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Proper 13 B: The Economy of God

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American Flag on Wall Street

As I was mulling over the whole
Jesus and “bread” thing
the Pledge of Allegiance
kept creeping into my thoughts.
It was kind of like an earworm –
a tune you can’t get out of your head,
and I couldn’t figure out why it was hovering around
in my strange little brain.
Then it hit me like a ton of bricks:
“I am the bread of life.”

Surely you see the connection now?

Okay, this is how my brain works,
or doesn’t work as the case may be.

A lot of people think about ‘the pledge’
in very religious terms.
I grew up at a time when people were burning
the American flag on a daily basis,
so taking a knee during the anthem
seems downright respectful in comparison.
But if you are someone who literalizes the flag
as the object of allegiance,
any disrespect is going to feel outrageous.
If “I pledge allegiance to the flag…”
means literally, I dedicate myself to the actual flag,
then the flag itself
becomes a sacrament
instead of a symbol.
As we know, a sacrament is imbued
with a great deal more freight than most symbols.

In contrast to a sacrament,
a symbol has a kind of mental weight to it –
a poetic image verses flesh and blood.
A sacrament has flesh on it – it is the thing itself.
So thinking religiously about ‘the pledge’
turns the flag into something more than it is.
But holding the flag as a mere symbol
allows much more room to explore
the elements and implications
of the flag as a symbol.

The same contrast can be applied
to the idea that Jesus is bread –
as in “bread of life.”
And that brings me to the song,
“I am the bread of life.”

While that song has an inspirational
and uplifting tune,
I find its lyrics very difficult to sing sometimes.
The lyrics to “I am the bread of life” say:

“The bread that I will give
is my flesh for the life of the world,
and those who eat of this bread,
they shall live forever…

Unless you eatof the flesh of the Son of Man
and drink of his blood,
you shall not have life within you.”

Well, just like thinking religiously
about the pledge
can turn a piece of fabric
with stars and stripes on it
into more than it is,
the same kind of thinking
can turn flour, water, and yeast
into flesh and blood.

But my way of thinking
takes a much different turn
when it comes to Jesus and bread.
I’m not saying my way of thinking is best,
or truest, or anything else,
but it may help you to understand this guy
you listen to yammering week after week.

What my mind wants to do
is understand the relationship between
Jesus and manna.

The reason I feel compelled to go there
is that Jesus was a Jew
and he could not help but think of bread
and manna in relationship to one another.

And when he thought about manna,
it would surely cause Jesus to think
of God’s abundantlove
rather than an implied threat to those
who do not believe,
which is the turn that song seems to take.
And in all fairness to the song,
it reflects the turn the author of John’s Gospel
seems to take.

So let’s dig into manna a little.

The Gospel of John,
written seventy or eighty yearsafterJesus died,
says that Jesus is the “Bread of Life.”

That really meant something in those days.

Bread was often the difference
between life and starvation.
And in Israel’s communal memory,
bread was also more than basic calories
because it was totally
intertwined with manna.

Basic sustenance and deep memory
made bread something very different
for those ancients
than it is for us modern folk.
For people of modern affluence,
like most of us,
bread is a little morsel on the side we nibble
before the real appetizers arrive.
To Jesus, and those who shared the world with him,
bread was the main course.
Like rice throughout Asia,
bread kept people alive.

To most of us, today,
bread is something that keeps our hands clean
while we eat lunch meat, chicken salad,
or sauerkraut and pastrami.

To say Jesus is bread– for laborers,
subsistence farmers,
fishermen, and even soldiers
that lived in the first century with Jesus –
meant that Jesus was a primary staple of diet.

Jesus is bread,
declares he is the main source of calories.
Jesus is bread,
meant he is a sustainer
who fills the hole that hunger digs,
and staunches that daily dread of insecurity
in a world in which you never knew
if there was going to be enough to eat the next day.
Think of it: If you had a loaf of bread,
some of which you could save until tomorrow,
then you had security beyond sundown.
That would have been a very good day for most people.

Bread was often the only thing standing between you and hunger on a daily basis –
the thing between you and starvation,
between you and death.

Declaring Jesus is the bread of life
is a metaphor of such massive proportions
I am not sure we can even get
our imaginations around it today.
But as I said,
it all goes back to manna.

