December 15, 2013: Matthew 11:1-11

Year A, Advent 3

I like to think of this Sunday in Advent as portraying the kinder/gentler side of John.  Last week we had a rather intimidating John who was shouting at the Pharisees and Sadducees who had come to see him. He called them a brood of vipers.  Sometimes insults get lost in translation and things that might seem insulting to us, were not so much in the time of Jesus.  That is not the case in this situation.  Calling the leaders of a religious movement a brood of vipers is always a pretty significant insult.  Then he went on to talk about baptism and the way that Jesus would baptize people.  “I baptize you with water for repentance…He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.  His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear the threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” 

            If I was one of the people being baptized by John, I would have thought, “Thank goodness I am being baptized by John and not this other guy he is referring to.”   Fire, while a lovely image, sounds like a rather painful way to be baptized.  The winnowing fork does not sound very comforting either.  I have seen picture of those things.  Picture a really huge fork.  A winnowing fork is what was used to separate the wheat from the chaff. The farmer would lift the harvested grain with his winnowing fork. Then the wind would blow the chaff away and the wheat would fall to the ground. People who were listening to John the Baptist were no doubt familiar with this image. It seems to me that even if you manage to escape the unquenchable fire, you are still being thrown around by a long and pointy fork.  Neither option is very appealing to me. 

            Soon after John’s pronouncement, Jesus appeared on the scene and chose to be baptized by John.  It is clear that John immediately recognized Jesus for who he was, the Messiah.  We know this because he said, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”  And if that was not enough, the heavens splitting open and the voice of God should have convinced him that the man that he was baptizing was no mere man, he was the Messiah, the savior.  

What happened between that moment and the story we have from the Gospel today?  All of a sudden, the once convicted and doubtless John is now having second thoughts.  Some hypothesize that it was the emotional and physical torment of being in jail that made him question.  Yet being in jail should not have come as a shock to John.  He had criticized Herod, the ruler at that time.  He knew there would be ramifications.  He was prepared to suffer.  The man ate locusts and lived in the wilderness.  It’s not like he was accustomed to the Ritz.

The text indicates that there might be something deeper at play here.   Matthew wrote, “When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’” When John heard what the Messiah was doing…It would appear that John was not satisfied with the way Jesus was spending his time.  It’s not that he was carousing, turning water into wine every night.  He wasn’t doing anything immoral.   He was healing, preaching, teaching, and ministering to the poor and the needy.  Yet for some reason, this was not enough for John.

 You might note that Jesus did not even answer John’s question.  He did not tell John what his title was or whether he was the Messiah who they had been waiting for.  He told John’s disciples what he had been doing: giving sight to the blind, enabling the lame to walk, cleansing the lepers, restoring hearing to those who were deaf, raising the dead and bringing good news to the poor.  These probably sound like pretty Messiah-like actions to most of us.  But this is not what John wanted to hear.  We can be pretty confident in that because John already knew about Jesus’ public ministry.  That was the reason he sent out his disciples in the first place. 

Voltaire once wrote that, “If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.”  We have a tendency to want to visualize Jesus and God as the kind of God we want, perhaps even a God a little like us.  For instance, when God talks to me, he usually has a slightly sarcastic sense of humor. He is also an Episcopalian, obviously. While it is important that we try to connect with God (and sometimes we do so by identifying with him), it is also extremely important that we do not limit God by our expectations of God. 

Do you remember how John first described Jesus?  He was supposed to baptize people with fire, separate the wheat from the chaff….essentially making judgments on those who were lacking.   By the time John landed in prison, he had probably spent some time observing the ministry of Jesus and Jesus had not behaved as John wanted and expected.  Jesus had not rained fire on anyone.  He had not condemned the corrupt leaders or tried to overthrow the Romans.  He was not spending his time with the powerful people.  He was healing the people who could not help themselves, and probably could not do much to help Jesus. He had spent his time with those who everyone else had forgotten.  He had brought them good news.   Some people think that John was having doubts about Jesus.   Perhaps.   More likely, he was having doubts about his own conviction of who this Messiah was supposed to look like, act like, be like.  I wonder if John was reassured when he got Jesus’ answer.  I wonder if he remembered the Jesus who knelt before him and insisted that John baptize him.

I suspect that Matthew did not write about John’s reaction because that was not the important part of the story.  The important part was Jesus response to John and Jesus response to all of us who try to pigeon hole him or define him by our own standards and expectations.  It is we who should be defined by Jesus, not vice versa.   Yet in this day and age, we are so accustomed to having things our way.  You have the iphone, the ipad, me-tv, my-space.    Everything is custom tailore to what we want.  Why listen to the whole album when you can create a playlist on itunes of just the music you like? 

People often refer to their God…who their God loves or does not love.   There is the liberal God…the conservative God, the people’s God.   But here’s the thing, there is only one God and that God has his own plan and his own identity and unlike every other aspect of our world, God will not be defined by what our culture needs or wants at the time.  While that might feel a little rigid to some of us, it’s also incredibly liberating to know that there is something steady out there, someone who is timeless and does not depend on us. There is a line in the communion hymn today, “The hopes and fears of all the years are met with thee tonight…” Jesus is our great hope, but also a fear because we cannot define him and sometimes we cannot understand him.   That’s ok.  God is big enough to handle our insecurities, our fears and our disappointments. Jesus was not the God who John expected, maybe not even the God John wanted, but he was the God who John needed, the God who we all need. 

