My oldest daughter Frances was married last Saturday—a major milestone for her and for our family. Being the oldest of our three children, my wife, Megan, and I learned how to parent in real time—or after the fact--as she was growing up. As Frances grew, we grew with her. There’s nothing like have a child to realize we are all a work in progress. Frances showed a distinct and strong personality from early on, putting us to the test as parents from the “get go.” She knew what she wanted and found a thousand ways to cajole, negotiate, and otherwise wear us down. I’ve always said she would have made a powerful and persuasive attorney (instead, she has found her own calling as a teacher, of which we are very proud). From early on, I tended to be a bit of a softie and would capitulate sooner than her mother. Megan, on the other hand would often say NO as a first response to most requests. That would make Frances all the more persistent in her arguments to get her mom to change her mind. That led, at times, to some rather unpleasant encounters. Sometimes the no would remain no (such as “no body piercing and no tattoos”); other times, sometimes sooner—or sometimes years later, Megan would relent. 

Today’s gospel reading shares a story of Jesus’ “no” in what was an unpleasant encounter, turning into a “yes.” We see a discouraged, wearied, angry--even rude--Jesus, at his most human, most like us—a work in progress. Jesus had just crossed into what is now southern Lebanon, discouraged, having just come from Galilee where his own people had taken offense at his teaching and his actions, and had doubted his authority. Jesus had up to this point believed that he was sent primarily to the “lost sheep of the House of Israel,” that is, to his own people; but for the most part, a number of people did not respond positively to him. Most did not acknowledge or were nonplussed at the possibility of Jesus being the Messiah of God. And he was not only discouraged but was also weary from all who clamored after him for a cure, a healing. So Jesus enters foreign territory, at the frayed end of his rope, dismayed, burnt out, and cranky!

What we then hear is a story of a somewhat embarrassing revelation about the humanness of Jesus. Through his encounter with a foreign woman, a Gentile, a non-Jew, Jesus’ self-understanding and mission are tested, as is our image of him. In this gospel, the woman is labeled a Canaanite, one of the ancient enemies of the Israelites, while the same story in Mark’s gospel more politely calls her “of Syrophoenecian origin” (Mark 7:26). She shouts for healing for her daughter and calls Jesus, “Lord, Son of David,” a title reserved for the Messiah. When she, a foreigner, calls him this, she names something in him that many of his own people, and his own disciples, did not recognize. Because Jesus had seen his mission extending just to his own people, this woman calling him “Messiah” may have seemed more like a mean trick of fate to him—hearing what he most wanted to hear, spoken by someone he least wanted to hear it from. That was combined with his exhaustion from being asked to do so much for everyone all the time. So he’s fed up, and after giving her the silent treatment for a bit, he collaborates with his disciples’ inhospitable comment by adding his own protest that his mission was to his own kind—“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” was how he put it. But she persists, pleading “Lord, help me.” And if you think his next reply was harsh, it was! Jesus’ reply led a colleague of mine back in Manhattan to say, “Who wants a savior that acts like a New York waiter?”—you know, “So whadya want? That’s not my table!”  “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” was what Jesus actually said.  Now let’s not get hung up with Jesus not getting everything just right. After all, this is a story about Jesus’ changing and about how he changed. Recall Luke’s gospel stating that “Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in divine and human favor” (Luke 2:52). What does that mean except that Jesus was human as well as divine? Just as we recognize the importance of growth and change as essential parts of our human development, so also we need to see that the humanity of Jesus entailed the possibility of growing and learning and changing course and changing his mind. For that is just what we see happen in this story as Jesus comes to see his call in a new way.

Martin Luther commented on this encounter, “All Jesus’ answers sound like no, yet are not no but swing in suspense. There is more in them than no. Yes is in them secretly and deeply.” Let’s stay with this story to see how this suspense is played out, and how Jesus gets to Yes from what is going on secretly and deeply within him in this encounter. It’s important to notice that Jesus lets someone else’s call clash with his own. The Bible is full of stories with the common theme of God’s making a habit of including outsiders in God’s mission, thus opening up insiders to that fact—even with Jesus. Jesus stays open enough to face into, rather than avoid, this clash of calls. He doesn’t follow the advice of his disciples to send the woman away. As I said, he had seemed clear about his understanding of his call to his own people, but when approached by the call of this foreign woman in need who calls him “Lord, Son of David,” something other than anger and frustration and weariness is also working in him. He allows his limited human perception of his divine mission to be challenged. He listens to the voice of a woman who is so seemingly outside the scope of his mission, and waits long enough to hear a new voice from God speaking through the unlikeliest of voices--this non-Jewish, foreign woman who expressed herself with courageous persistence, to the point of being annoying. Jesus leans in that direction of God’s grace. We don’t know just what went on in Jesus’ head and heart, but the Gospel shows him listening to her--not running away, not sending her away as the disciples advise. Even in the midst of his own rude outburst, he still listens to her. And, thank God, this woman gave as good as she got--with great grit and wit of her own: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” With a kind of verbal aikido, she takes his negative force, absorbs it, allows it to pass by, and then transforms it.

Barbara Brown Taylor likens this to Jesus’ drawing a line—“no one crosses this line”--and the woman just erases it each time. Or like the children’s game of looking into each other’s eyes, each trying to make the other blink first. Well, Jesus blinks—he has a change of heart not only about her but about his understanding of his call and purpose: “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” The Son of God was not too locked in or too proud to change his mind. So "yes” resides in this story of Jesus, secretly and deeply. That’s how we get to yes in this story. And God wants nothing less of us. You and I are given the privilege of discovering that secret and deep place in ourselves, as we become more mindful of the call we have each received, mindful of the voices to which we listen, mindful of the opportunities we are given to go in the direction of grace and mercy and love. So where do we put ourselves so as to allow different voices to challenge us? And how are we called to grow and change and move in the direction of God’s grace and mercy, not just in our personal lives, but as the church in the public arena? The Church—the Body of Christ—has had to change over the centuries as it has listened to the pain and needs of the world. Whether it was realizing the need to question the rule of monarchs in the 18th century, to begin the abolition of slavery in the 19th century, to affirm the rights and role of women in church and society, to acknowledge divorce, to respect the dignity of persons with different sexual orientations, to care for the planet—each generation of the Church has been called to grow in faith in new ways, and to follow the living Christ where he leads. That requires that we face up to the challenge to change from more traditionalist ways of reading Scripture and more narrowly defined understandings of the scope of our call. For it is Jesus himself, we learn in this passage today, who learned that God’s purposes for him were bigger than he imagined, and that he himself was called to step across new territory and listen to new voices, try new ways of thinking, and even change his mind.

In some ways, this gospel passage is a tough story to handle. But as the writer Kathleen Norris observed: “One often hears people say ‘I just can’t handle it,’ when they reject a biblical image of God. I find the choice of words revealing. If we seek a God we can handle, that will be exactly what we get. A God we can manipulate, suspiciously like ourselves, the wideness of whose mercy we’ve cut down to size. But there’s actually something marvelously hopeful about a God who risks to be among us, to grow with us in grace.”

The story ends with both healing and a new vision, which is what the living Jesus is really about. It’s this that led Luther to say that while Jesus’ answers sound like no, “yes” is in them secretly and deeply. That’s the kind of teacher we can learn from, and the kind of Savior we need, and the kind of Lord we can follow—the one who grows with us in grace.

Notes:
Barbara Brown Taylor, The Seeds of Heaven (Cincinnati: Foreward Movement Publications, 1990), pp. 39-45
Jay Sidebotham, “Getting to Yes” (New York: St. Bartholomew’s Church, August 18, 2002)

 

Scarcity and Abundance: Unmasking Illusion and Revealing Reality

The story of the feeding of the 5000 shows Jesus leading his disciples and this large crowd through a public contemplative moment, cutting through illusions of scarcity and revealing the reality of abundance.

Jesus had attracted quite a public following in Galilee. Crowds began following him everywhere. In today’s reading, Jesus attempts to retreat to a quiet hillside with his disciples near the Sea of Galilee; but instead, his retreat is cut short by the crowds who catch up with them. The entire series of events which follow are all occasioned by a contemplative element, especially if “contemplation,” as Quaker writer Parker Palmer puts it, is defined as a way by which we unmask illusion and reveal reality. Defined this way, contemplation doesn’t only happen in solitude or small group experiences of tranquility and quiet. It can also occur in public ways in public places – even in very large groups such as the multitudes Jesus encounters.

Jesus operates within the reality of abundance and unmasks the illusion of scarcity. With an abundance mentality we say that there is enough for everyone, food, shelter, energy--love, justice, knowledge…everything--if we would but acknowledge and share generously and wisely. Of course, around the world, and very close by, hunger, for example, persists for a number of reasons; and none of that is illusory or unreal, to be sure. Yet God’s creation is one of abundance; therefore there is plenty to give and to share. It seems so simple; but we make it so difficult.

We live in a world where the gap between scarcity and abundance grows wider every day. Whether at the level of nations or neighborhoods, this widening gap is polarizing people, making each camp more and more suspicious and antagonistic toward the other. The issue asks whether there is enough to go around – enough food, water, shelter, fuel or land, for example. An ideology of scarcity says no, there’s not enough, so hold on to what you have. In fact, don’t just hold onto it; put aside more than you need, so that if you do need it, it will be there, even if others must do without; and then defend it at all costs. For example, where one-fifth of the world’s population consumes nearly four-fifths of its food and associated resources to produce and deliver that food - this leads to the tragic conclusion that when we act on a mentality of scarcity through our prerogatives of privilege and our acquisitiveness and wastefulness, we help make scarcity a very real thing – and these are some of the roots of war.

As many have pointed out, an affirmation of abundance says the opposite: namely, appearances notwithstanding, there is enough food to go around, so long as we distribute not only emergency relief but also the basic means and knowhow of food self-sufficiency and fair trade, and so long as each nation takes only what it needs, thus not restricting aid or creating unfair trade--if we are willing to have but not hoard, there will even be more than enough left over. Two bold and well documented claims that have been made over and over again since the issuing of the United Nations’ Brandt Commission Report in the 1970’s affirm, first, that there is enough food and food production in the world to feed everyone on the planet, except for the poor ways in which it is distributed. And secondly, the equivalent of one-tenth of one percent of one year’s worldwide military expenditures would be enough to procure and distribute enough farm machinery, tools, high-yielding seeds, fertilizers and technical assistance in such a way that every part of the world could be food self-sufficient--or be able to trade--so as to have food security! The peculiar and ironic thing is that the people and nations with abundance more or less rely on an ideology of scarcity, while the ones suffering from scarcity more or less rely on an ideology of abundance. How can that be?