Here is a CliffsNotes reminder
of the story and circumstance of manna.

After Moses and the slave nation
escape Pharaoh’s army,
they end up in the desert wilderness.

According to the story,
there were thousands of them
and the only food they had
was what they were able to carry with them
the night they escaped.
It wasn’t long before that food ran out
and they were in the desert hungry
and full of panic.

Idealistic visions of hope
soon turned into the anger and resentment of the mob:
“The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness…’If only we had died at the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’”

So, as the story goes, God intervenes.
In the morning dew, miraculously,
there rains down upon the earth a substance
called “manna” – from then on,
known as the bread of heaven.

Manna had special properties,
very special properties.

First, God alerts the people
that there will be enough for everyone.
That is the first property of manna:
there is always enough of it to sustain those who eat it.

The second property, God tells them,
is that manna can only be eaten in the moment,
never kept more than a day.

No hoarding, God says.
But of course, the first thing that hungry,
scared, and starving people do,
is try to stash some.
But when they do, they discover
that second property:
it only lasts one day
and then gets wormy, stinky,
and gross.

Now if we engage this story with a little theological reflection,
which is what my brain likes to do,
it will bring us to some startling conclusions.
One possible rendering of the manna story
suggests that manna,
with its intrinsic properties
told to us in the story,
is the primary currency in the economy of God.

That phrase right there,
the economy of God,
is a way of messing with an important
and traditional Christian symbol:
the kingdom of heaven.
To call the kingdom of heaven
the economy of God
is to more plainly reveal that it has to do
with real life stuff that is here and now,
not just pie in the sky when we die.
I honestly think that is what Jesus was getting at
when he spoke so often about the kingdom of heaven.

Thinking about that manna story,
if the property of manna is
that there is always enough to go around
and everybody gets enough,
then perhaps it is saying to us –
even today, so many millennia later –
that anything that really matters
cannot be collected, amassed, or hoarded.

Let’s think about that
with an open mind and a deep breath:
In the economy of God
there is enough to go around
and everybody gets enough,
so that anything that really matters
cannot be collected, amassed, or hoarded.If that is true,
if that is actually the way the kingdom of God works –
and we are supposed to pray that
thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven–
then think about what we are actually asking.

Symbols and sacraments aside,
our real work – the thing our spiritual practice
and community of faith is supposed to be up to –
is co-creating with God,
the kingdom on earth as in heaven.
In other words,
we are supposed to be creating, with God,
an economy in which there is enough to go around.

Whoa.

One thing we know right now
is that in our world today,
poverty is a problem of distribution
not an issue of scarcity.
We DO have enough to go around
if we were to distribute it differently
and hoard it much less of it.

So now we can see, that this manna story
as well as the Jesus is bread story,
has a point aimed at us and we can feel it poking.

To say Jesus is the Bread of Life –
the manna we need to survive –
is to say, thy kingdom come, thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.

What that means,
if we use our theological imaginations,
is that we are supposed to be co-creators with God.
In other words, we are supposed to bring about
the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven:
the economy that God intends for the world.
It is not something that any one of us can do
all by ourselves, or even
a few of us gathered in groups
and impassioned to change our ways.

It is a collaboration between God and us,
and somehow, we have to convince
enough other human beings
that we would all be better off
living on manna
than hording what we imagine is the good stuff.

The first challenge we have
is convincing ourselves and one another
that all those material creature comforts we adore
is not our manna.
We imply such twisted thinking
with some regularity, maybe
without meaning to, when
we say we are blessed or someone else is blessed,
because they have stuff or got some more stuff –
even though we know true manna cannot be hoarded.

So often we think that blessings
are something some people ‘get’
and others lack.
Because we are so used to thinking that way,
we have commoditized manna
by talking about health,
success,
wealth
or beauty
as blessings from above.

In this scheme of things,
there are those who are blessed
and those who are not –
as if the economy of God
operates on the principle of scarcity
instead of abundance.

But that is because we define blessing so completely
by the amount of stuff we have
or our security, power, and health.
That is how our economy operates.
In God’s economy, rather than ours,
there is only blessing.
The story of manna in the wilderness
is a little reminder of that.