Dec. 8, 2013: Isaiah 11:1-11

Year A, Advent 2                                                      
           I only have a vague recollection of the day Nelson Mandella was freed after 27 years in prison.  I was still in elementary school, but even then I recognized it for the historic day it was.  I remember the day he was elected president of South Africa much more clearly.  It was 1994 and it felt like the world was shifting somehow, that it would never be the same.  For my whole adult life, Nelson Mandella has been a president and a major political leader.  I knew he was sick for some time, but I was still struck with an unexpected grief when he died this Thursday.  It felt like the end of an era and in many ways it is. 

After his death, the African National Congress (which was the party that he dedicated most of his life to) issued a statement that said, “The large African Baobab who loved Africa as much as he loved South Africa, has fallen.  Its trunk and seeds will nourish the earth for decades to come.”[1]  The Baobab tree is native to Africa.  These trees are magnificent; having extremely wide trunks, a diameter ranging from 23 to 36 feet.  It is also known as the “tree of life” because of the shelter it provides, the fruit that drops from its branches and the amount of water that can be found in its trunk.    It is no surprise that Mandella has become associated with this amazing life giving tree. 

For the next 2 months, our Old Testament reading will come from the Book of Isaiah.  Isaiah is one of the longest books in the Bible, but it still seems like a lot of Isaiah for one year.  Have you all ever noticed that while most of our readings move on a three year cycle, we get the same readings every year for the major holidays?  Every year for Christmas, we hear the same Gospel text from Luke that tells the classic nativity story.  There are shepherds, angels, a trip to the City of David.  There would probably be a small riot if we did not use that Gospel text. 

However, how many of you know what the reading from the Old Testament is on Christmas Eve?  It’s from the Book of Isaiah and we get it every year. We hear it every year because it seems to go along with the Gospel reading.  For centuries, Biblical scholars and preachers have used Isaiah to illuminate the Gospel….to point to Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of the prophesy.  There are good reasons for that and if you want to know them, you will have to come back on Dec. 24^th.  But what about the rest of Isaiah?  Does it have a purpose outside of Christmas Eve?

Isaiah is an amazingly rich text with very profound imagery.  Last week we heard about beating swords into plowshares.  This week, we hear about a stump, which does not sound very exciting.  In fact, it sounds so dull that I have ignored it for years.  It was only this year when I realized how powerful this image really is.  “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of its roots.”    Most of us probably know very little (if anything) about Jesse although his name occurs 45 times in the Bible.   Usually when his name is mentioned, it is in this way, “David, the Son of Jesse.”  David being King David…the greatest King of Israel, the one who would one day be connected to Jesus who would be called the Son of David, born in the City of David.  (It’s all coming together now!)

So this Jesse guy is like a modern day Kennedy.  This was the family to be in.  Yet call me crazy, but a stump isn’t exactly something you want to be connected with.  A great tree-absolutely, but a stump?  Isaiah was writing about the stump of Jesse at least 200 years after the reign of David.    A lot happened in those 200 years and most of it was not very good.  The Kingdom was divided.  The line of kings had deteriorated.  When Isaiah was first writing, King Ahaz was in power.  He followed pagan idols and revived the practice of human sacrifice.  Needless to say, he was not a bright spot on the family tree. 

Yet there were signs of new life on this stump.  When Ahaz’s son, Hezekiah came to power, he removed the idols from the temples.  The 2^nd Book of Kings tells us that he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord.  During Ahaz’s rule, the Davidic branch was on the verge of decay, but with Hezekiah, hope was still present.  A shoot was rising up from that withered stump.  That shoot carried a promise of new life, perhaps even a messiah in the future. 

For so long, the people of Israel had put most of their hope in kings.  This is one of the reasons God did not even want to give them a king initially.  He knew what would happen.  He knew they would try to make the kings into gods and people, even the best people, never make good gods.  I believe that this shoot wasn’t just the sign of a new and better king, it was a symbol of resurrection.  A stump makes us think of death and endings.  Yet even out of something that seems to have died, new things can come; better things can come.

I am sure that when Nelson Mandella was given a sentence for a lifetime in prison, people thought his crusade to end apartheid was over.  But really, it was just beginning.  The Baobab tree is called the tree of life, but it often looks like it is dead because for most of the year it is leafless.   People say that it looks like it is upside down, as if the roots are up in the air.  Yet appearances can be deceiving.  Stumps that look as though their life is over can be fertile ground for new life.  Leafless trees can provide water, food, shelter, and inspiration.  A man who spends 27 years in prison comes out ready to forgive, ready to start over and change the world.