This all means that we need to look at the abundance and scarcity we each carry within ourselves, along with the fullness and needs of our households, and then also account for the wealth and poverty of our societal and global community. A way to build bridges across each of these is to widen our horizons regarding God’s abundance in our lives and world, as a countervailing balance to our anxiety about scarcity.

Who knows whether the actual miracle of the multiplication of loaves and fishes was more Jesus’ overriding the conservation of matter, or the conservation of selfish people who were at first hoarding their hidden bread? Either way, Jesus’ whole approach refuses to be taken in by the disciples’ pragmatic protestations. Whether the scene is with one cup of cold water, or a widow’s mite, or a new way of dealing with our enemies, or starting with just five loaves of bread – Jesus’ answer again and again was simply, “Let’s see.” Jesus operated on a very different set of assumptions. He looked at the same situation that the disciples looked at, and where they saw not enough, he saw plenty: plenty of time, plenty of food and plenty of possibilities with the people and resources at hand. Not that Jesus knew just how it was all going to work out, exactly; but what he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was that wherever there was plenty of God, there would be plenty of everything else. Jesus opted for a way of sharing through a more cooperative process. Rather than sending the crowd away to compete on their own, Jesus tells his disciples, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”--thus urging his disciples to discover that community and abundance go hand in hand. Turning them toward a response that called forth the effort of a whole community rather than just individuals’ own purchasing power, Jesus reorients them from a mode of buying to a mode of sharing.

From this beginning then, Jesus takes his disciples and the crowd through the illusion of scarcity into the reality of abundance. Jesus gathers the large faceless crowd into smaller more intimate groupings where everyday miracles have a chance of happening, where they can meet, interact – where abundance will replace scarcity; and lo and behold, a miracle starts to happen, the miracle that there never seems to be enough even for ourselves until we start sharing. As Barbara Brown Taylor points out, while Jesus distributed the rather meager rations from the five loaves and two fish, probably some in the crowd might have laughed at least quietly, while others would have been mystified, while still others were embarrassed for Jesus, that he should have promised so much with so little to deliver. But seeing Jesus believe and then act on his assumptions of abundance, a number of the people themselves began to realize that they could share what they really had, so that the result was that everyone was satisfied. For what they really had in that crowd of 5000 were a lot more than five loaves and two fish. And so, caught up in the contemplative moment they not only witness a miracle, but participate in it – not just by receiving the food but in sharing the extra food hidden in their pockets, thus discovering their own capacity for creating abundance – discovering that there never seems to be enough even for ourselves, until we start sharing.

 “Without God we cannot. Without us, God will not,” wrote Julian of Norwich some 600 years ago. We have God’s abundance in us. That’s the realization Jesus wanted his disciples and the rest of us to come to – whether in the midst of a large and hungry crowd, or out on a storm-tossed sea, or anywhere else our journey with the living Christ takes us. So, however much or little we have, we are invited to bring it to God, and to share it with others, believing that it is enough to begin with, enough to start something, even a miracle.

Notes:
Parker Palmer, The Active Life (HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), pp.121-138.
Walter Brueggemann,  in The Other Side (Nov./Dec. 2001)
Barbara Brown Taylor, The Seeds of Heaven (Cincinnati: Forward Movement Publications, 1990),  pp. 30-32.

 

Laboring in a Messy Field

Several years ago, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair delivered an impassioned speech in response to the London bombings that had occurred at that time (in July of 2005). At one point in his speech, he addressed the religious and political ideology behind those and other acts of terror. He stated, “Its roots are not superficial but deep…We must pull this up by its roots.” Today’s readings raise a question about the wisdom and practicality of such comments made by many in recent times.

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus tells a parable about a field mixed with both wheat and weeds, and about the owner of that field who would not let his workers uproot the weeds from the wheat until the final harvest. Weeds among the wheat—an apt description of our fields as it were—whether those fields are our workplaces or neighborhoods, our churches, our nation or family of nations, or the interior landscape of our own psyche.

A “weed” of course, is a relative term, meaning a kind of plant that, in the wild, you might appreciate, or maybe not take much notice of, nor necessarily devalue; but which you wouldn’t choose to have in your yard, mixed in with the grass or flowers or vegetables that you have chosen to cultivate.  Each “weed” is nonetheless a special species of plant which, if it went extinct, would somehow diminish God’s creation.

There are people, too, with whom we live and work—or co-exist—who are as beautiful as Queen Anne’s lace or a honeysuckle but who are somehow out of place in the neat and tidy rows of relationships we try to keep. And we know some who are thorny like a bramble or who are rather irritating like poison ivy.  And then there are some who are as toxic as deadly nightshade, or as the plant generically called a “weed” in this gospel parable, but which is “zizanion” in the original Greek (or in the Latin “zizanium” or “lolium”) and more correctly translated into English as “darnel” (or “tares” in the King James version). Darnel is a grassy plant that resembles wheat and is often camouflaged alongside wheat while wrapping its roots around and through the roots of the wheat plant.  The seed of the darnel however is quite different than a grain of wheat; and if the wheat flour has the seeds of the darnel ground with it, the result will be bread that will sicken you with a serious stomachache.  And if enough darnel seeds are ingested, this has a poisonous effect, causing blindness and even death. That’s the image Jesus puts forward in this parable: wheat and weeds together—deadly weeds at that.

In this parable, those tending to the field ask whether the owner would like them to remove the weeds found among the wheat.  Before the days of herbicides, farmers dealt with weeds by uprooting them by hand early in the growing cycle of their crops, sometimes repeating the process several times, so that at the end of the harvest it would be easier to sort out the grain or seeds.  But in this parable, the landowner instructs his workers to hold off pulling the weeds—for fear that they will uproot the wheat along with the weeds—until the final harvest, when everything would be harvested and separated out for their particular use.

But such an approach would make it so much harder to sort the wheat from the toxic darnel in the final harvest! Nonetheless, the landowner in this parable can tolerate the mischief of these weeds because he does not doubt his ability to make it all right in the end. Yet, doesn’t such a strategy seem too passive an approach to sorting things out, to cleaning up the field?  There’s a lot of that that’s gone on—“let’s clean up the field,” some group says, sorting the wheat from the weeds, the “children of light” from the “children of darkness”, the Tutsis from the Hutus, the Serbians from the Albanians, the Protestants from the Catholics, the Muslims from the Jews, the Sunnis from the Shiites, the true believers from those who have strayed from the true faith, and on and on.  Whether it’s through genocidal “ethnic cleansing” or attempts at purifying the field by less hostile means, many are trying to do what the workers in this parable suggested—but they are doing it without permission or authority from the Landowner (with a Capital “L.”)  The Landowner has a different approach. And there’s wisdom in the Landowner’s method.  First, not only are wheat and darnel hard to tell apart. As well, uprooting the darnel by itself is no easy task, since it intertwines its roots with those of the wheat; and so pulling the darnel even if you know it’s darnel—ahead of the harvest—may result in pulling up the wheat before it’s ready. This says something of the Landowner’s concerns about our inabilities to judge the wheat from the weeds amongst those in our fields of work, and worship and in the wider world.  Barbara Brown Taylor writes of an example of this from an earlier day: “in one of the first crusades, knights from western Europe blew through an Arab town on their way to the Holy Land and killed everyone in sight.  It was not until later, when they turned the bodies over, that they found crosses around most of their victims’ necks.  It never occurred to them that Christians came in brown as well as white.”

Apparently the Landowner seems more interested that things grow than that they do so in a pure or clean or uniformly tidy field. Letting weeds and wheat grow together may in fact be useful to the growth of all.  In this parable, everything is useful—the grown wheat for making bread and the weeds for fuel to bake the bread.  In a messy field, in a mixed community, we can’t just take everything for granted nor assume that one person or group is useless. By being with others not like us, who have different perspectives and identities from our own, we are called to seek and find and grow into our own identities, an identity which can then, with a clearer sense of ourselves, love all the more, our neighbors who are not like us, as we love ourselves all the more.

Our reading from the Wisdom of Solomon relates well to this gospel parable. This text on strength and kindness subverts popular myths of power. Power is not for throwing your weight around. On the contrary, the more power one has the less one uses it. The most powerful God is the most merciful judge, whose sovereignty over all means that all are ultimately spared. Sure God is a God of justice, and justice must be done. But justice, if it is justice and not something else, does not preclude mercy and, in fact, makes mercy possible. As Frederick Buechner states, “the one who judges us most finally will be the one who loves us most fully…The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one.” Jesus’ judgment in the end is not hellfire and brimstone, nor “weeping and gnashing of teeth” as Matthew in his gospel is so wont to portray with his add-on interpretations of Jesus’ parables. Rather, the judgment from Jesus is that stated from his cross: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Forgiveness is God’s greatest show of strength. It’s not about us or God sorting it all out now, or even later, but about a mixed multitude within the embrace of an all-merciful God.

From the time of Pentecost the Church itself has been a mixed multitude. Unfortunately, because of a variety of forces at work, a number of churches have organized themselves more as homogeneous safe havens. But when St. Paul spoke of the Body of Christ “where the eye cannot say to the hand ‘I have no need of you’” (I Cor. 12:21a); so we today cannot say to others, for example, “We have no need of you on the Right” or, “we have no need of you on the Left.”  God allows a messy field, a mixed crop, whether we like it or not. And God asks of us to tolerate and labor in that mixed field—in the church, in the community and world.

