It’s a tragedy that reminds me of a great moment in The Lion in Winter, the film that pits Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine against Peter O’Toole as Henry II, and Anthony Hopkins (Richard the Lionheart, of course), John Castle as an oilily plotting Geoofrey, and Nigel Terry (A particularly feckless John) against each other and their parents.
Near the end of the film, the young princes have temporarily banded together, under Eleanor’s direction, in an effort to rebel against their father. Henry outwits them, and has them immured in the wine cellar—“the royal boys are aging with the royal port,” he declaims, while he tries to figure out what to do with them.
As they huddle in the darkening cellar, cooperating for the first time in their lives—it takes teamwork to break through a port barrel and jerry-rig a spigot with only a dagger--and John finally shows he’s good for something.
But then they hear footsteps approaching, and fear that their father is approaching, with revenge on his mind.
Richard refuses to be cowed. “He's here,” he says. “He'll get no satisfaction out of me. He isn't going to see me beg.”
Geoffery scornfully answers him, “you chivalric fool... as if the way one fell down mattered.”
Richard replies, “When the fall is all there is, it matters.”
But back to Samuel, who repeatedly hears God’s call, but who repeatedly mistakes that voice for Eli. Eli , is finally instructed by his mentor, Eli the priest to, on hearing the voice Samuel keeps mistaking for Eli’s, to answer simply, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
Samuel obeys Eli, and when he answers, God says to him:
See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle.The next morning, Eli confronts a nervous Samuel, and commands the boy to tell him what the Lord has said.
On that day I will fulfill against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house, from beginning to end.
For I have told him that I am about to punish his house forever, for the iniquity that he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God, and he did not restrain them.
Therefore I swear to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli's house shall not be expiated by sacrifice or offering forever.
And, on hearing the doom of his house and family declared, Eli answers simply, “It is the LORD; let him do what seems good to him.”
When the fall is all there is, it matters.
Now, Eli has already been warned. His two sons have treated the meat offerings of worshippers to the Lord with contempt, the author tells us, by using them as, essentially, their own private source of rich food. And if any worshippers at the temple refused to give them the meat fresh and unburnt, they took it by force.
Eli, who was already old when this took place, remonstrates with his sons, who, predictably, ignore him. A man of God comes and tells Eli that his entire house will soon be punished—that they will all die, except for one survivor, left behind to weep in despair.
So Eli is not surprised.
Yet he continues to serve in the temple, continues to instruct Samuel, who grows into adulthood, and, on the day that the long-ago promised fall takes place, the now blind ninety-eight year old priest Eli topples to his death upon hearing that the Ark of the Covenant has been taken by the Philistines.
In other words, he falls because the most holy relics of God gathered by Moses have been profaned.
He dies for horror and shame that the temple he—unlike his sons—has served faithfully has itself fallen. His death is quick, and seemingly painless, and he dies of his great love for the God who he served to the end, knowing that the fall would come in retribution for his failures as a parent, not as a priest.
When the fall is all there is, it matters.
Eli serves in the temple for an unspecified number of years from his first warning (when Samuel is a very young child) until his death. But we know that Samuel is an adult at the time of Eli’s death, and yet Samuel’s prophecy that Eli’s house was about to fall had not yet occurred.
It’s so easy to view this story through the lens of modern concepts of justice, and come to the conclusion that God punishes His faithful servant for the acts of his sons, that God is cruel to Eli.
But is that really what happens in the story?
Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of preaching at this service about Romans chapter 8, where St. Paul tells us that all things intermingle for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to his purpose. I reminded you that this saying of St. Paul means that the tragic aspects of life remain tragic, the losses are real, and that pain does not simply cease because we are followers of the Jesus Movement.
Rather, how we, the called, according to God’s purpose, play a part in establishing the pattern of light and dark in our own lives, and those lives we touch. And it is in our response to the call that we get to be active participants in God’s unending, unceasing, untiring efforts to redeem this divided, broken world, which groans in pain.
Witness Eli.
Told that he and his entire family—except for one broken-hearted survivor—will fall, Eli does not respond with bitterness against either his sons or the young prophet he is rearing up to replace him. He does not abandon the temple, does not, as Job’s wife advises him, “curse God, and die.”
No, Eli answers simply "It is the LORD; let him do what seems good to him."
And he continues his service, educating Samuel, praying, performing his priestly duties, even as time robs him of his sight, his body of its strength, and on the darkest day, when the Israelites are driven before the Philistines, he finally falls, falls and dies, his last thought his grieving the loss of the Ark, that most potent of all symbols of the covenant between the Israelites and God.
He dedicates his long life, every day of it, to a life of service, silently rebuking the crimes of his sons, their faithlessness and their selfish, mercenary ways.
And his days are long in the land.
Eli, complicit in the sins of his sons because he did not prevent them, or restrain them, lives a life of love to the God who he has failed as a father.
But not as a priest. He continues in that role until his body quite simply gives out.
And he atones for his failures as a parent by raising Samuel, whose fame will completely eclipse his own reputation, and who is the first of the line of the great prophets, but who learned how to hear the call from Eli, and learned also from Eli to speak the truth, without fear.
Eli’s response—to not reject the God who has told him that he and his family will not, after all, be the channel of revelation, instead selflessly assists in the education, training and formation of the prophet who will replace him.
