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Proper 13 A, 2017: A little something about the Economy of God

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Two Texts for Preaching

Matthew 14:13-21, and,

The Secret
by Denise Levertov

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that
a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

The Sermon

The powers that be,
the ones that designed the Common Lectionary
that we use each Sunday,
and which prescribes the Biblical readings
for each and every Sunday,
has an editorial bias.

Of course they do, all of us do.

Which readings they chose
out of the sixty-six books of the Bible,
and when they chose them to be read,
and which ones they chose to be read together,
all influences what we hear
when we listen to those readings.

Like I said, it is not strange or unusual
because that is what happens when we make choices
from among alternatives –
we always skew or influence the outcome.
No big deal.
But we still need to recognize
that every Sunday there is a silent secret agent
hidden among the readings.
And that is just one more reason
to add a reading that is NOT from the Lectionary –
which we do.
It rattles the arrangement
and throws a monkey wrench into the plan.
The liturgical poem we use
will insert itself into the fabric
and cause us to ask questions
we might not ask otherwise.

Like today.
Besides evoking
the powerful memory from childhood,
when excitedly discovering
some great secret truth
that is just as promptly forgotten,
Levertov’s poem also begs us ask

if indeed such secret truths exist?
Perhaps instead of the giant peach-of-a-truth
so many people reach for as if a huge, shiny nugget of gold
in a river of rocks,
truth is more like a pile of pick-up-sticks –
each little piece
connected to other little pieces,
always unfinished
and incoherent apart from the
precariously balancing relationships.

That may be more than we want to contemplate
mid-morning in the summer,
but it does open up that Gospel reading
to more than the usual Disney fantasy.

Going back to the editorial layout of the Lectionary,
they left out half of the Matthew story.
There must have been a reason they did that,
because as it is,
we are being asked to put together
a complicated jigsaw puzzle
without knowing what the subject is,
AND without all the pieces.

Clearly, the Lectionary Committee
wanted us to think of Matthew’s story
as a miracle story
inflating the powers and status of Jesus.
But it is not a miracle story.
Rather, it is a political commentary
and an economic and social criticism.

In fact, I will go so far as to say
that the so-called feeding of the 5000 story
is as close as we come
to uncovering Jesus’
political and economic manifesto.
But that is not what we hear
because we read only half of the story.
What we get
is the Disney Gospel
instead of the Jesus Gospel.

The Disney Gospel
is a consumer gospel that gives the religious consumer
what he or she wants to hear,
which is usually what consumer economics does.

But I think we will see,
if we acknowledge the whole story,
that it is not about magic
or satisfying wishes.

Today’s reading from the Lectionary begins,
“Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew in a boat
to a deserted place by himself…”

Heard what?
With the Lectionary, we do not get to know what he heard,
but clearly it was the motivation for his leaving
wherever he was before this part of the story.

So let’s back up
because instead of this story being the feeding of 5000,
it would more properly be called,
the tale of two feasts.

(And, just to touch the Levertov poem again,
we are uncovering a secret).

This story properly begins far, far away
from hungry peasants;
it begins, far away on the other side of the lake.
This story begins in a palace.

It begins where King Herod lives.

It is Herod’s birthday
and he throws a big party for himself.
Because he is king,
it is an opulent feast and it is
the first of two feasts
in this story from Matthew.

At Herod’s feast
there is the heavy aroma of lamb
sizzling on the spit.

Seasoned duck and pheasant perhaps,
along with soft, steaming bread
and thick flavorful hummus.
There is juicy, succulent fruits and wine,
lots and lots of wine.

(Hmmm, I wonder what’s for Coffee Hour today?)

At Herod’s feast
they eat while reclining on pillows.

At Herod’s feast, there is music.
At Herod’s feast, there is dancing.
At Herod’s feast, in fact,
there is a dance performance –
a sensual dance
with youthful bodies
schooled in the art of seduction.

Herod is smitten with one of the dancers.
No, smitten is not the word, it is too wholesome.
He is engorged with lust
and not for just any dancer.
It is for his teenage stepdaughter.
He becomes senseless with craving as she dances.
We have all known the sensation
of being captured by our own desires,
perhaps not to the degree Herod displays in this story,
but we can imagine it.
His hunger is riding on a horse of affluence
and so it can never be tamed.
Herod’s affluence diminishes his boundaries.
His appetites,
over-indulged and over-empowered
by the unreal degree of his affluence,
stretched his capacity for restraint
into an insatiable, bottomless pit.

She dances
and he falls prey to his obsession.
“Keep dancing!” he begs
as the music stops.

“Keep dancing and I will give you anything you want.
Anything!”

“Gold?
Power?
Palaces?
Slaves?
What makes you happy?”
“None of that,” she says,
“just cut off the head of John the Baptist
and serve it to me on a platter.”

What?
I know, right? How did John the Baptist
get into this story. Crazy.

John the Baptist is another prophet
and social critic,
more renowned than Jesus at the time.
He was a severe critic of the Disney religion
in his own day,
and Herod was often the foil of his critique.
But I don’t want to get into all of the politics
and palace intrigue today.
Suffice it to say,
an entourage of kitchen slaves arrives
carrying a large handsome silver platter.
Ceremoniously they make their way
through the feasting crowd
and place the human head with eyes wide open,
lips curled into a crooked grimace,
truth written all over his face,
on the table in front of the king.

