Cam Miller

3 Pentecost 2022: Little prophets

June 26, 2022 by Cam Miller

Don’t you just love euphemisms?
Check out that first line of Luke’s Gospel:
”When the days drew near
for him to be received up…”

By “received up” he must have meant
tortured,
stripped naked,
and nailed to a cross.
”Received up” does sound better.

So this little series of dark sayings
is positioned at the hinge of Luke’s gospel
in which Jesus turns away from the rural areas
where he is well known and popular,
toward Jerusalem
where messiahs like him
were a dime a dozen
and ended up as goo on the bottom of a Roman sandal.

Both Matthew and Luke have the sayings
we heard today,
while Mark and John do not.
The theory is
that Matthew and Luke
had a common source of Jesus sayings and stories
that Mark, being the earliest gospel, didn’t have.
Who knows,
but these sayings sure are hard to contend with.

9:59 To another (Jesus) said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”

9:60 But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

9:61 Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.”

9:62 Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

So this strikes me as warrior talk.
That is, the Jesus
who knew there was a target
on his back
and was dodging Roman patrols.
Jesus the warrior
who found himself up against it
and needed to know
that whoever was with him
had his back.
”Forget about those
who have already been killed
and forget about your mom and dad,
because you probably won’t see them again anyway.”

That said, I am not certain
there ever was a Jesus warrior,
but the kind of rhetoric
Luke has coming out of Jesus’ mouth
is not an every day kind of banter.

Let me just say, that I realize I talk about Jesus a lot
from week to week.
I don’t know Jesus any more than you do.
I know you know that
but I just need to say it once in awhile.

I probably read more about Jesus
and Gospel commentary than most of you do,
but talking about what Jesus said
and thought
and did
is an educated guessing game,
and anyone who pretends otherwise
is a delusional lout.
Not to put too fine a point on it.

That said, I’m going to talk about Jesus.

Okay, here is my take on today’s gospel.
The Jewish primal narrative
almost from day one,
was torn apart by dueling traditions:
the purists
and the prophets.
Jesus was a prophet.

Purists — represented by the priestly class —
saw the world
as a set of god-given rules.
Keep those rules and all is well.
Break the rules and all is lost.
When the rules were broken
then there were more rules
for repairing the fracture.
Every offense had a prescription
and every prescription
had a secondary solution.
It was a tightly constructed world,
built like interlocking Lego’s with a hierarchy of rules.

The prophetic tradition
saw the world differently.
The prophetic vision was of a human landscape
that operates within a standard of equality,
where goods and services should be
distributed evenly,
and the good guys lead
while the bad guys get punished
and then reformed.

The prophetic
can be infected with a purity virus also,
but often the very rigidity of the purity faction
acts as its own corrective.

Jesus the prophet, was a peasant.
He was impoverished by circumstance not by choice.
That makes a huge difference.

We are told by the Gospel of Mark that
Jesus lived in Capernaum.
He had a house there,
and he likely had some kind of business
in his house,
at least before he became a preacher.
Jesus also had some friends with more means
than he had, friends
who funded his public ministry.

Lazarus, Martha and Mary,
and perhaps others
must have provided capital
to supplement whatever collections
were taken at sermons.
We don’t often think about
how Jesus was funded
but it is worth thinking about.

As you may remember,
I spent a little over a decade
as a regular visitor to El Salvador.
On one of my visits
I went to a Church with over 150,000 members.

The pastor and his son, who was a co-pastor,
held ten services each weekend,
each service with about 10,000 people in attendance.
All along the streets
on every side of the compound
are vendors selling food,
beverages, and clothing
from carts and booths.
The market is not there during the week
as it is a shaded residential neighborhood.
But on the weekend
it becomes a crammed and jammed
mishmash of commercial enterprise.

The pastors showed us the church’s spreadsheet
for the month of June,
and each week
the collection was $70-100,000 dollars.
That is roughly five million dollars a year
collected from extremely poor people.
Attending one of their services,
I witnessed people putting quarters in the baskets.

Five million dollars…
a few quarters and dollars at a time!
When Jesus drew a crowd
his disciples also probably passed the hat.
I wish we could get a quarter every time
someone visits our website,
Facebook page, or YouTube channel!

Jesus is so often depicted
as a sweet, lamb-holding
shepherd
who wandered through this world
healing, and making nice
to everyone he met.
A kind of haphazard ministry
that ended up with him mistakenly crucified.
Not likely.

He was an organizer.
He was strategic.
He was a reformer with an agenda
and probably had some lofty goals.
He was also notorious
for breaking purity rules.

It is hard to imagine Jesus dining
with a Roman collaborator one day –
a tax collector who made his money
demanding imperial taxes,
and extorting extra for himself –
and the next day
rebuking a would-be follower
for wanting to say good bye to his parents.
I am betting that was Luke’s editorial bias —
but I could be wrong.