We have all seen the headlines: The Church is dead.  Christianity is dead.  For the sake of argument, let’s say that is true.  As Christians who believe that death is not the end, we should take this as an opportunity.  If we are dead, then we must have a stump somewhere that is ready for new growth.  And if we have fertile ground, then all we need is some seeds.  We have seeds all over the place.  These seeds come in the form of prayers, acts of service, music, community outreach, friendship, stewardship, hospitality, evangelism, and yes, worship.  They just need to be planted.  So find a nice old stump, or maybe an empty pot, or perhaps a huge plot of earth.  Plant the seeds wherever you can.  They might not all grow, but some will.  Even if they do not, the act of planting is growth in and of itself because it is a sign of hope.  Archbishop Desmond Tutu said that Nelson Mandela was exceptional, but not unique.  He said, “The spirit of greatness that he personified resides in all of us.”[2]  All we need to do it let it grow.

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[1] http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2013/1205/Nelson-Mandela-Because-of-him-we-grew-up-in-hope-video

[2] http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2013/1205/Nelson-Mandela-Because-of-him-we-grew-up-in-hope-video

Dec. 1, 2013: Romans 13: 11-14

Year A, First Sunday of Advent                                                                    

            In junior high I tried out for a play called “Teen.”  I was crushed when I was put in the chorus.  Apparently I had a decent voice, but really no acting ability.   It was a silly play and I didn’t think I had set my sights too high; so I was surprised when I could not even get a small part.  However, when I look back on the audition (and yes, I remember the audition) I was so embarrassed.  I had to say that a boy was a “fox.”   Even in the 90’s that was a hopelessly outdated phrase.  I just could not commit to it. 

Recently, I have been reading a bit about acting.  I have discovered that there are different acting techniques.  Some actors really believe that you have to lose yourself in the character you are playing.  Often people refer to this as method acting.  One particular school of method acting says it “trains actors to use their imagination, senses and emotions to conceive of characters with unique and original behavior, creating performances grounded in the human truth of the moment.”[1] I was trying out for the part of a teenager with a crush on a boy, but apparently as a 13 year old girl, I just couldn’t pull it off convincingly. 

Our epistle for the day (the second reading) comes from Paul’s letter to the Romans.  Paul wrote letters to different kinds of communities and even to some individuals.  We can tell from the content and the style of the letter what kind of community he is writing to.  Sometimes they are Jews who are just learning about Jesus.   Often they are Gentiles who were just being introduced to both Judaism and Jesus Christ.  The Roman community we heard about today was an established Christian community…about as established as you could get less than 30 years after Jesus died.  They knew a fair amount about Christianity, but they were also living in a fairly hostile territory, where they had to be very careful about how they shared and practiced their faith.

It would appear from some of Paul’s words that these new Christians had been Christians long enough to get apathetic.  We all know from our own experience that it does not take too long for that to happen.  We have one amazing retreat, pilgrimage, or outreach experience like Night’s Welcome and then a couple of weeks later we get back to the real world and everything else starts to take priority over our faith.  So it is no surprise that despite the fact that these Romans could not have been following Jesus for more than 20 years, they were already apathetic, maybe even a little lazy. 

It is for that reason why Paul said, “…now is the moment for you to wake from sleep.”  Wake did not mean to literally set the alarm, get out of bed and drink a strong cup of coffee.  When Paul was writing to the Romans, wake was a summoning to moral action.   For at least a decade, Paul had been telling people that Jesus was coming any day now.  People were certain that they would be alive the day that Jesus returned for the second coming.  But as the years passed and Paul kept gazing up at the sun saying, “any minute now…” people were less and less inclined to believe that Jesus was coming back any time soon.  Therefore, there was no real reason to be in a hurry or even to practice their faith.  Maybe this Jesus guy wasn’t coming back at all.

All of those concerns make sense, if the only thing you care about is whether or not you will be saved and get to heaven.  Paul was telling people that now is the time to wake.  They could not wait until Jesus returned.  The world needed their attention now.  “Let us lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light;”

A lot of people struggle with that imagery of armor.  It feels violent.  This is a different kind of armor.  This is an armor that allows people to fight not enemies of flesh and blood but the enemies of injustice, greed, pride, racism and even apathy.  These are the enemies that we cannot fight with swords or guns.  These things require a different kind of artillery.  Often these enemies of darkness, are things that are within us, whether we see it or not.  We can still fight the darkness that is within.  We fight it with light.

You might think that sounds a little abstract, and truth be told, it is.  Thankfully Paul provided us with another image, one that I find far more helpful.  To combat sin, we don’t just put on armor, we put on God.  He said, instead of living in these dark places, doing things that only make our lives more unpleasant and turn us away from Christ, “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” Still, that seems a little abstract.  What does it mean to “put on Christ?”

            The language of “putting on” a person was often used in Jesus’ day to refer to an actor playing the role of a character, “getting in to the role so intensely that (they) live and breathe it day and night, losing and finding (their) identity in that of the character.” [2]  This reminds me of the acting technique I was talking about before--method acting.  Clearly this is not a very new technique if this is what they were doing in Jesus’ day. People have been losing themselves and finding themselves in characters for thousands of years.   Maybe that was why I did not get that part in middle school.  I was not lost in the character.  One of the reasons I will probably never be a very good actor is because I don’t like the idea of getting lost in someone else.