And in so doing, a dramatic amount of redemption is achieved. Eli is not forgotten. We can’t forget him—without him, Samuel could not recognize God’s call to his own destiny, and so when we encounter Eli it is in that role—the man who, upon learning that he himself will fall, makes the most of the unknown amount of time he has left. Thousands of years have passed, and we are still reading about Samuel—and we can’t read about Samuel without reading about Eli. His choice helped the light to blaze up, and overcome the darker parts of the pattern of his flawed fallible life.
When the fall is all there is, it matters.
We will each and every one of us fall one day. We’re mortal, and we, like Eli, are flawed and fallible. Our lives are finite, oh, so finite, and like Eli before us, we have no idea when that last fall will come. So, like Eli, we must make a decision.
Not a decision to be free of sin—of failure, or regret. We can’t achieve that.
Not a decision to leave behind us great accomplishments that will fade with the memories of those who knew us, loved us, or not, as the case may be.
No, I can’t help but think that for us here today, a first step in answering the call while recognizing our own weaknesses and failings, is found in the words of Henri Frédéric Amiel, as my own mentor Bill Tully used to quote to us so often:
Life is short and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. So be swift to love, make haste to be kind.
After all, when the fall is all there is, it matters.
In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.
Sunday, April 15, 2018
Ghost Story: A Sermon on Luke 24:36b-48
[Delivered on April 15, 2018, The Third Sunday of Easter, at St. Bartholomew's Church, NYC]
Alleluia! The Lord is Risen!
The Lord is Risen Indeed! Alleluia!
So what were they so afraid of?
I’m asking from personal experience.
When I was 11 years old, my grandmother, the sweet, gentle “Nana” who loved my sister and me to distraction, died. Quite suddenly, of a heart attack, dying in my grandfather’s arms.
Too soon, but probably just how she’d want to go.
A few days after her death, I saw her, walking across the street. I ran to catch up with her, called out “Nana!”
But when I reached her, there was a very different, very puzzled woman facing a little boy she’d never seen before.
I knew my grandmother was dead. I knew that if I caught up with her, she still wouldn’t be alive.
But I thought she’d still be Nana.
That’s a ghost story without a ghost.
And so is today’s Gospel.
Which brings me back to my starting point. What were the disciples so afraid of?
What did they know that I didn’t?
Wouldn’t even a ghost of Jesus be better than no Jesus at all?
And yet the Eleven are terrified when he comes into the room. He says “Peace be with you,” and they’re still terrified.
Why?
In that same period of my life, I loved ghost stories. And to be honest—I still do. Enough that in my teens I read up on parapsychology, and learned about what people who took seriously the experiences of people who have seen ghosts think about the meaning of ghosts.
I’m not alone in this. Susan Howatch, the Anglican novelist, has read some of the same books I have, and it shows in the finale of her six volume chronicle of life in the Church of England from the 1930s to the 1970s. In that final volume, Absolute Truths, Howatch’s rational, highly intellectual protagonist, Bishop Charles Ashworth, believes he has seen a ghost in the Cathedral.
But before we get there, Howatch tells us some things about ghosts, things that the parapsychologists tell us, too.
That there’s always a connection of some kind between the viewer and the viewed.
That usually that connection means unfinished business.
And that, Hollywood portrayals of the charming romantic ghost aside, the ghost is not the person you knew. To use Howatch’s phrase, a ghost is a “discarnate shred of a former personality.”
Let that last phrase sink in for a minute. Evocative isn’t it? A little ominous perhaps. But what does it mean?
Discarnate? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it quite simply: “stripped of flesh,. . . or bodily form, unembodied” but then adds “the reverse of incarnation.”
Remember, these disciples in this reading are still cowering in the aftermath of Good Friday. Oh, they’ve heard the story of the women at the tomb, and the unnamed two disciples who met Jesus on the road to Emmaus, recognized him in the breaking of the bread—only for him to vanish.
They’re afraid. Something is going on, little hints of some tectonic shift in reality, but stuck in their extended Good Friday, hidden away in fear, they don’t know what it is, and whether it’s for their good or their harm.
Discarnate.
That’s the fearful power of Good Friday, under which these disciples are cowering. We take it for granted in the Apostle’s Creed in our 1979 Prayer Book: “He descended to the dead.” In older iterations—or in Rite I—it’s starker: “He descended into hell.”
As late as 1727, a book posthumously published book by Thomas Burnet could state that “the soul of Christ was perfectly human,” that “Jesus went through all” that we do, that, after the Crucfixion, “he went to the region of human souls—that’s Hades, to Burnet, by the way, a fancy way of saying Hell, but the classical Hell not our Christian one where the Devil is a charming imp with horns—“and being discarnated.”
In other words, Good Friday reverses the central miracle of Christianity: The Incarnation is violently ripped inside out, and God having become man becomes—what?
No wonder they’re afraid.
But it’s more than that, you know. A “discarnate shred of a former personality,” remember?
It won’t be Jesus, they’re thinking. Not really. Some echo of him, some phantom of him.
No, it has to be some last, powerful, emotion Jesus felt in his dying, and that won’t let him rest until the unfinished business is completed.
In antiquity, that unfinished business is usually revenge.