This tale of two feasts
is not quite the Disney tale we imagined
when we only heard half the story.
But this is now where Jesus comes in,
and the second feast.

Jesus hears the story about John’s beheading.
Immediately he leaves where he was
for a “deserted place.”
Matthew tells the story of the first feast
and then immediately,
Jesus withdraws.

Is he freaked out and afraid?
In grief?
Does he immediately read the punch line
of Herod’s action:
Those with power do not give it away,
and those who own affluence will not soon part with it?
Perhaps it is both:
Jesus’ grief and a strategic retreat,
all at the same time to consider his options.

Either way, Jesus is followed.
He is followed by people who are hungry.
He is followed by people who hunger for hope
as much as for food.
Hunger for hope that he is the chosen one
who can fix things.
Hunger for hope that he will take down Herod
and the Roman occupation.

Now for the second feast in the tale of two feasts.

At Jesus’ feast, there is no music.
At Jesus’ feast, there is no protein.
(There are no fish in Matthew’s version).

At Jesus’ feast, there is no wine.
At Jesus’ feast, there are no pillows.
At Jesus’s feast, there is no dancing.
At Jesus’ feast, there are no slaves –
or more probably, if slaves were there
they were without their masters.
At Jesus’ feast, there is only bread.

At Jesus’ feast, the host
shares what he has
and acts like that will be enough,
even without knowing ahead of time
if it will be enough.

At Jesus’ feast, there is no affluence
but there is abundance.
So right there, we have landed on the fulcrum
upon which this tale of two feasts balances.

Affluence is what we have
when we own wealth and resources.
Abundance is what we have
when what we have is more than enough.
Get it?

We can have more than enough and not be affluent.

An economy based upon abundance
ensures that everyone has more than enough:
whether no one is wealthy
or some are wealthy,
everyone still has more than enough.

Abundance is the invisible guiding hand
in the economy of God,
and that is what the tale of two feasts is all about.

The Disney Gospel,
which is the primary narrative of OUR economy,
is that we should own more than we need
and accumulate as much as we can.
Our economy is guided by the invisible hand
of Natural Selection that grabs for as much as it can get.

But in fact, our economy
is built on scarcity so that affluence is shared by only a few.

Affluence deepens our hunger
and it deepens our desires
and it seduces us
with promises of more and more wealth and riches.

Abundance, on the other hand,
insures that we have enough,
and more than enough,
no matter how much or how little we have
relative to everyone else.
An economy of abundance may include people with wealth
but it does not allow anyone to suffer deprivation.

The moral of the story,
according to the tale of two feasts,
is that affluence leads to jealousy,
anxiety, and violence
while abundance leads to generosity,
empowerment, and community.

Now here is a critical moment of truth:
we do not get to decide
which economy we live in,
even though we likely live in both –
side-by-side as if straddling two dimensions
at one and the same time.

We live in our economy
even as we might desire to live in the economy of God.
Our spiritual task then,
is to release ourselves as much as possible
from the seductive power of affluence,
and nurture in ourselves and one another,
the hope and work of abundance.

The Lectionary Committee
would have us hear that Jesus is a miracle worker
when instead, the tale of two feasts that Matthew tells,
is about us
and about which economy we will actually thrive in.

Like those two girls
discovering the secret of life in a line of poetry,
there is a secret to be uncovered in this story
we thought we already knew.

It is also likely a secret we will forget again and again,
and that we have discovered before.

Just one more view of abundance

 

Proper 12, Year A: Mustard & Oscar Romero

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TEXT (Gospel of Matthew):
“Jesus put before the crowds another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”

SERMON

First of all,
I have a confession.
I am leaning on a long-held notion about
those parables from Matthew.
I had two hours this week for sermon preparation, period,
Between five and seven PM on Thursday evening.
That was it.

You see,
along with Kim Donsaleer,
Mary Shelley, and Kathleen Carney,
I spent Sunday through Saturday
at a conference on congregational development,
during which we worked ten to twelve hours a day.
I’m sure you will hear more about this moving forward,
but the four of us are pooped,
and our brains are losing content like a leaky boat
that’s taken on too much water, too fast.

All of that is to say,
if this sermon is slightly incoherent
I wouldn’t even recognize it.
So I fall upon the mercy of God
to stand these words up on their feet
and use them for God’s own purposes.

Okay.
Sometimes something happens
and it wakes us up
when we didn’t even know we were asleep.

My oldest son played basketball in college
at SUNY Geneseo,
about two hours from where we lived in Buffalo at the time.
That meant his Christmas break was short
and he would return to play games
during Christmas vacation.

Come to think of it,
some of you may have already heard this story
and if so, my apologies.

One evening, the first year he played,
I drove his girlfriend and one of his best friends,
to one of those games.
It was a cold, wintery night
and the last leg of the trip
was along a two-lane state road
through farm country.

The further we got away from the interstate
and the deeper we traveled into farmland
and the more nervous and agitated
my two passengers became.

“Mr. Miller,” my son’s male friend,
who happens to be an African American, piped up:
“you’re not going to break down are you?”

“Yeah, Mr. Miller,” his girlfriend added, “whatever you do, don’t get stuck in one of those snow drifts.”