However, what if the person we are losing ourselves in is Jesus Christ?  What would that look like?  Imagine just taking a day where you are method acting, preparing for a part and the part is Jesus Christ.  You would not have put on a robe and sandals and rent a donkey to ride around.  You would act like Jesus.  You would even try to think like Jesus.  If you did it one day, you would just be pretending.  It might feel fake like acting; but what if you tried it every day?  Would it be acting then?

            Christians often get accused of being fake, just playing a part so other people will then think we are good people. We dress up and go to church.  We smile and talk about love.   Then we get in our car and provide less than complimentary remarks to the person who can’t seem to find their indicator.  I don’t necessarily believe that playing a part is really that bad.  Because being the person Jesus wants us to be is a really hard job.  And sometimes, we just have to fake kindness, even when we don’t feel it.  But the more we pretend…all of a sudden we realize, hey I’m not pretending anymore.  This is real.  That does not mean you will still have your moments, but that is the great thing about putting on Christ.  He’s like the classic suit that never goes out of style.  If you screwed up one day, you just dust that suit off and put it back on.  Once you have put that suit on over and over again, all of a sudden, it will be a part of you.  It’s not just that you will lose yourself in Jesus.  We can all find our truest self when we put on Jesus. 

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[1] http://www.methodactingstrasberg.com/methodacting  (The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute)

[2] Commentary on Workingpreacher.org by Susan Eastman (12/2/2007): http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=8

November 24, 2013: Colossians 1:11-20

Year C, Last Sunday after Pentecost                                      

 

 

      One of the most inspiring people I ever known was a woman named Roxie.  There were a couple of things I loved about Roxie.  The first was that she came to every funeral.  Whether she knew the person or not, she was there.   Whenever I mentioned it, she would act like it was no big deal. I mean, why wouldn’t she go to every funeral?  She was a tiny woman but feisty.  She had been a teacher for decades and I don’t think people often crossed her.  But what I admired most about Roxie was her ability to be grateful for almost anything and everything.   Every time I visited her, she talked about how thankful she was about everything in her life.  I can still feel her gripping my hand telling me, “I’m just so thankful, thankful, thankful, thankful.” 

            It is no surprise that I would think about Roxie so close to Thanksgiving.   But it was not Thanksgiving that reminded me of her, it was the reading from Colossians.  Paul, another rather feisty individual, started most of his letters with a prayer of thanksgiving, either for the community or the person to whom he was writing. The New Testament mentions some form of thanksgiving approximately 62 times and Paul accounts for ¾ of those references.  Colossians is no exception.  In verse 11 he wrote, “May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.”   

A lot of times Christians are criticized for our emphasis on the afterlife. Critics claim that it’s a lot easier to talk about life after death and the joys that will come in paradise, rather than dealing with the difficulties of the present life.   It probably sounds like that is what Paul was talking about when he referred to “the inheritance of the saints in light.”  Inheritance clearly means heaven and saints are the good Christians who have died and attained a place in heaven. Everyone knows that. 

Well, most people probably think that.  You don’t have to die to become a saint.  When Paul used the word saint, he was almost always referring to those who were alive.  According to Paul, all of us who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ are called to be saints and worthy to not only be children of God, but saints of God.   Not only are saints alive, but they are not necessarily perfect or sinless.  It’s not just for the upper echelon of Christians.  So if we can be saints now, then we can also share in the inheritance now.  The inheritance doesn’t take the form of a trust fund.  The inheritance is redemption and forgiveness.  It is unlimited potential and hope. This is not some future glory that Paul is giving thanks for; this is the here and now. 

I find this to be both comforting and a little terrifying.  If I am already a saint and am already sharing in this glorious inheritance, then there is not a lot of room for excuses.  While Paul starts his letter to the Colossians with a pep talk worthy of a Joel Osteen sermon, he ends with, “I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. Remember my chains.  Grace be with you.”   It was common for people to use scribes to write letters during this time period.  However Paul was probably in prison at the time, so he had to write with his own hand.  My theory was that this statement was a bit of a challenge/guilt trip.  He was saying: If I can spread the Gospel and do my part while in prison, surely you all can do likewise as people who are free.

Paul was never afraid of providing a challenge, even to people who probably did not feel like saints.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like a saint most of the time, even Paul’s definition of it.  There are times when I would rather not call on Jesus Christ because while Jesus loves all people, he also has high expectations of the saints of light because we have been given so much.   Jesus gave every part of himself not only in his death and resurrection, but in the way he lived.  He freed us from the power of darkness.  While that can be a profoundly liberating experience, I think sometimes it is easier to hide in the darkness and pretend that we are not strong enough, wise enough, good enough to be saints of God.  It is a lot less risky to stay in the dark. 

            Paul knew that we would have those fears because he had experienced them himself.  That is why his prayer for the Colossians and for all of us was “to be made strong with the strength that comes from Jesus’ glorious power.”  We don’t have to depend on our own strength because Jesus provides us with an unlimited bounty of strength, wisdom and goodness.  The question for all of us then is what do we do with that unlimited bounty?

