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4 Easter B, 2018: Core Strength

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This sermon is about “core strength.”

Core strength is a mainstream
health concept these days,
and the ever-popular disciplines
of yoga, palates, cross-fit, and barre
all promise to improve core strength.

The Gospels
make a promise about core strength too.

It is a wildly ridiculous promotion
that would be utterly unbelievable
and easily rejected, except…
on a deeply personal level,
we know it is true.

But before we get to any promises
about core strength,
I want to begin with what connects us.
What connects us
will lead to the crazy core strength promise.
When so little seems to connect us
and there seems to be so few
universal threads to weave us together,
what brings us here to an oddball community
of worship and spiritual inquiry?

That is not a question about Trinity Church,
it is a question about you and me.

What connects you and me, personally
to these strange and lovely
people here today,
and even to those not here today?

Take a moment and look around the sanctuary.
Go ahead, it’s okay to stare
because we are all going to do it.

Take a good look at who is here,
and also think about those people
whose faces you know, who are not here today.
What is it that connects us
when there may be so little common ground?

Do you have it yet?

There is more than one answer, of course.
But there is a fundamental, existential answer
as well as a deeply concrete and practical one.
What connects us
and holds us together
in a practical and experiential way,

is evoked by the 23rdPsalm.
Surely the most universal, existential connection
that we all share as human beings,
is the shadow of death.

Now, some of you might well respond to that
with an “Oh bummer.”
You may consider the reminder
that we live in the shadow of death
to be bad news.
But I want to suggest it is worth the reflection
because death brings life into focus
as nothing else can.

It is what Martin Luther King, Jr.
meant when he said,

“No one really knows
why they are alive
until they know
what they would die for.”

Now, if you are the kind of person
who believes in categorical absolutes,
knowing what you are living for
is not a tough question.

When the universe is a clearly defined place,
where right and wrong are neatly divided,
and you have a book of rules and regulations
with the authority
to arbitrate any confusion, then
what you would live and die for
is not a very difficult question.

I suspect however,
that most of us here do not divide
the world into such clean and precise categories.

But even so, most of us have specific people
who we know we would give our lives for –

children, lovers, friends.
Fewer of us, perhaps, hold beliefsand ideas
that we would be willing to die for.
In this post-modern twenty-first century
we recognize the extreme elasticity
of beliefs and ideas over time –
how they change.

2018 is a tough year to die for your country
or your constitution
or your religion.
Not for some, but for many.

If you are not a categorical thinker, and
you do not see the world and life
in starkly either/or terms,
then it becomes more difficult
to lie down on the tracks
for the imperfect institutions
that represent cherished ideas.

And yet, knowing in our heart-of-hearts
what we are living for
is a basic building block
of any truly spiritual quest.

If we do not know
what it is we would die for,
we will not know
what it is we are living for.

You may have discovered long ago
that happiness is not big enough
or deep enough
to carry us through.

If self-indulgence and feeling good
are the drivers,
then the ordinary crises of life
will pick us apart
like piranha on a carcass.
We will be left
holding nothing at our core
at the very moment
we need core strength the most.

Even people we love
will not be raison d’être enough
to hold the center
through the stormiest parts of life.

Children grow up and
move away, and build their own lives elsewhere
And as much as we love them
and they love us,
their evolution and re-orbiting away from us,
will make clear
that even loving them unto death
is not enough to hold the center.

A spouse or lover too, will die, leave,
or be taken away.
If we thought that he or she was IT –
the pier to which we could lash ourselves
against the worst of life’s squalls –
we will likely discover
he or she was not pier enough to weather all furies.

That most cherished life’s partner
will be diminished,
or become absent,
so that even our love for him or her,
and their love for us, will not be enough
to hold the center against all storms.
This is one of those core spiritual awakenings,
and it brings us to that moment
when we discover what it is we are living for.

I do not know what you are living for.
I do not think it is my job, or the task of the church,
to tell you what you should be living for.
We are not that kind of a church.
My job, and the task of the church,
IS to share what the Gospel invites us
to hold as the center of our lives.

The Gospel says – and here comes,
that zany, ridiculous, claim –
that at the core of our lives,
the one thing
that will hold the center –
if it is our core strength –
is to spend our lives
so that others might live.

See, I told you, it is a ridiculous
and outrageous claim.

But that is the claim of the Gospels,
and we heard it in spades today in John’s Gospel.
The only thing that will hold the center
against life’s greatest tumults and fiercest tempests
is to spend our lives
so that others might live.

And those others
are not only those we know and love,
but even those we do not know,
may not love,
and may not even like.
That which has the strength
to hold the center against all odds,
is a life spent for others.

Spent.

Cogitate on that for a moment:
Spending your life, and
how your life is spent.

If your life were currency,
how are you spending it
and what are you spending it on?
That, the Gospel says,
is the center that holds, even
against the most horrible storms.
We all have different things
to spend our lives with:
all of us have some money,
but that is not the only currency we have
for spending our lives.

