Author Archives: mbj

Now is the Time To Wake from Sleep

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ow it begins: a fresh start, a new season, a new year. Like a great wheel, the cycle of the liturgical year has turned. Last Sunday the church year ended with the Feast Day of Christ the King, and today on this First Sunday of Advent, we embark on a new year of our life in Christ.

“Advent” means “coming” or “arrival,” and during these four weeks that lead up to Christmas we prepare for the first coming of Christ, when God became incarnate in Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. Advent has the makings of a joyful season. We look forward to Christmas, to holiday parties and festive decorations. We anticipate the exchange of gifts and the renewal of friendships with people we might otherwise have lost touch with. We savor the colorful lights that can cheer our hearts when the days grow short, and we savor the joy of making wreaths and lighting candles against the darkness.

But Advent has a sober and reflective side, as well, for in Advent we also look ahead to Christ’s Second Coming. We look ahead to that last, great day in the unknown future when, as today’s Collect tells us, Christ “shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead.” Advent invites us to look up from the immediate concerns of our daily lives – how to get our kids to basketball practice, how to get that stain out of the rug, how to meet the next car payment – and to ask some big questions. Where am I heading? Where’s my life going? To what end am I living – with what intention, with what goal? Knowing our destination gives direction to the journey, so it matters how we imagine the end. Do we think that everything will end pointlessly, with a bang or a whimper? Or is something better coming?

Christianity tells us that at the end of time, everything on heaven and earth will be fulfilled and completed in Christ. We lift up that promise in the Eucharist when the celebrant prays to God, the Father and Mother of our souls, “In the fullness of time, put all things in subjection under your Christ.” What does that mean? It means that at some unknown point in the future, everything will be gathered up in God’s love, and ordered by love, and upheld by love. It’s one of my favorite lines in the Eucharistic prayer. It tells us where we’re heading: we’re heading to God.

But are we ready for that unknown moment when God will meet us and judge us and transform everything with love? Scripture makes it clear that at the Second Coming we must be prepared for judgment as well as grace. I expect that some of us flinch a little when we get to the part of the Nicene Creed where we say that Christ “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” We picture Jesus on the judgment throne, separating the sheep from the goats, rewarding the one and punishing the other, and we cringe. We know the sting of being criticized by a parent or teacher or someone in authority. We know how much it hurts to be found wanting. We can be our own harshest critics, and we fear a God who will pass judgment and condemn us all over again. Are we ready for judgment as well as grace?

When it comes to thinking about the judgment of God, I was very much helped several years ago when I read the text of a lecture given by Huston Smith, a well-known scholar of world religions. His remarks captured my imagination, and I want to share with you part of a letter that Huston Smith read aloud. In this letter, a history professor describes a near death experience that he had in course of a severe illness.

The man reports that he found himself standing in a flat, barren, blue-gray place and that he felt beside him what he calls a “Being” – capital B – whom he never saw. He writes, “Its presence was constant, enormous and powerful. With the Being beside me, exuding love and comfort to me, I re-experienced my life…from three different perspectives simultaneously.

“One perspective was my version of my life as I might have recounted it to anyone patient enough to listen. However, it was not so much the reliving of [outer] events as it was re-experiencing the emotions, feelings and thoughts of my life. Here were the emotions that I had felt and why I had believed that I had them. Here were my conscious reasons for the actions that I had taken. Here were the hurts I felt and my responses to them. Here was my emotional life as I recalled having experienced it.

“However, as I was re-experiencing my version of my life, I was also experiencing my life from the perspective of those with whom I was involved. I felt what they felt, I lived their emotions as they acted with and reacted to me. This was their version of my life. When I thought they were clearly out of line and reacted with anger or thoughtlessness, I felt the pain and frustration my actions caused them. It was an absolutely different view of my life and it was not a pretty one. It was shocking to feel the pain that another person felt due to what I had done even as, when I did them, I believed myself to have been fully justified because of the person’s own actions. At the time, I had told myself that I was justified, but even if that were true, their pain was real. It hurt.

“And there was more. At exactly the same time I experienced a third view of my life. It was not my version, with my justifications. It was not that of the others in my life, with their versions of my life and their own justifications for their own actions, thoughts, and feelings. It was an unbiased view, free of the subjective and self-serving rationalizations that the others and I had used to support the countless acts of selfishness and lack of true love in our lives. To me it can only be described as God’s view of my life. It was what had really happened, the real motivations, the truth. Stripped away were my lies to myself that I actually believed, my self-justification, my preference to see myself always in the best light.

“I did not find myself in Hell, but I was suffering torment. It was horribly painful to experience the fullness of my life and I was filled with contempt for myself. How could I have been so incredibly stupid as to believe my own lies? Why was simple compassion so difficult? In particular it hurt to discover that I had been hiding behind my own version of logic in order to deny emotional truths.

“All of this – the three-way re-experiencing of my life and self-judgment – was simultaneous and yet distinct. There was no such thing as the sequence of events that we believe time to be.

“In the end, I heard a judgment on my life, but it was my own judgment of myself. It came from within me and it had my voice. My life was clear to me. I was a failure.

“And through all this the Being was at my side. I felt nothing but love and support from the Being. It exuded emotion: you are loved, you are lovable; your worst fault is that you are human. It goes with the territory. I remember the words, ‘Don’t worry, you are only human.’

“I was in emotional agony. It was terrible to know that I was a mere mortal, just like everyone else, for I had thought that I was so much better than that. But the Being accepted me. The Being was letting me know that it was not acceptable to hurt other people, but it is part of the human condition. It’s not all right, because it hurts other people, but it is all right, because it is what humans do.”

The account goes on, but I will end here, only adding the man’s closing sentences, which are these: “I remember making a positive decision. I wanted to come back to life. I wanted to do what I would be needed for. I then began my slow climb out of the coma and into consciousness.”*

What a powerful account of what it may be like to stand at last before the One “to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid” [Collect for Purity]. Christians believe that the God who will come to judge us at the end of our lives and at the end of time is also the God who created us and who gave his life to redeem us. As a priest friend of mine wrote a few years back, “We [will] stand in the presence of Christ whose hands still bear the wounds he bore to show us how much we are loved” [The Rev. Susan B. Curtis, sermon, 11/27/94]. The eyes that gaze into our soul will be the eyes of love.

We don’t know when that last day will come – our last day or the world’s last day. Jesus himself warns that no one knows the details, no one holds the map or the time-table that can tell us exactly when and how the reign of God will finally be accomplished – not the angels of heaven, not Jesus himself, but only God the Father. But we do know this: at some unexpected moment, that day will come. So we need and want to stay awake. “You know what time it is,” Paul says. “It is now the moment to wake from sleep” [Romans 13:11]. God will come among us, Jesus says in today’s Gospel, as unexpectedly as a flood, as decisively as a kidnapper, as secretly as a thief. These disturbing images can shake us up, and that’s the point: God will break in at any moment. “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” [Matthew 24:42].

So now is the time to clean up our act, to sort out our life, to cast away the works of darkness and to put on the armor of light.

Now is the time to abandon whatever stupefies us and puts us to sleep – whether it be the drone of the media or the call to consumerism, a fondness for complaining or the inner voices of worry and self-attack.

Now is the time to lay aside the old habits of egotism and greed, of violence and unkindness – the old patterns, as Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans [Romans 13:13], of drunkenness, quarreling, and jealousy.

Now is the time to look ahead with hope, for, as Paul also says, “the night is far gone, the day is near” [Romans 13:12]. It’s as if we were standing in the doorway of a dark house, looking out to the hills beyond, and in the sky we can see the first glimmer of sunrise. Behind us is darkness, but ahead of us, light.

Christ has come, so the dawn is shining on our faces.

Christ is here, so we know we’re not alone.

Christ will come again, so we step out boldly through the doorway, leaving everything less than love behind.