            For starters, we acknowledge it and give thanks for it.  We don’t have to be specific about it because we might not always feel like we have an abundance.  We might not even know what we are giving thanks for.  What I loved about Roxie was that most of the time when she was saying how thankful she was, she was not connecting it to anything specific.  She was just thankful.   I think maybe that is why she came to all the funerals because she was so very thankful for life, for the very basics.  How often do we thank God for just giving us life? Not often enough.

            I hope it is not a surprise to you all that today is Stewardship Sunday…also called Pledge Sunday or Celebration Sunday.  It is a day when we focus not on what we need but what we have.  We focus not on the scarcity that demands so much of our attention, but the many gifts that we so frequently overlook.  We give out of thanks, not out of fear.  We give not because we love St. John’s, but because God’s love for us is so abundant that we have to share it in some way, some form.  We all share in the same inheritance.  In our giving, we are acknowledging that inheritance.  We are thanking God for letting us be saints of light.  It’s time to claim our freedom from the darkness.

Nov. 17, 2013 Luke 21: 5-19

Year C, Pentecost 26                                                                

                                                                                     

            After reading St. John’s history book, How Firm a Foundation,  I went back to check my church history book by Bob Prichard, one of my favorite professors at seminary.  I was dismayed to see that St. John’s was not mentioned.  It mentioned Bruton and the settlement in Jamestown, but no St. John’s.  If I had more time, I would have written that professor and asked him to fix his egregious error.  Instead, I spoke to our own Jim Tormey and asked how this could be.  He said something to the effect of, “St. John’s isn’t the oldest building, it’s the oldest community that has worshipped together continuously.”  The building itself only goes back to 1728….still pretty old, but not the oldest.  I guess it is easy to focus on the building because it is more tangible.  However, I am still going to write my professor when I have a chance. 

            The people of Israel had a tendency to focus on the temple.  When things were going well for the Hebrew people, the temple was a doing well and vice versa.  When the temple was destroyed, it was dire times for the Hebrew people because it generally meant that the people were under foreign control, or worse, they were exiled to another land.   So much of the Old Testament recounts the story of the temple.  It is built and destroyed….rebuilt and destroyed again.  The temple that existed during Jesus’ day was one of the finest temples that had ever been built.  It was built under the reign of King Herod in about 20 BC.  This new temple was twice the size of the old one and the outer walls were covered with gold plating.  Pilgrims poured into the city and were overwhelmed by its magnificence. 

King Herod did not have the best reputation and was certainly not seen as someone devoted to God. Many thought that the temple stood more as a monument to Herod’s own self-importance, rather than a temple in honor of God.[1]  So it is not surprising that Jesus was unimpressed with the temple and the beautiful stones that adorned it or the prospect that it would last forever.  He knew that like all things made by human hands, it could not last forever.  That did not mean that another temple could not be built in its place.  It just meant that this particular one, despite its appearance of greatness, could not stand forever. 

            From this text, a lot of people have concluded that Jesus was against houses of worship, perhaps even a critic of the temples.  This could not be further from the truth.  It is true that Jesus liked to preach on hills, boats and large fields; but he also spent a lot of time in the temple. According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus was at home in temple.  It was not his actual home, but it was the place that he always returned to, which is what I have always considered home. 

The Gospel of Luke begins and ends in the temple.  It begins with a priest named Zechariah being told by God that his wife will bear a son.  This son would be John the Baptist.  The Gospel of Luke ends with not the death, resurrection, or ascension of Jesus, but the gathering of the disciples in the temple.  After Jesus ascended into heaven, the disciples immediately proceeded to the temple in Jerusalem to sing praises to God.  In between these 2 stories, we hear of many instances when Jesus and his parents went to the temple.  From the very beginning when Jesus was dedicated in the temple, his parents made sure that Jesus was part of the community of faith.  The temple was the first place where Jesus went after he was tempted by Satan in the wilderness for 40 days.  That is where his public ministry began.  Clearly, Jesus was not against temples.   For Jesus, it was not about the beauty of the stones, but the beauty of the community of faith, the people of God.  That is why Jesus was in the temple.  God was manifest there.  God was manifest in the people of God.

            So why was it that Jesus wept over Jerusalem when he saw it?  Why did he feel the need to cleanse the temple?  Why did he predict the destruction of the temple?  He wept because when he saw Jerusalem, he saw a beloved city that had forgotten who they were and what they were about.  He saw a city that was headed for its own destruction because of its blindness.  He cleansed the temple because instead of it being a place of worship, it had become a place where people bought and sold things to make a profit.  It had become corrupt, a den of robbers.  He predicted the destruction because that was the truth.  Forty years after he died, the temple was destroyed once again. 

            Yet despite this sorrow, this doom, he had a message of hope for his disciples.  He said whatever horrible things happen, you have an opportunity.  Out of the dust and the rubble, will come a message, but only if you, the disciples of Christ, are willing to deliver it.   He said, “This will give you an opportunity to testify.  So make your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words of wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict… By your endurance you will gain your souls.”