It may be your voice,
it may be your art,
it may be your intellect,
it may be your hands,
it may be your peculiar wisdom,
it may be your creative thinking,
it may be your personal power,
it may be your charisma,
it may be your woundedness…

Each one of us has a currency,
maybe more than one,
that we can spend so that others may live.
The more we spend it
the stronger our core becomes.

The converse is also true, and is terrifying:
Others may suffer and die
when we do not spend the currency
we have been given
in order that others may live.

Figuring out our currency
is a major element of our spiritual work.

It may be quite urgent work as well,
because there are other people whose well-being
may depend upon us figuring out
what our currency is, and then spending
as much of it as we possibly can.

When we talk about “giving thanks
for the abundance of our lives,”
our currency is exactly what that means.
When we spend the currency
we have been given to spend
so that others may live, then there is no
such thing as scarcity.
The more we spend, the more abundant
our lives become –
it is the kind of whacko-mysticality
we should have come to expect from God.

When we spend the currency of our lives
so that others might live,
our own lives deepen
and strengthen
and mature,
and in short, become more abundant.

Abundance does not mean affluence,
it means plentiful – it means full.
When we spend the currency of our lives
so that others may live,
our own lives become more full.
The more we spend, the more full we become.
That is the bizarre, miraculous truth
about abundance.

So, the core strength which the Gospel
claims will hold the center no matter what,
is from a lifespent
so that others may live.

The outrageous claim is,
that in the process of spending our lives
so that others may live,
our own life becomes ever more abundant.

Now, because we are the kind of church we are,
I feel the need to add
that just because the Gospel says it,
does not mean you and I have to believe it –
or adopt it, or live by it.
God will love us either way.
Which happens to be another element
of the abundance.

You see, the spiritual secret
embedded in figuring out what we are living for,
is that there is no carrot or stick.

We build our core strength
around something because we hold it,
and cherish it, and are convicted to it,
and not because of any promise of reward
or threat of punishment.
Core strength comes
from the act of holding something
as the center of our lives,
not from the hope of reward or
the fear of punishment.

In fact, among the ancient Hebrews,
the people and community from which
our core wisdom comes,
we know by now,
the word for “faith” can be translated,
“to hold onto.”

What do you hold at the center of your life?
What is the currency
with which you spend your life?
Answer those questions
with the fierceness of passion,
and whether we are 19 or 93
we will know what it is we are living for.

3 Easter 2018 B: Empty Tomb?

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“Peace be with you…”

Have you ever sat by yourself on the beach
at the ocean, or walked along
its foaming boundary, or stood sentry
on a cliff overlooking its broiling brine?
When you were there
at the ocean,
up close or distant,
did you ever embrace the sound of eternity?
You know,
waves of sound rushing over
the curvatures of your ear,
your head now a conch shell
holding the echo of those waves through recall
all these miles and years later?

Have you ever been embraced like that by the ocean?

Have you ever walked
through a dawn meadow
slipping into a robe of dew, wet
with its freshness all over you,
gleaming in the new sun?
Or maybe it was at daybreak
in the forest, with the trees and ferns
dripping the moisture of a new day,
a freshly hung spider’s web glistening
in the light of a single ray
piercing the canopy above?

Have you ever been robed like that in a new day?

Have you ever laid flat on your back
in the grass
under an awning of lights in the night sky,
gawking at the endlessness of time?
Gawking, your mouth gaping
at all the years and miles so far behind you
in the universe?
Have you ever laid there like that, suspended between an endless past and an endless future?
Have you ever fallen into such timelessness?
Have you ever witnessed your own
infinitesimal self
as a dust mite of nothingness
within the dome of time?

Have you ever been small like that beneath the stars?

Have you ever sat in the arms of a big easy chair
with your eyes closed
holding the soft downy crown
of an infant beneath your nose,
that scent of fresh skin
filling your own mind with awe and gratitude?
Have you ever dozed off like that, cradled
in the power of an infant,
breathing the aroma of sweetness and
engulfed in joy?
Have you ever been held like that while holding a small, little other?

“Once or twice or three times, I saw something
rise from the dust in the yard, like the soul
of the dust, or from the field, the soul-body
of the field – rise and hover like a veil in the sun
billowing – as if I could see the wind itself…”

That Marie Howe poem
(“Once or Twice or Three Times I Saw Something”)
is a stuttering over the kind of moment
we receive as a gift
and want so much to tell someone else about,
but when we do, it disappears
like the rainbow sheen of a bubble popping.

I talk about the “whispers of God” a lot,
my phrase for such fragile moments.
Sometimes it is a very faint whisper
and sometimes a swarm.
It can be a horde of whispers carried
by an air force of lightening bugs
filling the stillness around us
with secret voices
that seem to know us by name.
But as soon as we go to tell about it,
to share it with someone with words
we can’t quite find,
it disappears.

Like the Howe poem,
it hovers and stutters over a moment
that cannot be captured or told.