But herein lies the problem for us.
Jesus becomes a purity figure
even though he was a prophet.

Jesus is a huge canvass
upon which we project
our own desires
beliefs
and hopes.
Whether it is Luke’s projection
of a militant-healer
or my projection
of a reform-minded organizer,
or Paul’s projection
of an eternal Christ-figure
or someone else’s standard bearer
for moral purity,
we do not get to know
the original Jesus.

When it comes to Jesus
there is no purity.
Within Christianity
the purity parties have captured Jesus
and imprisoned him under glass,
so that he is now
the litmus test of purity
and divine acceptance.

Meanwhile, Jesus’ prophetic vision
languishes in domesticated Christian churches
that have become the pillars of class and culture,
or purveyors of American Nationalism.

Too often when America looks at Jesus
in the 21st Century, it sees itself
and its own aspirations.
It does not see the prophet,
and instead sees the silhouette
of it own standard for purity.

It does not hear a vision of equitable distribution,
it hears a justification for individuality
and a prosecutor for private property
and gun ownership.
If I were to tell you that Jesus
was in fact, an evangelist of basketball
and a passionate partisan of the Boston Celtics,
you would rightly dismiss it as bunk.
And yet, the Jesus we hear
in the public square these days
is as ridiculous
and a lot more dangerous.

Whatever Jesus we want to espouse,
needs to be reconciled
with the soil within in which Jesus is rooted.
Standing alongside Jesus
is an ancient vision
born on Mt. Sinai,
handed down from Moses and Joshua,
to Elijah and Elisha,
to Ruth and Naomi,
to Elizabeth and Mary,
to Peter and Paul…
and all the way down
to Dietrich Bonhoeffer
and from Bonhoeffer to Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is a vision
to be debated, interpreted,
argued and shaped over time,
in every time.
It is not a vision to be prescribed
or force-fitted
or purified.

So where does that leave us?

Obviously, if you asked someone else
you would get a different response
than the one I have.
My take is this:
While I wouldn’t go so far as to say
the concerns of the purity gang
are irrelevant and retrograde…
I will say
that we are not
a purity institution.
Not if we hold Jesus
as the central teacher
of our movement.

Rather, we are meant to be
a prophetic movement.
But that is a pretty big umbrella
and doesn’t narrow it down too much.

One of the questions
we face as a spiritual community
is what kind of spiritual community are we?
I am guessing,
based on my experience with you,
that we do not have a lot of difficulty
choosing between
the purity faction
and the prophetic tradition.
But it is the next step we need to take.

And we will be taking that step this summer
for those of you who are part of the Geneva community.
The vestry is gearing up
for a mission development retreat
and inviting the whole congregation
to take part.
Date to be announced.

What kind of prophetic community are we?

We have been using three separate tag lines
the past seven years, none of which
were voiced by the whole community.

One is, “open, inclusive, and challenging.”
Another has been to say,
”We are a spiritual community in the tradition
of the Episcopal Church.”
And finally, on our windows, we declare
that Trinity Place is “an open space for growth, healing, wellness, and the arts.”

Clearly we are a hybrid of some kind,
a new creature on the evolutionary tree
of the Jesus movement.
But what kind?
What are our core values?
What do we name
as the most important things we do
or aim to do?
What would diminish us
beyond recognition
if we could not do it?

These are questions
every community, and certainly
every spiritual community,
must ask itself
in every new generation.
We are that new generation
in the life of Trinity Church Geneva.

Unlike Luke, I believe we are allowed
to turn our faces back
and remember
even as we move forward with the plough —
digging up and planting the future.

I also believe we can bury our dead
and grieve them too,
while still being faithful
to our newness.

And I do believe we can go home
and say good bye to whoever
or whatever it is
we are leaving behind,
while still being fully engaged
as a new kind of community
in the Jesus movement.

But if we hover too long
or too much
on the past
or on our grief,
Jesus will challenge us to stop it
and keep moving forward.

If you ask me,
and I realize you didn’t,
I would say that every single one of us
was commissioned as a little prophet
when we were baptized.
Our task now, as a community,
is to nurture and challenge each other
in that ministry.
As individuals, our task
is to engage with a community
and nurture and challenge
the community forward,
because being prophetic is a movement.

While we were baptized
to become little prophets,
Christian spiritual practice
is not something individuals do
it is what a community does.
The individuals within the community
are its gifts
and its charisms
that shape what and how
the community practices.
That is why we are a movement
rather than something that was.

2 Pentecost: True Story

June 19, 2022 by Cam Miller

We just heard my favorite Gospel story.
To my way of thinking about it
it is the most wonderful of many, many
wonderful stories.
So I am not going to preach today,
I am just going to unwrap a few things
you may not have noticed in the story.
In other words,
the story preaches itself.