            If I do write my professor, I am going to tell him this: “I don’t care about the oldest building.  I care about the community that was built to survive, a community that has lived through death and rebirth, a community that is ready to testify, to be disciples of Christ.”  Are you all with me on that?  Because I need some people to back me up if I am going to try to correct a history book.  Are you all ready to testify to not only the history that is behind us, but the future that is before us?  Let’s not just correct it.  Let’s rewrite it.

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[1] Joel Green,The Gospel of Luke, 733.

November 9, 2013 Luke 20:27-38

Year C, Pentecost 25                                                             

 

            I spent some time around Evangelicals in high school and college.  I got used to the question: “Are you saved?”  I had a pretty good answer to that.  Yes.  But when people asked me when I was saved, things got a little confusing.  While at seminary I asked an Episcopalian how he responded when asked that question.  He said, “Well you can tell them one of two things:  I was saved 2000 years ago when Jesus was crucified or you can tell them you were saved when you were baptized.   Both are correct and neither answer will actually please the person who is asking.”  Sadly, I have not been asked that since being ordained.  I want to be asked because I think I have a better answer now.  I’m not going to tell you yet because then you will have no incentive to listen to the rest of the sermon.

            Our Gospel reading begins with, “Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus and asked him a question…”  Already, it seems pretty clear what this question is going to be about.  Otherwise Luke would not have had to preface the question with the reminder that Sadducees didn’t believe in the resurrection.  Often the Sadducees and the Pharisees get jumbled up. They were both part of the Jewish leadership, but they represented different kinds of Judaism.  Much like we have differences of opinion within the Christian faith, the Jews are not all of one mind.  In the time of Jesus, the two major divisions (at least the ones that we hear about) were the Pharisees and the Sadducees.  The Pharisees accepted all of Holy Scripture including all of the oral and ceremonial laws.  The Sadducees only accepted what were written in the 5 books of Moses, which are the first 5 books of the Old Testament.   

As a result of this more limited acceptance of scripture and tradition (and probably a couple of other factors), the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection from the dead.  When Christians hear resurrection, we think of Jesus’ resurrection, but there was already a belief in general resurrection before Jesus even started talking about it. Jesus was not debating his own resurrection with the Sadducees; that had not happened yet.  He was debating the general concept while also laying the ground work for people to later understand his resurrection and what would become the Christian understanding of resurrection. 

            If you try to follow the argument in the Gospel today, it will get a little confusing.  Because the Sadducees believed that resurrection was impossible, they were using an absurd hypothetical situation to test Jesus.  What if a woman is widowed 6 times, and therefore ends up marrying seven different men?  Who will she be married to in heaven?  One of the reasons that Jesus was a master of debate was because he always kept in mind who he was talking to and what context they were coming from.  He knew that he was talking to the Sadducees and they only believed the first 5 books.  Any effective argument would have to come from those first 5 books.  He also knew that they were not really worried about marriage in the afterlife.  They just wanted to make the concept of the afterlife look absurd. 

            His answer was basically this: Marriage is not something that people are concerned with after they are resurrected.  It’s an entirely different world.  Then he reached back into the scriptures that they believed in.  He talked about Moses’ experience with God in the burning bush.   When God spoke to Moses he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”  All those people God mentioned were already dead.  So why did God tell him “I am the God of” all those people if they were dead.  To us, it might seem like a weak argument, but at the time, it was a pretty good one.  

Then Jesus went on to say something about God that was a lot more important than marriage in the afterlife. “Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”  Our God is a God of the living. Jesus went on to prove this for once and for all when he himself was resurrected.  He took what was one just this piece of lofty and unrealistic theology and he made it real.  He made it flesh and blood.  You don’t get any more real than that.

            I was leading a chapel discussion for 3 and 4 years old and we were talking about the church calendar.  When I got to Easter, I asked, “And what happens on Easter?”  A little girl raised her hand and said, “Jesus died and came back…and he does it every year.”  It made me laugh because I realized that it would look a little silly to a child that we go through this every year.  Every year Jesus is born.  Every year he dies about 4 months later and then come back 3 days after that.   Yet then I thought, maybe that is a good thing.  We all need a little more resurrection in our life.

I love the part in the Baptismal liturgy that says, “You are marked as Christ’s own forever.”  When I am teaching classes about baptism, I remind people that no matter what happens, where you go in life, you are always Christ’s own.  You may turn away from God, but God will never turn away from you.  On the one hand, you could say, “Well I guess I never have to go to church again. I can do whatever I want.  I can be selfish and hurt people and I will still be good because I am marked as Christ’s own forever.”  And I suppose that is one way to look at it.  Or we could look at it like this, we have unlimited opportunities in life to resurrect ourselves.  We might have a couple months or years where we have strayed from the Christian path, but we can transform ourselves, have our own resurrection.   I have never strayed too far from church and my faith.  But that does not mean I don’t need little resurrections in my life. 

I have always liked the idea of reincarnation (that you keep returning to the world until you get it right).  But then I realized that we have something better.  As people of the resurrection, we don’t have to die to have new life.  We can choose it each and every day.   If someone asks me when I was saved the answer will depend on what day and time they ask me because I am being saved all the time.  I am experiencing God’s saving power each and every day and you know what, we all can.   Because our God is a God of the living.  Our God is a God of unlimited potential for new life. 