The window on eternity is obviously
not limited to the four panes through which
I have just invited us to peek –
you have your own portals.
If we put all of our experiences together –
all the moments and all the whispers –
we might have hundreds of them,
thousands even;
times and places and sensations
that wrapped us ever so briefly
in a place beyond our own body,
and beyond our own time,
and beyond our own mind.

What I’m trying to evoke right here
is the opening of a portal
that looks into a dimension
that is actually present all the time,
and in every moment.

I am absolutely certain
you know the kind of moment I mean –
and know what it is like to fall into such an opening –
then re-emerge just as quickly
only to wonder how long we were there.

They are rare, these moments
or whisper of the holy, but we pass by them all the time.

We walk the beach in search of shells
and so pass by eternity while never knowing it.

We walk through the morning dew
trying to stay dry, and so miss the eternity infused in it.

We look up into the night sky trying to figure out
which stars form what constellations,
and neglect to fall into the timelessness
just waiting there for us.

“Peace be with you.”

You and I will never know,
at least not in the body we now inhabit,
if resurrection was the historical moment
that Luke attempts to describe.
Narrative can never do justice to experience,
any more than a movie can capture
the experience the mind creates
when reading a book.

But we do know, from the miraculous-ness
of our own lives,
that resurrection is a mysticalmoment.
You and I have fallen into such moments
and out of them again, in the blink of an eye.

Strain as we might,
we can never give the experience
to anyone else.
The mystical moments we experience
are ours and ours alone.
The best we can do
is tell each other what it was like,
and what we imagine we learned from it –
the meaning
of our Alice In Wonderland nanoseconds.

That is what Luke
and Matthew
and John
try to do.

They take a particular moment in history,
experienced by people they did not know,
in a place they may never have been,
and they try to describe what happened.
Luke, Matthew, and John
narrate what it was like,
and what it meant.
They’re not up to task though,
any more than any of us are up to it.
Even a stellar poet like Marie Howe
cannot quite do it.
Perhaps that is why the author
of Mark’s Gospel never tries.
Mark’s gospel leaves us at the empty tomb.

For him, that was enough.

The stranger at the empty tomb
telling Jesus’ closest friends
not to count him out,
and then those friends run away afraid.
They say nothing to anyone,
and that is where Mark’s Gospel ends.
That was enough.

Some moments cannot be shared.
Some of us will try
some of us will not.
Both are fine.
Neither one is proof or definitive.

Once, when I was in seminary
flying home for vacation,
I got stuck in the Detroit airport
for longer than expected.
Somehow, I struck up conversation
with a fellow traveler my age
who was an Evangelical Christian
in a seminary as conservative
as mine was progressive.

He kept pressing me to answer questions
I could not answer
or for which I had no answer.
The more I pleaded the poetic awe of mystery
the more he tried to pin me down.

“But what if someone had had a movie camera
right there as they rolled away the stone?
What would the camera capture?”

He had me now, he thought.
Nowhe would find out whether or not
I was a true believer;
meaning of course,
if I believed what he believed.

“It wouldn’t matter,” I answered.
“What do you mean, ‘it wouldn’t matter?’
Of course, it would matter!”
His voice was impassioned.
“No,” I continued, “it would not matter because
even if it was on film
we would both see different things in the film;
we would both experience
the images before us differently.
No two people see the same thing
any more than two people
have the same experience of the same thing.”

He looked crest-fallen.
We were two ships passing in the night
and the best we could do was wave at each other.
Just because that young man
clung to the precise denotation
of every word of the narrative,
rather than the mystical natureof resurrection as I do,
doesn’t make his understanding lesser,
or better, more faithful or less thoughtful.
Because I cling to the mystical nature of resurrection
rather than upholding the historicity of the story,
doesn’t make me better or lesser either.

The entire history of Christianity
will teach us nothing
if we are unable to see that from the beginning
we have all been like those fabled
blind men around the elephant,
each describing the creature
in grand but different detail.

None of us owns the truth. No one does.
There is not one, single truth to be owned;
no one truthavailable to any one human being
or group of human beings.
That is our limitation,
that is our smallness,
that is our reality,
even though we are always
trying to make it different somehow.
Coming to peace with that limitation IS
the beginning of wisdom.

So, whether you are devoted to the narrative –
to the exact and literal words of the biblical text,
or like me, you share a reasoned skepticism about the text
yet have an unshakable faith
in the mystical nature of resurrection…
I bid you peace,
in the name Jesus, who said it himself:
Peace be with you.

 

Easter 2018: The Day After Easter

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The man told the two Mary’s and Salome,
who were de facto disciples by the way,
to let Peter and the others know
where they could see Jesus again.
“As always,” he might have said, “he’s a step ahead of you.”

We have been stuck for most of two thousand years
with primitive writing, anemic narrative
like the account I just read from Mark.
But we can imagine the original oral accounts of this story
must have been fantastic.