In those days everything had spirits
and demons
inhabiting them: tables, trees, stones and people.
Stub your toe on a rock?
It’s the demon of the rock
that just struck you.
Schizophrenia,
psychosis,
dementia,
epilepsy…all 21^st century names
for 1^st Century demons.

By the way,
I know the poem doesn’t exactly match
the story — it goes with Jesus
stilling the storm.
But think of the wild man
in the cemetery
as a storm — as a killer storm —
and the Mary Oliver poem
works beautifully

Now, we do not know
what hour of the day
Jesus and his crew arrived
on the shore of the Gerasenes.

For dramatic effect
I like to imagine it was dusk.

No 1^st Century Judean or Galilean
in their right mind
would willingly go to Pigsville
if they didn’t have to.
You hired someone to go there for you if you could.
The country of the Gerasenes was pig country –
where Gentiles like us lived.
You know, Goi or pig-eaters.

To put it mildly, such people
were spiritually filthy.
No one with an ounce of spiritual wisdom
went to Gentile country
where they would become defiled
simply by association with pig-eaters.

That makes me think
that Jesus and crew got becalmed
out on the lake
and finally ended up
drifting to the wrong side.
Maybe it was late and they were tired,
so they figured on sleeping on the beach
until dawn and then shove off.
But that’s not how it came down.

Immediately,
as soon as they took that first step
onto the beach
they were met by the demoniac.

Here is one of the first little details
I just love about this story.
In the translation we’re using today,
Luke calls him, “the madman from town.”
Translations that stick closer to the original
say “a man from the CITY who had demons.”

Think of the severe social and political rupture
we have now between urban and rural America.
Jesus and his disciples were mostly
country peasants.
The demoniac was a urbanite
who had fled into the wilds.
It is worth noting
that Jesus was popular in the countryside
but found himself crucified in the city.
This story may be a fore-shadowing.

The demoniac was also naked.
Public nudity was not allowed in Judaism.
And living among the dead was a defilement as well.
Luke says he’d been naked for a long time,
by which he might have meant
the wildman didn’t have any tan lines.

So a big, naked, hairy guy
met them on the beach
probably smelling to high heaven,
and immediately begins shouting at the top of his lungs

Another cool detail.
Spiderman, Superman, or Batman
would have beat up or killed the guy
because that is what our superheroes do.
Our Gospel story guy…heals the enemy.

Compared to Marvel Comics
or James Bond,
Jesus is kind of boring.

Confronted by this wild,
screaming mass of ferocious energy
Jesus does something truly astounding.
It is something that even you and I could do,
but usually don’t have the presence of mind to do it.

In response to this loud, menacing figure
Jesus simply asks for his name.
But it is not just practicing good manners
on Jesus’ part.
In that culture,
to know the name of someone
or something
was to know its essence —
it was to know its power.

Whether a god, spirit, demon,
person, place, or thing,
its name gave it meaning
and the meaning described its power.

If you wanted to utilize the power
of that god, spirit, person, or place
you had to know its name.

When Moses meets God for the first time
and God tells Moses to go back to Egypt
and free the slaves –
an adventure that would likely get him killed –
Moses insists on knowing God’s name.
“What kind of God are you,” he asks,
“because I know what kind of god Pharaoh is
and what kind of other gods he has backing him up.
And if your just a little old fertility god or something,
I am not going.”

In the Gospel of Mark,
when Jesus meets God for the first time,
which is at the Jordan River
with John the Baptist looking on,
God names Jesus, “the Beloved.”

Joshua was a very popular name
and meant, “YHWH saves.”
But through Mark’s story,
Jesus is the Joshua who is God’s “Beloved.”
That’s a big name.

Even for us, in our 21^st century sophistication,
when we can name something that is bothering us,
we suddenly have a new grasp on it.
When we finally have a firm diagnosis,
or arrive at an “Ah Ha!”
that fills in a nagging blank,
there is an almost immediate sense
that we can do something about it.

Naming the problem is the first step in solving it.
Naming the enemy is the first step
in reconciling with them.
Naming the illness is the first step in treating it.
To know the name
is to know the power,
and in the end, this story is really about power.
In the end, of life that is,
the question for all of us is,
“How did we use our power?”

So back to the story.
Jesus asks the demoniac his name
and here Luke gets in a little dig.
“My name is Legion.” he says.
Our weird translation says, “mob.”
Legion is the name of the oppressor.

If you are a 1^st Century Jew
living at the margins of the Roman Empire
and hating them with every fiber in your body,
Legion is the name that personifies your hatred.
A name with the essence of hatred
is indeed a powerful name.

A Roman legion was 4,000 to 6,000 soldiers
which was more than enough
to subdue a rural backwater like Galilee
where Jesus was from.
6,000 Roman soldiers
could crucify, rape, and pillage a lot of peasants.