Nov. 3, 2013 Luke 6: 20-31

Year C, All Saints Day                                                                                     

                The summer after I graduated from college, I got an internship in a small Methodist Church in a town of 1000.   The down side was that I did not know anyone in the town and since it was such a small town, there was really no one my age.  My closest friend was about two hours away.  They had me living alone in the big rectory next to the church.  Not only was there no TV, but there was no internet.  This was before cell phones became so accessible, so all I had was a phone card that charged me about a dollar a minute.  However, I was in a good place.  I had finished college and had a wonderful boyfriend who I absolutely adored.  He was only about 2 hours away, so I figured I could see him every week and in the meantime I could catch up on my reading, learn how to cook, exercise, and get a taste of ministry.  Two weeks after I started, my perfect boyfriend broke up with me.  All of a sudden the town felt like a death trap as opposed to an opportunity to fine tune my cooking skills and read the classics.  I couldn’t sleep and I cried all the time when I was not around the parishioners.  I was going to a Catholic Church on the weekdays and I just sat in the back and cried during the service.  I cannot begin to imagine what the priest thought of me.  I also started attending their weekly Bible study.  I do not recall what we were studying, but at one point the priest said, “Being blessed is not the same thing as being happy.” 

I found that flabbergasting.  It just never occurred to me.  I was used to people telling me that they were blessed when good things were happening.  People tend to equate blessings with successes. I am sure you have all heard the word blessing used the same way.  People will talk about their lovely family and then say, “I’m just so blessed.”  Or they will talk about something good that just happened and describe it as a blessing.   I have actually had Christians correct me when I described something as lucky.  They will say, “I don’t believe in luck.  I believe everything good is a blessing.”  

Well ok, but that really doesn’t mesh with the Gospel for today.  “Blessed are you who are poor… Blessed are you who are hungry….Blessed are you who weep…Blessed are you when people hate you…”  If that is what it is to be blessed, how many of you want to be blessed?  I have never heard the following, “I have no money.  My family has disowned me.  I’m so depressed I can’t get out of bed.  I’m just so blessed.”  It would sound crazy if someone said that.  And I bet that people thought Jesus was a little crazy when he made those statements.  Many of the people who he was talking to were poor and hungry.  Many of them knew what it was to be ostracized, on the margins of society.  I doubt they were feeling particularly blessed by God. 

But wait, I did not finish the blessings did I?  “Blessed are you who are poor now, for yours is the kingdom of God.  Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled…”  There is debate about what Jesus meant with those statements.  Did he mean that the people would be filled in this lifetime or in the life to come, the heavenly realm?  It’s hard to say.  Either way, it is meant to give people hope when they are going through trying times.  Whatever you are experiencing now, it will pass.   

If the blessing part was not hard enough, Jesus then started on the woes.  “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.  Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.  Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.”  That just sounds mean.   Why would Jesus want to punish people who were well fed or happy?  It’s a hard text to reconcile, especially when you do have money and are well fed.  If we are in that situation, are we not loved by God?     

Sometimes blessings and woes are best seen in retrospect.  When I look back on that summer after college, I don’t see it through rose colored glasses.  I was extraordinarily depressed.  It wasn’t just the guy…he was just the final push that sent me spiraling.  I would never want to go through that summer again.  I remember at one particular low point I was driving by a pasture and saw some cows grazing and thought to myself, “I wish I was a cow.”  If you asked me on any given day during that summer if I was blessed or woeful, I would definitely have told you it was summer of woe.  Yet that summer was a time that I was extraordinarily close to God.  It was then when I learned what it was to truly have God as a companion, to really depend on God. Even though I was miserable, I felt like God was hovering over me, making sure that the spiral did not go totally out of control.  I felt his presence as much as I felt the suffocating weight of the depression.  That was not a happy summer for me.  But it was a blessed summer. 

I had my first finance meeting about a week after I arrived at St. John’s.   It was a rather anxiety provoking meeting.  St. John’s is in a very challenging place financially, possibly the most difficult place we have been in recent memory.  My instinct was to panic after the finance meeting.  Instead I went home and I prayed.  I haven’t stopped praying since that meeting.  Every time I want to go into fix it mode or start stressing about the numbers, I try to pray instead.    It hasn’t been easy.  It was really not until I was writing this sermon when I realized that perhaps this is actually a magnificent opportunity for us.  St. John’s is in a place of need.  We can’t necessarily rely on one or two very generous people this time around.  We certainly cannot rely just on the rector.  This time, we rely on God.  Right now, we might not be blessed in the worldly sense of the word, but my friends, we are blessed in the Gospel sense of the word.  Because of that, I believe that Jesus is closer to us now than ever.  So we persevere, not just for the sake of surviving, but because we are blessed by God.  It is my fervent hope that in ten years we will look back on this time as a time when we felt God’s presence in our own need.  And once we have felt that, I pray that no matter how much we grow, how secure we become, we will never let go of God’s presence….we will never forget what it is to be blessed.