*Quoted from Huston Smith, “Intimations of Mortality: Three Case Studies, The Ingersoll Lecture for 2001-2002,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Winter 2001-2002, p. 15.

Heading for Healing

For those of us who like a good story, today’s a good day, because today we have a pair of fine stories to consider – the story of Elisha healing Naaman the leper, which is found in the Second Book of Kings, and the story (from the Gospel of Luke) of Jesus healing ten lepers and receiving a word of thanks from one of them. 

Let’s take a look at Naaman’s story.  He’s an impressive fellow, this “commander of the army of the king of Aram.”  The land of Aram bordered the land of Israel and the two neighbors were often in conflict.  Naaman is a “great man“ and a “mighty warrior” whose victories in battle have earned him the admiration of his king.  Naaman is a big shot – I imagine him being a proud and self-sufficient man, a man acutely aware of his own accomplishments and importance.  But at the same time Naaman also suffers from leprosy, a debilitating disease that in ancient times was incurable and considered the most devastating illness you could possibly have.  So that’s his situation: a man of public power and prestige with a deep and ingrained illness gnawing away at him that only God can cure.

The action begins when a young girl who was taken captive by the Arameans from the land of Israel and who now serves as a slave to Naaman’s wife comments to her mistress, “Oh, if only Naaman were with the prophet in Samaria!  He would be cured of his leprosy!” 

The slave girl obviously has no social standing whatsoever – she’s young, she’s a slave, she’s a girl – but apparently her mistress has the good sense to listen to her.  After all, what if the girl is right?  What if Israel’s prophet really can cure Naaman’s illness?  So Naaman’s wife talks to Naaman, who talks to the king of Aram, who in turn sends a letter to the king of Israel that says, “I have sent to you my servant Naaman, that you may cure him of his leprosy” [2 Kings 5:6].  The next thing we know, the king of Israel is reading the letter and tearing his clothes in despair.  How in the world is he going to cure Naaman’s leprosy?  Only God can do that!  Is his enemy, the king of Aram, just trying to pick a quarrel?

At this point the hero of the story finally makes his entrance: Elisha, the man of God.  He hears that the king of Israel has torn his clothes and he sends the king a message: Don’t you worry. Send Naaman to me, “that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel” [2 Kings 5:8].

So Naaman travels with a grand retinue of soldiers and servants and horses and chariots.  They all march up to Elisha’s little house, stop at the front door, and Naaman says, “OK, here I am.  Give it your best shot.”

But Elisha stays inside.  He doesn’t even bother to come out and say hello.  He just sends a messenger with a very simple instruction: “Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean.”

Naaman throws a fit.  “Who does this guy think he is?  Doesn’t he know who I am?  I’m important and I deserve an important cure!  I don’t want something simple – I want something elaborate!  I want Elisha to come out in person and do a special ritual, maybe use a lot of big words and wave his arms around and cure my leprosy in a dramatic way.  I’m not going to stoop to washing in the lousy river Jordan – I’ve got rivers of my own back home in Damascus!”

He turns away in a rage and there is a wonderful moment of suspense – is he going to go home, taking his leprosy with him?  Is he going to walk away from his own healing?  But his servants intervene – and you’ll notice that just as with the slave girl at the beginning of the story, again it is the humble people of low social status who have words of wisdom for the people in power.  His servants are deferential – “Father,” they say – and rather than tell him what to do or give him direct advice, they simply raise a question: “If the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it?” [2 Kings 5:13]

Somehow Naaman has the grace to take a chance, take a risk, and so he “[goes] down and [immerses] himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God.”  We don’t see the scene in detail, but here is how I imagine it went.

Naaman strides angrily down the riverbank, wades into the chilly water, holds his breath, drops below the surface, and whoosh – his self-importance is washed away.  He comes up for air and then drops into the water a second time, and whoosh – his desire to be in charge is washed away.  He drops into the river a third time and whoosh – his desire to be in control is washed away.  In all, he makes seven plunges into the river – a good large number that for us might symbolize a washing away of the seven deadly sins, or a kind of baptism that heals him, body and soul.

When at last Naaman steps out of the river, the story tells us that “his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean” [2 Kings 5:14], which means, I suppose, that not only his painful wounds and sores, but also his freckles, wrinkles and age spots, have been restored to healthy young flesh.  He has obviously received not only a physical healing, but a spiritual healing, too.  Naaman “[returns] to the man of God, he and all his company; he [comes] and [stands] before him,” and confesses his faith in the God of Israel. 

I hear this delightful story and I start thinking about our own stories of healing.  Every person in this room has a healing story, for we are all sinners in the process of being healed.  We are all fallen souls in the process of being redeemed, and surely there is a bit of Naaman in all of us, whether we like it or not.  For instance, maybe we know what it means to look good on the outside, as if everything in our life were going perfectly well and we hadn’t a care in the world, while secretly something was eating away at our soul.  Maybe we know what it is like to have many good deeds and accomplishments to our credit, to be leaders of one kind or another and to receive people’s praise and respect, while deep down we know that something within us is amiss and we cannot heal ourselves. 

Leprosy is a metaphor for the fallen human condition, for the lost-ness and sin to which human beings fall prey and which can’t be healed without God’s help.  “Leprosy” can take many forms.  Maybe we’re eaten up with resentment and complaint; maybe we’re grumbly, critical, and dissatisfied, and we secretly or openly scowl because the people around us never quite measure up.  Maybe we’re gnawed by self-doubt and insecurity, by a deep sense of unworthiness or shame, and compensate by spending our energy trying to please other people and make them like us.  Maybe our lives are poisoned by worry, by a constant, lurking, fretful dread that something awful is coming around the next corner.  Maybe, like Naaman, we’re riddled with pride, by the desire to be in charge and in control, and we take quick offense if we don’t get the respect we think we deserve.  Sure, Naaman wants to be healed, but he wants to be healed on his own terms, not on God’s terms.  He wants to be healed in a way that leaves his pride intact.

There are all kinds of leprosy going around.

Here’s another connection with Naaman: like him, we may need to open ourselves to God’s healing by doing something very simple.  Our deep healing often does not depend on doing something dramatic, but on being willing to take a small step – maybe to start going to Al-Anon meetings, or to begin a practice of daily prayer, or to walk up to that person we’ve hurt so badly or neglected for so long and to say we’re sorry.  Our first step to healing may be as simple as falling on our knees and asking Jesus for help.  I know that sometimes the step I need to take toward healing can be very simple, but – heaven help me – I can be as stubborn as Naaman and put it off as long as possible, and may even consider marching back home with my pride – and my illness – intact.

But, if we are willing, we will finally do what Naaman did: take Elisha’s good advice and take ourselves down to the Jordan, down to the healing waters of God, and give ourselves a good soak.  If you were to dip yourself seven times into that river of God, what would those cleansing waters wash away?  Every time you dunked your head and came up for air, you would be freer, more able to let the love of God flow through you without any hindrance at all.  What would those healing waters wash away from your soul?

And let’s say you’ve been cleansed.  What would happen then?  What would you do next?  I bet that, like Naaman returning to stand before Elisha and like the tenth leper who returned to thank Jesus for his healing, you and I would want to give God thanks.  That, of course, is what we do every Sunday, and what we come back every Sunday to do: to give God thanks.  Our whole service is about thanksgiving.  The lector reads a passage and says, “The Word of the Lord,” and we say, “Thanks be to God.”  At the Great Thanksgiving – note the title! – the celebrant says, “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God,” and we say, “It is right to give God thanks and praise.”  At the end of the service, the deacon says, “Let us bless the Lord,” and we say, “Thanks be to God.”

It’s all about saying thanks – thanks to the Creator who gave us the gift of life, thanks to the Redeemer who shares our suffering and heals our sin, thanks to the Holy Spirit whose love embraces us at every moment of our lives, whether we’re conscious of it or not.  Someone [David Steindl-Rast] once said that the human heart is made for thanksgiving, and I think that’s true.  All the lepers had faith in Jesus and all of them were healed, but only one of them, the tenth, knew the joy of turning back and saying thanks.  I can’t help thinking that he was the happiest one of them all.