I queried them about my driving, if they thought I was being reckless or something.
“No, but Mr. Miller,” the young man said earnestly,
“there are farmers.”
“Yeah so, there are farmers. We’re driving through farm country,” I answered.
“Yeah, but Mr. Miller, they have pitchforks
and who knows how many of them there are?”

I started laughing at the image of Elmer Fudd
hiding at the side of the road with a pitchfork.
But then I realized they were both truly nervous.
It suddenly hit me like a ton bricks,
this was totally alien territory
for either of these two city kids.

They started nervously chattering
about all the hazardous things that could be out there
in the dark of farm country.
It sounded exactly like
the anxieties born of ignorance
I have heard from suburbanites and rural folks
about the dangers of the city.

This was reinforced for me in rural Vermont,
where people unfamiliar with the city
often revealed anxieties and assumptions about “the other,”
and doggone if they weren’t almost exactly th­­­e same anxieties city folks express about strangers out there in rural America.
­­­
Even though I grew up in Indiana,
and the flat expanse of corn and soybeans
strums notes inside my heart that feel like home,
at that moment I realized,
with a great deal of consternation,
that my children are city kids.

All that’s worth thinking about regarding
the pastoral and agricultural images
that serve as meat and potatoes for the gospels,
and how alien they are to most of the population.

We can learn about plant biology in class
but that is far different from the relationship
formed with seeds, soil, and seasons
in the garden or on the farm.

80% of the US population lives in urban areas –
and over 50% of the world’s population lives in cities –
and that is increasing rapidly.

I mention it as a preface to today’s gospel metaphors
because the power of ancient metaphor gets diluted
by how far removed we may be from the soil and seasons.

That is just a thought to hold and wonder about
as we encounter all these parables
over the rest of the summer of our own growing season.

But now let’s notice today’s parable itself.
Jesus tells us the kingdom of God
is built upon the accumulation of unnoticeable,
inconsequential moments.
The kingdom of God
is the Cosmos upon whose branches are nestled
countless spinning orbs,
far-flung fiery asteroids,
and clusters of life in untold trillions –
and all of it has its origins
in the teeniest tiniest speck of a molecule.

That is a slightly more 21st century metaphor
than the agricultural mustard seed one,
but it conveys the same idea.

To this parable, Matthew has Jesus add another;
the one about leaven: hidden in only three measures of flour,
the leaven contaminates all the flour.

I take that to mean that while God may not be
present in all things,
God’s presence makes all things sacred,
while also ripening in the moment;
ripening inconspicuously as the first parable notes.
Most dramatically we should notice
neither parable is not about us.

We are not the one who animates life.
It is not our seed that grows.
It is not our tree.
None of it requires our action to take place.
We cannot ripen it.
We probably cannot even hurry it.  I’ll repeat myself:

We are not the one who animates life.
It is not our seed that grows.
It is not our tree.
None of it requires our action to take place.
We cannot ripen it.
We probably cannot even hurry it.

Wow.
We are not in this picture at all!
It is not about us.

The meaning of this parable is hard news for human beings,
because we like to imagine it IS all about us
and it is all about what we DO.
But not so:
It is not about us
and we have nothing to do with it.

It is all God’s action
and whatever God is doing,
God is ripening it without our knowledge
and without our input
and as far as we know,
without our action.

I suspect many of us, if not all of us,
would rather carry the weight of the world
on our own shoulders
than accept the kingdom of God
is moving
and growing
and acting
in utter inconspicuousness all around us,
while absolutely without us.

We would rather be crushed
by the weight of the world
than know we are powerless
and without control
over the things that are most important to life.

The kingdom of God lives and moves and has its being,
and unfolds in the universe around us,
with or without us.

The Kingdom of God is ripening:
small,
insignificant,
inconspicuous,
with unnoticeable growth
and incremental accumulation.
God does what God will do,
where God chooses to do it.
And we are not even in the picture.

All of which begs the question,
why am I preaching about something
that has little, if anything, to do with us?

Well sometimes,
especially when we only have a few minutes
like I did this week,
it is very helpful to step back…
and remember.
Sometimes…
we just need to climb down off our high horse,
step down from the podium,
pull the plug on the huge importance of our own lives,
and remember it is not about us.
Then we can go looking for the mouse hole –
or pinhole even –
where we might be able to plug in
some very small bit of contribution.

It’s just a little bit of perspective,
nothing more and nothing less.
You may not need it from where you are looking out
at the universe,
but it sure is helpful to me sometimes.
So bear with me.

There is prayer I have used over the years,
sometimes even as an Affirmation of Faith,
that was written by folks celebrating
the life and ministry of Archbishop Oscar Romero.

If you know about him,
you may remember that he was
the Archbishop of San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador,
as that country began to enter into civil war.
He was a prophetic witness against
the crimes of his own government
as well as those of the opposition,
and even of the Roman Catholic Church.
He was assassinated by agents of the government
as he celebrated Holy Communion,
after having demanded that Salvadoran soldiers
put down their arms and refuse to do violence
to their fellow Salvadorans.

He is now commemorated
on our calendar of saints and martyrs
each year on March 24th.

This is that prayer,
and it eloquently laces
the wisdom of Jesus’ mustard seed parable,
with the refreshing perspective
that is so helpful for us to wash our face with now and again.

Let us pray.

Gracious God, help us, now and then,
to step back and take the long view:
Your kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is your work.