In Mark’s stingy and economical written version,
all we get is a young man matter-of-factly
suggesting they go deliver a message,
as if there is nothing out of order.
“Oh, don’t be alarmed…
Nothing to see here, keep it moving.”

This story is a prism,
it refracts light from every direction
and throws beams and colors and reflections
every which way.
This year I am stuttering over
a very small element that casts a big light,
at least for me.

“Go back to Galilee,
he will meet you at home.”

In essence, that is what the young man was saying
when he invited the Marys and Salome to go back to Galilee,
which he assured them, is where they would see Jesus again.
Galilee was home.
The empty-tomb message was: go home.

I’ll tell you what got me thinking about it.
One of my daughters called me from her commute last week,
and asked why Jesus went to Jerusalem in the first place.

She had been trying to explain the Palm Sunday story
to her boyfriend who did not grow up in Church,
and that piece of the story was now lost to her.

It made me realize how important that question is
on both ends of this story.
Why did Jesus go to Jerusalem in the first place,
and why, the day after Easter,
were they went home?

Allow me to color in the lines a little.

The city of Jerusalem was where Jesus was killed.
Jerusalem was really enemy territory for Jesus
and therefore his friends and students.
It was not their home.
It was a hostile environment for them.

Jerusalem was in the southern province of Judea.
Jesus and his cohort were from the north, in Galilee.

The distance in miles
wasn’t very far at all by modern standards,
but the cultural distance between Galilee
and Jerusalem
was as far apart as, say,
the Finger Lakes and Manhattan.

To the smaller, rural provinces like Galilee
with its splash of tiny towns and villages,
Judea and Jerusalem might have seemed like Manhattan surrounded by Jersey City, Newark, and Paramus.

Galilee, the province where Jesus and is friends were from,
was up north – far away.
It was dotted with villages
smaller than Dresden, Seneca Castle, or Reed’s Corner.
There were Garrisons and a spa or two
for the Romans and their collaborators,
but none creating a population center around it.
Nazareth, for example, one of the bigger villages,
was about fifty houses clumped together on four acres.

Galilee was influenced by rural culture
and suspicion of urban life.
Judea was decadent, hostile territory.

To be told to go home,
having just suffered horrendous trauma,
felt like a dream to those women.
Go home – where you feel safe.
Go home – where your memories seed the ground.
Go home – where you are woven with love into community.
Go home – where your grief does not water the sand.
Go home – and away from this hell-hole awash with urban decadence and Roman brutality.

The terror and bewilderment
of that religious experience at the empty tomb
must have been mitigated, at least a little,
by the relief of hearing those words: go home.

You do not have to stay here in danger.
You do not have to go up against impossible odds.
You do not have to try to convince these hostile people.
You do not have to live in fear among such strangers.
You do not have to be crucified.
Go home.

Just stutter on that message awhile.

Jesus’ friends and companions
had no interest in going to Jerusalem
and warned Jesus not to go – we know this from the story.
But it was Jesus’ decision to go anyway,
and now his friends received permission to go home
without guilt or shame.

Preachers and theologians have a bad habit
of neglecting certain parts of the Gospel stories
in favor of other ones
in order to underscore our beliefs.
For example, we have an image of Jesus
going around dragging perfect strangers
away from their lives to evangelize
and maybe get themselves killed in the process.

We have painted an image of Jesus
calling his followers to act like lemmings running off a cliff.
But we have obscured the fact
that Jesus himself had a home.
Jesus had a house,
his own house
where he lived.
(It was in Capernaum by the way,
though that is irrelevant just now).

I think this is important for us,
for our own narratives
and because it may influence how we think
about our own spiritual practice
and the practice of our Baptismal promises.

In all the stories we hear about Jesus and
the vast majority of the people he touched –
even those whose lives he unalterably changed
and radically transformed –
most of them stayed at home.
After a real-life, real-time encounter with Jesus
they stayed at home
with the people they had always lived with.
They stayed at home
and lived their new life where they had always lived.
Of all the people Jesus knew and loved,
and who knew and loved him,
apparently only a very few of his friends
were asked to go south with him to that urban hell-hole
down in the province of Judah.

When we read the Gospels as a whole,
it seems that Jesus and his friends didn’t get into trouble
until they went south;
until they left home to take their message
and their campaign into Judea and Jerusalem.

But now, at the tail end of this Gospel story,
Jesus whispers from the shadow of death
via a strange messenger, and assures them:
“Don’t be afraid, go home.
I will see you at home.”
On this side of Good Friday,
we need to pay attention to what happened
after the third day.
That is where WE live.
What happens the day after Easter?
They go home.

The day after Easter
is the most important day for us
because it is the one we live every day.
The day after Easter they went home.

What I am struck by today
is that the resurrected life
takes place at home.

The spiritual life is a home life,
not necessarily the dangerous hero’s adventure
that takes us to strange places among exotic people.
When we encounter the empty tomb,
what do we do the day after?
We go home.
We go home to our lives as we have lived them,
and then we look ourselves in the eye and ask,
“What do we do now?”