“I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart” – that is what today’s psalm says [Psalm 111:1], that is what Naaman said to Elisha, and that is what the tenth leper said to Jesus.  Healing ends in gratefulness, and sometimes healing begins there, too, for sometimes it is when we choose to be grateful rather than bitter, when we choose to give thanks rather than to be skeptical, critical, or sour, that God’s healing waters can begin to flow in us again and we can be drawn back into the stream of love that is our true home. 

I will give ee cummings the last word: 

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
…….
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Blessed Unrest

I‘m going to ‘fess up right here.  On a beautiful summer morning like this one, I am sometimes tempted to show up in church, slide into my seat, and more or less doze through the readings.  But then – whoosh!  Along comes an urgent, edgy Gospel passage like this one and suddenly I have to sit bolt upright, startled awake.  Some contemporary New Testament scholars say that the pointed sayings of Jesus – the ones we want to set aside because they make us uncomfortable – are often the very ones that are most historically accurate.  So when I saw today’s Gospel reading, I had to sigh, OK, Margaret, forget about just showing up and offering a few casual remarks in your homily – Jesus has something else in mind.  Jesus wants to set us on fire.  

That’s how he puts it, right off the bat.  “I have come to start a fire, and how I wish it were kindled, how I wish it were blazing right now!”  Jesus comes with fire – that traditional biblical image of judgment and purification.  “I have come to change everything,” Jesus says to us this morning.  “I have come” – and now I’m quoting a contemporary rendering of this passage – “I have come to turn everything right-side up.”^[i]  “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to earth?” (Luke 12:51, NRSV)  “Do you think [that I have come] to smooth things over and make everything nice?  Not so.” (Luke 12:51, The Message)  I have come not to bring peace, but division.  “I’ve come to disrupt and confront!  From now on, when you find five in a house, it will be – three against two, and two against three; father against son, and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother….” (Luke12-51-53, The Message) And so on.  You know the rest.

And if we say we don’t understand, if we say that Jesus’ coming doesn’t present us with a decisive moment of choice that could be disruptive and that may separate people, even members of the same family, from one another, Jesus has some strong words of rebuke.  He says to the crowd, “When you see clouds coming in from the west, you say, ‘Storm’s coming’ – and you’re right.  And when the wind comes out of the south, you say, ‘This’ll be a hot one’ – and you’re right.” (Luke 12:54-55, The Message)  So if you know how to tell a change in the weather, “to interpret the appearance of earth and sky” (Luke 12:56, NRSV), don’t tell me you can’t interpret the present time.

What is the present time?  Well, it’s late-summer time.  It’s back-to-school-shopping time.  It’s time-for-a-haircut time.  It’s almost fall-TV-schedule time.  But above all it is God’s time.  In Jesus, God has come close; God has come into the world and entered human life, and from now on we are confronted with a daily choice: will we choose the ways of God?  Will we choose life rather than death?  Will we “lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and… run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus”? (Hebrews 12:1-2a)  At first this might have seemed like another sleepy August morning, but instead we get a wake-up call, a summons to renew our commitment to Christ and to his proclamation of the kingdom of God.

But before I say another word, I must say this.  When Jesus announces that in a household of five, it will be three against two and two against three, I don’t believe for a moment that he wants us to be troublemakers for trouble’s sake, or to incite division for division’s sake.  Heaven knows the ordinary family has enough conflicts and misunderstandings of its own, and doesn’t need Jesus to encourage further division.  Heaven knows we don’t need to interpret this passage as license to bump against each other and revel in argument and controversy just because we’re in the mood.

In fact, the whole New Testament makes clear that Jesus’ overarching quest and his deepest longing was for God’s peace, God’s shalom – that Hebrew word that means not just the absence of strife or war, but well-being, wholeness, reconciliation with one another and with God.  Peace is what God desires and wills not only for the soul or for the human race, but for God’s whole creation.^[ii]  

“Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9).  Jesus was recognized as a peacemaker at the very beginning of his life, when Zechariah welcomed him as the one who came “to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:79).  Near the end of his life, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus stopped those who were reaching for their swords, and when someone struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his ear, Jesus said, “No more of this!” (Luke 22:51), a cry for peace that echoes down through the centuries.

The early church carried forward Jesus’ message of shalom.  Paul wrote in one letter, “Be at peace among yourselves” (1 Thessalonians 5:13), and in another, “Let us then pursue what makes for peace and for mutual up-building” (Romans 14:19), and in yet another, “…agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you” (2 Corinthians 13:11).  Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy says, “Have nothing to do with stupid and senseless controversies: you know that they breed quarrels” (2 Timothy 2:22b-23).

At the heart of Christian faith is a quest for peace, what one commentator calls “an insatiable appetite for God’s shalom.”^[iii]  But Jesus makes it clear today that dedicating ourselves to God’s peace, God’s shalom means being willing to be passionate, to be set on fire, to give ourselves utterly to the quest for the wholeness and flourishing of all beings, even if it leads to division with those near and dear.

Here’s an example.  Let’s say you have a 16 or 17-year-old in your life and you love him dearly and you’re committed to his flourishing, to his shalom.  And let’s say that he’s a good kid but he’s hanging with the wrong crowd and you know there’s some drinking going on.  If you like, you can keep the peace and look the other way.  You know that if you insist on keeping track of his whereabouts, or enforce a curfew, or call ahead to be sure that parents will be present in the house where his group plans to party, you’re not going to win any popularity contests with your son.  He’s going to be plenty annoyed with you, and he’s going to tell you so in no uncertain terms.  But the only way you can stay true to your commitment to be a good parent and to stand up for his wellbeing is to be willing to do what you need to do, to bear his wrath, and to let him be upset.  A false peace is no peace at all.

Or let’s say you’ve reached a point in your life where you sense that something in your life doesn’t ring true.  On the surface everything may be placid, but underneath you feel restless and edgy, or maybe you just feel numb, as if you’re only going through the motions.  As you listen to your deepest truth, you realize that something deep inside you is hungering for expression, something is calling you to make a change, something is asking you to take hold of your life in a more authentic way.  Doing that may create waves in the world around you.  It may disrupt some long-standing relationships.  But a fire has been kindled within you.  You want to discover who you really are and what you really value.  You want to get clear about what really matters to you, and how you want to spend what poet Mary Oliver calls “your one wild and precious life.”^[iv]  And you realize that you’re willing to stand up for your truth, even if that means upsetting some of those who are closest to you.

That’s what I hear in Jesus’ words today: a call to passion, a call to fire, a call to stay true to God’s longing for the flourishing of life within ourselves, within our families and communities, within the world at large, even when standing up for life means that we must go against the grain, provoke controversy, and refuse to do business as usual.

Blessed unrest – that’s a good term for it, our refusal to settle for a status quo in which the poor go hungry, landfills overflow, lakes die, entire species disappear, gas-guzzlers foul the air, and the global climate is scorched.  Did you know that Arctic sea ice is expected to reach record lows in September?  We may feel as if we’re living in that vineyard that Isaiah was talking about, the one that was on the verge of turning into a wasteland – un-pruned, un-weeded, choked by briers and thorns (Isaiah 5:1-7) – although this time it’s not God we can blame for its destruction, but only we ourselves.

Yet here is Jesus, living for us, dying for us, rising for us, standing with us and calling us out to a life of fire, to a life that is devoted to God’s shalom and to the healing and wellbeing of all, even when living such a life will disrupt the powers-that-be. 