A ghost, traditionally, cannot rest until it has revenged itself.
But the disciples loved Jesus, followed him—hey, it was Judas who betrayed him, not—well, wait a minute.
They all fled.
Peter denied him three times.
And if a ghost is only a shred of the former personality—usually the angry, vindictive shred—well, there’s enough guilt washing around in that room that they can all bathe in it.
So there is the connection between the viewers and the viewed.
There’s the unfinished business.
It’s guilt. But not any guilt of Jesus’s making. It’s the disciples’ own marinating in their failures at Gesthamane, at Golgatha.
And guilt being what it is, they’re probably doing the deep dive, remembering failures great and small.
Whether it’s Jesus saying to Peter, “Get behind me Satan!”, or James and John vying to sit on either side of Jesus in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Or most likely it’s all of them, remembering that at the Last Supper—in their last moments of peace—when Jesus interrupted them arguing over who was the greatest among them, and rebuking them, reminded that he came as one who serves, and so must they. And Peter again remembering his boasting that he would never deny Jesus.
Maybe there is a ghost in this story after all.
Eleven ghosts, to be precise. Eleven men, who once walked in the sun and the air, who cast out demons in Jesus’s name, who cured the sick—now cowering in the Upper Room, waiting for something to happen to them. To bring them back to life.
And that’s just what happens.
These guilty men, these traitors, failures, skulking in the dark—they can’t believe their ears when they hear that much loved voice use that familiar phrase:
“Peace be with you.”
And so Jesus approaches them, one after the other, touches, them, lets them see and touch his wounds—whatever it takes to help them understand what is standing right in front of them.
And it really is Jesus—he’s even hungry, and eats some fish with them.
Jesus is right there, and there are no ghosts.
Eleven men, who were fading away into something very like ghosts, though, have been reborn with joy, and a sense of the awesome possibilities of life.
The dark miracle of Good Friday has been transfigured with light; Jesus has risen, and the reversal of the Incarnation has been set aside.
That was many years ago, in another country, and besides, the witnesses are dead.
But we gather here weekly in a building named for one of them—St. Bartholomew, also known as Nathaniel.
This whole city is dotted with churches named after the disciples, dedicated to the worship of God, and spreading of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
So maybe we should follow today’s Gospel reading to the end. He resumes his teaching of them, opening the scriptures to them. He explains that his ordeal and resurrection had to be, and then gives them their marching orders: repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in Jesus’s name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.
And they did it.
Traitors? Failures? Braggarts?
Once, maybe.
But then they fell to earth on Good Friday, and could not find themselves in its wake. They needed to be found by the man they had failed, by Jesus.
And the ghost story is replaced by a resurrection miracle, an Easter miracle.
We all have our guilt. We all have our failures, are guilty of our betrayals, small and large. And, often, we can feel like we need to hide from that guilt, skulking in our own version of that Upper Room. So sure we are beyond forgiveness. Unworthy.
But the Easter miracle is that, when the door is opened, and we turn, expecting the nightmare figure of vengeance, come to denounce us, we see no such thing.
We see our teacher and friend, Jesus of Nazareth, who offers us his peace, shares a meal with us, and then begins to say, as confidently if we’ve never failed him or anybody else, “Get out of this place you’ve been hiding in.” And what are we to do once we’re out in the open air? I think St. Francis got this right: Go preach the gospel. Use words if you must.
In the Name of God, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.
Alleluia! The Lord is Risen!
The Lord is Risen Indeed! Alleluia!
So what were they so afraid of?
I’m asking from personal experience.
When I was 11 years old, my grandmother, the sweet, gentle “Nana” who loved my sister and me to distraction, died. Quite suddenly, of a heart attack, dying in my grandfather’s arms.
Too soon, but probably just how she’d want to go.
A few days after her death, I saw her, walking across the street. I ran to catch up with her, called out “Nana!”
But when I reached her, there was a very different, very puzzled woman facing a little boy she’d never seen before.
I knew my grandmother was dead. I knew that if I caught up with her, she still wouldn’t be alive.
But I thought she’d still be Nana.
That’s a ghost story without a ghost.
And so is today’s Gospel.
Which brings me back to my starting point. What were the disciples so afraid of?
What did they know that I didn’t?
Wouldn’t even a ghost of Jesus be better than no Jesus at all?
And yet the Eleven are terrified when he comes into the room. He says “Peace be with you,” and they’re still terrified.
Why?
In that same period of my life, I loved ghost stories. And to be honest—I still do. Enough that in my teens I read up on parapsychology, and learned about what people who took seriously the experiences of people who have seen ghosts think about the meaning of ghosts.
I’m not alone in this. Susan Howatch, the Anglican novelist, has read some of the same books I have, and it shows in the finale of her six volume chronicle of life in the Church of England from the 1930s to the 1970s. In that final volume, Absolute Truths, Howatch’s rational, highly intellectual protagonist, Bishop Charles Ashworth, believes he has seen a ghost in the Cathedral.
But before we get there, Howatch tells us some things about ghosts, things that the parapsychologists tell us, too.
That there’s always a connection of some kind between the viewer and the viewed.
That usually that connection means unfinished business.