Nothing we do is complete,
remind us that your kingdom
always lies beyond us.

No statement can say all that could be said.
No prayer can fully express our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No healing brings complete wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church’s mission.
No goals and objectives includes everything…

Empower us, O God, to make a beginning,
a step along the way,
an opportunity for your grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results
so grant us the wisdom to know
this is the difference between
the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders,
ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future
not our own. Amen.

As the summer moseys along,
and we do not notice – but reap the benefits of –
incremental growth going on all around us,
may we savor the jubilance of ripening fruit
and the succulence of fresh green vegetation
that has come in and out of the world
without us.

My wish,
my hope,
is that you and I can be those people
who love the world,
and experience God’s animating fingers
in the magnificence of life.

My wish,
my hope,
is that your heart and mind,
as well as my own,
now and again feels compelled to dance
and raise our arms in amazed gratitude
for this lovely abundance
born of so imperceptible a presence.

My wish,
my hope,
is we can luxuriate in the wisdom
that we live and move and have our being in God,
but that we are neither
the beginning nor the end of that life;
and certainly not the power upon which it depends.

Hoo-ha!

 

Proper 11 A, 2017:The problems we’re born with are the ones we die with

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TEXTS for Preaching: Sunday, July 23, 2017

Wisdom of Solomon 12:13, 16-19

There is no god besides you, whose care is for all people,
to whom you should prove that you have not judged unjustly;
for your strength is the source of righteousness,
and your sovereignty over all causes you to spare all.
For you show your strength when people doubt the completeness of your power,
and you rebuke any insolence among those who know it.
Although you are sovereign in strength, you judge with mildness,
and with great forbearance you govern us;
for you have power to act whenever you choose.

Through such works you have taught your people
that the righteous must be kind,
and you have filled your children with good hope,
because you give repentance for sins.

Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

Jesus put before the crowdanother parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”

Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” He answered, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!”

Sermon

Your power over all, O God,
causes you to spare all and judge with mildness.
We’ll get back to that sweet little line from
the Book of Wisdom.

We have before us a parable
that has been so well chewed by the oral tradition –

by which I mean that river of years meandering
from the death of Jesus to when
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John edited his words
forty to eighty years later –
that whatever Jesus’ original intent or meaning was,
it is now lost to us forever.
The consequence is that Cam Miller at Trinity,
and Deb Lind at the Presby Church,
and Donald Golden at Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church,
can all get up into their pulpits on the same day,
preaching on the same parable,
and say very different things.
But that is the interpretive nature of Scripture.
It does not stand on its own and speak for itself.
And that is the human experience as well,
each of us encountering one and the same thing
and walking away with sometimes wildly different perceptions.

I am about to do a little de-construction with this parable,
but as I do, I should admit up front
that I am not a big believer in the apocalyptic promise
of a Second Coming.
“He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,”
is only one of the many lines
of the Nicene Creed that I choke on.
The idea that Jesus will arrive at the end of history
to separate the good guys from the bad guys –
which, by the way, is also an orthodox Muslim belief –
just doesn’t compute for me.

I stand instead,
in the modernist tradition of scholarship
that does not see anything in the teaching of Jesus,
to suggest that Jesus thought he was coming back
when the clock stops ticking.
Some Gospel editors clearly believed Jesus would be back,
but they were doing some expansive interpretation
in order to get there.

I prefer the Book of Wisdom’s take on things:
Your power over all, O God,
causes you to spare all and judge with mildness.

Now we know, from modern Biblical scholarship,
that Jesus’ stories and parables
circulated by word of mouth for two or three generations
before they were written down.
And over the course of that span of years
the world changed quite dramatically.

In other words,
the world of the gospel-writers
was quite different from the world Jesus lived in.

Think of it this way.
I was born in 1953,
and my youngest child, James, was born in 1994.
That is roughly the same span of time
that passed between Jesus’ death
and when Mark’s gospel was written.
Think about how much the world changed
between 1953 and 1994.
Think how the presumptions of my world
are different from the presumptions of his world:
The Cold War.
The crumbling of Colonialism.
The expansion and then decline of Communism.
The receding of nationalized economies and the birth of globalism.
The globalization of American culture
and the evaporation of American dominance.
Space travel.
Earth travel.
Studebaker to Prius to self-driving cars.
Mainframe computers that filled a warehouse
reduced to a laptop computer,and then again to tablet size computing,
and now a phone with nearly as much speed and memory
as the old mainframe.
From industrialization, to the explosion of information,
to the crisis of climate change.

We could go on and on
naming how the world has changed,
and how many human assumptions have changed with it,
in that brief lapse of time between when I was born
and the year James was born.

But we should not make the mistake of modern hubris,
and say to ourselves that our world is changing
so much faster than the world of Jesus’ day,
and that of the New Testament writers
writing forty to eighty years after him.
While our rate of technological change
is light years more rapid,
history always races by
from the perspective of those living it.

You see, between Jesus and Matthew,
there opened up a chasm as wide as the one
between my world and James’.

A war of Jewish insurrection
against Roman domination,
led to the near elimination of what Jews had come to know
as Judaism – and their religion
was nearly extinguished altogether.
The social and political landscape
changed radically from Jesus to Matthew,
and if we do not know about those changes
then we cannot fully understand the Gospels.