Blessed Unrest is the title of a new book by environmentalist Paul Hawken that traces the extraordinary upwelling right now around the world of people and groups who are devoted to the renewal of life on this planet.  You won’t read about them in the newspapers.  You won’t see them on TV.  Most of their work is carried out under the radar of politicians or the corporate media.  But, he writes, across the planet, “groups ranging from ad hoc neighborhood associations to well-funded international organizations are confronting issues like [social justice], the destruction of the environment, the abuses of free-market fundamentalism… and the loss of indigenous cultures.  They share no orthodoxy or unifying ideology; they follow no single charismatic leader; they remain supple enough to coalesce easily into larger networks to achieve their goals… [And] they are bringing about what may one day be judged the single most profound transformation of human society.”^[v]

I believe we Christians are called to be part of this sometimes disruptive transition to a more just and sustainable world, where local communities can thrive with face-to-face contact, eating locally-grown food and learning to live within the “carrying capacity” of our planet, its capacity to maintain and renew life.  We do not do this work alone.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.”  (Hebrews 12: 1-2a) 

This morning, I pray that the words we hear, the prayers we say, and the sacrament we share will strengthen our intention to become people of fire.  Dear Jesus, give us courage to stand with you and to become fearless agents of God’s healing and God’s peace.  Amen.

 

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For Freedom Christ Has Set Us Free

I would like to say a few words about freedom, because freedom is in the air. For one thing, it is summer, when many of us go off on some sort of vacation and are free of our daily schedules and routine. Freedom will be the national focus in a few days when we celebrate the Fourth of July. And freedom is a theme that runs through Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, from which we read this morning as we’ve done for the past three weeks. Galatians has been called the Magna Charta of religious liberty, for in this epistle, Paul proclaims our freedom in Christ. “For freedom, Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” [Galatians 5:1]

What does it mean to be set free in Christ? What does it mean to be set free, period? If I asked you, right now, to imagine that you were free, completely free, I wonder what would happen in your body, where you would feel it, how your body would respond. I imagine that many of us would take a long, deep breath. When we feel free, it is like a burden lifting, as if the space around us and inside us has become larger and more open. We may feel less constricted, lighter on our feet, and suddenly aware that we have room to move.

I suspect that for many North Americans one thing that curtails our sense of freedom is the relentless pressure of having too much to do. Many of us live quite frantic lives as we hurry from one task to the next or juggle multiple responsibilities, caring for children or aging parents, handling the demands of one job or two, squeezing in a dash to the grocery store or the post office. Many of us have little time for silence or solitude, or for the kind of contemplative listening that helps us know what’s going on inside us or where God might be.

I remember a particularly busy period, years ago, when I found it appealing to consider conducting a sit-down strike. Above my desk I taped a cartoon of a train sitting motionless on a track. The train was glaring straight ahead and saying to nobody in particular, “Get lost.” The caption read: “The Little Engine That Could, But Just Didn’t Feel Like It.”

Around that time I served as chaplain at a clergy conference in another diocese and I read to the assembled priests part of an essay from The New Yorker. A young mother had sent the magazine a kind of song or chant or poem that her four-year-old son had invented and liked to sing every evening in the bathtub. She explained that the chant went on forever, like the Old Testament, and she was able to copy down only a fragment. It is sung, she said, entirely on one note, except that the voice drops on the last word in every line. This is how it goes:

“He will just do nothing at all.

He will just sit there in the noonday sun.

And when they speak to him, he will not answer them

Because he does not care to.

He will stick them with spears and put them in the garbage.

When they tell him to eat his dinner, he will just laugh at them,

And he will not take his nap, because he does not care to.

He will not talk to them, he will not say nothing.

He will just sit there in the noonday sun.

He will go away and play with the Panda.

He will not speak to nobody because he doesn’t have to.

And when they come to look for him they will not find him,

Because he will not be there.

He will put spikes in their eyes and put them in the garbage,

And put the cover on. . .

He will do nothing at all.

He will just sit there in the noonday sun.”

The clergy to whom I read this poem responded pretty much the way you did, and then there was a thoughtful silence. Finally, one of them observed, “I think we should declare this the 151st psalm.”

Maybe so. Surely human freedom includes having some space for leisure, for being rather than doing. And surely Christian freedom includes knowing that we don’t have to earn our salvation — we are not work-horses whose value and identity depend on how much we accomplish, and how fast. This is good news both to those of us who feel internal pressure to work too hard and get caught up in the willful, anxious drive to produce and achieve, and to those of us who feel squeezed by very real external demands and responsibilities. The truth is that we are deeply loved by God not for what we do, or what we accomplish, or how much we earn, but simply for ourselves. If we want this summer to explore our freedom in Christ, we might begin by carving out time to rest and play and pray. Giving ourselves space for rest and refreshment can be our own first step in re-claiming the gift of Sabbath.

Our rector is on sabbatical this summer, and so are you, so am I, whenever we are able to set aside — at least for a while — those urgent lists of Things To Do and can begin to find out what it means to be free. One of my great pleasures has been to work on the Creativity of Grace committee, and we’ve begun to put together what I consider a quite marvelous array of workshops for the summer and fall. Just as the Restoration Project is dedicated to re-building and renewing the outer structures of our parish, so our Creativity of Grace events are intended to renew and refresh our inner selves. Most of these workshops will be led by people from within our own parish community, offering their time and talent to us from the goodness of their hearts. As I imagine it, these workshops will give us a variety of creative spaces in which to explore parts of ourselves that we may not have heard from for a very long time. They will give us spaces in which to try out new ways to hear and respond to the Spirit, new ways to let the breath of God blow through us and open us up. And as Paul writes in another epistle, Second Corinthians, “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” [2 Corinthians 3:17).

The children will lead off with a one-week liturgical arts camp that begins on Monday, July 9. As for us grown-ups, there are all kinds of possibilities to choose from.

For instance, maybe you’ve always wanted to learn how to cook, or want to sharpen your culinary skills, or wonder how preparing and serving a meal can become a spiritual practice. On three Saturdays this summer you can join a small group that, under the guidance of a fine local chef, will head to the farmers’ market on the Amherst town common, buy armloads of fresh, local produce, and then head inside to cook, prepare, and serve each other some really good food and discuss food’s connections to our life of faith.

Or maybe you want to try your hand at writing, or want help with a writing project already underway, or want to overcome your total aversion to writing. We have all kinds of writing workshops for you in the weeks ahead — workshops on writing memoir, on writing as a spiritual practice, and on ways to make friends with writing, so that writing becomes “more natural, comfortable, satisfying, and even pleasurable.” There will even be a writing workshop with the provocative title “Street-Fighting with the Universe,” a name that aptly conveys writing’s challenge and peril and excitement.

Or maybe you would like to explore drawing as a contemplative practice, and would enjoy a workshop that gives you skills and support to draw a small page every day as an act of prayer. By the end of the workshop you will have made a long series of drawings that open and close like an accordion. Or maybe you would like to explore icon writing. In a weekly series that will begin sometime in August, everyone in the parish of any age and any level of skill will have a chance after the 10:30 service to “join in the prayer of creating a large icon that can adorn a variety of sacred spaces at Grace Church.” In a very informal, drop-in way, right here in the Parish Hall, we will “express our spiritual renewal and honor our parish restoration by creating an image of ‘Christ with the New Paradise.'” As someone with no painting skills at all, I was quite reassured to read in the workshop’s description, “if you can breathe, you will be able to apply gold leaf.”

Coming in the fall will be a series of workshops on music, including one that encourages our creativity by giving us a chance to improvise with sounds in the natural world. Our own Brooks Williams plans a series of group guitar lessons for beginners; Beth Hart will lead a workshop on freeing the natural voice; and we may also have a workshop on African drumming and dancing.

All these events will climax on the weekend of November 17^th and 18^th, when we will have a chance to share together the fruits of our journey into the freedom and creativity of the Holy Spirit, and will celebrate an Earth Mass – featuring jazz-gospel compositions by Horace Boyer – that by all accounts promises to be quite extraordinary.

Can you tell that I’m excited about this? It’s true. I am. We have begun making workshop flyers with information on when and how to register, and I hope you will pick one up, or check the announcements printed in the service leaflet over the coming weeks.