6,000 Roman soldiers could tax
and bankrupt
and dispossess an awful lot of people.
So to call the Gentile demon Legion
was both a description
of the demoniac’s power
and a commentary
on the Roman Empire.

Trigger warning for Animal Rights people,
a whole bunch of pigs die.
Jesus doesn’t actually send the demons
into the swine herd,
he just insists that they leave the naked man.
So in a reverse of COVID or the Swine Flu,
the legion jumps out of the human genome
and into the swine.

The pigs here are obviously a metaphor
for everything that is wrong with Gentiles.
But the fact that Jesus is engaged in healing a Gentile
was incredibly radical.
The fact that he has anything to do
with people like us
was also incredibly radical.

To truly pick up on this story
we have to think Bernie vs MAGA,
Iranians vs Saudi Arabians,
Pakistanis vs Indians,
Palestinians vs Israelis.

The implication of this story for 1^st century
Judeans and Galileans,
was that all borders can be crossed
and no boundaries will be kept
and no limits will be acknowledged
to the love of God
around the table of community.

You and I can intellectually
assent to this idea
but if we truly lived it out,
if we truly believed it,
we would not live
in segregated neighborhoods
and lead lives or hold friendships
so thoroughly segregated by
class,
ethnicity,
non-genderfluid,
race,
age,
and sexuality.
If we really bought into this ideal
of diversity and inclusion
that is so often touted in the least diverse settings,
then building congregations and institutions
with deep and meaningful diversity
would not be so difficult.
Rather, it would be the natural thing to do.
So if we are really honest
this story has as much bite now
as it did for those who first heard it.

Well there are two more little nuggets
tucked into the end of this story
that are my two favorites.

The Garesenes are scared to death of Jesus
and they ask him to leave their country.
It doesn’t say why Jesus scares them so,
but I think it was the fear
of Jesus’ impact on the economy.
If Jesus would so easily
allow the devastation of private capital
for the sake of one naked, flailing demoniac,
then there is no telling
where Jesus’ influence would lead.

Clearly his values were inverted
if he thought that the cost-benefit ratio
of the demoniac to a valuable herd of pigs
was acceptable.
They didn’t need an influence like him around, especially one with the kind of power
that they couldn’t control.
The demoniac was bad enough,
but clearly Jesus
was more powerful than the demons.

Finally, and to tell you the truth,
my favorite part of the story,
is the surprising ending.
It ends just like it began,
on the beach
with Jesus and his pals
getting into their boats,
and the now-healed demoniac
right there in their faces.

By the end of the story,
the healed-demoniac has
showered, shaved and dressed,
so he is more pleasant to be around.
But still, when he asks to go with Jesus,
Jesus says, “no.”

The poor guy begs – begs it says – to go with them.
But Jesus says “no.”
”No, you can’t come with me.
Please?
No, you cannot get into the boat and go with me.
Please?
No, you cannot follow me.”

What I love so much about this ending
is how subversive it is to evangelical
and even mainline Christian thinking.
No, not everyone has to follow Jesus.
No, not everyone gets to follow Jesus.
Jesus tells the the sad and downcast man
to stay at home
and tell the people he lives with,
the ones he works and plays with,
about how good God has been to him.

In other words,
Jesus sends him to be
where he has the most power –
with the people he knows.

I told you this was about power.

Power is the ability to influence,
and the ability to influence change.
MAGA enthusiasts don’t have much ability
to change the hearts and minds of people
who are absolutely hostile to them,
but they do have enormous power and influence
to change the hearts and minds of those
who are true believers with them.
And vis versa.

Most of us have far more power
to influence prejudice
among our peers
than we do influencing strangers.
So the punchline of this story
is go where your power is.
Use your power
to influence change
among the people who you know best
because that is where you are most powerful.

Finally, and really finally,
just one more little detail to note.
Jesus tells the guy to go back to his people
and tell them how good God has been to him.
What does he do?
He goes back, Luke says, and tells them about Jesus.

I think the truly amazing nature of the Gospel
is that it is not about Jesus –
we have corrupted it to be about Jesus
but that is not what it is about.
Jesus was about God
and changing the world
through the love of God.
Jesus was always pointing to God
and not himself.
But the succeeding generations
made it all about Jesus.

The clear message of this story
is that we do not have to be followers of Jesus
to be agents of God’s love.

What a great story — so unexpected.
It’s all about using our power
to change the world
as agents of God’s love.

Day of Pentecost 2022: Story

June 5, 2022 by Cam Miller

A video version follows the text

I am going to preach on a story
we didn’t even read out loud today.
But that’s okay,
because I think you know that story
and it is rooted in the one we did hear.