We have all been blessed;
we areall blessed.
No one gets more manna than anyone else
and no one gets more blessing than anyone one else –
we have all been blessed.

We would see and understand that
if ever we established the economy of God
on earth
as it is in heaven.

But until then,
we suffer and inflict suffering on one another
by amassing and hoarding anything we can,
and then we blame those who didn’t get much
and say it’s their fault.
It is absolutely as crazy a way of thinking as it sounds,
which is why Jesus asked us to give it up
and instead, work with God
to create God’s economy
on earth
as it is in heaven.

So, Jesus is manna:
he is a reminder that there is always
enough to go around
and everyone gets enough,
and anything that really matters
cannot be collected, amassed, or hoarded

 

 

Proper 12B 2018: Hearing Voices

by

So today was supposed to be a bread theme,
as you may have guess from the readings.
The biblical readings are appointed each week
by the powers that be,
and today has “bread” written all over it.
So I threw in the Passover reading
to connect them.
The problem is, as it turns out,
I’m not going to talk about bread.
Oops.

Last week I talked about a spiritual practice
that helps us to lean into our compassion
instead of falling into the self-orbit
of our neediness.
This week I want to push us the other way.
I know, right? Make up your mind!

There has been a lot written and said
these days about “confirmation bias” –
which is most easily described by pointing out
that those who watch Fox News
are mostly conservative,
and wouldn’t you know it, those who watch MSNBC
are mostly liberal or progressive.

It turns out that people tune in
to whichever news reinforces their own view of the world.
Now there is a shocker.

The reason I mention it,
is because Christians are the same way
when it comes to the Bible.
Conservative Christians
will mostly tell you that a story
like the one we heard from John today,
is ‘the Gospel truth’ –
by which they mean
it is an accurate description
of an actual historical event that took place.

Liberal Christians
will mostly tell you that such a story
is intended to be metaphorical,
or is otherwise an exaggerated tale
to accentuate a point or moral
greater than the story itself.

What I will tell you,
being neither conservative nor liberal,
is that John’s story is a direct result
of that little piece we heard from 2 Kings –
which was a story told about 700 years
before John told his story.

So John’s story is classic one-upmanship.
“Well, our guy (Elisha)
fed a hundred people
with only 20 little loaves of barely bread
and a few lousy ears of corn.”
“Oh yeah?  Well our guy (Jesus)
fed five thousandpeople
with onlyfivebarely loaves
and twostinking fish.”

The Jesus Movement
was competing with the better-established
Moses Movement (that included Elisha),
in the same way
that Islam and Christianity
are in intense competition in Africa and Asia
in our world.

One-upmanship
was really important
in capturing the imagination
and devotion of followers back in the 1stcentury.

“And not only did he do he feed 5000,
but then Jesus walked on water!”

So now-a-days, twenty-one centuries after
John told his story, we want to know:
Did it really happen?
Did it really happen that way?
Asking if something really, really happened
just the way it says it did,
is only important if we think
the Bible has to be factual
in order for it to be a worthy source of wisdom.

Few people ask if Buddha or Lao Tzu
actually wrote all the ancient wisdom ascribed to them
as if the answer would impact the wisdom itself.
But somehow Christians,
or at least some Christians,
got it in their heads that the Bible is proof
of everything they want to believe about Jesus –
and if so, it all has to be factual
and historically accurate to have any of it be credible.
Basically, that is like people tuning into Fox and MSNBC
to hear what they wanted to hear in the first place.

People tune into conservative and liberal
Christianity to hear what
they wanted to hear in the first place, too.
That is no reflection on religion, by the way,
but it is a reflection on human nature,
or the curious and strange weirdness of being human.

So, did Jesus really do all that stuff?
How the heck do I know?
I truly doubt it, but then again,
I have seen and heard strange things
that do not conform to the world
that my rational mind wants to believe is predictable.

But, more importantly,
I can’t see any possible reason why it matters
whether or not, or how, Jesus did whacky things.
Biblical wisdom and
the power of the teachings of Jesus,
do not rest upon supernatural events –
they are far more practical and self-evident than that.

But by all means,
if you want to dither about with
questions that cannot be answered –
like “did it really happen” – feel free.