No one knows what will come from these projects, what tangible creations to be eaten or read or gazed at or listened to or touched. And that’s the point: it is when we open the door to the unknown, when we step out of the familiar and predictable, that we experience both our freedom and our creativity. Creativity enlarges our sense of inner freedom, and inner freedom enlarges our capacity to create.

I think of that little boy in the bathtub, savoring his freedom and chanting a poem that he made up as he went along. That is what I hope we grownups will experience this summer: something of the freedom of a child at play. We live in a stressed and fast-paced world, and we have many responsibilities, so claiming our creativity and making space for the Spirit will take some commitment on our part. It is a kind of spiritual discipline or practice. I think of the powerful image from today’s Gospel of Jesus “set[ting] his face to go to Jerusalem” [Luke 9:51]. Jesus knew exactly where God was calling him to go, and he didn’t let anything stop him. We may need that kind of fierceness if we want to say Yes to our freedom and creativity, for we will have to say No to something else. But, as Paul once put it, “For freedom, Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”

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Stories under the Stars

“The jar of meal was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail…”
(I Kings 17:16)

Last week Ton Whiteside commented that worshipping in the Parish Hall would be a bit like going to church camp, and I think he’s right.  I never went to church camp, but I did go to regular camp, and I see some resemblances to what we’re doing here.  We don’t have a campfire, but in a while we will gather in a circle around the altar, our own center of energy and warmth.  We won’t eat hotdogs and lemonade, but we will be fed with food and drink that satisfy the soul.  We can’t look up and gaze at stars shining above us in the night sky, but because we are gathered in God’s presence, we are opening ourselves to the big picture, the long view, the larger mystery in which we swim.  We know that the stars are shining, and that God’s light shines within them all.

And like campers everywhere, we will tell stories.  Today’s readings give us two wonderful stories, and after saying a few words about them I will tell you a third story. 

Story #1 is from the First Book of Kings, and it might as well begin like this: “Once upon a time there was a widow who lived with her only son in the city of Zarephath.”  The land was undergoing a terrible drought, and the woman was so poor that she had no fuel for her fire and no food except one last handful of meal in a jar and a bit of oil in a jug. Now the word of God came to the prophet Elijah and told him to visit the poor widow, for – surprisingly enough – God had commanded her to feed Elijah.  Elijah set out, and at the gate of the city, Elijah found the desperate woman gathering a few sticks for a fire.  She figured that, after cooking the morsel of food she had left, she and her son would just lie down and die.

But Elijah interrupted her despairing slide toward death.  “Bring me a little water,” Elijah told her, “and bring me a little cake of the oil and meal, and don’t be afraid.  There will be enough left over for you and your son.” I imagine the woman staring at him in amazement.  She must have thought he was crazy.  But then it got even stranger – Elijah promised that not only would she and her son be fed, but God wouldn’t let the jar of meal be emptied or the jug of oil run out until the rains returned and the drought had come to an end. 

And it was so.  In an act of quite astonishing trust, the generous widow placed the little she had into Elijah’s hands, and lo and behold, God kept re-stocking that jar of meal and re-filling that jug of oil.  And for days on end, until the rains came, everyone ate and was satisfied.

This wonderful story shows what God wants – for the hungry to be fed, for the weak to be protected, for the poor to be satisfied, and for all of us to be caught up in the life-giving, liberating, and loving energies of God. Sometimes we feel like the widow of Zarephath, desperate, helpless, and afraid, and are astonished by God’s power to rescue us when we’ve reached the end of our rope.  And sometimes we feel like Elijah, listening to the urgings of God and heading out into our family, or out into the world, to bring a word of hope.

That is Story #1: Elijah and the widow of Zarephath.

Story #2 is from the Gospel of Luke.  Jesus was like Elijah, traveling where God sent him, and like Elijah, when he reached the gate of the town – in this case, the town of Nain – he saw a desperate widow.  As in our first story, this widow was probably poor, or soon to be poor, for her only son had died and the young man was probably her only means of support.  And now she was alone in the world, grieving and bereft. 

At the gate of the city, the two large crowds met, approaching from different directions – on one side, Jesus, his disciples, and a great throng of followers; on the other, a large funeral procession made up of family members, friends, and hired mourners and musicians, as the dead man was carried on a bier, a kind of wicker-work basket or frame, for burial outside the city gates.

When Jesus saw the grieving mother, he had compassion for her, for that is God’s way.  That is the nature of God.  And in a miracle story that couldn’t be told with greater simplicity, Jesus came forward, touched the bier, and the bearers stood still.  The walk toward death was stopped.  We can imagine silence falling over the crowd as the flutes and cymbals were hushed and the cries of grief were stilled.  Confused, startled, maybe even resenting this interruption, everyone looked at Jesus. Then, very simply, without any drama or ritual, without even saying a prayer, Jesus commanded the young man to rise.  And, the story tells us, “the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother” [Luke 7:15]

It is another miracle story, another tale that expresses both the depth of human misery and the compassion of God, the power of God to set us free.  Where should we look for God?  Wherever people are suffering, lonely, and lost.  Wherever people are marching or sliding toward death.  That’s just the place where God is likely to show up and say Stop! Or Rise! Or Be healed! as Elijah did for the widow of Zarapheth and her son, and as Jesus did for the widow of Nain and her son.

Stories like these remind us that God is with us in our longing for life, and that God yearns to work through our hands and minds and hearts so that we too can bring healing to the world, so that we too can stand up for life.  Sometimes we do this very explicitly, knowing that our longing for life is God’s longing, too.  Elijah knew what he was doing when he reached out to the widow of Zarephath, and Jesus knew what he was doing when he reached out to the widow of Nain and her son — they were listening to God, and filled with God, and allowing the power of God to flow through them.

But sometimes God uses us to bring life into the world in ways we never intended or expected, and in ways we may never even know.  Which brings me to Story #3. 

This is a true story about a woman named Rebecca Parker, a woman who at one point in her life felt as hopeless as the two biblical women in the stories we just heard.  Someone close to Parker had died, and as the weeks went by, she began to spiral into deep despair.  During the day she worked dutifully at her job, but at night she couldn’t sleep, and would pace the rooms of her house and wail.

One night, she writes, “[my] sorrow, despair and isolation came to a crisis.  I was past living one day at a time, or even one hour at a time, and was down to the question of whether I was willing to continue to live at all.  In the depths of that sadness, I stopped pacing…  It was past midnight.  I left my house and walked down the hill to Lake Union.  The city was quiet.  My face was wet with tears as I set my course toward the water’s edge.  I was determined to walk into the lake’s cold darkness and find there the consolation that I could not find within myself.

“At the bottom of the hill, the street ended and the lake-side park began.  I walked across the wet grass and climbed the last rise before the final descent to the water’s edge.  As I crested the rise, to my surprise I discovered that between me and the shore there was a line of dark objects, stretching the whole length of the field, a barricade I was going to have to cross to get to the water. 

“I didn’t remember this barricade being there before, and it was so dark I couldn’t tell what I was seeing.  But as I edged closer, I discovered it was a line of human beings, hunched over some strange looking, spindly and bulky equipment.  Telescopes!

“It was the Seattle Astronomy Club.  A whole club of amateur scientists up and alert in the middle of the night, because the sky was clear and the planets were near.

“In order to make my way to my death, I had to get past an enthusiast in tennis shoes.  He assumed I had come to look at the stars. ‘Here, let me show you…” he said, and began to explain the star cluster his telescope was focused on.  I had to brush the tears from my eyes in order to look through his telescope.  There it was!  I could see it!  A red-orange spiral galaxy!  Then he focused it on Jupiter and I peered through to see the giant, glowing planet.  I could not bring myself to continue my journey.  In a world where people get up in the middle of the night to look at the stars, I could not end my life.