Again, this is not a call to passivity.  Instead, it is a call to stretch and grow and to engage in this hard work of reaching out and across to others in the messy mix of it all.  As any of you who have tried to love your enemies know, that’s about as hard a work as anyone can do. But what God the Landowner knows is that the best solution to others’ limitations is to bear your own good fruit, especially if any of us have been labeled as a “weed” at some time or other! If all we do is try to attack the weeds, we run the risk of turning into weeds ourselves, becoming full of prickles or poison—good people who turn into bad people trying to put the bad people out of business, as Barbara Taylor put it. Recall her story of the crusaders; or think of all the modern examples of such behavior. As William Sloane Coffin stated, “If you love the good you have to hate the evil; but, if you hate the evil more than you love the good, you just become a damn good hater and the world is full of such folk.” Or as St. Augustine put it, “Never fight evil as if it were something that arose totally outside of your self." Our job as workers in the mixed fields God has placed us in, or called us to, is not to give ourselves over to the enemy by consuming ourselves with the destruction of the weeds, but rather to mind our business as it were—our business being the repair of the world as instruments of God’s love, justice and healing—seeding more than weeding.  If we give ourselves to being and doing that, God will take care of the rest—the harvest—all of it. Toiling in such mixed ground, may we begin to find some new common ground, and in that, even holy ground.

Notes:

SPIRITUAL/BIBLICAL and PHILOSOPHICAL/CIVIC
UNDERSTANDINGS OF FREEDOM

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28) These words are often heard by us as Jesus referring to everyone who works hard or who is weighed down with all kinds of trouble. Yet in the context of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus was focused on those who labored and were heavy laden from following all the religious rules and obeying all the religious observances and customs and certainties of the day. “Lighten up! Take it easy!” Jesus is saying to them in this gospel. Your earnest yet anxious religiosity is a hard yoke to bear. Paul goes even further in our reading from his letter to the Romans by describing this anxious way of living as enslavement. These days we may not feel as burdened by the religious codes and observances of our forebears, but many of us have replaced all that with a modern frenzied anxious toil that is just as burdensome and enslaving. Many of us also labor under the illusion that the yoke we bear is a single one and that all the plowing, as it were, is up to us. Yet Jesus offers again and again his yoke—a double yoke, a tandem yoke which, when we bind ourselves into it, somehow becomes lighter. It’s lighter because it is a shared yoke, a yoke we share with Jesus, who allows us to join his team, to do what we can do, but when we can’t do anymore, he is there next to us, carrying it forward while we rest. As William Sloane Coffin pointed out, what is so wonderful about our relationship with God is not only what God gives in terms of hope and strength, challenge and courage, purpose and power, but also what God never takes away, namely support. It’s a wonderful thing to be loved by someone who is never in competition with you, someone who wants only your well-being. Christ is that someone, the only one in your life who will never compete with you. To bind yourself to him and his yoke is perfect freedom.

“I bind unto myself today ...” That line from our processional hymn is attributed to St. Patrick. Now, binding ourselves to anything may appear on the surface to limit our freedom. Many of us find ourselves bound to many commitments, pursuits, and distractions—whether serious or trivial. In many of these connections we find ourselves still seeking more profound and enduring ties. Binding ourselves to Christ’s double yoke means being bound to the One who sets and keeps all human commitments and natural energies in motion. Christ is the source and goal who links us with these commitments and energies and empowers us with God’s goodness, truth and beauty. Thus, binding ourselves to God means coming to our true selves and therefore being free to share ourselves with others. In our reading from Paul’s letter to the Church in Rome, Paul wrestles with the seemingly enslaving aspects of his religious law—but works through it. Listen to his “Declaration of Interdependence” in his letter to the church in Galatia (5:1,13-14): “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Thus freedom is what being a Christian is about. It’s a freedom that has no higher loyalties than to God and to God’s law of love. And to love God means to belong to God and no one and nothing else; but to love and serve God means to love and serve everyone else. That service is true freedom, however, because it is based on the law that sets everyone free, the Law of Love. As St. Augustine stated in his well-known prayer, “O You who are the light of the minds that know you; the life of the souls that love you; and the strength of the wills that serve you; help us so to know you that we may truly love you; so to love you that we may fully serve you; whom to serve is perfect freedom.”

Now, here we are in these United States, 232 years after our own Declaration of Independence was put forth declaring freedom from the tyranny of British rule and freedom for creating a society where the liberties to speak, worship, and assemble publicly—and to pursue happiness—were its hallmarks. These hallmarks of freedom were not just personal or individual, but were placed in the context of service for the common good. John Adams, for example, spoke frequently of “public happiness,” and linked it with the “common good” (a term used as far back as St. Paul). Adams objected to taxation without representation, for example, not because taxes were large and taking a bite out of individual wallets—in fact, taxes were quite small—but rather he objected because the representation of those paying taxes in the British colonies was nil. To deny people the right to participate in decisions that affect their lives was to John Adams “to deprive them of public happiness.”

As well, freedom was linked with virtue by our forebears and virtue was given public meaning in contrast with its more exclusively private or individual emphases today. As Samuel Adams stated, “We may look to armies for our defense, but virtue is our best security. It is not possible that any state should long remain free where virtue is not supremely honored.” Freedom to our forebears was not freedom to do as you please; it was freedom to be pleased to do as you can for the common good.

All of our early American leaders read the French political philosopher Charles Montesquieu who differentiated various societies, for example, tyranny from monarchy from democracy. In each of these forms, he found a governing principle: for tyranny it was fear; for monarchy it was honor; and for democracy it was virtue. And because freedom was practically synonymous with virtue and virtue was understood in very public and social and not just personal or individual terms, we turned out a generation of political leaders named Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Hamilton and Madison—albeit human beings with personal shortcomings, and people of their time with what we today see as glaring omissions in their moral perceptions regarding people of color and women.

Yet, as William Sloane Coffin pointed out, today with a population now 100 times the 3 million who were Americans in 1776, we don’t produce leaders like that these days. One reason seems evident—as Plato said, “What’s honored in a country will be cultivated there.” So we have superb athletes and generally inferior political leaders—with a few exceptions. Having said this, it is also important to remember that the philosophers Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and Jean Jacques Rousseau who had had significant influence on our founding fathers and mothers, believed that freedom within a society was not, and could not be, much more than freedom from interference and concentrations of arbitrary power: the guarantee of freedom in society was more a set of negative checks and balances designed to prevent unjust accumulation of influence. In their view, freedom in society is essentially “negative” (freedom from) because there cannot be in principle, agreement among diverse human groupings about the “positive” ends of political communities (freedom for), beyond the protection of the liberties of the individuals who compose it. And so society (e.g. a city, a nation, a group of nations) that is no more than amoral (if not downright immoral) in its individual parts cannot really be made to “stand for” something whether what it would stand for is coming from a religious right or a more secular left. In other words, so-called free society offers no salvation and cannot become a Kingdom of God on earth – for us or for others. It can only offer protections from excesses and oppression. These philosophers offered grave warnings on free societies’ abilities to even offer such protection. For example, Jean Jacques Rousseau insisted that obsession with private interests would lead to a neglect, or distortion, of public duty, and amid such neglect or distortion, despotism might thrive in various forms even within so-called free society; and both public virtue and personal freedom would be corrupted. And, continuing this logic, to force this upon other nations and regions can run the risk of doing not even the limited good we want, but the evil we do not want (in the words of St. Paul) – a very heavy yoke we end up bearing and imposing on others.

Of course, that’s not the whole story. We also know of great things that have happened when people work together toward a common good whether it was during the Second World War; or the Civil Rights Movement and other large movements for positive social change; or at a local level, communities organizing for safe streets, affordable housing, cleaner environment, living wage jobs, or good schools. As we bear one another’s heavy burdens, we so fulfill the law of Christ, the law of liberty (as St. Paul [Gal. 6:2] and the letter of James [1:25] put it).

To sum up, we find that in democratic societies neither government institutions nor the market economy nor individuals alone can make society and humanity free and flourishing. These must be balanced by a strong civil society made up of ethical and cultural, civic and religious institutions such as families, schools, synagogues, mosques, churches such as All Saints, and other voluntary associations actively seeking to build the bonds of our common humanity and serve the common good. We shouldn’t underestimate these institutions which at their best build in us the habitual practice of public virtues that are essential to our personal and societal freedom—virtues such as honesty, self-control, and respect, without which neither government nor the market economy nor we as individuals could function for the common good.

Radical Welcome

In our gospel we hear Jesus say, “Whoever welcomes you, welcomes me and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” Some 500 years after these words from Scripture were recorded, St. Benedict wrote a Rule of life for his community of fellow monks that included, “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ.”

And our baptismal covenant calls us in our generation to see the divine image in, and respect the dignity of, every human being. Now if all that is so, then exercising such “radical welcome” involves more than a Sunday smile. It involves welcoming the stranger, and supporting all that strengthens individual and family life, including showing support for and solidarity with, for example, those needing quality education, good work or decent housing. I am glad All Saints is a community that is continually finding ways to live this out. Some of the initial things pointed out to me in my very first visit to All Saints were the flags hanging in the back, plus the people of many races and backgrounds found in the stained glass above the flags--symbols of this church’s wider vision and embrace. And having been here four months now, I certainly see this in your faces and hearts and lives.

This call to radical welcome is at the heart of our Scriptures. For example, Leviticus states, “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you (19:33-34a).” The Letter to the Hebrews states (13:2), “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” Or in Matthew’s gospel where we hear “When was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you…?” and God’s response, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (25:38, 40). Could these texts be any clearer? And yet how hard they are to fully live out, and not only in our personal, community and parish life. Their implications couldn’t be more timely for our role as churches in our national life together. If we scratch the surface of our own family histories, many of us would find amazing variety in the ways our hard-working ancestors made it to this country – and it wouldn’t be all legal, or voluntary or otherwise above board. How is it, then, that the people who now harvest our crops and process our food, who bus the tables and wash the dishes, who clean offices and mow the lawns and even take care of our children--how is it that these people have now become our enemies because Lou Dobbs, or Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh says so? God calls us to a radical welcome based not only on the realization that we are all truly interrelated as beloved children of God, but also because of who God is and the fact that Christ lived and died for all, not just some. For God is a God of mercy as well as justice; as the hymn goes, “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea; there’s a kindness in God’s justice, which is more than liberty.” Sure, God calls us to justice and to respect the rule of just laws, make no mistake about that. But, God calls us also to mercy. There’s a line—but it is just a fine line--between justice and mercy. We humans struggle endlessly with how, when and if to extend justice or mercy, as if they were mutually exclusive. Well, we who are gathered here, worship and serve a God who loves justice and mercy equally, and who invites everyone to the Lord’s table.