But what I want to do
is allow this story to remind us of a truly serious
and critical truth:
How we feed the 5000 screaming voices
inside our own heart and mind
has everything to do with our capacity to feed
the many multiples of 5000 screaming voices
in the world around us.

It is really quite simple.

“In the event
the cabin loses pressure,
oxygen equipment will magically appear
from out of nowhere
and you will be able to breathe.
Parents, please ignore that core bestial instinct
to rush oxygen to your dependent child,
and instead,
place the mask on your mouth first…
even if your tiny two-year old
is violently gasping for air.”

If you fly, you know that instruction,
and if you are a parent,
you know that even though it violates
everything you might feel,
it is the truest, best thing you can do.

When the five thousand screaming voices
in our own hearts and minds are clamoring for more,
and desperate for even a morsel of food and drink,
feed them!
If you can’t or don’t want to feed them,
then at least listen and be present to them.

Every single one of us is needy.
That is who we are: needy little humans
with big appetites and limited abilities
along with significant woundedness.
Let me repeat that:
We are needy little humans
with big appetites and limited abilities
along with significant woundedness.

If anyone here is NOT needy,
do NOT raise your hand!
The rest of us will not believe you,
and will resent you for it just the same.
So if you are somehow not
a needy little human
with more hurts and needs
than you have capacity to meet,
just sit there smugly, knowingly,
feeling sorry for the rest of us…in silence.
But for the rest of us,
we know about those 5000 hungry voices
wriggling inside us like a tangle of worms.

I truly hate to admit it,
but I know what I am talking about.
When I worked in downtown Buffalo,
and before that, in Columbus, Ohio,
a week didn’t go by without someone down and out
stopping by to seek help and assistance.
Sometimes, in some seasons,
it was many people in a week,
sometimes many people in a day.

Like you, I hope,
I am well aware of my privilege.
I am not down and out.
Only twice in my life was I ever poor enough to be hungry
without the ability to feed myself immediately –
and even then, I knew people who could help me.
So, when someone comes to church for help
I know they have very few other resources.

Trust me, a church is the last place
you want to ask for help if you are hungry or homeless.
Nine out of ten churches
will either slam the door in your face,
or lecture you, or both.
The ones that will give you food or shelter,
will make you jump through hoops
as onerous as any government agency.
No one comes to a church for help
unless they have exhausted their other options
or unless they are new to hunger and homelessness
and haven’t learned yet.

Sometimes I can give practical help,
like food or rent support, or pay a utility bill.
But whether I can help or not, I can always listen.
I can be present to someone
and give him or her the time and attention
that few people will give to someone living at the margin.
I can at least, if nothing else,
be humane, present, empathetic
and otherwise caring
when much of their world is not.
That is, unless I have neglected
or denied
or refused
the 5000 voices in my own heart and head.

Even though I am intensely aware
of my own privilege;
and even though I am keenly aware
of the disadvantage and misery
of the person coming to our door;
and even though my values and experience
scream for me to be open to them;
if I have neglected, denied, or otherwise refused
to address too many of those 5000 screaming voices
in my own head and heart,
I will not respond well
to any of the 5000 and more voices
that are screaming at me
from the outside.

As ashamed
or angry at myself
or humiliated
as I might feel after neglecting or refusing
a screaming voice from the outside,
the facts on the ground will not change.

It is part of being human
that ordinary, little,
needy humans like us
must live with.

We do not walk on water.
We do not feed 5000 with five loaves of bread
or even two stinking fish.
So, if we want to be good
at addressing the needs of those around us,
we better get good
at addressing the needs
screaming at us from inside.

Clearly, this is not hi-toned theology or philosophy
or any kind of psychology –
it is just nitty-gritty,
practical,
human physics.

When we hear the story about
Elisha
or Jesus
doing amazing things for needy people,
it is an utter, total distraction
to ask if they really did it, or
if they really did happen that way.

The question to ask
is how we handle the needy voices
inside
and outside
our own little needy selves.

After we address thatissue
we can get highfaluting about
our needs vs. their needs,
and our privilege and their marginalization,
and other important
but secondary tactical questions.
So, our mission, should we accept it –
is to consider which of those 5000 needy voices
inside our own heart and mind,
have had a fair hearing lately,
and which ones we have
neglected,
or denied
or refused.
Just that little inventory
will produce enough data
that we will easily be able
to size up the work we have to do on ourselves.