“I know there is grace,” she goes on, “because my life was saved by the Seattle Astronomy Club, by those human beings that night who held fast to the desire to see the beauty of the universe, in spite of the cold or the late hour.  I was saved by the human capacity to love the world and the distant reaches of the unknown.  I was saved by one particular human being who assumed I shared a desire to see the stars.  I was saved by being met, right in the pathway of my despair, by one – actually one hundred – who wouldn’t let me go that way.  I was saved by the stars, by the cool green grass under my feet, by the earth, the cosmos, its presence, which won me over and persuaded me to stay.”

So here we are, campers all, pilgrims, listening to stories, and I have to tell you, I want to be like those amateur astronomers with their telescopes pointed at the stars.  And I want us all to be like them, too – so caught up in the beauty of life, so grateful for the fact that we are here, that anything is here at all, so convinced that life is good and worth living – that we become a barricade for anyone who is openly or secretly on a march toward death.  If it hasn’t happened yet, I hope it will happen now – I want us to fall in love with life this summer, to fall in love with God. 

So I give thanks for the jar of meal that is never emptied and the jug of oil that never runs dry, thanks for the God who has compassion for the poor and raises us from the dead, thanks for the God who can use anyone – even you, even me, even “an enthusiast in tennis shoes” – as a channel for grace. 

Doubt, Faith, and Fire

 “Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” 
-John 20:27

Today is a good day to talk about doubt: yours and mine.  We have just shared the marvels of Christianity’s most sacred week.  Most of us here this morning participated to one degree or another in the experiences that make up the journey from Palm Sunday through Holy Week, Good Friday and Easter – candle light and star light, attentive silence and ringing bells, the raw wood of the cross and the scent of Easter lilies.  We listened to the core narrative of Jesus’ dying and rising.  We re-told, re-lived, and reaffirmed the foundational story of our faith.

And today, as we do every year on the Sunday that follows Easter Day, we make room for doubt.  Thomas is remembered for many things: he is the disciple who asked Jesus to show him the way to the Father’s house [John 14:5]; tradition says that Thomas brought the Gospel to India; and there is a non-canonical Gospel that bears his name.  Still, because of the passage that we heard this morning, Thomas is remembered above all as “Doubting Thomas,” as the disciple who wasn’t there when the risen Christ appeared to the other disciples and to the women, and who insisted that he would not believe until he had seen the evidence for himself.  When the other disciples tell him, “We have seen the Lord,” Thomas replies, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” [John 20:25].

Thomas is a man of doubt, a skeptic, a man who insists on evidence. Second-hand testimony is not enough for him.  Someone else’s belief is not enough for him.  He wants to know the truth for himself through his own direct experience.  And I want to say: let’s hear it for that kind of doubt.  We need critical, analytic, and doubting minds to break the spell and cut through the fog that cloud our consciousness. 

Years ago I saved a New Yorker cartoon entitled “Fatalism… and the seeds of doubt.”  A family leans over a toaster that has just burned two slices of bread to a crisp.  Smoke rises into the air.  With a tragic face, the mother declares, “It is God’s will.”  The father declares, “Had the toast been destined to be edible, it would be so.”  Their startled son looks up at his parents and says, “B-b-but…”

Thank God for the “But’s.”  Thank God for the seeds of doubt.  Thank God for the questions that propel us to explore the truth, to look for answers, to discover for ourselves what we really know and trust and believe.  Doubt can impel us to test our experience and to refuse to settle for believing something just because other people say it’s so.  What’s more, doubt is part of being human, and, as the writer Frederick Buechner once put it, “If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.” 

It seems to me that the Christian life needs both faith and doubt in the same way that a fire needs both logs and space in order to burn.  Here is part of a poem by a poet named Judy Brown.

What makes a fire burn

Is space between the logs,

A breathing space.

Too much of a good thing,

Too many logs

Packed in too tight

Can douse the flames

Almost as surely

As a pail of water would.

 

  You know how it is when you build a fire.  You have to pay attention not only to the wood but also to the spaces between the pieces of wood.  As Judy Brown goes on to say, “It is fuel, and absence of the fuel/Together, that make fire possible.” (1)

If we hang on to faith too tightly – if we banish all doubt and cling rigidly to our convictions – before long we’ll turn into a fanatic enclosed in our own small world, our own narrow ideology.  Without some space for doubt, faith morphs into self-righteousness, and before long we’re likely to pick up the logs of our convictions and start wielding them like weapons against someone else. 

Doubt gives us space for humility, space to acknowledge that we don’t have all the answers or possess all the insights.  We know what we know, but we also know that there is more to know.  Doubt keeps us open to fresh evidence and makes us eager to learn.

On the other hand, if all we hang on to is our doubt, if we trust nothing but our doubt and our capacity to criticize and challenge, if we question and belittle every expression of faith in the people around us and in ourselves, then we will stake out for ourselves a very small world and hold ourselves back from the fire and mystery of life. 

I think of doubt and faith as existing at their best in a kind of dynamic tension: faith gives us the willingness to believe, to trust, and to give ourselves in love.  Doubt gives us the willingness to question, to stay humble, and to admit that there is more to learn.  Together, faith and doubt are like logs and space that make a powerful and life-giving fire. 

Take Thomas, for instance.  He is called “the Twin,” the Gospel tells us, and he is our own twin, too.  He is a man of faith, for he is a disciple who has followed Jesus through thick and thin.  But Thomas has now reached an impasse.  He’s been stopped by a wall of doubt.  “Unless I see for myself, I won’t believe.”  It’s not that Thomas refuses to believe – we don’t get the sense that he is invested in clinging to his doubt.  It’s just that he needs more evidence, some direct experience of his own, before he can take the next step in faith. 

        And so, the story tells us, the risen Christ appears again, says “Peace be with you,” and invites Thomas to reach out and touch his hands and side.  “Do not doubt but believe.”  And Thomas answers, “My Lord and my God!” [John 20:27-28]

What just happened?  Jesus had mercy on Thomas’ doubt and on the suffering that Thomas must have felt in holding back.  Thomas was searching for a deeper, more direct experience of the risen Christ, and that is just what Jesus gave him.  Jesus went looking for Thomas, even moving through closed doors to find him.  He spoke gently to the astonished disciple with words of peace, and then invited him to reach out and touch his wounded hand and side.  And in the intimacy of that mysterious encounter, Thomas’ faith caught fire.  He experienced some kind of inner transformation.  His doubts fell away, his fear turned into boldness, and his sorrow into joy.  “My Lord and my God!” he exclaimed, in what is really the climax of the Gospel of John. 

It’s that kind of release of energy and hope that marks the early Church.  The Book of Acts is full of stories of men and women so filled with confidence in the reality of the Risen Christ and the transforming power of the resurrection, that they stand up again and again to the political and religious powers of their day in order to proclaim the power of the kingdom of God.  As Peter and the other apostles announce in the passage we heard this morning, “We must obey God rather than any human authority” [Acts 5:29].  That is where the life of faith and doubt can take you – out into the world, on to the streets, to proclaim that love and not death will have the last word.  It’s the kind of energy that sent tens of thousands of Americans on to the streets yesterday – including a fine group from Grace Church – to proclaim that carbon emissions must be cut 80% by 2050 and that we will not stand idly by and watch climate change take down this planet’s web of life. (2)

And notice this, please: Jesus is talking to you in today’s Gospel.  He is talking to me. Turning to Thomas and to every one of us down through the ages who has wrestled with doubt and with faith, Jesus says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” [John 20:29].   Here we are —  partly believing, partly doubting — and Jesus is giving us his blessing.  Bless you, he is saying to you and to me.  You may not see me fully.  You may not understand completely who I am, or who you are to me.  But I know you are searching, and I know you are coming to believe.  And I bless you.  I bless you. 

A friend of mine, poet and teacher Annie Rogers, joined us at Grace Church for the Easter Vigil.  She told me a while ago that although she grew up attending church, somewhere along the line Christianity stopped singing to her. And so she stayed away.  But something drew her back last week, some mixture of uncertainty and desire, doubt and faith that only she can name.  