And that, Hollywood portrayals of the charming romantic ghost aside, the ghost is not the person you knew. To use Howatch’s phrase, a ghost is a “discarnate shred of a former personality.”
Let that last phrase sink in for a minute. Evocative isn’t it? A little ominous perhaps. But what does it mean?
Discarnate? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it quite simply: “stripped of flesh,. . . or bodily form, unembodied” but then adds “the reverse of incarnation.”
Remember, these disciples in this reading are still cowering in the aftermath of Good Friday. Oh, they’ve heard the story of the women at the tomb, and the unnamed two disciples who met Jesus on the road to Emmaus, recognized him in the breaking of the bread—only for him to vanish.
They’re afraid. Something is going on, little hints of some tectonic shift in reality, but stuck in their extended Good Friday, hidden away in fear, they don’t know what it is, and whether it’s for their good or their harm.
Discarnate.
That’s the fearful power of Good Friday, under which these disciples are cowering. We take it for granted in the Apostle’s Creed in our 1979 Prayer Book: “He descended to the dead.” In older iterations—or in Rite I—it’s starker: “He descended into hell.”
As late as 1727, a book posthumously published book by Thomas Burnet could state that “the soul of Christ was perfectly human,” that “Jesus went through all” that we do, that, after the Crucfixion, “he went to the region of human souls—that’s Hades, to Burnet, by the way, a fancy way of saying Hell, but the classical Hell not our Christian one where the Devil is a charming imp with horns—“and being discarnated.”
In other words, Good Friday reverses the central miracle of Christianity: The Incarnation is violently ripped inside out, and God having become man becomes—what?
No wonder they’re afraid.
But it’s more than that, you know. A “discarnate shred of a former personality,” remember?
It won’t be Jesus, they’re thinking. Not really. Some echo of him, some phantom of him.
No, it has to be some last, powerful, emotion Jesus felt in his dying, and that won’t let him rest until the unfinished business is completed.
In antiquity, that unfinished business is usually revenge.
A ghost, traditionally, cannot rest until it has revenged itself.
But the disciples loved Jesus, followed him—hey, it was Judas who betrayed him, not—well, wait a minute.
They all fled.
Peter denied him three times.
And if a ghost is only a shred of the former personality—usually the angry, vindictive shred—well, there’s enough guilt washing around in that room that they can all bathe in it.
So there is the connection between the viewers and the viewed.
There’s the unfinished business.
It’s guilt. But not any guilt of Jesus’s making. It’s the disciples’ own marinating in their failures at Gesthamane, at Golgatha.
And guilt being what it is, they’re probably doing the deep dive, remembering failures great and small.
Whether it’s Jesus saying to Peter, “Get behind me Satan!”, or James and John vying to sit on either side of Jesus in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Or most likely it’s all of them, remembering that at the Last Supper—in their last moments of peace—when Jesus interrupted them arguing over who was the greatest among them, and rebuking them, reminded that he came as one who serves, and so must they. And Peter again remembering his boasting that he would never deny Jesus.
Maybe there is a ghost in this story after all.
Eleven ghosts, to be precise. Eleven men, who once walked in the sun and the air, who cast out demons in Jesus’s name, who cured the sick—now cowering in the Upper Room, waiting for something to happen to them. To bring them back to life.
And that’s just what happens.
These guilty men, these traitors, failures, skulking in the dark—they can’t believe their ears when they hear that much loved voice use that familiar phrase:
“Peace be with you.”
And so Jesus approaches them, one after the other, touches, them, lets them see and touch his wounds—whatever it takes to help them understand what is standing right in front of them.
And it really is Jesus—he’s even hungry, and eats some fish with them.
Jesus is right there, and there are no ghosts.
Eleven men, who were fading away into something very like ghosts, though, have been reborn with joy, and a sense of the awesome possibilities of life.
The dark miracle of Good Friday has been transfigured with light; Jesus has risen, and the reversal of the Incarnation has been set aside.
That was many years ago, in another country, and besides, the witnesses are dead.
But we gather here weekly in a building named for one of them—St. Bartholomew, also known as Nathaniel.
This whole city is dotted with churches named after the disciples, dedicated to the worship of God, and spreading of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
So maybe we should follow today’s Gospel reading to the end. He resumes his teaching of them, opening the scriptures to them. He explains that his ordeal and resurrection had to be, and then gives them their marching orders: repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in Jesus’s name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.
And they did it.
Traitors? Failures? Braggarts?
Once, maybe.
But then they fell to earth on Good Friday, and could not find themselves in its wake. They needed to be found by the man they had failed, by Jesus.
And the ghost story is replaced by a resurrection miracle, an Easter miracle.
We all have our guilt. We all have our failures, are guilty of our betrayals, small and large. And, often, we can feel like we need to hide from that guilt, skulking in our own version of that Upper Room. So sure we are beyond forgiveness. Unworthy.
But the Easter miracle is that, when the door is opened, and we turn, expecting the nightmare figure of vengeance, come to denounce us, we see no such thing.
We see our teacher and friend, Jesus of Nazareth, who offers us his peace, shares a meal with us, and then begins to say, as confidently if we’ve never failed him or anybody else, “Get out of this place you’ve been hiding in.” And what are we to do once we’re out in the open air? I think St. Francis got this right: Go preach the gospel. Use words if you must.