Matthew and his Jewish contemporaries
believed they were living close to the apocalypse,
at the near end of history.
But the world Jesus lived in
was still open-ended and full of possibilities.

That difference alone
shows how Jesus’ parable evolved
into a metaphor about Christian community
even though Christians and Christianity did not exist
when Jesus walked the earth.

As told by Matthew,
Jesus’ parable deals with the question
of how something so good,
like church,
can have such yucky people in it.

Matthew is concerned about how Christians
will define themselves over and against the world:
making clear that Christians are the good guys
and the rest of the world, bad guys.
And if that is true, Matthew wonders,
then how do some of those bad guys
get into the good guys club?
If they get in,
does that spoil the goodness of the whole club?
The answer Matthew comes up with,
is the Devil done it.
A mysterious enemy snuck in by night
and planted the bad guys.

So that is how Matthew
interpreted a parable told by Jesus
fifty years earlier;
and how he then passed it on to us
with implications quite different from Jesus’ original.

Now if we were to strip away
the presumption of Matthew’s world –
and remember that for Jesus there was no Church
and there were no Christians,
nor even a dawning apocalypse –
we might hear a different punch line from Matthew’s.

In other words,
if we shift the context of the parable
away from Matthew’s post Jewish/Roman war –
when Judaism no longer existed in Judah and Galilee,
and was hanging by a thread everywhere else –
and we listen to it back to Jesus’ day,
what we notice right away
is that the workers are downright edgy and anxious
when they go out and find weeds in the field.

That is an important clue
as to what the parable was about for Jesus.

Remember, they are peasant-farmers
and so they are worried
about being blamed and punished.
They know they are innocent –
they know they didn’t plant the bad seeds.
So they start to calculate the possibilities
like a fugitive fox sniffing hounds in the wind.

They race through the questions:
Does the presence of weeds
mean the farmer mixed in the weeds with the seeds?
Will we be blamed?
Maybe people will think
we pocketed some of the good seed for our own plots,
and then filled in with weeds.
Should we purify the field now,
protect what good seeds are left so we don’t get blamed?

They anxiously question the integrity of the farmer,
raise doubts about their own credibility with others,
and worry about what to do now.
We know from our own experience
that the presence of ugliness and evil causes us to be anxious,
and to question any goodness we had presumed.

Now here is the counterpoint
I suspect Jesus wanted us to hear in the parable
before Matthew got ahold of it.

The farmer enters the scene.
The farmer owns the land.
The farmer owns the peasants.
The farmer owns the produce.
The farmer, who is sovereign,
practices non-anxious presence,
or as the Book of Wisdom declares: Mildness.
“No! Don’t purify the field,” the farmer calls out,
“you have no idea what is a weed
and what is potential fruit!
Leave it alone and let the harvesters deal with it.”

That is the Jesus we see in so much of the gospels –
the one who stands without anxiety
while everyone around him frets about, “What if?”
In the presence of a knee-jerk temptation
to separate the good guys from the bad guys,
Jesus, standing in the middle of them all,
sits down for supper.

When confronted with a demand for purity,

Jesus remembers the Book of Wisdom:
Your power over all, O God,
causes you to spare all
and judge with mildness.
That is not apocalyptic.
There is no fear of God as judge in that ancient wisdom.
The world, from that point of view,
does not end with judgement, if it ends at all.

Let’s think about that parable of Jesus’
on a very personal level.
We could use it on a macro level to think about
institutions like the church,
but let’s go micro today.

We have character defects,
you and I.
All of us, right?
We all have defects of character.
We all have significant problems
that keep re-emerging in our lives
like mildew keeps coming back.

We have painful limitations
and flaws,
ones that have followed and cursed us
all throughout our lives.
They are weeds that won’t disappear
no matter how much we work at it,
any more than plastic surgery will overcome aging.

So to this weediness of ours,
to those ugly and embarrassing parts of ourselves
that have become entangled with the fruit we bear,
Jesus whispers to us from out of this parable:
Do not try to purge yourself.
What you think is a weed may bear fruit.
Live with it.
Watch it grow.
Tend it.
Let it be.
One day, God will wipe away every tear,
and then you will know peace.
For now, let it be.

Here is what I take away from this parable.

Most of what we struggle with
was planted there in the beginning,
or deposited along the way by others,
and we will not get rid of it.
In other words,
the problems we are born with
are likely the same ones to keep us company
on our death bed.
Live with them.
Learn from them.

Grow with them.
Find ways to compensate for them.
Seek to live non-anxiously alongside them.
Assume that God, one day,
will heal us with unspeakable love
but until then,
make due with the presence of weeds in our garden.

“Your power over all
causes you to spare all
and judge with mildness.”
Let us go and do likewise.

Proper 10, 2017: Mad Farmer of the Cosmos

by

Link to Matthew 13:1-9; 18-23, today’s text: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+13%3A1-9%2C+18-23&version=MSG

There are some problems with 1st century agrarian wisdom
as the core narrative of a 21st century urbanized info-culture.
But that is what we have so let’s make the best of it.

Jesus’ parable about God as a whacko,
impetuous farmer
is awesome and spot on.
God is not OCD –
there is nothing about God
that is obsessive-compulsive
because, as we see, life is scattered
throughout this tiny little planet of ours – and perhaps across the cosmos.

Life, and stupendous, marvelous,
spectacularly awesome miraculousness
is everywhere and willy-nilly.