Martin Luther King, Jr. put it:

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny…Together we must learn to live as brothers [and sisters] or together we will be forced to perish as fools…In a real sense, all life is interrelated. We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother [and sister]. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

Radical welcome is not only crucial in our national life, but is also crucial in our international life, for example, as part of the global Anglican Communion. A number of bishops have just concluded a meeting in Jerusalem. Our bishops will gather soon in England at the Lambeth Conference. These meetings will take our worldwide communion either toward greater unity, or towards greater division. How will this get played out? Though a rift now seems inevitable, I’m heartened by the comments of former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold who said, "I am put in mind of the Archbishop's [of Canterbury] observation...that in Baptism we are bound together in ‘solidarities not of our own choosing.’ Communion is costly and difficult to live in the concrete, and it is impossible to do so without the love, which is the very life of the Trinity, being poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit."

Listen also to Njongonkulu Ndungane, former Archbishop of Capetown, South Africa who points out,

"We must recognise as brothers and sisters in Christ those who call on Jesus as their Lord.  We may think they are wrong on various issues, but that is different from doubting their sincerity, the validity of their faith or their membership in the body of Christ. As Paul tells the Corinthians, we know there is vast diversity within Christ’s body – so vast it is likely to stretch our understanding of legitimate faith to the limit, just as seeing is incomprehensible to the ear, or hearing to the eye (cf 1 Corinthians 12:14ff).  It is God alone who decides who is a member of Christ’s body, among those who claim to follow him.  We must wrestle with one another as brothers and sisters in Christ, encouraging one another in pursuit of the truth; and if any of us are misguided in our sincerity, we too can trust Gamaliel’s words to the Sanhedrin:  ‘If this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow [it]’ (Acts 5:38, 39)."

As we continue to wrestle with these broad ways of extending our radical welcome, I’m reminded, finally, of another powerful line from the Letter to the Hebrews, “Let us then go to [Jesus] outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured (13:13).” This passage says that we welcome one another not primarily on altar or in sanctuary or with flags, but outside the camp as it were, which in the Bible meant both a place that was unsafe (beyond the camp confines or later, the city walls) and a place of shame and reproach where the blasphemers and rabble-rousers, prophets and Sabbath-breakers were stoned—the place outside the city walls where Jesus himself was executed with criminals on either side. Those today who share the way of Jesus can expect to follow and worship/serve him “outside the camp”--beyond our comfort zones, in all the places of despair, distress, and urgency in our communities and in the wider world. Christian institutions that seek to be true to the call of Jesus Christ must, as a first priority, respond to people within and beyond the membership who suffer hardship and dislocation, and who find themselves vulnerable or ignored. The Church is one of the few institutions that exists not primarily for the benefit of its members, but for those outside its “walls.” Of course, we ourselves, after all, are really outsiders as well. We are broken ones who come together to be healed, forgiven, strengthened, and to express our gratitude to God for all we have been given, as we then reach out to others “outside the camp.” Having said that, the life and work of radical welcome by the gathered community within our walls has meaning and value only insofar as it occurs primarily in order to better understand and connect to Christ’s mission and purpose for the greater and common good “outside the camp.”

“Whoever welcomes you, welcomes me and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” Amen.

When my parents handed down their old car to my children several years ago, Karen and Greg weren’t that concerned about the dents and rust, whether the seat belts worked or what kind of gas mileage it got….their biggest concern was whether or not the bumper stickers plastered over every inch of the front and back of the car would come off……….

My parents believe bumper stickers are the perfect form of communication!….These particular stickers urged support for local farmers and for autism research and New York state wines (they owned a vineyard there at the time), votes for presidential candidates who had run for office back in the ‘80’s (this was a very old car!), and my favorite bumper sticker of all time:

When Jesus said ‘Love your enemies’, I don’t think he meant kill them.

I never looked at that bumper sticker without stopping for a moment….and thinking about Jesus and enemies and whether I am capable of the kind of love Jesus asks of those who follow him….

That bumper sticker became a touchstone for me – calling me back, again and again, to what it means to follow Jesus: what is asked of me, what am I willing to do, and what holds me back from keeping all that Jesus lived and taught at the center of my own life?

Jesus knew what he asked of his disciples would not be easy….He knew his followers would face temptation and ridicule, that suffering and death were very real possibilities for anyone who walked with him and that discipleship could not be chosen half-heartedly……

Jesus asked a lot of those first disciples…….
…..he asks no less of us today……..

And he leaves the choice up to us: will fear stand in our way – or will we follow him?

Today’s gospel is part of the commissioning and instruction Jesus gave to his disciples:

He told them to cure the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons and take no payment for their services….he warned that he is sending them out as sheep in the midst of wolves, and that they will be forced to defend themselves, be beaten, and alienated from the people they love most in this world…

…all in all, Jesus painted a pretty grim picture of what it would mean to follow him – and so, lest any of his disciples fera he was asking more than they could give, he urged them – three times in today’s text alone – to not be afraid: God cares for them and all is in God’s hands.

These disciples were not fools……..and any remaining hopes they had that it might not be so hard to carry on in Jesus’ name were probably dashed when he said things like “you will be hated by all because of my name…..”……..

Now, I’m just guessing here, but I suspect that if I’d been sitting at Jesus’ feet and he kept telling me not to be afraid, I’d start wondering if I could quietly slip away before he noticed I’d gone….

It is much easier to keep our faith private than it is to put ourselves on the line and let our lives be a witness to the life and death and redeeming power of Jesus…….

It’s wonderful to be able to come here on a Sunday morning – let the liturgy (and music) and scripture – and maybe even the sermon – touch our hearts, open our minds…….but once we leave this place – does what we heard, what we felt make any difference at all in the way we live?

If there is one line for you to take home from today’s sermon, it is this challenge Jesus gives to all who seek to follow him:

Do not let your fears make you small and secretive….

Jesus did not teach his disciples so they could keep that wisdom, that knowledge of God all to themselves…he didn’t love them just so they would feel good about who they were………
Jesus gave of himself so that we would know how to live as the people of God – and be empowered to do so….

Imagine the temptation those first disciples felt to keep quiet about what Jesus taught them…….Can’t you see them murmuring among themselves, perhaps whenever Jesus slipped away to pray, wondering whether they really had what it takes to go where Jesus was calling them?

How much did they want their lives to change, anyway – was it worth giving up all they had for a promise – a hope? For some deep hunger that Jesus alone seemed to feed…………..?

Ultimately, though, how could they keep all Jesus had given them – the wisdom, the healing, the trust, the love – how could they keep it to themselves?

That’s the question at the heart of all this, isn’t it?

Like the disciples, we have been given a glimpse of good news – of grace – and Jesus calls us – as he calls all who follow him – to proclaim it from the housetops and wherever and however we can….

One evening this past week, the All Saints Fellowship gathered for Eucharist and a potluck supper, and as we sat in the chapel, all the noise of the street – the blaring car radios and squealing brakes, the conversations and laughing and shouting – broke into our quiet prayer, almost as if there weren’t any walls between us and them……………….

…..and I kept wondering “what difference does it make to these people, living their lives all around us, that we are here?”………….

Is our presence too quiet and private – our faith too small and secret?

Sometimes it is………..Sometimes we are afraid to speak what we believe, to live what we know to be right….to risk our comfort, give up one more moment of our valuable time or one more dollar of our hard earned money….

And in those times when we find ourselves holding back, holding in – remember that Jesus calls us out and promises us that we need not be afraid, because we will be given all that we need to teach and heal, love and serve in his name….

Sometimes, though, our faith shines with brightness and power – and our witness is strong and clear: Children in this neighborhood know All Saints is a safe place, residents have seen us walk these streets in prayer and fellowship, people without homes have found rest here, our rainbow flag proclaims that all are welcome to join us at Christ’s table….

We can not know all that our faith will ask of us…
……we can not know if taking seriously Jesus’ command to “follow me” will cause division with those we love or if we will have the courage to live and forgive as he did….

This we do know: if we give into fear and hide our faith so carefully that no one ever knows we belong to God, we lose our lives…..

…but when we step out in faith, when we carry Jesus’ word of justice and compassion and peace into the world, we will find our lives – and we will be deeply blessed.

May it be always so…
Amen……..

 

Chutzpah and the Journey of Faith

The long Biblical journey from the beginning of Creation, to God’s visit with Abraham and Sarah in our first reading, to Jesus instructing his disciples in our gospel, to the present moment, is fundamentally about attitudes—God’s and ours. One such attitude spills out as laughter. For example, who of us could possibly have predicted the giant tree sloth, or the blue-footed booby, or the duck-billed platypus coming along in the creative and evolutionary symphony composed by God?  Now those were a surprise, and pretty funny!  God has a sense of humor. And, who would have guessed that God would have told Abraham, who was one hundred years old at the time, that at the age of 90 his wife Sarah was going to have a baby and that that lineage would be the beginning of the people of Israel, and would eventually include one Jesus of Nazareth?  You don’t think that’s funny?  Well, Abraham earlier [Genesis 17:17] and Sarah in our reading today [Genesis 18:8f] came close to knocking themselves out in laughter when they got that news!  And there’s more, for when God asked Sarah about her reaction, she denied that she had laughed, I guess figuring God wouldn’t like that.  “No but you did laugh,” God replies back. Far from holding their laughter against them, instead God tells them that their baby is going to be a boy, and that God wants them to name him Isaac. Isaac—or Itzhak—by the way, is the Hebrew word for “laughter.”  So why did they laugh?  They laughed because, in the words of Frederick Buechner,

“they knew only a fool would believe that a woman with one foot in the grave was soon going to have her other foot in the maternity ward.  They laughed at the perplexing and absurd idea of being told they would have a child at their age.  And they laughed because God expected them to believe it.  They laughed because they half-believed it themselves.  They laughed because laughing felt better than crying.  And they laughed because if by some crazy chance it just happened to come true, they would really have something to laugh about, and in the meanwhile it helped keep them going.” 

In other words, their laughter was an attitude of healthy skepticism and astonishment--“a baby? Yeah, right!” And their laughter was an attitude of gutsy audacity—chutzpah—an attitude of energy and courage, resilience and even enthusiasm that help them get through such a confusing and challenging moment. Chutzpah, along with attentiveness and openness, are essential elements of faith or at least the prelude to faith, with the moral, “When in doubt, laugh!” Such attitudes are choices we make to move forward in life in spite of difficult, perplexing or even overwhelming circumstances, and in spite of more negative attitudes that often prevail in those situations.

Faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” says the letter to the Hebrews (11:1).  Faith is laughter at the promise of a child called “Laughter” (-Itzhak).  Faith is laughter at the promise of God turning all things to good and enlisting us in that endeavor.

Laughter as gutsy audacity—chutzpah--is so important that in the Jewish tradition, they have even institutionalized it into a holiday: the festival of Purim, according to Rabbi Lawrence Kushner.  Purim celebrates the foiling of enemies as the Biblical story of Esther is reenacted during the Purim observance. But Purim is more, for it involves inviting laughter by dressing up like the enemy.  Kushner adds that when the Purim play is over, all the actors get applause; but Haman, the villain in the story of Esther, gets the most applause. For access to the part of ourselves that can dress up and then laugh at our enemies through such rituals as Purim reminds everyone that we are as human as our enemies.  And only our ability to laugh at ourselves keeps us sane and from becoming completely like them.  And thus, according to another Jewish tradition, after the Messiah comes, observance of all the holidays will be ended, except the day when we laugh at our enemies and ourselves. 

“God who sits in the heavens laughs” states the second psalm (2:4).  God catches us by surprise. For who could have seen the sloth, the blue-footed booby, or the platypus coming along?  Or who would have guessed that God would bless Sarah and Abraham with a baby at their great age. Our laughter sometimes results from astonished delight at the sheer unexpectedness of things. I certainly encounter this as a priest.  For example, it seems ironic, but some of the best humor in liturgy happens at funerals!  I have done quite a few funerals—nearly 800--and surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, there has been much humor even in the saddest moments, in the shared stories of family and friends.  In fact, laughter at sad times does more than just relieve tension; it initiates real healing, builds real resilience.

As Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “Humor is concerned with the immediate incongruities of life and faith with the ultimate ones.  Humor is, in fact, a prelude to and a part of faith, and laughter is the beginning of prayer.  In the holy of holies, laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humor is fulfilled by faith.”  The person of faith is characterized by laughter in the book of Proverbs where it says, “strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come” (31:25).

So yes, Sarah laughed an honest and gutsy laugh. And then she went forward boldly and gave birth, as she and Abraham went past the available facts, believing the impossible, making the evidence change—thus becoming the parents of a child called laughter; and a whole new movement in human history began.

Yet of course, as Buechner points out, we humans also cry, because if we have the heart to see it, the world we see is in a thousand ways heartbreaking.  Only the heartless can look at the world unmoved, and that is presumably why Jesus says in Luke’s gospel, “Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep,” referring to a laughter of callousness and indifference, a very different attitude than I’ve been describing.  We can laugh like that only if we turn our back on the suffering and need of the world; and then the time for weeping comes when we see the suffering and need too late to do anything about them.

So what then of God’s laughter and all the unspeakable or tragic things—the suicide, the overdose, the devastation we hear daily of earthquake, storm, war and famine.  Would I talk about God’s laughter to the refugee still lost in the devastation of her war experience?  No, of course not, but there are other things I wouldn’t talk about either.  Anguish is not healed by crushing its victim under the weight of every truth you know.  It is healed or at least lessened by listening, by time and often by giving to the other the sense that you also have lived—and still live—without the answers.  The silence of God, at first so hard to bear, can become the most satisfying answer, a gracious comfort.  So, God does not laugh at our pain; God’s laughter is its resolution.  With God all things are possible, and the blundering, partial and tragic character of who we are and what we do or leave undone does not surprise or dismay God.  But that does surprise and dismay us.  That good and surprising news we hear today is that the God who brought new life out of Sarah and Abraham, the same God who had the last laugh in raising Jesus from the dead and promises the same for all of us, is not baffled by our problems and limitations.  God is working out the details of an eternal friendship with each and all of us in spite of all our capacity to fail and fall and die.  God is waiting for us to catch on to that.  In this sense, God is a God who laughs. 

And therefore Jesus also says in Luke’s gospel, “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”  That means not just that you shall laugh when the time comes but that you can laugh a little even now in the midst of the weeping because you know that the time is coming.  All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the ending will be a happy ending.  That is what the laughter is about.  It is the laughter of faith.  It is the divine comedy. I invite you to listen to what Dante Alighieri reported in his sublime poem The Divine Comedy written some 700 years ago.  He wrote that after he had made the tortuous ascent from hell and had drawn close to the celestial sphere, he suddenly heard a sound he had never heard before.  Stopping and listening, he writes, “It sounded like the laughter of the universe.”

So listen carefully, and you may hear a gentle murmur, ethereal yet earthly, angelic yet quite human.  It may sound like the laughter of eight-year-olds doing cartwheels, or a friend savoring a special letter, or a person chuckling at the antics of a grandchild.  Such holy laughter—such chutzpah--is a gift of God.  It is the Holy Spirit’s and the human spirit’s last best defense against evil, pointlessness and despair.

Notes:

So, today we welcome our choir alumni and thank them for their gifts to the parish, we recognize our present choristers as they complete another year of service, and look forward to their trip to England in August.  And today, we will take time after the service to share in some conversation about our worship life, and consider what the evolving future of our worship might be.

And I know you’re looking forward to a nice, long sermon on justification by faith.  That’s what our readings are about today, the fact that God’s deepest desire is to be in relationship with us, and that that relationship is the basis of our human freedom.  We can do nothing to earn God’s love, but when we respond and return that love as best we are able, we are free to risk and fail and risk again in the service of love and truth and beauty.  In faith, law, rather than enslaving us, is our partner in exploration, our guide and gift.

Since we are celebrating our choirs this morning, consider the possibility that music may help us understand this fundamental mystery of faith.  Music and faith both begin with the passing on of a discipline, with rules that arise out of a larger commitment to music and to learning.  If we are singers, we slowly learn to play our vocal instrument.  We learn to hear intervals and scales; we learn to hear a tone and repeat it.  We learn to shape our tone, we learn to blend our voices with those of others.  We learn the complexities of rhythm and interlocking melodies.  We learn to read music.  If we are lucky, our teachers are loving and patient, but very, very demanding.  Try it again until you are on pitch, listen for the interval.  Listen to the other members of the chorus; you cannot learn to sing until you learn to listen.

Isn’t this the way we learn our faith?  Patient and loving teachers help us learn the stories, they help us find our own experience in those stories.  They teach us to pray, they teach us to sit in silence and listen for the nudgings, the whisperings, the sighing breath of God.  And we learn to hear, slowly.  We learn the difference between the empty silence of despair and the pregnant silence of the Advent of the Incarnation.  We learn the broad complexities of faith lived out in community.   We learn to listen to each other, we learn to disagree in love, we learn to listen beyond the anger to the fear and the hope beneath.  We learn to listen to our own fear as we learn to trust the truth we know and as we learn to move beyond the walls of the church to touch the hand of Christ in the need of the world. 

There is a reason why even the most accomplished musicians continue their instruction throughout their lives.  There is no end to the learning, there is no end to the perfecting of our instrument.  But over time our loving teacher helps us hear our own voice emerging from all those years of repeated scales.  We begin to trust our voice, we begin to experiment and interpret.  We take on harder material and seek its meaning for us.

And there is a reason why even the most mature and faithful person continues in work with a spiritual director, with a confessor, with a therapist.  The life of faith is never perfected.  But as we grow, as we become more aware of the ways in which our soul and spirit live and react and try to fool us and cheat us, we learn trust and humility.  As we learn to recognize the urgings of God in the midst of the noise of our lives we learn to rest in the silence of our creator.  As we learn to live in community and to live out justice with our neighbors, we learn to be the person whom God loves and God calls into being.  We learn that we have a unique voice and that God loves to hear that voice, loves to see us try new things, take risks.  God even loves to see us fail, because that is how we learn; and God does not care so much about our successes as God loves to see us stretch and grow and love and be transformed and to be the instruments of peace and transformation.

Musicians and God’s faithful people learn the rules, and grow and try new things precisely so that we will reach the point where we will break the rules, where we will see so far into the possibilities of the future that we will break rules and offend all the right thinking people around us.  What did the lovers of plainchant think of Bach; or the lovers of Bach think of Beethoven, or the lovers of Beethoven think of Britten and Barber and Thompson and Rorem and Glass and Dizzy Gillespie and Ornette Coleman and Lennon and McCartney and Bela Fleck and David Grissman?  I learn the rules in order to break the rules.  The freedom comes as we internalize the rules and the culture that goes with them, and make them our own.  I improvise and I risk and I fly.

It is the same with faith.  God’s desire for us is that we be so deeply grounded in the disciplines of our faith and religion that we improvise, we find our voice, we try new things, we discover newer and deeper realities, we rediscover ancient truth in new guises.

If we are truly grounded and truly free, if we know how deeply we are loved, we may even be able to love so deeply that like the Incarnate Word of God we risk everything and we lose our life and our world is made new.  We improvise and we risk and we fly.

Justification by faith is not an intellectual exercise or a dead dogma.  It is the fundamental reality of our life in God and our life in the world.  It is the truth of our freedom, and as we give thanks for our music and as we consider our worship may we rejoice in that freedom and give thanks.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

AMEN

Practice Prayerful Persistence

Today’s reading from Matthew is the conclusion of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. He calls on his hearers to base their words and deeds in sync with each other, built on the solid foundation of relationship with God. And this foundation of relationship with God is grounded on the practice of prayerful persistence. It’s hard to both talk the talk and walk the walk without some compass. It’s hard to obey when you can’t listen. It’s hard to dig deep through sifting sand until you find a solid foundation if you can’t find the strength from within. We need the persistent practice of prayer and action to seek and struggle and trust, knowing that God is forever with us. But first let’s acknowledge Frederick Buechner’s helpful distinction between prayerful persistence and manipulative magic, which goes something like this. Magic is saying Abracadabra and pulling the rabbit out of the hat. Magic is having a little figure of Jesus on our dashboards to prevent accidents. Magic is going to church so that we and all those we love will be safe, and go to heaven. Magic is using that specially advertised toothpaste so everyone will love you. Magic is the technique of controlling unseen powers, and will always work if you do it by the book. In other words, magic is manipulation and says, “My will be done.”