In the Name of God, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.
Friday, March 30, 2018
What Didn’t They Know?: A Meditation on Luke 23:32–35
[For the past several years, I have had the privilege of preaching at the Good Friday Liturgy of the Seven Last Words of Christ at St. Bartholomew's Church. It is one of the most moving liturgies of the year, and, as always, I am honored to share a pulpit with colleagues and friends I greatly respect and admire. This year's slate had some real standouts; when the audio and texts of the meditations are posted, I'll post a link. My own contribution is below..
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
Just what was it that they didn't know?
It’s a public execution, a common event in the ancient world—and actually common into the early Twentieth Century in America; the last public execution in America was in 1936, only three years before my father was born. There are multiple criminals to die—at least three, including Jesus, Roman centurions and Temple leaders authorities to mock the condemned, and the carnival atmosphere of cruelty is strong.
This saying of Jesus’s, on the surface so typical of him, is missing in some of the earliest manuscripts of Luke’s Gospel, and that lets interpreters off the hook—they cut it and don’t address it, like Joseph Fitzmyer in his two massive volumes on Luke in The Anchor Bible Series series, or just mention it’s not clearly authentic, like the editors of The Jewish Annotated New Testament, and still don’t discuss it.
In the 12 volume The Interpreter's Bible, the preacher’s friend from 1952, the editors admit that they aren’t sure it’s authentic, wonder just who is being forgiven, anyway, and fondly picture the scribe who created what they call “one of the most typically Christian utterances credited to Jesus in the gospel tradition.”[1]
I suppose it’s better than the older theology, from the Church Fathers until the 19th Century, that claims that the whole point of Jesus’s forgiveness is that all concerned—from Judas, the Sanhedrin, and Herod through Pilate and the centurions, are committing the terrible sin of slaying the Son of God, killing the Incarnated Lord, and so Jesus’s forgiveness is of the very specific crime of deicide. A crime of rebellion. Of disobedience to the cosmic order. The worst kind of blasphemy.
But for that blasphemy, that rebellion, the older theology tells us, Golgatha is not problematic. Even the repentant thief seven verses later in this same chapter of Luke’s Gospel says “we are getting what we deserve for our deeds.”[2]
And there’s the problem.
Since so many commenters prefer to dismiss this, the first of the Seven Last Words, as pure legend—as fiction—let me help explain why I believe it is true and prophetic in every sense by using an actual fiction, a novel written by George MacDonald Fraser.
This fiction is about a very bad man: a bully, a coward, a selfish man who drifts into the British Army in the Nineteenth Century, and, because he’s both clever and lucky, rises to the rank of Colonel. He’s sent undercover during the Indian Mutiny in 1858, and finds himself stuck in a battle he’s hoped to avoid. He’s knocked unconscious, and, when he wakes up, he finds himself tied to a cannon, the muzzle at his back, just like the actual native soldiers who no longer wanted to serve the British, and tried to rebel, and lost the battle. He can’t even call out for help, because he’s gagged.
But this bad man manages to keep his wits, and winks at the soldier who’s about to light the fuse and execute him until the gag is removed, and he proves to the Captain who won the battle that he is a British officer.
And then he does a very strange thing, for him. As he’s gasping with relief, he sees the lines of mutineers (as the British called them) tied to cannons, all about to be horribly executed on the Captain’s order. And this bad, selfish man takes command. He is a Colonel, after all, and he orders the Captain to “cut ‘em all loose, and tell ‘em to run away, away as far as they know how—away from us—and never to get caught again.”[3]
He’s had enough, and even this bad man—and he is a very bad man—has his limits, on this day at what was very nearly his Golgatha.
And if even so bad a man as our Colonel would be moved to compassion by his Golgatha experience, I simply cannot believe, will not believe, that Jesus of Nazareth was forgiving his killers solely for their unknowing crime of murdering the Messiah.
I can’t imagine that, if Pilate suddenly listened to his own conscience and his wife’s dread, and sent men to prevent Jesus from being nailed to the Cross, that he would walk away, satisfied that justice had been done.
Even more than our bad Colonel, Jesus would have looked around him, seen the victims about to be put to a long slow death, watched the mocking, laughing, faces in the crowd, and prayed, just as he in fact did, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.“
Because they didn’t.
They couldn’t.
They’d been conditioned, like lab rats in a terrible experiment to believe that the cruelty surrounding them all was normal, was good. That it was all right to enjoy the sufferings of the condemned, to revel in them, in fact.
No—not like rats. Like the people in the Milgram Experiment, who are told by a “teacher” that they are required to test a student, and press a button that shocks the student whenever he or she gets an answer wrong. The tester is told that the shock increases every time a button is pushed, and that the shocks go from 15 volts, a minor shock, to a danger level of 450 volts. The so-called teacher stays with the tester, and at each mistake, would urge the admission of the higher shock.
All of the testers pressed the buttons to administer shocks up to 350 volts, and two thirds pressed the button labeled “Danger—severe shock.”
For all too many people, cruelty is acceptable if it’s required or even just encouraged by authority figures. If they give us permission to do it over time, it’s not just acceptable, it can be done light-heartedly, like the pictures from Abu Graib of American soldiers grinning and giving a thumbs up sign as they pose with a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners, or the infamous photo of one of those soldiers, Lynndie England, dragging a prone naked man on a leash.