We know
that archaeology
is not an exact science.
For example, the estimates
of the population of Jerusalem
at the time of Jesus,
range from 20,000 to 250,000.
The middling view of many
hovers around 75,000.

There were three festivals each year
that male pilgrims
were obliged to attend
at the Temple.
Passover, of course,
Sakkot (Feast of Tabernacles),
and Shavout (Feast of Weeks, or Pentecost).
At these three festivals
the number of people in the ancient hilltop city
would blossom.

Today on the Christian calendar,
it is the Day of Pentecost
that marks the memorial
of that cinematic story from the Book of Acts
when a handful of people
who still believed the dead Jesus had been Messiah,
started speaking in every language
represented in that part of the world.

Tongues of fire, it says,
lighted upon their heads
and a mighty, even violent, wind
blew the sound of their yammering
across the crowded city.
We do not know for certain
where this cadre of women and men
had gathered, but I vote for the theory
that they were somewhere
in the “Lower City.”

That was the southern quadrant
on a downhill slide
where poor people lived.
And I see them nudged together somewhere
near the southern stairs entrance
to the Temple,
right near the Mikvoth —
or ritual baths
where people cleansed themselves
before entering the Temple.

It was undoubtedly grimy, dry,
stinky, crowded, hot,
and unpleasant
from the point of view
of people like us
who live in the spacious
and pastoral cool
of the Finger Lakes.

Like I said, archaeology
is not an exact science,
and that makes biblical theology
or interpretation
not a science at all.
But that is okay
because what we have
in the Book of Genesis
and the Book of Acts
and everything in between,
is story.

Story,
in the sense that I am using the word,
is full of truth
whether or not
there is a single fact
found within it.

Truth and fact
have little to do with one another.
Although, on occasion,
they do both rest upon
the same event
at the same moment
and generate a shared artifact.
But that’s not what I want to talk about.

I want to compare two stories
from two bookends of the Bible
and point to a truth or two
held within those stories.

You can speculate for yourself
whether they represent any facts,
but I for one,
could care less
if they are factual.

The Tower of Babel story
is an awesome, odd, and revealing story.
It is also the left hand bookend
to the Christian Pentecost story.

In fact, I would go so far as to say
that the Pentecost story from Acts
was first told
with the Tower of Babel story
from Genesis in mind.
It was told by Jewish-followers
of the dead Messiah
to explain where they came from.
That is my theory
but as I said,
I am talking story here, not facts.

In that book of Genesis story
we read today about Babel,
God a sundered humankind
by causing us
to have different languages
so that we could no longer communicate
with one another.
It was not exactly a punishment
but rather, a tactical maneuver on God’s part.

It was in response
to our rascally capacity for engineering
and technology,
and our voracious appetite for more.

As it says, we humans
had succeeded in building a tower
too high into the sky.
God recoiled at this human encroachment
upon the divine habitat.
Remember, we had been thrown out
of The Garden
because we were an unruly bunch
from the very beginning.
Here we were again,
building a stepladder back up there.

Babel is a story that also shows its pre-literate origin
well before monotheism is in place,
since it hosts a conversation between the gods
about what to do
in response to these human vermin.

It was a clever response.
The gods decided to divide us
by inflicting us with a variety of languages
so that it would be difficult for us to collaborate.
It worked.
And right there
is the counter-story for Christian Pentecost.

The Book of Acts
makes an intentional contrast to Babel.
Where God once separated us with language,
God now unified us with a Spirit
that enabled understanding without shared language
and so overcame any human division.

The punch line to the Pentecost story,
if we were hearing it
steeped in the stories of ancient Israel,
would be that God
had made all of those people
speaking in different languages
understand one another.

Think about what a miracle that would be –
if suddenly we could understand each other.
It’s a heck of a punch line,
and it is a reversal on God’s part
that suggests God suddenly trusted us again.

What we need to realize
is both of these are foundational stories:
Babel and Pentecost,
Genesis and the Book of Acts.

Genesis is a collection of stories
that tells us how it all began.
The exodus and kingdoms of David and Solomon
had already happened,
as had the civil war
and eventual exile.

The people called Israel
started to collect and tell the campfire stories
about how it was before the time
that anyone remembered how it was.
They were stories
that explained difficult to understand things.
Things like, what’s a rainbow?
Things like, why do we wear clothes
and how come, if God loves us,
we have to work so hard and suffer so much?
Stories that explain things
like why we can’t all get along
and why those other people
don’t speak our language?

The Book of Acts does the same thing.
The gospels tell the story of Jesus
and convey his teachings,
but the Book of Acts
tells stories about how Christians
became Christians
and churches became churches.
It tells stories to explain things too,
like how things got started
after Jesus was gone.
Things like how Judas got replaced
and how the numbers grew.
Other things like splitting with the Synagogue
and baptism
and transfers of power.