Prayer, on the other hand, is an openness and persistence which says “Thy will and no other be done.” Maybe prayer will be answered and maybe it won’t, at least not the way you want nor when you want, and maybe not at all. Even if you do it by the book, prayer does not always work—Jesus stated this when he said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 7:21). Jesus then went on to say that the way to enter the Kingdom of Heaven is to do the will of his Father. History is permeated with claims that the church is certain just what that will is—but when that has happened the church has most often been bluffing. And not just the church, of course, but those within every religious or political tradition who have claimed with certainty to know God’s will, have for the most part been bluffing. Remember, magic’s favorite tactic is the bluff. Magic is always sure and always bluffing. So, if simplistic answers, narrow minded security and false certainty are what you’re after, try magic. But if wrestling with angels (and demons)—in other words, heartfelt questioning, risk and truth—are more what you’re after, try prayer.

According to Jesus, by far the most important thing about praying is not the words said, nor the physical posture of praying, nor where you pray, but rather, doggedly keeping at it and acting upon it. The images Jesus uses to explain this are all rather comic, as though he thought it was rather comic to have to explain it at all. In a tongue-in-cheek style, Jesus uses some un-caring examples of caring behavior, not to insinuate that prayer is about dragging grudging concessions from some Scrooge-like God. Rather, these parable examples reveal a God whose love and mercy are ever greater than our limitations and who gives in ways that go beyond our desires and even our needs. So, Jesus tells a parable about “a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people” and a poor widow whose only means of obtaining justice was her persistence [Luke 18:1-8]. The widow obtains a just decision from the judge out of his fear that she may finish him off completely with her obstinacy. Thus good comes out of a bad motive—the judge just wants to be rid of her perpetual nagging and wants to be left in peace—and so exercises justice. Or, like the man in another of Jesus’ parables who shamelessly pesters his neighbor late at night, seeking bread for a guest (Luke 11:5-8), we too are to persist in praying, like a dog worrying a bone. And so God will all the more come to those who cry to him, even if their persistence and patience are put to the test. If a lot of human interaction is getting others to do the right things even for the wrong reasons, then how much more will God respond with a motive that seeks only our deepest well-being.

But you may be thinking that all this seems a bit beneath our sophistication about prayer. After all, God is God. Who are we to badger God? God already knows all about us and our needs. We should rather surrender ourselves to the inscrutable will of God and be willing to receive whatever God sends (or refuses to send)—right? God is immutable, and cannot be changed by our incessant prayers, right? Oh yeah? Well I’ve just described a belief called stoicism, plain and simple—a philosophy quite different than what we actually find in our Scriptures. Jesus, and the rest of the Bible with him, teach prayer as persistence, as “jawboning,” as my Kentucky relatives would call it. Look at the story in Genesis of Jacob wrestling with the angel all night, his hip thrown out of joint, and yet still holding on and demanding, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” The angel in essence says “uncle” and blesses him (Genesis 32:22-31). Look also at the marvelous prayer in Genesis 18 (vv. 20-33) of Abraham haggling with God, or the even more remarkable prayer in Exodus 32 in which Moses, by sheer persistence, makes God repent. In all these accounts, God appears to want relationship, not unapproachable authority or power. God, it seems, is creating history, repairing the world with us, alongside us, through us; and therefore God wants, even needs, and cannot do without, our input. The limp passivity of what so often passes as Christian prayer is not how prayer is prayed or described in the Bible. Rather, when we pray, whether in a quiet and calm place, or in a loud and busy place, and with whatever words we use or don’t use, we are called to be energized beings staking everything on God’s future for the world and our lives. As the English mystic Julian of Norwich put it, “Without God, we cannot; and without us, God will not.”

So be persistent, keep it up, don’t lose heart, Jesus says. Pray constantly, St. Paul says, not because you have to beat a path to God’s door before God will open it, but because as Buechner puts it, until you beat the path maybe there’s no way of getting to your door. You see, the door God enters is your door, which is often locked from the inside.

Yet, having said this, what about the prayer for protection for our children as they are out driving or for our troops in combat or for loved ones as they face life-threatening illnesses—and then, in spite of our praying, we find our worst fears being realized? Well, God’s silence is sometimes stunning, especially for those of us who talk a lot. We think perhaps that we can solve the problem, avert the crisis, make sense of or even reverse the tragedy by making more noise ourselves. But it is only when we stop talking and listen that the silence can teach us anything, namely, that our disillusionment with God is sometimes not a bad thing. Just take that word apart and you can hear what it really means: dis-illusion-ment. The loss of illusion. The end of make believe. The end of magic—the beginning of prayer. The end of loose sand, the beginning of bedrock. To learn that God’s protection and intervention are not something we can manipulate, and that God’s job is not to reward our persistence or devotion, and that God’s agenda may in fact be quite different from our own. These are hard and sometimes disillusioning lessons. Here’s where prayer is clearly not magic.

So then, what about when the prayer in all its persistence goes unanswered? Who knows? Just keep at it, Jesus says, like the stubborn widow or the persistent neighbor. Even if the loved one dies and your worst fears are realized, keep on beating the path through your door to God, because, as Buechner states,
“the one thing you can be sure of is that down the path you beat with even your most [stumbling] and halting prayer, the God you call upon will [be there]. And even if [God] does not bring you the answer you want, [nor the way you want it, nor when you want it—God] will bring you [God] Himself…[Herself]. And maybe at the secret heart of all our prayers, that is what we are really praying for.”

So keep at it, keep speaking into the silence, and even if nothing comes, speak again and then again. And then, listen. Listen for the understanding—which is not the same as an answer—that God is doing for you better things than you can ask or imagine, than you can desire or pray for; and, that when clinging to magic ends, God begins. And so Julian of Norwich prayed the following:
“God of your goodness, give [us] yourself, for you are enough to [us]; and [we] cannot ask for anything that is less that would be full worship of you. And if [we] ask anything that is less, [we] will forever be left wanting, for in you only have [we] all.”

For when God gives us God’s very presence, we feel that in the strength and courage to persevere, as well as in the power that prepares us for persistent action. As Rabbi Ferdinand Isserman wrote:
“Prayer invites God's presence to suffuse our spirits, God's will to prevail in our lives. Prayer might not bring water to parched fields, nor mend a broken bridge, nor rebuild a ruined city. But prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, rebuild a weakened will. Who rise from prayer better persons, their prayer is answered.”

And finally, persistence in prayer strengthens for perseverance in action. Prayer, in whatever form it takes, is an essential discipline of the journey of faith and is the loving invitation from God into the most important of relationships, so that we can have the strength and courage to work this out in all arenas of our lives. Prayer and all the other ways to act in God’s presence and purpose, personally and publicly, must be held together. They are not options. To bend the old Jewish adage a bit: Pray as if everything depended on God [so as to] Act as if everything depended on you.  Or as W. E. B. Du Bois stated:
"The prayer of our souls is a petition for persistence; not for the one good deed, or single thought, but deed on deed, and thought on thought, until day calling unto day shall make a life worth living."         Amen

Notes:

Thankfulness: Our Saving Grace

In a previous parish, I regularly visited a man and his wife in their apartment. He had been in bed since 1945, as a result of injuries he sustained during the Second World War. That man had such a spirit of gratitude—and so did his wife who looked after him all these years. I was amazed at that, especially given the difficult circumstances they faced. Gratitude is a choice, an attitude, a gift itself which, as an element of our faith, keeps our views about life in all its complications fresher and clearer. Gratitude, thanksgiving is the fountain of youth of the spiritual life—it keeps life from becoming shopworn, hobbled by anxiety, or taken for granted. Gratitude is the element of faith that acknowledges God’s grace, God’s abundance, God’s gifts of life and love and support--each day of our life, even in difficult and desperate situations. Thankfulness in all circumstances is our saving grace.

“Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks in all circumstances,” St. Paul says. Give thanks in all circumstances and show that thankfulness in “pouring yourself out for the hungry and satisfying the desires of the afflicted,” the prophet Isaiah says. Well, all this is easier said than done. What prevents many of us from being thankful, from living lives full of gratitude, and from sharing all of who we are and what we have in thanksgiving?

Well, Jesus gives us an insight into this in our gospel reading by suggesting that we compare ourselves--not to people who are worse off than we are so as to feel a bit more gratitude in our own circumstances; but rather, he suggests that we compare ourselves with the birds of the air. The birds of the air? Now when I’ve heard this passage before I have generally wanted to argue, not only for myself but also for the whole worried world. “Yes, but…” That is what I wanted to say. “Yes, that is a lovely passage and I really do believe it on some level, but birds do not have bills to pay, nor do they have children that have to be fed, diapered, educated and nurtured for many, many years. Yes, God will provide, but meanwhile there are people close by sleeping between cardboard sheets and eating out of garbage cans who seem to have fallen between the cracks of this passage. And food riots are breaking out in poor nations around the globe; and more than 850 million people suffer from hunger every day in this world. What about them? Okay, but let’s look at the birds of the air and ourselves for a moment as Jesus suggests.

Birds are animals bound up in millennia-old gene pools that are rich in instinct. Animals do most things by instinct. We humans, on the other hand, are instinctually impoverished—instead we are bound to meaning. Instead of doing things by instinct we have to have reasons to motivate us to do many things. There has to be some meaning that moves us to act. We have to have some meaning, or reason even to get up in the morning, or to go to work, or to come to church or whatever. And because we are bound to meaning, rather than instinct, we often invent meaning; we perceive wants and needs that give us the motivation to act in our daily lives. Now a lot of that meaning comes from others and their reasons, interests and wants, their expectations and needs and sanctions—kind of like the fellow who wanted to sleep in one morning, but his wife nudges him and says, “Come on, you’ve got to get up.” He replies, “No, no I want to sleep in!” But she nudges him again and says “C’mon it’s Sunday, you have to get up.” He replies, “No, please just let me sleep in!” But she persists and says, “But you have to go to church.” Again he just says, “O, please let me sleep in!” Whereby she shouts, “Now come on—you’re the Rector!”

Well, whether prodded from within or without, we get up in the morning and we live the rest of our days and lives by endowing certain actions with meaning or purpose for us. In all this, our emotions, feelings, and imagination play important roles in wrapping around certain actions and certain people and certain goals, providing a driving vitality to engage in some things, and to refuse others.