Or less than a year ago, Americans marching under Nazi flags, and Confederate flags, in Charlottesville, and one driving a car into a crowd of peaceful protesters that same day, hurting many, and killing a 32 year old woman named Heather Heyer.
Mark Heyer, confronted with unbearable grief and loss, forgave his daughter’s murderer, saying “he don’t know no better.” He added, “I just think what the Lord said on the cross. Lord forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.”[4]
And neither do we.
We walk by the poor and hungry, and turn an uneasy eye away from them.
We know not what we do.
We read about the mistreatment of women in the streets, in the workplace, and dismiss it with a “well, is it really so serious?”
We know not what we do.
We are so numbed by the shooting of children in our schools—more than one a week so far this year—that only when the students themselves mobilize and march for their lives, does the numbness begin to wear off, a little.
We know not what we do.
We buy our wonderful electronic devices, only to read by their light that they were made with slave labor—and it’s time for an upgrade, so we go out and buy more.
We know not what we do.
We acquiesce in the continuation of systemic prejudice against people of color, and watch in silence as schemes unfold throughout the nation to make it harder for them to vote, as they are sentenced disparately in the courtrooms.
We know not what we do.
Jesus’s forgiveness is not just for his executioners.
It’s for us. And we need it.
In the Name of God, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.
[1] Walter Russell Bowie, John Knox, G.A. Buttrick & Paul Scherer, “Luke: Exposition,” The Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 8, at p. 408.
[2]Lk 23: 41 (NRSV).
[3] George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman in the Great Game (1975), at 313.
[4] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/15/16151014/father-charlottesville-heather-heyer-forgives
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
Just what was it that they didn't know?
It’s a public execution, a common event in the ancient world—and actually common into the early Twentieth Century in America; the last public execution in America was in 1936, only three years before my father was born. There are multiple criminals to die—at least three, including Jesus, Roman centurions and Temple leaders authorities to mock the condemned, and the carnival atmosphere of cruelty is strong.
This saying of Jesus’s, on the surface so typical of him, is missing in some of the earliest manuscripts of Luke’s Gospel, and that lets interpreters off the hook—they cut it and don’t address it, like Joseph Fitzmyer in his two massive volumes on Luke in The Anchor Bible Series series, or just mention it’s not clearly authentic, like the editors of The Jewish Annotated New Testament, and still don’t discuss it.
In the 12 volume The Interpreter's Bible, the preacher’s friend from 1952, the editors admit that they aren’t sure it’s authentic, wonder just who is being forgiven, anyway, and fondly picture the scribe who created what they call “one of the most typically Christian utterances credited to Jesus in the gospel tradition.”[1]
I suppose it’s better than the older theology, from the Church Fathers until the 19th Century, that claims that the whole point of Jesus’s forgiveness is that all concerned—from Judas, the Sanhedrin, and Herod through Pilate and the centurions, are committing the terrible sin of slaying the Son of God, killing the Incarnated Lord, and so Jesus’s forgiveness is of the very specific crime of deicide. A crime of rebellion. Of disobedience to the cosmic order. The worst kind of blasphemy.
But for that blasphemy, that rebellion, the older theology tells us, Golgatha is not problematic. Even the repentant thief seven verses later in this same chapter of Luke’s Gospel says “we are getting what we deserve for our deeds.”[2]
And there’s the problem.
Since so many commenters prefer to dismiss this, the first of the Seven Last Words, as pure legend—as fiction—let me help explain why I believe it is true and prophetic in every sense by using an actual fiction, a novel written by George MacDonald Fraser.
This fiction is about a very bad man: a bully, a coward, a selfish man who drifts into the British Army in the Nineteenth Century, and, because he’s both clever and lucky, rises to the rank of Colonel. He’s sent undercover during the Indian Mutiny in 1858, and finds himself stuck in a battle he’s hoped to avoid. He’s knocked unconscious, and, when he wakes up, he finds himself tied to a cannon, the muzzle at his back, just like the actual native soldiers who no longer wanted to serve the British, and tried to rebel, and lost the battle. He can’t even call out for help, because he’s gagged.
But this bad man manages to keep his wits, and winks at the soldier who’s about to light the fuse and execute him until the gag is removed, and he proves to the Captain who won the battle that he is a British officer.
And then he does a very strange thing, for him. As he’s gasping with relief, he sees the lines of mutineers (as the British called them) tied to cannons, all about to be horribly executed on the Captain’s order. And this bad, selfish man takes command. He is a Colonel, after all, and he orders the Captain to “cut ‘em all loose, and tell ‘em to run away, away as far as they know how—away from us—and never to get caught again.”[3]
He’s had enough, and even this bad man—and he is a very bad man—has his limits, on this day at what was very nearly his Golgatha.
And if even so bad a man as our Colonel would be moved to compassion by his Golgatha experience, I simply cannot believe, will not believe, that Jesus of Nazareth was forgiving his killers solely for their unknowing crime of murdering the Messiah.
I can’t imagine that, if Pilate suddenly listened to his own conscience and his wife’s dread, and sent men to prevent Jesus from being nailed to the Cross, that he would walk away, satisfied that justice had been done.