There is a very earthen, practical wisdom here.

We so often forget that home,
among the people we know and who know us,
is where our power is.
When we want to put our faith into action
and ‘walk our talk,’
we often imagine we have to go somewhere else to do it.

While that kind of service is fine
and important to be sure,
especially if it allows us to build relationships
across socio-economic boundaries,
our true power is with those at home.

Our power, the ability to influence change,
is greatest among those with whom
we live and work and play.
If we want to address racism, for example,
we will be far more powerful agents of change
addressing it with those we know
than we will with total strangers.

If we want to be peacemakers,
we will be far more influential seeking converts
among the voters we know
than only public protest.

If we want to be advocates of freedom and dignity,
and lobby against government
and corporate spying on ordinary citizens,
we will be more powerful trying to convince
those we live with to change online and spending behavior
than writing letters to the editor
in the Democrat and Chronicle.

At the heart of our Baptismal Covenant
is the invitation for us to be agents of God’s love
in a world that is often hostile to it.
That is our spiritual practice:
To be agents of God’s love in a world that both
needs and resists that love.

But we do not have to go to Jerusalem
or other strange provinces
in order to serve that love.
In fact, we can serve it most powerfully,
most often,
at home.

We have not been sent as perfect strangers
to proselytize and preach.
Instead, we have been invited to go home
and be agents of God’s love to those
with whom we live, and work, and play.

We have been invited
to share our amazement and joy
among those with whom
we have the greatest influence.
And that is because we are never more powerful
than when sharing our experience
of the resurrected life
with those who know and love us.

Our influence will never be greater
than when we are agents of God’s love
sharing that love
with those we know
and who care about what we know.

“Do not be afraid. Go home.”
Go home and tell the people you know
what it is like to stand before the empty tomb
only to discover it is full of life.

Do not be afraid.
Go home and tell the people you know
how and where you encountered the presence of God,
and invite their sense of wonder.

Do not be afraid.
Go home and tell the people you know
what it is like to feel loved without condition,
and be accepted without judgment
by the God of the Cosmos.
Do not be afraid.
Go home and tell the people you know
that you discovered a community of worship
that seems to be guided by Jesus’ radical hospitality
and welcomes all:
seekers, believers, unbelievers,
and everyone in between.

Go home
and be agents of God’s love
where you live
and among those with whom you live.

Go home
and be powerful.
Do not be afraid, you are home.
Happy Easter!

4 Lent B, 2018: The Gettysburg Address and the Gospel of John

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A Harvest of Death. Gettysburg, July 1863. Timothy O’Sullivan. (War Dept.)

Here is part of a speech so famous, everyone
sitting here today, knows it.

“Four score and seven years ago
our fathers brought forth on this continent,
a new nation conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war,
testing whether that nation, or any nation
so conceived and so dedicated,
can long endure.
We are met on a great battlefield of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field,
as a final resting place for those
who here gave their lives that that
nation might live.

It is altogether fitting and proper
that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate –
we cannot consecrate –
we cannot hallow –
this ground.
The brave men, living and dead,
who struggled here,
have consecrated it,
far above our poor power to add or detract.

The world will little note,
nor long remember what we say here,
but it can never forget what
they did here.
It is for us the living, rather,
to be dedicated here to the unfinished work
which they who fought here
have thus far so nobly advanced.

Can you hear the grief underneath those words?

Abraham Lincoln penned those words
and read them to dedicate the very first monument
on the battlefield at Gettysburg.
The Civil War was far from over –
we know now
that Gettysburg turned the tide
but they did not know then
how the war would end or when.

The nation was in grief
in all directions –
north, south, east, and west.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans had died.

Grief was carried in the blood of the living
like sap runs in the veins of a maple.
In the Gettysburg Address, as in the face
of the man who wrote it,
grief is wedged around every
word like mortar around brick.

The speech ends,
“ – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

But that was not a forgone conclusion.
Lincoln’s plea “that the dead will be remembered,
and that their lives will not have been in vain,
is a hope, and from his vantage point,
not a sure thing.

That the place they stood bore unspeakable suffering
is held in Lincoln’s arms like a dying child,
but that it would be the place
from which hope blooms,
was uncertain.

Well, I brought up that hallowed speech,
as an example that leads us back to the Gospel.
As we know,
all history, all speeches,
all words,
have a context.
Everything we harbor
as a communal memory, was sculpted
by the moments that surrounded it.

Hearing the ghostly whispers
surrounding such speeches
enables us to understand them
a little beyond the moment that defines us.

The Gospel of John is full of such speeches.
They are not Jesus’ speeches, by the way.
John’s Gospel is full of speeches
that John wrote and placed upon the lips of Jesus.

In the same way that Lincoln,
four and a half months after the battle
ascribed motives and inspiration
to the dead,

John, seventy years after Jesus,
ascribes words and
meaning to the dead messiah.