The Book of Acts
is the New Testament Book of Genesis —
lots of stories
about how it all began.
Are they factual?
It doesn’t matter, because facts
are not what Acts is all about.

These two stories —
Babel and Pentecost —
tell us a truth we already know:
our inability to understand one another
is deeply destructive
and likely the source of our inability
to build the kingdom on earth
as it is in heaven.

At the same time, it also tells the truth
that sharing the love of God
in the same place and same time
with one another,
can create a bond between us
that bridges our limited capacity
to understand.
It doesn’t suddenly cure us
but it gives us a moment
and a shared experience
that forms a bond
enabling us to forgive,
and move on,
and keep working together.

Those aren’t big secrets
deserving a loud “Ta Da!”
Just two simple,
humble,
ordinary truths
we know from experience.
Our limited capacity
to truly understand one another
is a killer.
The opportunity to share
the love of God
in the same time
and within the same space,
offers us a reprieve
in the form of a bonding agent.

That’s why we engage in spiritual community
in the first place.
We know something happens here,
together, over time,
that makes this different
than other places and people.
It is not a difference
we can describe with facts,
but we can tell a few stories
about being part of a community like this
that may convey its truth.
I have a friend
who just got back from Nigeria
where he visited a single church building
that accommodates one million people.
He studies mega-churches.
Can you imagine one building
holding that many people?
Me either.
But I will tell you a truth,
that is even a fact:
Any experience of the love of God
between and among those million people
that bridges our limited capacity
to understand one another,
is no different and
no better
than what happens here
in this old wine bar
among us.
Three, twelve, twenty-five, a hundred
or one million…
no better
among many
than a few.
No better among a few
than many.
When it happens —

whether in a story from the first century
or among us today —
it is the same love of God
creating a bond
that we can nurture
so it will help us bridge
our lack of understanding.
It won’t take away our different languages
but it will empower us to touch and be touched
by one and the same spirit.

That is the truth embedded
in the Babel and Pentecost stories,
and by the way,
it also happens to be a fact.

5 Easter: Preaching, Trust, and Death

May 15, 2022 by Cam Miller

A video version follows the text

Can I just say that preaching
isn’t as easy as it looks.
I know it is not really a job for a grown man or woman,
but it’s all I know.
And once in awhile I just need to vent.

You see, we have hit a rough patch
along the Lectionary Road.
The Lectionary, as you know,
is a three-year cycle of readings

Episcopal, mainline Protestant, and Roman Catholic
congregations read on Sunday morning.
They are similar to one another
though not exactly the same.
I pick and choose to be honest,
but sometimes the choices are narrow.

You may have forgotten
that there are actually four readings appointed
for each Sunday
because we only read two.

Then we add a contemporary liturgical reading.
And before I disrespect the current cache of readings,
let me acknowledge
that it is a good thing to have a lectionary.

The Lectionary is a practice
rooted in our Jewish ancestry, and it extends far into our past.

It is also a good discipline to keep the preacher
from hopping like a crow, to pick over
his or her own favorite topics
again and again.

But having said all that,
I feel like we are hydroplaning on a nasty slick
of crude proclamations.
The readings since Easter
have been repetitious first century claims
about Jesus and the young Christian movement
that are either irrelevant in our world
or simply not very credible.

Now maybe it is just me,
but it is hard to find a fist in these readings
that reaches up
and grabs my shirt
and yells into my face:
“Listen up you, there is something
you need to hear!”

I confess to liking it
when Scripture is rough with me like that.

But there IS something here
in most of these Easter Lectionary readings.
It is a nag.
It isn’t a fist grabbing us by the shirt,
it is a little nagging nit
that is poking through them.

In all these excerpts from the Bible —
the ones we’ve read on Sundays
and even the ones we didn’t use —
there is an echoing complaint
behind the veil of words:
death.

I have heard, and read
many times
and in many places,
that the spark that ignited the flame
that became Christianity,
was its promise of life after death.

Apparently the culture of Roman society
in the first century
was rotting away like a fallen sequoia:
solid and immovable
but eaten alive by the parasites of cynicism,
seductive fantasy
and near total corruption.
Huh…sounds like another culture I know.

Anyway, Roman society
was starved
for a good religion,
and like hollow Hollywood celebrities
in their frantic search for perpetual youth and beauty,
Roman citizens
snapped up nearly every exotic idea
that came along.

They weren’t much interested in Jesus,
at least not the one
who left footprints with parables
and his ideas of an egalitarian community

gathered around an open table.
Those spiritually and intellectually starved Romans
were more enamored with the Jesus
who escaped like a canary from the cold, dark tomb.

That turned out to be
a delectable idea
with oodles
of first century traction.

The idea of life after death
and a sure and certain path to it,
was an idea whose time had come
and it caused a seismic shift
in all subsequent human history.