Now just to go back and reinforce
what I was talking about last week –
which is having a spiritual practice
that helps us lean-into our compassion
more than our self-orbiting neediness,
that is really the core principle of Jesus-wisdom.

We will be better,
stronger, more beautiful people,
in a world that is a more hospitable place to live,
if we practice a compassion-centered spiritual way of life.

But, apropos of today,
in order to lean into our compassion,
we really do ALSO
need to listen to
and address the hunger and need
within our own lives.

Good luck with listening to all those voices
shouting at us from both
the inside and the outside.
We will have far greater success
listening and addressing those voices
than we will walking on water.
Amen.

 

And now, I invite you to take a nice slow, deep breath,
and stand or sit as is your custom for prayer.

Proper 11 B, 2018: The practice of self-orbit and the practice of leaning into compassion

by

If you ask me, which you didn’t,
Jesus was not interested in being a shepherd.

In fact, I do not think Jesus saw himself as a shepherd
and he definitely didn’t want to be the guy
following along behind the flock
walking through all that manure.
That’s what the shepherd did –
walked behind the flock to keep it moving.

From what we read in Mark’s Gospel,
Jesus liked to be by himself
or with a small group of folks
with whom he could eat and talk.

But we also know, from story after story,
that people wanted Jesus to fix them.

The pus-encrusted,
sore-oozing
finger-less and toe-less lepers
chased him.

The raggedy blind,
legless bundles
begging into the dark
yelled for him.

The mannerly and proud
sent for him.

Paraplegics, and those with tumorous faces,
the lung-infected and
the hairless contagious,
all of them chased him,
were dragged to him,
or got pushed and carried until they found him.
He didn’t like it.

I know, I know,
we have been given this image
of the gentle, patient, and loving healer
who wanted nothing more than to cure people in need.
I don’t think so.

Too many times it says in Mark,
that Jesus went off to lonely and deserted places.
In today’s story, Jesus’ disciples
had been away on their own for a long while –
having been sent out two-by-two
to develop their own spiritual practices.
We do not know what Jesus was doing while they were away
but we do know that when they were back together,
the first thing Jesus did was to take them away
to a quiet and deserted place.

Here is a small side-note to this story.

I think it is John Dominic Crossan who theorizes
that the reason the teachings of Jesus survived
while those of John the Baptist didn’t,
is because Jesus’ ministry was NOT about him.
We have made it about him over time,
but when Jesus was alive
Jesus was not about Jesus.
Rather, he was about the spiritual practice
he taught and preached.

John the Baptist wasthe ministry
for those who followed the Baptist,
and when he was beheaded,
the herd was shepherd-less.
But Jesus was the agentof ministry
who sent his disciples to go out and engage in ministry also.

Both prophets – John and Jesus –
were executed by an oppressive military regime
but Jesus’ wisdom was preserved
and his ministry thrived even after his death.

Since the lectionary seems to want us
to be thinking about shepherds today,
it is worth noting that if Jesus was in fact a shepherd,
it was because he got dragged into it
and made doggone sure that his sheep were equipped
to go out and battle coyotes and wolves themselves.

Think about this now.
In chapter one of Mark – the very first chapter,
when, in the other gospels,
Jesus is having a miraculous birth
or being declared God of the cosmos –
in Mark, Jesus runs away and hides.

Don’t take my word for it!
Read chapter one in Mark.