Life, love, and abundance is scattered;
thrown to and fro,
not planted in neat little rows.

God, it turns out, farms
with a higher degree of randomness rather than order.
I find that simply awesome – and strange.

Think on it.

God is not even an Amish farmer
who we might expect to at least
carefully plant within the lines of Nature.
But unlike the Amish, who harvest a prodigious yield
with only the bare strength and ingenuity
of humans and domesticated animals,
God’s creation now brings forth the bloom of Life
from Petri dishes,
and abundance flows from synthetics drugs
and hybrid energy sources.
Up, and up, and up it comes
percolating from mechanical extensions
of the human mind,
and mathematical models
reaching far beyond our limited capacities.
I find it simply astounding – and disconcerting.

God is most definitely not a Monsanto farmer either,
as if scrupulously planting by cost-benefit ratio
and slavishly chasing the highest productivity
for the least investment of capital and labor.

We see this unorthodox God in Evolution,
itself a much more trial-and-error system –
if even a “system.”
Evolution leaves behind a wake of victims, wastefulness,
and failure.

In Evolution, we can see that God
is spectacularly wasteful,
spilling abundance even in the face of scarcity.
I think this is simply amazing – if not unbelievable.

If Jesus’ parable is apt,
then God is indeed a lousy farmer –
indiscriminately tossing seeds wherever they land.
And, in fact, we see evidence of this everywhere.

When hiking in higher elevations above the tree-line,
where it is often as barren as a moonscape
and even the most athletic human
finds him or herself huffing and puffing and sucking air,
it is not strange to stop suddenly,
arrested by astonishment
from a sight seemingly miraculous.

Perhaps you have seen it too.
I saw it again yesterday,
at Chimney Bluffs on Lake Ontario.
The wind,
or a bird,
will have deposited a seed.

No, not in fertile soil,
but on a lip of a rock,
a flat space no bigger than a child’s hand.

There on barren stone,
a spoonful of soil like a layer of crumbs
where a cake once sat,
blooms a tender, brilliant flower.

How could something so lovely,
so beautiful and seemingly fragile,
eek out life
from so very little?
And yet there it is.
Awesome.

But that is not all.
Those who trod the painfully bleak paths
of human extremes,
will witness the same thing.

Go, venture toward the ragged and harsh plains
where gather the lives of victims –
those crushed and scarred by violence or neglect.

A child once brutalized by abuse,
routine violence or extreme neglect –
even from someone who should have protected them –
and instead of barren scar tissue in that grown-up child,
there also blooms joy and hope
as sweet as any gentler life could issue.

How is it
that all sweetness and gentleness
is not snuffed out by indifference or cruelty?
Under pain and betrayal
that would crush many of us –
that does in fact, crush most of those in its wake,
still there can and does bloom love
and loving-kindness more powerful than suffering.
Miraculous.

But we need not look only to
the magnificence of Nature
or in the intimacies in other people’s lives.

Even in our own lives,
yours and mine,
the cuts and scarring of deep grief, ordinary abandonment or neglect,
rejection,
hurt,
sorrow and wounding;
even in all of these
the mad farmer of the cosmos
has planted seeds.
They grow there, in the bleakness.

Even there, even in us,
we have witnessed the bloom of joy,
the blossoms of hope,
the tiger lilies of love,
without our own intention or effort tending them.
They just grow.
Incredible.

Lewis Thomas, the famous biologist
and one-time director of Sloan-Kettering Cancer
Institute urged,
that now and again we should direct our attention
away from the 20% of smokers who get lung cancer,
and be astounded and amazed by the 80% who do not.

Life and love and abundance
are remarkably resilient,
and we find example after example
of their relentless bloom
wherever we witness the debris of violence,
cruelty, neglect and abuse
on the landscape of human activity
or on the inscape of the human heart.

God seems utterly indifferent
to the borders we create for our neat little gardens.

We make,
and live our lives,
along well planned little rows.

We expect to harvest what we plant
and that it will grow where we planted it.
But often, very often,
that is not what happens.

We discover that what grows
is not what we planted
but something else.
And we encounter the fruits of our labor
in places we did not plant it.

Often when this happens, we reject it –
because we did not plant it
or because we did not plant it there.

We get angry and resentful
that it is not as we did it.

“It’s NOT how we planned it, God,
and by-god, we are not
going to harvest something we did not plant!”

And so we miss the awesome,
the miraculous,
the amazing and inspiring
that is growing all around us – and within us.

I want to end where I began:
to go back to that dilemma
of ancient agrarian wisdom
as the core spiritual narrative
for 21st century urbanized, commercialized,
and consumerized Christians.

We have made a mess of Jesus’ parables.
We have taken these little beauties
blooming among thorns and along the barren paths,
and tried to domesticate them.
But they are vibrantly wild products
of the mad farmer of the cosmos
that won’t be domesticated.

A parable
is a figure of speech
that bears one self-evident truth.

They are not secret rhymes or coded messages,
nor mystical puzzles with sublime punch lines.

They are blunt instruments
creating insight through blunt force trauma to the mind.
Jesus used parables to tell bald face truths
with no apology,
no need for spiritual guru’s
nor hired guns in priestly robes.

Over time Christianity,
like all religions,
learned the value of holding secret truths
and passing them out one at a time
to those who had demonstrated loyalty.