It is understandable: we hate death.
Death is like a raspberry seed stuck in our teeth.
It doesn’t matter how magnificent
and beautiful the day,
the month,
the year,
the life…just the idea that death is inevitable
has the potential to make us miserable.

So it’s not just those old Roman’s
in search of life beyond empire.
And it is not just you and me
who long for meaning
in a life of too much affluence.
It goes way back — way, way back.
We could go as far back
to those iconic cave paintings
from prehistoric France,
and talk about how they rage against the machine,
and how they express hope
for something more from life.
That was long before the advent of words.
But I am not a student of that extended tribe
of our elongated human community.

So instead of 10,000 years back
I’ll point to a mere two-thousand,
six-hundred years backward…
to that poem
from which the Book of Revelation
snagged
its poetic imagery.

Almost six-hundred years
before Jesus was born,
the poet Isaiah
envisioned a new heaven and a new earth.
But it was on a mountaintop
rather than a city where Revelation put it.

In Isaiah 25:6 Isaiah wrote:

“On this mountain
the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of fat things,
a feast of wine on the lees,
of fat things full of marrow,
of wine on the lees well refined.
And God will destroy on this mountain
the covering that is cast over all peoples…
the veil that is spread over all nations.

God will swallow up death for ever,
and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces,
and the reproach of God’s people
will be taken away from all the earth…”

Seven hundred years later, someone named John —
not the same John as the one who wrote the Gospel —
echoed Isaiah
from a Roman prison island on Patmos:
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth;
…And I saw the holy city of Jerusalem coming down…
…(and there) God will dwell with (God’s) people,
and God will be with them,
(and) wipe away every tear from their eyes,
and death shall be no more,
neither shall there be mourning nor crying
nor pain any more,
for the former things have passed away.”

When we humans
get enough cushion
between ourselves and starvation,
and then a little hint of stability and security,
we start asking questions about life and death.
No matter how fat and sassy we get
as a society,
it never feels like enough
when it comes to the reality of death.

We want some assurance that this is not all there is
and that, in fact,
what lies ahead is good.
Heaven,
Moksha,
Jannah,
Salvation,
Nirvana…
all the ideas
about what happens after we die
reflect what the culture they derive from
believe would be an improvement
on what is now.

In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition
a very human sounding
system of distributive justice
is exacted upon the good guys and the bad guys alike,
with rewards and punishments
meted out
at the end of life,
all to even out the scales of justice.

Likewise, in Hinduism, the scales of justice
measured somewhat differently,
are balanced through reincarnation.

Hinduism explodes the mind
with an openness to a withering array of gods
and levels of the universes,
and succession of lives
that make possible
any and all conceptions of fairness.

Buddhism,
of which there are as many brand names
as there are Christian denominations,
reckons that all lives, good and bad,
are spokes stuck on a wheel of suffering.

The only hope hinges,
not upon balancing a scale,
but upon release into nothingness;
in the absolute going out of existence
instead of the relentless cycles of lives.

But modern science has also given us a new vision:
an odd kind of afterlife
knit within the confines of molecules and atoms.

Science has declared
that no energy is ever lost
but simply changes form.
We live,
we die,
we become part of the soil
and that in turn feeds
and becomes a part of the on-going
cosmic cycle of energy.
Even the dust of once distant stars
resides in us,
a kind of resurrection beyond our imagination.

But is that all there is?
Are those our only choices?
Heaven, Reincarnation, Nirvana, Thermodynamics?

I think there is another choice: Trust.

Put our hand in the hand of God
and simply trust.
Trust that, because God loves us,
that whatever happens
it will be okay.

To me, that is what Jesus demonstrated
and we do not need to say more.

If in fact, we trust the love of God,
we do not need any theories
about what happens next.

Rather, we need good and better methodologies
for preparing and expanding
our open table.

We need
good and better methodologies
for creating and nurturing
the kingdom on earth
as it is in heaven.

Trust God about what happens next
and get on with the kingdom.
That’s all.
I think that’s a gospel that will preach, as they say.

Trust God about what happens next
and get on with the kingdom.

4 Easter: Your Work

May 8, 2022 by Cam Miller

A video version follows the text

The Messenger
by Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Sometimes a sermon is about nothing.
You know, like Seinfeld
was a television show about nothing.
Like today’s readings are about nothing,
at least nothing
in any concrete sense
that you can collect or build or decorate with.

The something that this sermon
and these readings are about
is gone
the very moment we recognize it.
It is more like air
than water.

The psalm, the poem, the gospel
are all about merger.

“The Father and I are one,” says Jesus.

The world and I are one,
and you too — Mary Oliver’s metaphors proclaim.

The green pasture, death’s shadow,
and the table God spreads
even in the presence of our enemies,
are all enfolded
within the goodness
of God, says the psalmist.
Merger, melding, oneness…
it is all about the momentary collapse of boundaries.