  • The first thing to happen is he gets baptized.
  • The second thing to happen is he goes into the wilderness by himself for a month.
  • The third thing that happens in chapter one,
    is that he asks Peter, Simon, and the Zebedee boys
    to hang out with him.
  • The fourth thing that goes on,
    is they all go to synagogue together on the sabbath.
    While they are there
    Jesus stumbles into an exorcism and word spreads.
  • Next, on the same day, still in chapter one,
    Jesus heals Peter and Simon’s mom
    so that she can fix them dinner.
    So now everyone knows he’s a healer
    and the house is inundated.
    They surround the house and drag people that can’t walk, or see,
    or go to the bathroom by themselves to Peter’s mom’s house.
    The healing and fixing goes on all night and in the morning,
    when Peter, Simon, and the Zebedees go looking for Jesus, they can’t find him.
  • The sixth thing to happen then, is Jesus runs away to a deserted place.
    That is what it says, and we’re still in chapter one.
  • The seventh thing to happen
    is that Jesus’ new buddies find him
    and urge him to come back to town
    because everyone is looking for him.
    That is when Jesus tells us why he came in the first place.
  • It is the eighth and almost final thing that happens in chapter one. It is when we learn
    that Jesus does not see himself as a shepherd or healer.
    To his friends who want to drag him back, he says,
    “Uh uh, let’s go to some other towns
    so I can preach, because that is what I came to do – preach.”
  • So, the ninth thing to happen in that first chapter,
    is that he and his pals go preaching at the synagogues
    all around that region.
  • The tenth and final act in chapter one, ironically,
    is when a leper kneels down and begs Jesus to fix him. He does – probably with a big sigh.

So here we are, today, five chapters later.
“When they had crossed over (the lake…and) got out of the boat, people at once recognized him, and rushed about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. And wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak…”
I think this is a fascinating theme
within the Jesus story.

Here is this preacher and teacher
that everyone wants to make into their shepherd, healer,
and miracle worker.

Clearly, he is compassionate
and responds to immediate human need,
but we have to wonder how miserable he might have been.
In a world of gimme, gimme, gimme,
Jesus is promoting a selfless missionary zeal
that would have people focused on loving their neighbor,
turning the other cheek,
and refusing to play the victim role
even when they were clearly being victimized.
Because of the last week in Jesus’ life,
which is where we have focused so much of our attention,
we think the primary tension in the gospel narrative
is between Jesus and the temple
or Jesus and the Romans.

But look again.
I’m thinking the primary tension
is between Jesus,
who came to preach and teach
and send his buddies out two-by-two to practice the same,
verses all those others –
the needy,
self-focused,
urgent care waiting room.

I think that is our primary tension too.

You and I are wounded souls,
deeply flawed
and needy
in ways we’d be embarrassed
for anyone to truly recognize.

Some of us may be the mannerly and proud
who would send for Jesus
rather than be seen in public needing him explicitly,
but we are wounded and needy just the same.

The tension is between our neediness
and the agency that Jesus calls us into.

Neediness turns our focus inward –
drives us toward a self-orbit
where the gravity of our own hurts
and wants
and needs
is strong
and pulls us toward them.
It takes so much thoughtful breathing and mindfulness
to listen to the murmurs of our compassion
when all we want to do
is appease our hungers and our hurts.

But that is the tension –
to lean into our compassion
even as our own ego-driven desires
furiously demand our attention.

Our political leaders
would have us lean into our hurts and fears
and be led by the angels of our darker natures.
Jesus calls us to lean into our compassion.

Our religious leaders
would have us lean into our anxieties and resentments
and be led by the fear of hell and the thirst for retribution.
Jesus calls us to lean into mercy more than justice.

The puppeteers of capitalism
would have us lean into our greed and self-preservation
and be led by competition and survival of the fittest.
Jesus calls us to lean into generosity and sacrifice.
You and I are not always going to win this struggle
between compassion and neediness,
but sometimes we will.
One thing is certain.
We will be led more by our compassion
than fall into self-orbit
only if we engage in a spiritual practice
that strengthens and builds compassion
the way exercise and nutrition builds muscle instead of fat.

That is what Jesus came to do, by the way:
teach us about a compassion-based spiritual practice
and preach about how to win more often than lose
in the tug-of-war between compassion
and our own self-orbiting neediness.

That’s what our spiritual practices ought to do for us –
help us lean into our compassion
rather than our own neediness.

 

Proper 8 B 2018: Touch and Being Touched

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The thing about a chronic illness
is that it’s always with you.
It is relentless, an uninvited guest we do not want
and probably fear.

Many once life-threatening illnesses
have become chronic in nature –
ones we can live with and manage.
Cancers that would have killed us sixty years ago
may be something we can manage for decades
and eventually die from something else.

While it may be something far less dangerous,
like a skin condition or an allergy,
most of us have some chronic issue
or will have in our lifetime.

And with the proliferation of pharmaceuticals
that cantreat but not cure,
I suspect more and more of us
will be living longer and longer
with multiple chronic conditions.