But Jesus told truths outright,
self-evident truths about God
and about life inside the human heart and mind.

For example,
the punch line for today’s parable
is the simple, homely little truth
that God is a lousy farmer.

God splashes holiness and love indiscriminately,
without concern for where it lands.
In contrast,
we parsimoniously, timidly, and fearfully
plant our love only where we believe it will grow
and bear fruit to our liking.

That is the parable.

We could get creative
and make up our own parables about the same thing:
God is like a whale blowing sea water like a geyser across the ocean.
We are like a squirrel hiding nuts for the winter.

God is like a sandstorm
burying everything in its path with generous abundance.
We are like a cautious whistle struggling to stay on tune.

God is like a flooding river
overwhelming its banks and changing the contours of the land forever.
We are like a church, offering communion and grace only to our members.

You see, there is no deep, dark, juicy secret here.
What we have is just a bald face truth.

We are being told
God is indiscriminant with the love that bears life,
so we should be little sloppier too.

That’s all.

It is not about being effective
it is about risking-taking with what matters.
It is not about being efficient
it is about radical hospitality.
It is not about cost-effectiveness
it is about reckless generosity.
It is not about conserving love
it is about scattering it.
It is not about getting it right
it is about practicing openness.
It is not about good order in all things,
it is about wild exuberance
in the midst of God’s amazing creation.

So…we are about to enjoy a lovely anthem;
a solo in which to pause and breathe in the moment.

I invite us to use it,
and allow the moment and
the mad farmer
to pry open our minds,
and shake loose our arms,
and limber up our fingers
and open wide our imaginations.
Where might you scatter your love?

On what little ledge might God have planted you –
someplace you may have had no idea about
until right now.

Where did you think there was not enough
nurture or abundance to grow or bloom?
Look again,
see if perhaps you’ve grown a little joy,
a sweet blossom of hope
you never imagined could have survived?

The mad farmer of the cosmos,
indiscriminant and radically generous
in astounding and stupefying ways,
makes our lives relentlessly open
to new scenarios
and new possibilities.
It’s crazy.

*Homage & thanks to Wendell Berry’s image of the Mad Farmer



 

 

Proper 9, 2017: Reversal Wisdom

by

“Come to me,
all you that are weary and
are carrying heavy burdens,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me;
for I am gentle and humble in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

 

Burdens and yokes – each of us have them;
and some of us, like old lumbering oxen,
are no longer even aware of the weight we carry
soldiering on as we do through life.

You know, Jesus was downright smart.
I mean really,
Jesus must have had a sky high emotional IQ –
able to read and understand people in depth.

Not only were his stories and parables penetrating,
rascally,
and insightful,
he also had reversal sayings and parables
that came in the back door
and smacked the listener upside the head.

The Good Samaritan – an oxymoron.
A camel threading the eye of a needle – an absolute impossibility.
Those who love their life will lose it and those who lose their life will gain it – a paradox.
Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth – an absurdity.

He seemed to talk like that all the time,
or at least within the residue of what we have left to us.
I am sure he said plenty of ordinary things too,
like: “Please pass the spuds.”
Surely he put his foot in his mouth more than once, too.

But on the preaching circuit he was pretty phenomenal.
And so it is, with today’s gospel from Matthew.

Imagine what that proverbial image meant to a peasant?

Seriously, a yoke that is easy,
a burden that is light?
A first century Galilean peasant,
burdened by debt and taxes to absentee Roman landlords,
would never have experienced a light burden
or an easy yoke – an oxymoron.
Oxymoron,
reverse logic,
Zen Koan…
a wisdom-teacher is waiting in the bushes of such ancient reversal-sayings,
ready to jump out and rattle the cage of our logic and open us up to new insights –
or slam our mind shut.
That’s what happens.

We can hear such proverbs and exclaim, “No way!”
But that is the beauty of Jesus’ way of teaching: open up the mind
and something new will drop in;
or if we choose to close the gate,
he will leave us alone.
An easy yoke?
A light burden?

I want to share a difficult storyabout burdens and yokes
and reverse-wisdom.

Before I became a priest, as you may know by now,
I worked in an inpatient Mental Health Unit.
It was a marvelously therapeutic environment –
a Camelot with a miraculous healing milieu
balanced precariously upon the politics of healthcare and psychiatry.
It has long since fallen into the realm of institutional psychotropic drug therapy, I am sure.

But for a time a healer was at the helm, a Gestalt Therapist
with a mere Master’s degree in the land of the MD’s and Ph.D.’s.
She was a wizard of wellness.

Her name was Claire
and she would gather her staff each week,
those with large and small academic degrees
along with aids who may have only had a high school degree.

She gathered us to do our own inner work through dream interpretation
and the exploration of our own angels and demons.

One thing she would frequently do is invite us to name the patient on the unit that week
who was most difficult for us to feel empathy toward.

As it turned out, the patient we had the most personal difficulty with
was also often the one who evoked something in us
that was personally threatening.
In other words, and ironically,
the patient that was the most difficult to empathize with
was usually the one that evoked the deepest sense of personal vulnerable within us.

It was never that obvious of course,
and we had to work hard to figure out the source of our vulnerability because,
let’s be honest, who wants to feel vulnerable?

There was one thirty-something woman
that I just could not warm up to and often could hardly even care about.