Even more than our bad Colonel, Jesus would have looked around him, seen the victims about to be put to a long slow death, watched the mocking, laughing, faces in the crowd, and prayed, just as he in fact did, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.“
Because they didn’t.
They couldn’t.
They’d been conditioned, like lab rats in a terrible experiment to believe that the cruelty surrounding them all was normal, was good. That it was all right to enjoy the sufferings of the condemned, to revel in them, in fact.
No—not like rats. Like the people in the Milgram Experiment, who are told by a “teacher” that they are required to test a student, and press a button that shocks the student whenever he or she gets an answer wrong. The tester is told that the shock increases every time a button is pushed, and that the shocks go from 15 volts, a minor shock, to a danger level of 450 volts. The so-called teacher stays with the tester, and at each mistake, would urge the admission of the higher shock.
All of the testers pressed the buttons to administer shocks up to 350 volts, and two thirds pressed the button labeled “Danger—severe shock.”
For all too many people, cruelty is acceptable if it’s required or even just encouraged by authority figures. If they give us permission to do it over time, it’s not just acceptable, it can be done light-heartedly, like the pictures from Abu Graib of American soldiers grinning and giving a thumbs up sign as they pose with a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners, or the infamous photo of one of those soldiers, Lynndie England, dragging a prone naked man on a leash.
Or less than a year ago, Americans marching under Nazi flags, and Confederate flags, in Charlottesville, and one driving a car into a crowd of peaceful protesters that same day, hurting many, and killing a 32 year old woman named Heather Heyer.
Mark Heyer, confronted with unbearable grief and loss, forgave his daughter’s murderer, saying “he don’t know no better.” He added, “I just think what the Lord said on the cross. Lord forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.”[4]
And neither do we.
We walk by the poor and hungry, and turn an uneasy eye away from them.
We know not what we do.
We read about the mistreatment of women in the streets, in the workplace, and dismiss it with a “well, is it really so serious?”
We know not what we do.
We are so numbed by the shooting of children in our schools—more than one a week so far this year—that only when the students themselves mobilize and march for their lives, does the numbness begin to wear off, a little.
We know not what we do.
We buy our wonderful electronic devices, only to read by their light that they were made with slave labor—and it’s time for an upgrade, so we go out and buy more.
We know not what we do.
We acquiesce in the continuation of systemic prejudice against people of color, and watch in silence as schemes unfold throughout the nation to make it harder for them to vote, as they are sentenced disparately in the courtrooms.
We know not what we do.
Jesus’s forgiveness is not just for his executioners.
It’s for us. And we need it.
In the Name of God, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.
[1] Walter Russell Bowie, John Knox, G.A. Buttrick & Paul Scherer, “Luke: Exposition,” The Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 8, at p. 408.
[2]Lk 23: 41 (NRSV).
[3] George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman in the Great Game (1975), at 313.
[4] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/15/16151014/father-charlottesville-heather-heyer-forgives
Sunday, March 11, 2018
“For God So Loved the World” A Sermon on John 3:14-21
[Delivered at St. Bartholomew’s Church, NYC, March 11, 2018.]
So here we are, past the halfway point in Lent, and wondering what to make of these last few weeks before we commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus.
A few years ago, Martin Sheen starred in a film called “The Way,” a fictional story based on a real pilgrimage, the Camino de Santiago—the Way of St. James, made every year by hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world, to the shrine of St. James the Great, the brother of John, the "beloved disciple," traditionally the author of today's Gospel. In the film, the hardships and companionship of the pilgrimage open up the mind and heart of those who walk the way.
Lent can be, if we let it, just such a pilgrimage. And as every pilgrimage must have a destination, so too does our Lenten way: Jerusalem.
And, in fact, the pull of the readings over these past weeks has been to point us, along with the disciples, toward Jerusalem. Toward that brief, shining, joyous triumphal entry into the City. And toward the Last Supper, where Jesus promotes the disciples from “servants” to “friends,” and, in a shocking gesture of humility their Master—their teacher, that is—washed their feet. Their apprenticeship, he is saying, is over.
But also this pilgrimage leads to the Garden, where Jesus is betrayed and arrested, and then betrayed again, this time by Peter, and then—to the Cross. And yes, of course, ultimately to Easter but first we have to grapple with the way to the Cross, through the past few weeks’ reading.
Two weeks ago, Jesus rebuked Peter in the harshest terms when he tried to turn Jesus away from the path of suffering and death. Last week, after driving out the merchants and moneychangers from the Temple, Jesus spoke of his death and resurrection, in terms of the Temple’s destruction.
And now in the readings appointed for today, we are invited to see Jesus in the bronze serpent that was lifted up to cure the Israelites whose complaints along the way in their pilgrimage from slavery to freedom caused God to punish them by sending poisonous snakes among them. Well, to heal the ones who hadn’t already died from the snakebite, anyway.
And in the Gospel reading we flash back to almost the very beginning of Jesus’s ministry, so that we can be told of the judgment that we are to face at the end of our own journeys. But we are also given the key to the whole pilgrimage, laid out clearly for us, so that we can view the whole story, looking back briefly, before we continue on our own journey to Jerusalem.
“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.”