Fear and anxiety are very potent feelings that provide extra drive to act or refuse to act. Fears of tangible things like hunger, homelessness, sickness, and pain motivate us. And anxieties of death, loneliness, meaninglessness, and condemnation are even deeper fears of intangible things that motivate other behavior. Fears and anxieties are rarely expressed directly. Rather, they provide an extra motivating force behind many of our drives, our worries, our occupations, and pre-occupations. I’m one of those who is not only occupied a lot, but is also pre-occupied, which basically means that I think, and fret, and worry, and pray, and am busy with situations before I’m even directly occupied with them. I can identify with the characters in the New Yorker cartoon, where the man says to his spouse, “Let’s go somewhere fun, and not really experience it.”

A number of years ago, I worked in Waterbury, Connecticut for forty-five churches. It was an intense job and I worried about it while I was on the job and also when I was supposedly off the job. Working long hours, and often bringing home grant proposals and other work, I recall one evening my then four year-old daughter came up to me and asked, “Are you still my daddy?”—ugghhh, that hit me right in the heart. We tend to wrap too much meaning around certain things and take too much responsibility for those things; and that prevents us from fully appreciating other more important people and realities.

Also, exaggerated fears and anxieties that we carry provide the impetus for much of our prejudice, our selfishness and sense of entitlement as well as our pettiness--all of which neatly divide up the world into those who are blessed somehow and those who are not.

I know first hand that fears and anxieties can make many activities and pursuits to be far more important than they really are. Anxieties about what we’re to eat, drink, and wear, and what we are to provide for our loved ones, often make those activities more ultimate pursuits in our lives than they need to be. And even when some of us have the things we think we want, our anxieties can still make our lives unbearable. Our very concern for a happy life makes us unhappy. As Frederick Buechner points out, a whole lot of us use up our whole lives trying to reach the point where we can enjoy the lives that we have almost totally used up. The 127th Psalm describes this way of living as “eating the bread of anxious toil.”

Even when we move beyond ourselves and care about those outside our familiar circles, we often cling to the illusion that some of us are blessed and some of us are not, and that it is our job as those who are blessed to rescue those who are not. We labor under the illusion that our work involves “us” and “them”, with us—the caregivers, the helpers, the lucky—on one side of the counter and them—the clients, the supplicants, the unlucky—on the other. We succumb to the illusion that they can all be saved if only we will work enough hours, find enough money, get enough publicity. Along with this, we may also cling to our own comforts we deem so important, more aware than ever how much they matter to us, and we may try to cut deals with God—that if we are allowed to keep what we have then we will double our efforts on behalf of those who have less than we do. Meanwhile, we may hardly enjoy what we do have for all the guilt it may provoke in us. Shall we cut our own rations to bread and water? Wear sackcloth to work?

When our activities become more ultimate pursuits in our lives than they need to be, then other action, other people and Gods purposes of union and communion of all creation become less important. Here we have a functional definition of idolatry - namely, that we people who are bound to meaning have made some things out to be far more meaningful or confused than they are because of our fears and anxieties.

But Jesus says, “Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them… do not worry, saying ‘What will we eat?… What will we wear?’”

When we forget who we are, our Lord reminds us: we are people, God’s creation who live by the grace of God alone, by trusting in God’s love and by remembering that we are more, far more, than what we consume or wear or where we live. We may care for ourselves and we may care for others, but it is God who cares for us all, far beyond what we can desire or pray or work for. If we remember that, our service to others will be as different as our sense of ourselves. There is not “us” or “them” out there, just us—all of us—lined up on the same side of God’s counter. Some have more than others, but we are all blessed, and are called to bless one another, and to give thanks in all circumstances in one another’s company. And how do we do that? Well, we can and must serve the God who feeds and clothes and shelters by doing that ourselves as God’s hands and feet on earth, yet now with the knowledge that it is God who provides, and in whose household there is plenty—for the birds of the air, and for every one.

Our gospel dares us to thank God and partake in God with thanksgiving for our whole lives and not just the parts we like. It tells us that life is most livable at an appropriate and realistic level of anxiety. Jesus knew that we cannot get rid of all our fears and anxieties. He knew that we, unlike birds, are bound to meaning, and anxiety, and illusion and therefore also to functional idolatry. “Be not afraid,” is what Jesus is saying here. He is not saying that we must not have fears, because we all do have fears. But he is saying that we don’t have to be our fears, and we don’t have to create or be part of a world in which those fears dominate.

So, this gospel dares us to laugh at our worrisome selves whatever our circumstances. For half of us spend our lives worrying about what we do have, and the rest of us, about what we do not have, while the birds of the air do not worry at all. O yes, our God is a God of justice, make no mistake, but in the words of Deuteronomy [8:3], “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” Or as Jesus stated today, “strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

True Evangelism in the Name of the Trinity

Today is Trinity Sunday – not a time to restate a complicated doctrine, but rather, to celebrate the Living God who creates, redeems and sanctifies all of life. God is the One who is paradoxically beyond us, among us, and also within us – yet all the while the One and same power of life and love. This God we experience as unknowable, the incomprehensible mystery beyond our knowledge. Yet we also experience this same God as well known through the life, death and resurrected life of Jesus. And we experience the same God as infinitely knowable, as the Spirit of God, who is as close to us as our very God-given breath. And so, we have a Trinity. This is the God of our experience “in whom we live and move and have our being,” not some complicated speculation.

Today, we encounter this Trinity--this divine paradoxical mystery—in what’s often called the Great Commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…” (Matthew 28:19). So, today’s gospel reading is also about evangelism, which continues to be one of the most misused and misunderstood terms in our church’s vocabulary. We know it means different things to different people depending on their enthusiasm and their interpretation of what it is to share the gospel—the good news of Jesus Christ.

That’s not all bad, because we each can do evangelism in different ways. For some, this means the strict dictionary definition of “the winning or revival of personal commitments to Christ.” For others, it means church growth. For still others, it means making the church community more inclusive and more representative of the wider community. For yet others, it means being the hands and feet of Jesus in the world, working for healing, justice, and peace, in co-mission--joining Christ’s mission to build the bonds of our common humanity more than imposing a Christianity. For a lot of us, it’s a combination of these.

I’m sure there were diverse interpretations of the mission on which they were being sent, among these disciples sent out by Jesus. And, I am sure, not each of them handled their assignment in quite the same way. I also suspect that some of the disciples weren’t just doubtful, but also were anxious, standing before Jesus and being commissioned to such a vast undertaking. They were not being sent out to make a few social calls to people who would welcome them and wine and dine them, or afford them some “red carpet” treatment. Rather, they were being sent out, as Jesus stated earlier [Matthew 10:16; cf. Luke 10:3], as “lambs in the midst of wolves.”

Jesus had made it very clear that not everyone would have the welcome mat out for them. He told them that in some places they would be rejected. But that was all right too, because he gave them specific instructions on how to handle both acceptance and rejection [Matthew 10:5-15; Mark 6:6-13; Luke 10:1-20].

According to the gospels, there is no evidence that the disciples were chosen and sent out by Jesus because they were more articulate or smart or morally upright than other people. In fact the gospels suggest over and over that, as Frederick Buechner put it, "they were continually missing the point, jockeying for position, and when the chips were down, interested in nothing so much as saving their own skins. Their sole qualification seems to have been their initial willingness to rise to their feet when Jesus said, 'Follow me.'"

Also, there is no evidence that Jesus spent much time teaching his disciples how to evangelize, or how to preach, teach or baptize--or how to heal or prophesy. What Jesus did teach them was how to pray ("Our Father, who art in heaven..."), and how to pack lightly. Therefore the way they were to proceed was not with a great tool box of techniques or dogma, nor with stacks of seminary notes, nor with an overload of personal baggage. Rather, they were called simply to follow, to show up, to be sent out and then to improvise. They were to recognize the divine in themselves and in others, to recognize their companionship with Jesus even when he was not there with them, and to recognize their complete reliance on God and their need to connect with others in right relationship.

Looking at this Biblical evidence, I can say that that it consoles me and maybe some of you as fellow disciples, because I, we, are always a little unqualified, never quite prepared. And we are reminded that it is Jesus' ministry and not just our own to which we are called through the Holy Spirit. I’m also reminded of the blockages and stumbling blocks that I carry with me which may prevent others’ receiving a message that I am trying to carry. One such obstacle to communicating the Good News can be our use of less than sensitive communication – communication that may clutter or counter the very love of God in Christ we’re trying to communicate.

Our Christian story is a compelling one, but as Sam Portaro points out, it is a family story. Much that is good and even holy has come from sharing this story within, and from, our own Christian family. Portaro states, however, that our greatest failing and our greatest positive challenge, may be to turn our story from a monologue with the wider world to a genuine dialogue, first, amongst different branches within, and then, with those beyond the Christian family. When Christians take the opportunity to share with those who do not espouse their faith and spiritual worldview, we tend to launch defensively – and at times offensively – into our story. We tend to use esoteric or insider vocabulary, and a lot of other clutter that has been developed within the family for talking about these things, which can have the effect of excluding others and giving them the unintended perception that we are arrogant, and feel superior to them. Moreover, we who have heard the story many times have not always listened attentively; and we sometimes garble and distort our story when we pass it along.

A vast and growing number of people do not know our story, and neither do we know theirs. A challenge for all of us is to learn our story well and become more secure in our own faith journey and tradition and its broad embrace. In that process we can learn new ways of telling our story--centered in the Love of God in Christ and our common humanity--not with the intent to change, “complete” or convert their story into ours, but with an honest and deep appreciation for the truth of their experience, thus honoring their family, as it were. Our shared challenge--ours and theirs--is to listen and understand. And when we find some common ground, we will then discover we are on holy ground. So then, when we set about “building community” and “working for inclusivity,” we need to be careful not to act as though ours is the only family and the only story, and that our mission is to make everyone like us. We affirm a Creed that states that we all originate from one God—a God who creates all, redeems all and sustains all. If we really believe this, then we are already surrounded by community. We do not have to make it; we just have to find ways to understand and relate to it. And we do not have to work for inclusivity; for God already includes us all in one family – “the world house” as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it. We simply need to uncover and rediscover that reality, recognizing in the beauty and the challenges of diversity the intrinsic unity that underlies it, and free ourselves from all that we have been doing to obscure and hide it, and divide it.