Annie wrote a poem about what happened at the Easter Vigil, and she has given me permission to share it.

 Still in our winter coats we wait
in the dark for it all to start. 
At the back of the church a fire
flares in a barbecue pit, and the
 
tall candle’s lit.  We walk around
to the front, while in the Lord
Jeffrey Inn, the dining room is full
and over on Pleasant Street, friends
line up for the cinema because
something good is playing.

 

The poem goes on to portray the entry into church, the acolytes who lit our candles, the biblical stories we listened to.  Finally the time comes for the Eucharist, and Annie ventures to come forward.  Annie writes,

  … A man
in a red t-shirt kneels beside me, crosses
his arms on his chest, and the priest’s hand
 
falls light on his head to bless his refusal. 
I have teetered with disbelief, and were I
truthful, I want only this: a blessing
on my incredulity…

 

“A blessing on my incredulity.”  That is what Jesus offers us this morning: a blessing on our incredulity, a space for our doubts, for they are part of who we are. 

Who knows what happens next.  Anything can happen.

As Annie leaves the church, she heads into “the cold Spring night” and hears bells pealing out over the Common.  And whatever she can or cannot say about Jesus, she does know this:

 …the sound invades me
hammers into me a strange joy
that defies all logic, all possibility.

 

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(1) Judy Brown’s poem appeared in an email from Spiritual Directors International.

 (2) For news of Step It Up – and for photos of our Grace Church contingent – visit StepItUp2007.org .

 (3) Annie Rogers, “Who answers?” unpublished manuscript.

Irrational, Pointless, and Necessary

Some of you may recognize tonight’s Gospel reading as the one we heard little more than a week ago, when the lectionary assigned most of this passage for the Fifth Sunday of Lent.  Rob Hirschfeld preached a wonderful sermon that morning, and being handed the same text on which to comment 8 days later leads tonight’s preacher to quote from Rob’s sermon: it “stinketh.”

I don’t know what the lectionary planners had in mind when they placed the passages so close together, but maybe they wanted to be sure that Christians had a chance to ponder deeply – and often – the story of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet.  Luckily it is a story so rich in meaning that we can return to it again and again and discover something new.

All four Gospels include a scene of a woman anointing Jesus, but the details vary quite a bit, such as when and where the event took place, which woman did the anointing, and whether it was Jesus’ head or feet that she anointed.  Scholars attribute the differences partly to the particular meanings that each Gospel writer wanted to convey, for each Gospel has its own distinctive emphasis, its own way of making meaning of Jesus’ life.  But I have to say that John’s version of the story is to me the most irrational, even muddled, of them all – and, I would argue, maybe for that reason the most beautiful.

I’ll tell you why.  As we just heard, John places the scene six days before Passover at the home of Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from death.  While Martha, one of Lazarus’ sisters, serves the meal, his sister Mary takes a great quantity of costly perfume, bathes Jesus’ feet with it, and then dries his feet with her hair.

Now, really, what sense does that gesture make?  Anointing someone’s head with oil would have made sense.  Anointing the head of a dinner guest was a familiar gesture of hospitality in that ancient culture, so if Mary had anointed Jesus’ head with oil, her act would have been quite normal, a gracious and familiar expression of welcoming a guest.  What’s more, anointing his head would have recalled how in Old Testament times a prophet anointed the head of the Jewish king [2 Kings 9:1-13, 1 Samuel 10:1].  Anointing Jesus’ head would have meant that she recognized him as the Messiah – literally, the anointed one. 

But here Mary is anointing Jesus’ feet with oil – a gesture as unusual in that culture as it would be in ours today.  Not only that, she then wipes away the oil with her hair – an even more extraordinary gesture, to say the least.  Why apply perfumed oil to Jesus’ feet, only to wipe it off right away?  And why wipe it off with her hair?  No respectable Jewish woman would have appeared in public with her hair unbound – so this was a scandalous gesture, one that was unbecoming to be a respectable woman.

Mary’s gesture was lavish, irrational, and apparently pointless.  No wonder the reaction comes swiftly – what a waste!  How much more sensible it would have been to have sold that expensive perfume – worth nearly a year’s wages for a laborer – and to have used the money for something useful, like giving it the poor!  Mary, what were you thinking? 

Some scholars look at this apparently muddled gesture and explain that John’s Gospel was conflating two separate historical incidents. (1) In one event, an unnamed, penitent sinner knelt before Jesus, and when her tears fell on his feet, she hastily wiped them away with her hair.  Loosening her hair in public would have fit with the woman’s dubious reputation and character.  In a second event, a woman expressed her love for Jesus by anointing his head with expensive perfume. 

Maybe we should try to explain the strangeness of John’s version of the story by saying that he brought together and confused two separate incidents, so that the details of one story passed over to the other, giving us a scene of a woman anointing Jesus’ feet and wiping them with her hair.

Or maybe we can defend the woman, as Jesus did, by saying that her gesture made sense because, whether she knew it or not, she was in effect preparing his body for burial.  After all, the world around Jesus that night was full of foreboding.  The tension around Jesus was rising to a breaking point.  The civil and religious authorities were plotting to take his life and looking for a way to arrest him.  By telling us that Mary anointed Jesus’ feet, maybe this Gospel intends to show that she intuited or anticipated Jesus’ approaching crucifixion, and anointed his feet as a mourner would anoint a dead body.

But I see more than that in this story.  To me it is the very pointlessness of this act of love that most moves me, for in a sense every act of love is pointless.  What is the point of love?  What is the point of beauty?  What is the point of existence itself?  Mary’s act of overflowing, extravagant love has no point, just has love itself has no point.  And yet how beautiful it is, how necessary!  It is an act that feeds the soul, and an act in which we give ourselves to God. 

Of course we do need to care for the poor – after all, Jesus himself came to embrace the lost and lonely and marginalized, and to set the captive free.  In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus even tells us that that he so identifies with the poor, that when we feed and clothe the poor, it is Jesus himself whom we feed and clothe [Matthew 25:31-45].

Yet in this story Jesus lifts up another truth, as well: there comes a time when we must set aside being efficient, useful, and sensible.  Tonight’s Gospel passage reminds us that every genuine act of love, however muddled – every gesture of kindness, however incoherent – every act of creativity, however wild and extravagant it may be – can be our offering to God, our way of giving thanks and of sharing in God’s love.

There is a quote by the novelist Gunter Grass that says this more succinctly than I have.  “Art,” he writes – and, I would add, kindness, beauty, and love itself – “is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same.  Pointless and yet necessary, that’s hard for a puritan to understand.”

Tonight we lift up the beauty of pointless acts of love.  And maybe Mary’s extravagance is not excessive, after all, for she is responding to the extravagant love that Jesus would reveal soon enough on Good Friday. 

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(1) See The Anchor Bible, The Gospel according to John (i-xii), Introduction, translation, and notes, by Raymond E. Brown, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1966, pp. 445-454.

On the Move

In last Sunday’s sermon, Rob spoke of pilgrimage as an image of the Christian life.  Through baptism, we are drawn into intimacy with God in Christ, and – as I once heard someone put it – even though God loves us exactly as we are, God loves us too much to let us stay the same.  By the grace of God we begin in one place and end in another – we change along the way.  That’s what the early Christians called themselves – people “on the Way.” Lent, in particular, is often described as a journey, a pilgrimage to Good Friday and Easter, and this morning’s readings set before us two men on the move: Abram, whose faith in God sent him out to an unknown land, and Jesus, on his way to Jerusalem to confront the powers-that-be and to lay down his life for the world.

Two men on the move.  I thought about Abram’s willingness to honor God’s call to let everything go – his country, his kindred, and his father’s house [Genesis 12:1] and to set out to an unknown place, “not knowing where he was going” [Hebrews 11:8].  I thought about the night that God took Abram outside and showed him the stars, the night that Abram fully entrusted himself to God and accepted God’s covenant, wherever it would lead.  