October 27, 2013 Luke 18:9-14

Year C, Pentecost 23                                                 

 

            This past week, one of the big news stories was a German Roman Catholic bishop who was accused of spending millions on lavish renovations.   Shortly after the news broke, Pope Francis called him in to speak with him.  He then temporarily suspended him.  Apparently the renovation project was over 41 million dollars, and a portion went to the bishop’s private residence.  (Makes our renovation project seem pretty minor.)  The timing of this scandal is rather ironic because Oct. 31^st marks the anniversary of Martin Luther nailing the 95 theses on the door of Castle Church in Whittenberg Germany.  One of the things that Martin Luther condemned in the 95 theses was the excesses of the Roman Catholic Church. This action marked the beginning of the Protestant reformation. So now around the same time, a bishop is condemned in Germany for the very same thing.  I grew up Catholic and I remember every time something like this happened, I found myself having to defend the Roman Catholic Church.  Yet this time around, I thought, thank goodness I am an Episcopalian.

            It’s easy to do that, isn’t it, compare ourselves to one another?   One of the reasons that I think reality TV is so popular is because it makes us feel better about ourselves. “Well I have done some stupid things, but at least I have never acted like those people on the Jersey Shore or Desperate Housewives.”  (Which admittedly is a fairly low bar.)

We do it as Christians more than we would like to admit.  I sit on the Commission on Ministry for the diocese.  We are the commission that interviews people who are seeking ordination in the Episcopal Church.  One of the questions I often ask people is, “How would you describe the Episcopal Church to someone who knew nothing about the Episcopal Church?”  The majority of the time, people describe the Episcopal Church as what we are not.  “We are kind of like the Catholics, but we do not have a pope and we ordain women.  We are much more open-minded than most Christians.   We are not nearly as judgmental.”  And I admit it, in desperate times, I have used the same tactics to describe our faith.  Sometimes it is just the easier way to go.  Unfortunately it does not speak much to the richness of our faith or our tradition if all we can say is what and who we are not. 

            “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.  The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying like this, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector…”  You know the rest…hopefully because I just read it.  The Pharisee goes on to recite all the wonderful things he does, which are rather impressive.  Then we see the humble tax collector who cannot even lift his eyes to heaven.  Instead he says, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’” This man went home justified rather than the other one.  The moral of the story is clear:  Pharisee is bad, the tax collector is good.   Thank goodness we are not like the Pharisee. 

            It is important to note something about tax collectors in this time period.  People who work for the IRS right now might not be on everyone’s dinner party list, but they are not nearly as maligned as tax collectors were in Jesus’ day.   Tax collectors were considered traitors because they worked for the Romans, a government that oppressed the Jews and taxed them, but gave them no rights. Tax collectors were part of this oppressive government, and to make matters worse, they often earned their living by asking for more taxes that even the Roman government required. They were basically stealing from their own people.  That was why he was beating his breast and asking God to be merciful. He is often described as humble.  He wasn’t necessarily humble, he was just honest. 

            The Pharisee on the other hand, was probably a pretty good person.  He was devoted to his faith.  He went above and beyond what the requirements were of that day.  Yet in this story, the tax collector is the one who returned home justified.  The Pharisee was not justified, because he started off as righteous.  The words justified and righteous both have similar meanings.  One is not better than the other.  The problem was not that the Pharisee started off as righteous, the problem is that he was righteous because he trusted in himself and regarded others with contempt.  He trusted in himself.  Again, that does not sound so bad.  Most people would not think poorly of a person who claimed to trust in his or herself.  In fact, we would probably say that person has a healthy self-confidence.   There is nothing wrong with being confident.  There is nothing wrong with being righteous. The problem comes when we forget who the source of that righteousness is.   The Pharisee believed that he was able to make himself righteous with his own actions.  He did not realize that it was only God who could make him righteous. The tax collector knew that he was nothing without God.

            As long as we think that what we do justifies us, we will always compare ourselves to others.  When we compare ourselves to others, no one wins. Because we are either judging the other or we are judging ourselves. Either they fall short, or we do. There was only one human who was ever fit to judge and he died and was resurrected almost 2000 years ago.  So if you have to compare yourself to someone, compare yourself to Jesus.  That sounds like a tall order, right? Jesus was sinless.  So how about we stop comparing and we start striving, striving for the example that Jesus set for us and continues to set for us.  Then when we weary of striving, we forgive others and we forgive ourselves. 

             Did you all notice how many comparisons I made in the beginning of the sermon?  I wrote those on purpose to make a point, but those thoughts, those all came naturally. I really compared the Bishop’s renovations to ours when I first heard about it.   Before I heard about this recent scandal, I was even kind of jealous of my Roman Catholics friends and family because I am experiencing pope envy.  This new pope is awesome.  So I get it. I get the Pharisee.  But you know what, I’m also so tired of having to be good enough.   I think a lot of us are.  That is why everyone is so busy and stressed.  We are all trying to be good enough. So let’s just admit that we are never good enough…and we do not have to be.  We have a God who is the source of all goodness.  When we are weary of the effort, we can let go of the pretenses and scream or just mumble, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”  That is all it takes to be good enough in God’s eyes.