As Christians we are summoned and given authority as were the disciples in today’s gospel, to share the Good News by word and deed. I suspect, however, that such good news is often more effectively communicated first by our concerned and attentive listening than by any rush of pious and impassioned preaching or witnessing or serving or baptizing. If evangelism really means sharing the good news, what is more evangelical than the good news that someone cares enough for another simply to listen to him or her? As the Letter of James says, “let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak…[1:19].” Or as St. Francis said, “Preach the Gospel at all times, and when necessary, use words.” It’s amazing how the Holy Spirit can work through our stammering tongues and anxious manner to reach people with the good news of God’s love in Christ. As one of my mentors, retired Massachusetts Bishop Barbara Harris often stated, “The power behind you is greater than the task ahead of you.” As Jesus promised, “remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age [Matthew 28:20].” When we see the evidence of an almighty, loving, merciful God moving in and through us, the awkward moments and the anxious feelings can turn to a calm and joy.

Finally, a word about “success.” This great commission is a challenge to us to move out into the wide world We know that what we do may not always have immediate or even eventual success. But we know, as well, that God does not require us to be successful; God requires only that we be faithful. As his disciples, Jesus wants each and all of us to bear and proclaim the gospel, not necessarily in displays of obvious effect or power, but rather in our own persons and upon the strength of our own character. That we could together and with others build affordable housing, improve our schools, help people help themselves as they seek satisfying work, or simply help mend broken hearts, or start a friendship in church or on the street, or at a shelter—it can be satisfying, even exciting when we return and tell what the Lord is doing beyond us, around us and through us. And our great reward will be in Christ’s promise that our names are “written in heaven.” [Luke 10:20]--not because of our success, rather because of our faithfulness--but even more so, because of God’s grace and mercy. Blessed be God, the Creator, Redeemer and the Giver of life.

During one of our staff meetings a few weeks ago, we were filling Kevin in on the Pentecost traditions at All Saints….…

We told him that everyone is invited to wear red, and we described the lovely dove that flies above our heads at the 10:30 procession, and how the congregation is encircled by people reading the gospel in different languages at 9:00 and 10:30 …………and we told him that on Pentecost, all the clergy wear special Pentecost deedelee boppers like these – symbolizing the tongues of fire that rested on the heads of all the worshippers on that very first Pentecost….

…he didn’t believe me….he should know better by now! I’m thinking maybe we should all wear these on Pentecost next year – and not just the preacher!!

We celebrate Pentecost in all kinds of wonderful ways: with wind chimes and doves and birthday cakes for the church…..with flame colored banners and balloons and bubbles and fans…..I’m not so sure about these deedelee boppers, but I’m hoping they’ll catch on…..

And we do all this to celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit into our lives and world – the fulfillment of the promise Jesus made in last week’s gospel that we  “will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon us…”

The Holy Spirit has come upon us – transformed us and empowered us…and today we claim that power…….and somehow, much though I love all this flame-colored red and the dove and the Gospel read in so many different tongues – and even these silly deedelee boppers, I think we are called to do much better when it comes to showing the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives!

Jesus set us up last week when he promised that we would receive power when the Holy Spirit came upon us – and it is no ordinary power, this power of the Holy Spirit….

The power of the Holy Spirit is the power to forgive, to understand one another, to speak out and claim without fear who we are and whose we are….

It is the power to live and work for justice – to see the face of Christ in each person we meet – not just the ones we know well and like….

It is the power to live the peace of Christ – and if anyone thinks that is an easy thing to do – I assure you, it is far more difficult than it seems…..

Is it any surprise that we try to tame the Holy Spirit?

This is one gift we’re not so sure we want to accept…………
…………just imagine what it might mean for us if we claimed the power of the Holy Spirit and let ourselves be transformed.....................

No wonder the disciples were confused and afraid after those last days with Jesus….no wonder they huddled together, locked away where they thought they would be safe….

They should have known that Jesus had plans for them….that his death was not the end – but a beginning, and that what would come next was up to them….

….they should have known that they could trust Jesus – who loved them more than they could begin to imagine – trust him to give them all they needed for whatever would be asked of them….

It is no wonder that we, too, choose to lock ourselves away, pretending that will keep us safe….We may not hide in an upper room, but there are other ways of locking ourselves away:
….busyness is one…as is fear and worry and a need to control…….as is prejudice and the assumption that we know what is right and that God wants what we want…..

There are times when we just can’t trust enough to claim this power God is giving us, to believe that God will give us all the strength and wisdom and understanding and forgiveness we need to live out the Gospel in our lives and in our world…………

….Pentecost challenges us to let go of whatever holds us back – to unlock the doors, open our hearts and receive the power of the Holy Spirit so that we are empowered to be a living, vibrant, spirit-filled community of faith.

My experience of All Saints Church is that, despite our fears, despite the uncertainties and unknowns and the occasional conflict in values and priorities, the Holy Spirit lives in and breathes through and empowers this community….

We claim this truth in our mission statement, printed on the front of every issue of the Parish, in words we should probably all memorize:

As a visible sign of God’s presence in the world, All Saints church is a welcoming, diverse and urban Christian community, actively proclaiming and living the Gospel.

There is no way we can be all we are called to be without the power of the Holy Spirit…….

And so on this Pentecost Sunday, I ask:
How is the Holy Spirit empowering us – right now, today?

Well, we are here – and that’s not a bad place to start! We are giving up a precious morning – Mother’s Day at that – to come together in one place, sharing prayer and bread and wine and the reconciling peace of Christ….

Simply by being here, we proclaim our desire to be in relationship with God and with God’s people….

We are here – in the heart of Worcester…...many of us drive quite a distance to come to All Saints, and our presence in worship and in the ministry and running of this church reflects our commitment to bring the Gospel to life in this very neighborhood….

The Holy Spirit empowers us to be a community in spite of our diversity…

There is so much that can cause conflict between individuals and within a church, and in a time when we hear of so much division within the Body of Christ, it is a blessing that we are able to remain in communion:
…..not just tolerating our differences, but embracing them with our willingness to listen to one another as we learn what it means to be the people of God….

The Holy Spirit empowers us to grow – not just in numbers or financially, although both are vitally important to the future of this church – but also in our faith, in our relationships with one another and with God, and in our ability and willingness to receive the power of the Holy Spirit………..

Jesus breathed upon his disciples and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit….”

On this day, with each breath, we breathe in that same Holy Spirit…..

Receive it!

Amen!!

 

So, aren’t you glad the transition is over?  Great service, great party Wednesday night you guys!  We installed Kevin and celebrated our ministry, we welcomed the Bishop, and now we can settle down and get back into the groove. 

Transitions are hard, but it sure is a good thing that they only last a year or so.  Transition started when Mark left.  Right?  And it really ended when Kevin was called, but now we know it’s over.  Right?  Oh.  Well, maybe it started when Mark was elected Bishop of you-know-where.  Oh.  Well, maybe it started when Mark told us he had been nominated.  Oh.  Well, maybe it started when he put his name in the process down there.  Oh.  Well, maybe it was the first time it crossed Mark’s mind that he might want to be a bishop.  What, you mean that happened before he ever arrived in Worcester?  When did the transition start, anyway?

But it is over now, right?  Oh, it will be over when Kevin starts making mistakes.  Oh, it will be over when we start noticing the mistakes Kevin makes.  Well, will it be over when we get bored of hearing people talk about transition?  And what do you say crossed Kevin’s mind the other day?

I thought about transitions again when I listened to the story of the Ascension the other day.  It was the first reading today, from Acts.  The disciples were involved in the quintessential leadership transition.  After all, their leader died.  That’s pretty transitional.  But, the story tells us that they woke up that Easter Sunday morning to discover that Jesus had risen from the dead.  He had thought of some things he needed to show them, and some things he needed to tell them.  He needed to be sure they were ready for the transition.

So Jesus hung around for forty days, filling them in.  And on Ascension Day he rose out of their sight in a cloud.  That’s transitional, right?  He’d left, and he’d told them they were going to be a community of Good News and healing and sharing.  He’d said they were going to be a community that was itself the presence of God; they were going to be, in some sense, his own body in the world.  That’s clear, right?  Jesus had ascended, and there they were, looking up into heaven wondering what in the world they were supposed to do now.  Always beware when you see two figures in white robes standing around waiting to talk to you.  Run the other way, because it’s going to shake up your assumptions.  Happy Ascension Day.

Am I the only person around who sometimes feels cheated?  Am I the only person around who sometimes feels like it’s time for things to wrap up and get over with so I can go back to something I can think of as stability?  Any of us with infants who can’t sleep through the night?  With projects at work that, as soon as they end, seem to begin all over again?  Any of us with elderly parents who drive us crazy?  Any of us who think of ourselves as living happily in a settled middle age, only to discover that we are in a, you should pardon the expression, transition, into, God, not old age, late middle age?

Those figures in white robes seem to me to be calling the disciples back from some dream of stability; to be calling them back into the transition from dependency on Jesus to responsibility for the ministry that Jesus carried out.  Get your eyes out of the heavens and back down to earth.  They are calling the disciples into transition from Ascension to Pentecost.  They are calling them back to the day-to-day world of responsibility for the ongoing transitions of the life of the world.  Their first job is to think up a process for replacing Judas in the work of the apostles.  Leadership transition.  As soon as Pentecost is over, they are called into preaching the Gospel, building the Christian community from a Jewish sect into something we might eventually recognize as Church. 

And it is their responsibility, as it is ours, to remember that we are called not only to live the life of Christ in the world, but to die the death of Christ in the world.  Jesus always remembered that his life was a constant transition from life to death, giving of himself so that the Love of God might triumph.  And isn’t that why we avoid transition so passionately, so remorselessly?  We don’t want to be reminded of death.  We don’t want to be reminded that we are not in control of our lives.  Well, I don’t want that, I don’t know about you.  So we pretend that transitions are discreet and finite and that normality is an eternal bright sunshiny day unclouded by a shadow of change, unchilled by the cold wind of death.

Transition never ends.  We are always in a process, moving away from one set of circumstances into an unknown future.  We are always trying to impose endings on our transitions, but it won’t work.  God is calling us into a future that we cannot know, cannot fathom, cannot fully prepare for.  Our job is not to force events into a framework that makes us feel better, it is to be as open and responsive as we can be to the voice of God from the cloud, the cloud that Jesus ascended into. 

People of Worcester, why do you stand there looking up into heaven?  Kevin we are here to stand with you as we move into