Living with a chronic condition
is made worse by stigmas
or the sense it must be kept as private –
a secret even.
Substance abuse
and the co-dependency that haunts
its family members,
when kept a painful secret, is corrosive
and a roadblock to recovery.
Depression is funded
with even greater dark power
when forced to live inside a secret.

Anxiety or anxiety attacks
are more furious
when sealed inside the lonely envelope of Self.

Hiding things, keeping them secret,
for good or bad or silly reasons,
makes the impact of the hidden thing
more painful, debilitating, and powerful.
The power of hidden things
is the ability to isolate.

When we have a secret
and we do not want the people around us
to know it,
it forms a layer of distance around us.
We grow a second skin so to speak,
only it is dead skin
that human touch cannot penetrate.

Usually the thing we keep secret,
or hide away and do not discuss
or expose to the open,
is the very thing
for which we need tender loving care.
But we can’t get it
because the secret or the hiddenness
does not allow touch to penetrate.

I mention this because I suspect
everyone here today
has some secret or shame or isolated sorrow
we hold inside and do not,
will not, share.
We know it costs us dearly,
but for whatever reason we fear exposure
more than we dread the cost.
If we can get in touch with that tender spot
in our own lives,
then we can get inside this story Mark tells.
The woman with the twelve-year hemorrhage
is the poster child for chronic illness
with a stigma.

Her social isolation
is more severe than any shame or vulnerability most of us will ever know.
She has so many strikes against her.

In that society,
in that culture,
and in that moment of history
to be a woman
was to be totally vulnerable.
If you were an unmarried woman
without a family
you were destitute.
No social safety net.
Nothing.
You were nothing.
Now we do not know anything
about this woman
other than her chronic condition.
The fact that we don’t even know her name
and that we DO know Jairus’ name,
tells us what we need to know about this story.

Jairus was the leader of the congregation –
he had status.
As a male he had more status
than the nameless woman would ever have,
but then add onto that
he was the leader of the congregation,
and we know he had enormous influence.
His name was so meaningful
that Mark thought it important enough
to remember him by name.

This was Jairus, not some nameless nobody!

But the womanhemorrhaging blood
was a nameless nobody!

The contrast could not be clearer.
The nameless woman –
just think about namelessness for a moment –
and the man remembered by namefor 2000 years.

So this woman, even if she were married,
had probably been abandoned
because not only was she considered unclean
as the result of her chronic condition,
but she made everyone around her unclean.

To sit in the same chair she had been sitting in,
or even on the same spot in the grass
where she had been sitting,
was to make yourself unclean.
No one could touch her
without being made unclean.
Literally, she was untouchable.

Remember what isolation feels like –
how it makes touch from others
impenetrable.
Remember how it feels
to be untouchable – to wrap yourself in a secret
that numbs you to the touch of others.

In her case, while she likely suffered
a high degree of self-loathing
because of her condition,
she was also forciblyplaced on the margin
by everyone else’s loathing as well.
She was untouchable.
She was nameless.
She was nothing.

Jairus’ situation is much easier for us to touch.

Anyone who has ever received that phone call,
the one about his or her child
who has been in trouble,
or injured,
or worse…
knows what Jairus knew.
Those parental moments turn us oldinside –
turn us old in an instant.
Jairus’ blood was turning cold,
and he was growing older inside
with each ticking second
that his twelve-year old daughter
struggled for breath.

All that pain and anguish –
the abject suffering of Jairus
and the nameless woman –
are really too hot to touch
for any of us that have ever known
the terror, the grief, and the pain they represent.
If we hear this story in the color of blood
that runs through our own lives,
it will be almost too painful to touch.
If we take the wraps off our own secrets
and pull the skin away
from our own hidden wounds,
we will feel the touch of this story.
It is not a 2000 year distance
if we get up close and personal
with Jairus and the nameless woman.

The place THEY touch
is the placed that touches us.

Just imagine the panic in Jairus
as he hurries with Jesus toward his daughter.
Just imagine the anguish of Jairus
when Jesus stops.
“What?” Jairus turns around bewildered.

“What? What are you doing, Jesus?
My little girl, she’s dying. Please, please,
we must hurry.”

But Jesus stops.