Abram’s story brought to mind a long-ago summer in Colorado when my family and I spent a week hiking and horseback riding at a small family ranch.  We galloped along mountain trails with our hair, and sometimes our hats, flying in the wind.  We breathed the scent of dust and wildflowers, gazed at fields of purple thistle and sagebrush, and waded knee-deep into the cold water of the Colorado River.  Around us we sensed the silent presence of the mountains: snow-capped, enormous, and millions of years old.  In their presence the concerns and preoccupations of ordinary life suddenly seemed very small.

One night around 2 a.m. my husband slipped out of the cabin to take a look at the night sky.  After a while he climbed back into bed and urged me to go look for myself.  I’m not usually a stargazer, and who wants to crawl out of a warm bed?  But curiosity got the better of me, so I roused myself, threw on a bathrobe, pushed open the screen door, and went outside. 

Except for the burbling sound of the river beside the cabin, the night was completely quiet.  When I looked up, I was struck dumb with amazement.  I had never seen anything like it.  If you’ve been outside at night in the wilderness, you know what I mean.  The whole sky was lit up with stars: sweeping overhead was the arc of the Milky Way, and in every corner of the sky shone more constellations than I could begin to count or name.  Everywhere I looked there were stars – stars and more stars, an exuberance of light. 

“[God] brought [Abram] outside and said, ‘Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them'” [Gen 15:5].  Of course Abram couldn’t count them any more than we can.  “So shall your descendants be,” God tells him, and then comes the passage’s key line: “And he believed the Lord.”  He believed the Lord.  Abram heard the divine promise  and he accepted it.  No, let’s put it in stronger terms — he committed himself to it, even though there was no tangible evidence to support it.  Abram saw the stars, he heard the promise, and he put his trust in God.

The stars that shone that night in the deserts of Canaan are the same innumerable stars that shine today over the Rocky Mountains and over the Holyoke Range.  “Come out of your tent,” God says to Abram, and to me, and to all of us this morning. “Come out of your tent.  Come out of your self-enclosure.  Step away from your worries and preoccupations, and your anxious self-concern.  Come outside.  There’s something I want to show you.”  And then God spreads before our wondering eyes the infinite beauty of the stars, a glimpse of something larger, more ancient and more enduring than ourselves and our small world.  Suddenly we are caught up in beauty, caught up in mystery.  We are caught up in a Reality that is at once distant and intimate, a Reality that we suddenly discover has been sustaining us at every moment and whose presence fills us with both humility and joy.

That is how the spiritual journey begins, and is renewed: something lures us out beyond the small ego that likes to be in control and to declare itself the center of the world.  Our Lenten pilgrimage gives us a chance to notice and to repent of the ways that we lock ourselves into our small tents and never gaze at the stars.  I think that’s how sin often works: sin makes us close in fearfully upon ourselves, so that we evaluate everything only with reference to how it affects us.  I, for one, begin to imagine that I am the center of creation and that everything exists – or should exist – to please and serve me.  Sin can dull our awareness in all sorts of ways. Maybe we succumb to routine and the grind of ordinary life.  Maybe we fill our spare time with the drone of TV, or blur our perception with too much caffeine or too many drinks.  Maybe we get eaten up by anxiety or frantic busyness, or nurse some favorite obsession, such as the need to be perfect, or the need to be liked, or the need to be in control.  There are countless ways to retreat from life, from what that Dostoevsky wonderfully called “zhivaja zhizn,” “living life.”  I know that when I build my little tent, my world grows very small.  My worries loom large.  It’s when I’m hunkered down in my little tent that life gets urgent and stressful and oh, so serious.

 But then along comes the Holy Spirit, the wind of God, blowing open the flap of the tent, inviting us out to contemplate the stars.  Suddenly we glimpse again the true grandeur of what it means to be alive.  Suddenly we wake up and notice again that we are part of something much larger than ourselves, and that our life is not our own.  I love those lines in the Eucharistic prayer that the celebrant often says during Lent: by the grace of Jesus Christ, now “we are able… to live no longer for ourselves alone, but for him who died for us and rose again.”  That is a big shift in consciousness, when the center of gravity in our lives is no longer our own small self and our own narrow band of concerns, but God – our love for God, our desire for God, our longing to be of use to God, wherever that takes us.  We begin to taste the joy of knowing that true happiness is found in loving and serving God, not in staying put and staying safe and trying to make the world love and serve us.  We become willing to move. 

 There is joy in setting out on this journey with God, but of course it’s a fearful thing, too.  Abram knew it – otherwise God’s first words to him wouldn’t have been “Do not be afraid.”  Jesus knew the cost, too – the risk and the fear.  In today’s Gospel passage from Luke, some friendly Pharisees warn Jesus to turn back, because Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, is after him and seeks to kill him.  But Jesus refuses to step off the road along which God is leading him. “Today, tomorrow, and the next day,” he replies, “I must be on my way” [Lk 13:33].  In other words, he won’t be stopped.  He may be afraid, but, like Abram, he puts his trust in God and keeps going.  No wonder it is so inadequate to think of the Church as a fixed institution or a frozen set of beliefs.  The Church is not a building but a movement, a community of people joined with Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, and we are on the move. 

Images of pilgrimage, of following where God leads even if the cost is great, are especially poignant this year as we consider the turmoil in the Anglican Communion.  As you know, the Primates, or top leaders, of the worldwide Anglican Communion have presented the Episcopal Church with a deadline of September 30 by which it must declare that it will not consecrate gays and lesbians as bishops, and will not authorize rites for blessing same-sex unions – or risk expulsion from the Anglican Communion.  We in the Episcopal Church find ourselves in a decisive place, a place that calls for careful prayer and discernment.

As Gene Robinson, the openly gay man who was consecrated bishop of New Hampshire in 2003, recently wrote in an eloquent essay, this request is not consistent with the organization of our Church.  As Gene puts it, “The changes in our polity proposed by the Primates can only properly and canonically be responded to by the laity, clergy and bishops gathered in General Convention in 2009. The Primates’ demands can be seriously, prayerfully and thoughtfully considered at that time.”

But what’s more important, of course, as Gene points out, is that the Episcopal Church remain faithful to the Gospel.  What does it mean if we deny gays and lesbians full membership in the Body of Christ?  How can we do that when Jesus has given us a vision of the reign of God in which the hungry are fed, the poor are welcomed, and the oppressed are set free?  How can we do that when, in the baptism that begins our journey with Christ, we promise to “seek and serve Christ in all persons,” to “strive for justice and peace among all people” and “to respect the dignity of every human being”? 

These are questions that our Church will ponder in the weeks and months ahead.  The Episcopal Church is on a pilgrimage here, a journey to an unknown place.  It is a place of risk, and it is a holy place.  Gene Robinson writes in his essay:  “During the debate over the consent to my election, I am told that the Bishop of Wyoming noted that not since the civil rights movement of the 60’s had he seen the Church risk its life for something” Gene goes on to say, “Indeed, I think he is right. This is such a time. A brief quotation hangs on the wall of my office: ‘Courage is fear that has said its prayers.’ Now is the time for courage, not fear.”

Given the readings this morning, it seems a good time to ask ourselves, not only as individuals but as members of the larger Church: what kind of tents have we built that block out the grandeur of the sky and the reality of the love that longs to set us free?  Where do we close down and shut love out?  Where is God inviting us to step outside, look up at the stars, and renew our courage to take our next step in faith? 

Abram saw the stars, heard the promise, and put his trust in God.  Jesus said, “Today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way.”  Abram and Jesus are men on the move, and so are we.  So are we.

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Note:

• Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s reflections following the February 15-19 meeting of the Anglican Primates near Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, “A Season of Fasting: Reflections on the Primates Meeting,” may be found at:

http://www.episcopalchurch.org/3577_82669_ENG_HTM.htm

 • The Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson’s “Response” to the Presiding Bishops’ reflections may be found at:

http://www.nhepiscopal.org/artman/publish/bishop_msg.shtml