So, I am going to read a few lines from John
that we just heard,
because when we listened to them,
it was in the comfort of our moment,
and for the hundredth time as we heard John
from the large end of the funnel
presuming everything we know from what has happened since his time.

So, as I read, please listen for fear;
listen for the anxiety; listen for the rage of the hunted.

John is writing from inside persecution.
John is giving voice to the hope
and judgment
of those living in the terror
of State-sponsored violence.

In fact, for John
there is little hope that
the beast of Roman domination will end.
Instead, his hope is in the meaning of their suffering.
Not the avoidance of suffering,
because he knows it can’t be avoided.
But in the meaning he will give
to whatever awaits.

Just as Lincoln could not remove
the grief of the living
over the tragic loss of the dead,
John could not remove
the obvious terror of the moment:
he was limited to giving the moment meaning
beyond the present moment itself.
Sometimes, often in fact,
that is the only authentic power we possess:
Giving meaning to the moment
even when the moment is cruel.

Listen then, to John
and hear the angels of light and dark
fluttering in and through his words
like a hummingbird in search of nectar.

“This is how much God loved the world:
He gave his Son, his one and only Son.
And this is why:
so that no one need be destroyed;
by believing in him,
anyone can have a whole and lasting life.

God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son
merely to point an accusing finger,
telling the world how bad it was.
He came to help, to put the world right again.
Anyone who trusts in him is acquitted;
anyone who refuses to trust him
has long since been under the death sentence
without knowing it.
And why?
Because of that person’s failure to believe
in the one-of-a-kind Son of God
when introduced to him.

“This is the crisis we’re in:
God-light streamed into the world,
but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness.
They went for the darkness because
they were not really interested in pleasing God.
Everyone who makes a practice of doing evil,
addicted to denial and illusion,
hates God-light
and won’t come near it,
fearing a painful exposure…”

From John’s historic perspective,
standing where he stands,
the world, literally, is a study in dark and light.

John sees God
and the angels of our better natures
inhabiting one side of the moment,
and Satan
with his angels of our darker nature,
inhabiting the other side of the moment.
In John’s world, we must choose;
there is not an in-between.
We cannot live with a foot in both worlds, nor
with a divided loyalty
even to the smallest degree.
God or Satan,
light or dark,
Pagan, Jew, or Christian –
in John’s mind, it is one or the other.

And surely it must have seemed that way
to those living through that persecution.
Any reign of terror makes all decisions acute:
every decision,
every choice,
every movement
feels starkly and ultimately consequential.
And in fact,
under such circumstances
every decision, if the wrong one, may be the last.

So decide, John urges.

Choose light and life,
because even if it rains suffering upon you now,
the meaning of your choice
will guarantee your joy in the afterlife.
Do you want to avoid a moment of pain now,
or endure happiness for eternity?

John’s speeches on the lips of Jesus
imbue every moment
with that kind of cosmic significance.

But that was then, and this is now.
If you do not believe that God
operates a cosmic and eternal reign of terror,
wielding hellfire against the bad guys
and embalming good guys with bliss,
then John’s categorical thinking
does not seem aptly descriptive.

If you live in the same world I live in,
then you know for certain
that we do not balance on a sharpened blade
of good or bad,
light or dark,

God or evil.
It is more like slogging through mud,
trying to figure out which step
will help us take the next one,
and which step may be a sink hole.

Here is what we need to know,
and that we already know
but is seldom said out loud…in a church:
It is okay to disagree with the Bible.

Someone can disagree with the Gospel of John,
for example, and still be Christian.
John does not own the truth
about God or Jesus or Life.

“Believe” is the big word in John’s Gospel
that is missing in the other gospels.
John wants us to “believe”
what he believes.
John works hard to convince his audience
to “believe” what he “believes” we must believe,
in order to become the light of God.
And conversely,
to avoid being in the dark about God.

Such belief-based faith
falls into and promotes black and white thinking –
absolutist ideas that mistake truth for fact.

I want to argue against belief-based faith,
and urge us toward an embodied-faith –
one rooted in core principles and values
that spends its energy
on living as closely to principles as we can.

Belief-based faith
espouses what it imagines
are facts about God and Jesus,

as if material and observable data.
It requires barbed-wire thinking
that does not allow inquiry and thought
beyond the interlocking Lincoln-logs that define it.

Belief-based faith is brittle,
and exceedingly fragile
under the weight of actual experience.

Enter Anne Sexton.

“My faith
is a great weight
hung on a small wire,
as doth the spider
hang her baby on a thin web,
as doth the vine,
twiggy and wooden,
hold up grapes
like eyeballs,
as many angels
dance on the head of a pin.

God does not need
too much wire to keep Him there,
just a thin vein,
with blood pushing back and forth in it,
and some love.
As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.”

Believing in love, instead of loving,
is as fragile as believing in God
instead of acting as agents of God’s love.