The second time she was admitted she was on suicide watch
because she had tried to kill herself several times,
and judging by her efforts
she was growing quite serious about it.
We took away her belt,
her shoelaces,
her sheets,
her razor,
we even made sure she didn’t have
a plastic dinner knife.
Anything she might use to harm herself was kept from her,
or was keenly observed while she had it.

The woman was very quiet and introverted
and she bothered me a lot.
She bothered me because
I could never connect with her,
and I never had any sense
that I knew what she was thinking or feeling.

One day on my shift,
as I walked past her room,
I saw her hanging from the ceiling.

She had tied one sleeve of her nylon parka
to the sprinkler pipe on the ceiling
and the other sleeve around her neck.
She was still alive and adrenaline shot through me.
I yelled for help and ran into her room.

My first instinct was to grab the parka
and desperately try to tear it apart,
as if a string of yarn.
I don’t know how long it took me to come to my senses,
it may have been immediately or a minute
before I grabbed her by the legs and held her up as I called for scissors.

People came running,
the coat was cut, I lifted her down
and off she was taken to the emergency room.
She lived.

Instead of being elated or even thinking about having saved a life, I was angry.
My anger lingered and it confused me.

She made me so angry.
Everything about her aroused my anger and in that anger, I felt guilty,
ashamed and…well, angry.

In our group that week with Claire it became obvious why:
She made me feel powerless.
An otherwise large, strong and competent person,
she reduced me to impotence.
My immediate impulse to try to tear a nylon parka
revealed how much I depended upon my physical strength.
The fact I could never connect with her
diminished faith in my intuitive capacity.
My inability to get her to respond to me
and my growing anger about it, revealed how important it was to me
to have other people respond positively to my efforts.

All my normal abilities and the sense of power they provided me
were thwarted in her presence, and were intensified by the experience
around her attempted suicide.
The way Claire invited me into that exploration was like Jesus inviting peasants
to imagine an easy yoke and a light burden.

She asked me to intensify my anger.

Rather than trying to ignore it or moderate it
or numb it
or intellectualize it,
she encouraged me to intensify it: make it bigger, she encouraged.
When I made that anger bigger
I could suddenly see it.
It was powerlessness I feared
and that which drew me into my fear made me angry.

The invitation to intensify the anger
instead of keeping it at a distance
was an unexpected strategy that led to insight.
Likewise, that was Jesus’ strategy.

What is your burden?
What is your yoke?

Put it on and feel it’s heaviness.
Put it on and feel how it captures and constricts you.
Feel it in your shoulders,
let your knees and hips feel its weight.
What are you carrying – intensify its weight if it helps.
In the encounter and relationship with that which burdens us
our spiritual journey ripens.

Let me repeat that.

In the encounter and relationship
with that which burdens us
our spiritual journey ripens.

But please, do not hear more than is being said.

This is not about courting pain and suffering,
as in some crazy, masochistic medieval spirituality.
It is not about those who are going through
intense sorrow and grief,
or the depths of despair and depression
making themselves feel worse.

This is about those of us who are cozy;
those of us who are within the normal walk we walk;
those of us doing just fine
with a few bumps here and there.
To those with a truly heavy burden
and a cruel yoke,
Jesus stretched out his arms
and invited them to use him
as a comfort station.

To those who lived in the mainstream,
supported by the current of economic comfort
and buoyed by social status
while leaving the multitude in their wake,
Jesus had in mind
an invitation to try on a yoke and burden.

But do not fear,
the invitation is not even for the biggest or heaviest of burdens,
nor the most restrictive or crushing of yokes.
You see, even the little ones
have something to show us.

Even the ordinary and everyday kind of burdens we feel,
or yokes we carry,
can deliver an insight to us:
that job that seems routine,
our home that feels like a money-pit;
relationships that are grinding or pinching,
those simmering conflicts or disagreements,
and the demands or neediness of others;
debt, grief, chronic physical pain, or emotional angst;
decisions we do not want to make;
losses we do not want to incur;
obligations we dread fulfilling;
inordinate needs or desires or fears that plague us…

What is your burden?
What is your yoke?

Whatever it is,
it is likely something you do not want to do,
and likely it evokes a range of emotions
you do not really want to feel.

But you see, when we do not want to feel it
we tend to do whatever we can to manage it
with the least amount of contact.
We distance it,
deny it,
detach from it,
suppress it.
That is our usual go-to response
when it comes to discomfort and pain.

But Claire’s wisdom,
and that of spiritual director’s
and other guides throughout generations,
is to enter into it
and intensify it
in the hopes of getting clear with it.

We are invited to venture into our burdens
and shoulder our yokes
and feel their weight,
so we can name what it is that weighs us down
and makes us leaden.
That is how we lighten our load,
and liberate ourselves from our yokes.

It is a Jesus paradox –
the kind of reversal wisdom
Jesus was famous for.

 

Our Vision

Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry, preached at Trinity November 2016
Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry, preached at Trinity November 2016

Our vision is of a Trinity Church known in the community as a welcoming home to everyone, responding effectively to the needs of all of our neighbors, in collaboration with fellow Episcopalians and other faith communities.

What that means is that we are striving to be as open as the table Jesus hosted, in solidarity with our neighbors in Geneva, and an accessible partner to others who share our sense of the gospel.

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