So often we hear of Christian teachers condemning those whose lives they decry as “unbiblical,” breaking fellowship with other Christians for being too lax, turning a dour expression upon high spirits or frivolity of any kind. Urging us to fear the world, to distrust it, to pull away from it, in case we become unclean by association with—well, pick your target. There are more than enough to go around.
Now Lent may seem an odd time for me to preach against asceticism. And in fact, I’m not preaching against asceticism in general, but against asceticism for its own sake. The great ascetics withdrew from the world not out of hatred of it, or fear, but because they knew from their own personal experience, that their love of the world and its joys made it harder for them to fulfill their own unique callings from God—to become their own best selves, to love God and their neighbors, and to do the work that they were born to do, to translate that love into action.
Sometimes we need to simplify our lives to understand what’s important. Nearly fifteen years ago, I lost my home, most of the books and other possessions I had spent my whole life gathering together. All but a very few were gone forever.
The shocking thing was the realization that that I had not in fact lost anything that I in fact needed.
Much that I had loved, but nothing I had needed. And the loss of those lesser loves clarified my life so that I could see what was in front of me, a new path that led me to be able to hear the call to serve in our church.
So asceticism isn’t a good in itself; it’s a stripping away of the incidental to see the essential. A turning down of the noise to let the small still voice of the Spirit rise up. But don’t take my word for it;
let me repeat those words of Jesus again:
“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.”
And the Evangelist goes further still, quoting Jesus as saying “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
The point of our pilgrimage to the Cross isn’t to suffer for suffering’s sake. It isn’t to despise the crowd that we will soon represent in the Palm Sunday Passion drama. It’s to see in the world what we have missed, that the judgment has come, and it’s not imposed on us by God—we are not, contrary to Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” who dangles us, like a loathsome spider over a flame, by a strand of our own web.
Now, that’s dramatic Eighteenth Century preaching, and I’m sure it was the collection plate was especially heavy that day, but it’s bad theology. And not at all biblical.
No; the judgment is self-imposed. As Jesus says, “And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”
Jesus tells us that “those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God,” so we know that those of us who can feel securely righteous can just bravely stride out into the light, sure of our reward.
But what keeps people in the dark, rather than in the light?
We could easily write off the people who hesitate to approach the light as the obviously evil, malevolent and manipulative, enjoying being the villains of the piece. But Jesus’s words about them give me pause.
He says: “all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.”
In other words, they’re ashamed. They’re afraid. They don’t believe themselves to be worthy. Or, worse, they believe their errors, their sins, make them beyond forgiveness.
Or, as I was told early in my sobriety, I suffered from delusions of terminal uniqueness—that everybody else could find forgiveness and reconciliation, but not me. Telling your story at an AA meeting—will help you see this—I forced myself to talk about what I saw as the darkest, worst moments of my life, only to be surprised when the room rocked with laughter—not mocking, derisive laughter, but laughter with the attitude, “That all you got, kid?”
The laughter of those who’d been through the same, or worse.
And that experience is far from unique. In his semi-autobiographical novel The Light and the Dark, C.P. Snow depicts his closest friend Charles Allberry, as searching yearningly for God, but not being able to believe. But he’s come close on two occasions, as Snow has his fictional counterpart Roy Calvert say: “I’ve had the absolute conviction—it’s much more real than anything one can see or touch—that God and His world exist. And that everyone can enter and find their rest. Except me. I’m infinitely far away for ever. I am alone and infinitesimally small—and I can’t come near.”
It’s far more common than you may think. Maybe you’ve heard of “Imposter Syndrome,” which has been described as a persistent nagging belief that one was a fraud, that all our achievements were the result of luck, or seeming to be more competent than we in fact are. And, worst of all, the utter terror that some day, we’ll be found out for the fraud we are.
In case you’re wondering, about 70% of people experience this phenomenon.
So people stay out of the light for reasons that are eminently understandable: shame of sins, actual or exaggerated in the mind, fear of rejection by God. Fear of unworthiness, of having every black thought about themselves vindicated, and their worst fears of who they are be affirmed.
And that’s why Jesus tells his disciples again and again: Be not afraid. And in today’s gospel, he tells us, believe that his mission is not to condemn, but to save, to heal, not to judge.
We sing “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy” as a standby at St. Barts—it’s practically our anthem—but maybe we don’t take the lyrics to heart:
“There is no place where earth's sorrows
are more keenly felt than heaven:
there is no place where earth's failings
have such gracious judgment given.”
But it costs us something to accept forgiveness: pride. We have to come forward, in all our imperfections, trusting in the love of our God to see us as we are, flawed and marked by life, worked on by time and events, hurt and in need of healing. We have to trust.
And it is very hard to trust.
But I take comfort from another verse from our hymn:
For the love of God is broader
than the measure of the mind;
and the heart of the eternal
is most wonderfully kind.
And if you have known one person—just one—who has loved you just as you are, unconditionally, or if you have been that person for another—than you know that our mind can rise to that kind of love, and if we can do it, God will do it.
So the judgment is, ultimately, one we pass on ourselves.
We can exile ourselves to the darkness, in self-inflicted fear. Or we can put aside pride, and fear, and step into the Light, knowing, in that wonderful phrase of Leonard Cohen’s, “every heart to love must come—but as a refugee.”
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
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