John’s Gospel is a second century blog post
interpreting events, stories, and beliefs
handed down to him by three previous generations,
and in the context of his moment in time.
It is what made sense for him,
of Jesus and God and persecution.

We live in a moment, in the United States,
in which people are far more likely
to die by random gun violence than
from a principled act of faith.
What act of faith,
what small, irrepressible act of love,
will give meaning to our lives today?

We are not in a belief-centric time like John was,
when he interpreted Jesus the way he did.
But we are still left with the challenge
to declare meaning for our lives,
and interpreting Jesus
in a way that makes sense for us.

So, again I ask,
what act of faith,
what small, irrepressible act of love,
will give meaning to our lives today?

As is always the allure of preaching,
I am tempted to try to give you an answer.
But how absurd.
It is your life.
It is your moment.
It is your next step.
What act of faith,
what small, irrepressible act of love,
will give meaning to your life today?

3 Lent, Year B, 2018: Spiritual Maturity

by

Bernadino Mei, Christ Cleansing the Temple 1655

Today we have Jesus
making a whip to foment a riot at the Vatican,
or National Cathedral,
or Rotunda of the Capital building,
or Geneva Rotary.
Today we have many more sacred places
and commercial networks
than they did in his day.

I wish I could have been a fly on the wall
when such stories were read
in the company of Queen Victoria
and the gathered House of Lords
and other British upper class society.
What in the world,
must they have thought about this Jesus?
Or any place and among any gathering
of people who value, above most things,
control, order, and rules?

And I wonder how this story
is being read and preached today
at the National Cathedral
or St. Patrick’s
or St. Peter’s Basilica
or Christ Cathedral, Lagos Nigeria –
or in the chapel at Langley (if the CIA has a chapel).
How in the world
do those in power and authority
hear this story
of Jesus-the-whipster and riotous agitator?

One of my takeaways is to confirm
there is a place for militancy,
outrage,
and agitation
every bit as much as
there is a place for
gentle, loving-kindness.
Spiritual maturity – which I guess
this sermon is really about – is capable
of holding more than one element
at one and the same time.

Young children do not
simultaneously hold multiple emotions –
one emotion inflates and obliterates the others.
Happy or sad,
excited or bored,
angry or hurt – it is either/or.
Slowly, though, hopefully,
children mature and gain the ability
to feel more than one thing,
at one and the same time.
Emotional maturity
greases the skids of intellectual maturity –
or the other way around,
or con-currently.
We learn to recognize that truth is not categorical
but rather, a gradation –
a continuum of possibilities.

Eventually, we learn to hold opposites:
keeping several contrasting ideas
all at the same time;
puzzling and appreciating the actual complexity
of many competing truths.

As we grow in wisdom and understanding,
right and wrong,
moral and immoral,
good and bad
become cloudier, grayer, fuzzier;
and softer around
the edges –
and they seem less and less
like hardened silos.
To be the presence of God in the world,
among those with whom we live and work and play,
as well as with total strangers,
we must activate both salt and sugar within us;
we must blend the butter with the flour inside.

We must be able to speak softly,
and, when called upon, we must be able to rant.
We must be able to act with compassion,
and still be fierce when necessary.

We must be able to nurture and strengthen,
just as we must be able to agitate and challenge.

At some point we learn it is rarely only
one way or the other, and more often, both/and – some of this and some of that;
comforting the afflicted
and afflicting the comfortable;
but also challenging the afflicted
and encouraging the comfortable.

It really is time that we cease drawing lines
as if we are one or the other.

It is not difficult to see where our political
and theological rhetoric has gotten us:
the balkanizing of States,
the grim alienation of cultures,
animosity among classes;
and hostility among races and ethnicities.

Think about all this dysfunction of alienation
as we would when trying to heal a family system.

When there is a child or adult acting out in a family, he or she is probably acting out a problem
the entire family-system shares.

In a family, the one doing the acting out
is the incarnation of a bigger problem,
some wound or difficulty in the family itself.
What we have learned over time,
is that treating only the individual child –
the problem child, so to speak –
while not addressing the larger family issues,
probably won’t make much progress.

Edwin Friedman, one of the first people to articulate Family Systems Theory, applied his understanding
to institutions beyond the family – like churches.
I once heard him say that anxiety is usually located
in a particular part of a system,
whether a family or institution or government.
The anxiety of the whole system
gets acted out in especially vigorous ways
among the people or groups holding it.
In other words, the anxiety of the entire system
gets associated with whichever particular part
is holding onto it or exhibiting it,
but any individual or group
is only holding the anxiety for the whole system.

The example I heard him give,
is that in a synagogue, often it is the Hebrew School
where the anxiety of the whole system resides.
In a law firm, he said, the system’s anxiety frequently is held in the litigation department.
In churches? The choir. (He said it, not me).

His point is something we probably recognize
from within our own experience.
While the acting out is done by one child,
or one part of the system,
the acting out is symptomatic of an anxiety
running through the entire system.

We cannot resolve the issues
by treating one person
or one part of the system.

A global example is helpful here.