This is William James’ famous definition of religion:
“the feelings, acts, and experiences
of individual (people) in their solitude,
so far as they apprehend themselves
to stand in relation to whatever
they may consider the divine.”

It is that moment of oneness
or being in the presence of
something or someone
that melts the boundary
between them and us
or it and us.

It can be nature,
as Mary Oliver describes
in so many of her poems.

It can be another person
when we fall in love —
that intensely romantic phase
in which the boundaries between us
feel as though they fall into one another
and we are consumed
in that unique moment of intimacy.

It can be a different intimacy
when a conversation between friends,
or even an encounter between a professional
with client or patient,
suddenly distills into a joint recognition
of an experience and its meaning.

And I dare say, with God,
when we enter the moment with
the Holy Spirit or Jesus or Krishna or Mary
or whoever the perceived agent might be,
and there we are for an instant,
as William James explained,
”standing in our solitude” and yet
with something that is no longer “other”
but we in it and it in us.

I know darn well
that everyone in hearing of my words
knows this experience I am trying to describe.
It is the collapse of boundaries
between us and someone or something else.
Religious and non-religious people
will ascribe different causes and meanings
to the experience,
but it is a universal human experience.
At least I think it is.

But what I am most interested in
is not the moment of merger
but what happens
after that moment.
After the boundaries have collapsed
and we have merged
through a powerful suspension of individuality —
what happens next?

If we do not re-collect ourselves
and re-assert the boundaries
that were momentarily
penetrated,
we will loose connectivity
with the other people and elements
of the world around us.

We will loose perspective and forget
who we are
and what we are
and the full extend of to whom we belong.

We will get pulled like taffy
and the middle of us, which is our core, will sag
as we are stretched further and further
beyond our boundaries.
Eventually,
whether temporary of permanent,
we will go mad
because we are a Self
and Selfness lives within a particular body and soul.

Pull the Self away too far and too long
and we loose our minds
one way or another.

That happens sometimes
to some people
with religious experience,
just as it does
between individuals through
unsustainable intimacy.

Neither religion nor meaningful relationships
are for the feint of heart.
Both begin with a bang
and then,
well then, our boundaries
are supposed to snap back
and return to their original shape —
accommodating of course,
the new experience
or wisdom
or person.

It really is a wild and crazy ride —
religious experience,
falling in love,
or any kind of momentary intimacy.
So much so,
most of us live on-guard against it.
We would rather have predictability
and a semblance of control
than having our boundaries bent out of shape.

But here is the thing.

Religious experience
is like near-death experience.
It causes us to consider changing our lives
but in the aftermath,
as the experience recedes
in the rear view mirror,
we go on just as we were.
Our excited resolutions to be different
are like a balloon with the air
rushing out as it
snakes around the room.

So three dollars
and a mystical experience —
whether it is falling into God,
or “the phoebe and the delphinium,”
or the eyes of a lover —
is just enough
to buy us a large coffee
at Dunk’n Donuts.
But itself it won’t change us,
except in the moment.

And maybe that is okay —
just the experience.
Maybe just the moment of merger is enough
in and of itself?
But honestly, I think there is something else.

I want to go back to the Mary Oliver poem
because, of the three readings,
I relate to it best.

“My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished…”

Can you,
with such simple clarity,
say what your work is?
I do not mean
what makes or made you money.
Most of us do not get paid
for the work of our soul,
or if there is a blending
of our job and our work
our work is never contained
by the limits of our job.

What, my friends,
is your work — the work of your soul?
I am not the judge of your experience
but I will say
that any time
I have had the experience of merger —
when my boundaries melted
and I slipped into a bigger reality —
it has always brought clarity
to my work.

That fact causes me to imagine
that experiences of merger —
what William James
called religious experience —
is for a purpose
more than it is for a pleasure.

It is not only Jesus and God who are one,
it is also you and I
who are one with the Creator of all that is.

We are one
and the green pastures we lie down in are one,
and so are the right pathways
and the shadow of death
and the cup running over.
All of it — all of us within it — are one.

We have all had glimpses of our oneness
and those glimpses,
those fractions of a second of recognition
are given to us as gifts
to bring clarity to us
about what our work is.

I would so love —
at least in my head —
for my work to be what Mary Oliver’s work was:
loving the world
and learning to be astonished.
I would — I would love that job.
But it is not mine.

I have other work,
and sometimes God grants me glimpses
of my oneness with all that is
so that I can receive greater clarity
about my work.

I hope that maybe
this rings true for you too.

3 Pentecost 2022: Little prophets

2 Pentecost: True Story

Day of Pentecost 2022: Story

A video version follows the text

5 Easter: Preaching, Trust, and Death

A video version follows the text

4 Easter: Your Work

A video version follows the text

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