We cannot treat climate change
as if it is only an issue of oil and coal.
Instead, it has to do with the entire economic system
from top to bottom.
Climate change involves every political
and business institution in the world;
not to mention, nearly every element of culture
that we cherish.

To address climate change,
we will have to engage all of them
and not treat one as the enemy
and one as the hero.

So let’s think systematically about spiritually,
even our own personal, spirituality.

If we are only comfortable ranting
about God’s justice
and judgment,
then what tender, little voice
are we neglecting
that is left to fester within us?
Even tender voices can create chaos
when neglected.

On the other hand, if we are only capable
of pretending uniform niceness,
our anger will become a hardened cist within us.
Hidden, it will grow and gnaw
until it damages our other capacities.

If we only hold one element of God’s presence
and deny or neglect the rest,
then a dysfunction will be created within us.
The lover,
the judge,
and the agitator;
the teacher,
the activist,
and the pacifist;
the fighter,
the wise,
and the innocent –
they must all be in conversation within us
and among us,
or the whole loaf will crumble.
This is as true for us as individuals
as it is for us as a society,
or a city,
or a congregation.

We need to think of ourselves,
and those with whom we share the world,
as a whole loaf with many ingredients;
and each ingredient is incomplete,
and perhaps even undesirable,
when out of relationship to the whole.

I would make the same observation about Jesus.

What we have in the gospels is a prism,
the many parts of Jesus casting light
in all directions.
If or when we try to homogenize
all those many parts of Jesus,
making them fit together smoothly
and without agitation, we lose the light.

We cannot force Jesus into a uniform theology.
We cannot turn Jesus into a doctrine.
We try, but whenever it is done,
it ends up doing violence to Jesus,
or to those who do not fit with the doctrine.

In our rational, age of reason little brains,
we keep trying to make everything fit into a science
or a theory
or a description of reality
with which we can feel comfortable.

Jesus will not fit,
any more than you or I will fit.
When we try to reconcile Jesus with a whip
causing a riot in the temple,
with Jesus encouraging victims
to turn the other cheek,
they are pieces of a puzzle that do not fit together.

We cannot force them,
because they do not really fit together –
they are ingredients
that act and react to one another
to create a whole.
Jesus the lover,
the judge,
and the agitator;

Jesus the healer,
divider,
and peace-maker;
and Jesus the harbinger of catastrophic change,
do not all fit together to create a smoothie
that goes down easily.
Instead, like you and me,
he is many ingredients
that together,
work on
and react to one another.
Together, it all makes up
an edible and nutritious whole.
So, we need to stop trying to round off
the sharp edges and instead,
feel the sting.

We need to stop trying to sharpen the softness
and instead, feel the love.

We need to let be what is truly present:
feel it,
learn from it,
know it,
and hear its unique voice.

We need to stop trying to get rid
of the parts of Jesus we do not like,
just like we need to stop trying to get rid
of the indigenous and inevitable parts of ourselves
we do not like.

We need to embrace them all
as ingredients
that somehow will become whole
if we allow the presence of God to be our yeast.

It is not about exorcising sin, evil,
and darkness from within ourselves,
it is about embracing them
and understanding that those are parts of us –
ingredients, that with God as yeast,
actually make us whole.

If we think of the things we
do not like about Jesus,
or the things we do not like about ourselves,
as parts that need to be removed or eliminated,
it will cause us severe damage.
We will be doing violence to Jesus,
and violence to ourselves.

We cannot remove the elements we do not like
without doing violence to the whole.
But with God as yeast, all those ingredients –
the good and bad and the ugly,
the ones we like and do not like –
work together, to create wholeness.

Holding it all,
all the ingredients,
and allowing the presence of God
to act upon us
and within us
and among us
is the fruit of spiritual maturity.

Our Vision

We are striving to be as open as the table Jesus hosted, in solidarity with the people of Geneva, and an accessible partner to others who share our sense of the gospel.

It also means we have opened ourselves to the future, and not only moved but adopted a new way of being church from the more traditional model. Join us at Trinity Place, 78 Castle Street in downtown Geneva, NY.

Trinity Place is a venue suitable for yoga, tai chi, intimate acoustical concerts, poetry and author readings, a temporary art gallery or installation, classes or recovery groups, and receptions and public meetings. By offering free (to non-profits) and low cost (for-profit) space to the community, Trinity Place hopes to become an open space for the community to meet and build relationships.

Trinity Place is an outreach program of Trinity Church, an open and inclusive space not requiring any religious affiliation on the part of those using it. Trinity Church moved its parish office and after-school tutoring program into an adjacent part of the building and we expect to offer musical fare and alternative inter-faith worship events at Trinity Place as well.

 

THIS WEEK – Sunday, April 15th

our Holy Communion features the music of

“Arise & Go”

Celtic Musicians Extraordinaire!

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The Rev. R. Cameron Miller is our “Priest-in-Partnership” which is a title he urged us to use … Read more

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