He looks around in the crowded street
to find the nameless woman
who has touched him deeply
and who he, without intention,
has touched.

Now it would be easy to be judgmental
about Jairus,
mostly because he is the powerful 1%
while the nameless woman is,
well, she is nameless.
But in all fairness to Jairus
he is desperate,
desperately loving his young daughter
and fearful beyond words.
Just imagine the place
where two awful anguishes like that
wreck into each other.

I like to imagine that your anguish and mine…
touch at this altar.
You bring your anguish here,
at least I hope you do,
and walk it up to Communion
where it meets with my anguish,
and together we share the bread of affliction
that is the same bread
our ancestor have eaten.

I cannot take away your anguish
and you cannot end mine – we are not Jesus.
But I can allow you to touch me,
and you can invite me to touch you.

We can remove the second skin
we wrap ourselves in
if we have created a safe place to do so
and muster the courage to do it.

The wounds that hurt the most are chronic.
They can be treated but not cured.
And the only way they can be treated
is by touch –
allowing others to touch our wounds
with their wounds,
and with the loving-kindness
born of shared woundedness,
we will know healing compassion.

In my mind that is what “church” is about.

Many imagine that church is somehow
supposed to fix the wrongs of society
or convey the right beliefs of religion.
But I don’t think so.
In my life,
when and where “church” has been powerful
is where it has been healing.

In the touching and being touched
our chronic wounds and illnesses
are made tolerable,
sometimes even healed.
When that happens, our compassion
is activated
in new and ever-increasing ways.
And then
we can do some really big things.
But it all begins,
and requires,
that we touch and be touched.

Trinity Place
will indeed be a place for growth,
wellness, and healing,
if and when we touch one another
in the power of the holy
and in the love of community.
Our mission is to respect the dignity
of every person with whom we intersect
through Trinity Place,
and the way we do that
is by sharing our own woundedness –
by touch and being touched.

With that invitation evoked by Mark’s story,
let us take a moment of silence before
we share our prayers and thanksgivings,
and to touch those prayer stones
as we imbue them with our prayers.

Proper 6B, 2018: And finally, God speaks…

by

This artist’s concept illustrates a supermassive black hole with millions to billions times the mass of our sun. Supermassive black holes are enormously dense objects buried at the hearts of galaxies

“This artist’s concept illustrates a supermassive black hole with millions to billions times the mass of our sun. Supermassive black holes are enormously dense objects buried at the hearts of galaxies.” NASA

You have heard this sermon before.
Maybe not this exact sermon,
but something close to it.

It is said, and you are a better judge of this than me,
that preachers have only a few core sermons.
Even the very best, most insightful preachers,
they say, have at most six or seven sermons
on top of which everything else is a repetition.
If that is true, today is one of my seven.
It may be number one even.

Blame it on Job.
That excerpt from the Book of Job
is one of the best, if not thebest, speech
written onto the lips of God
in all the thousands of pages of the Bible.
I am not shooting sparks here;
that speech in Job
is the coup de grace of divine utterances.

But before God’s big speech,
it is Job who has been making speeches.
Job earnestly explains,
and at length,
why God has done or allowed
so many bad things to happen…to HIM!

He has been explaining with eloquence
and a degree of plausibility, WHY –
when HE is such a good guy –
all the darkness and suffering of life
has found its way to him.

No one argues with the premise that Job is a good guy.
He is sweet, trusting,
loving, kind,
and loyal.
He has all the qualities of a good friend
and all the characteristics that a just and loving God
would want in a human being.

And yet…he suffers.
There is a backstory
to both the Book of Job and your story
and mine.
As good and kind
and sweet at Job is,
he does not have a clue
as to the depth of his own ignorance
or his unintended arrogance.
His ignorance
and his arrogance
are so deep a BP oil rig couldn’t plumb them.
And remember,
Job is you and me.

What Job wants most of all
is to have God declare him innocent.
Job wants God
to explain to his family and friends
how all his tragedies came to be,
and how they are God’s providence
not the result of his failure.

Just as an aside,
the minute you and I feel ourselves
pointing the finger of blame
it is time to get out the mirror.

Seriously, as soon as we feel that urge inside
to blame someone else for something –
or have ourselves declared innocent and wonderful –
we can be darn certain
that we are operating with our blinders on
and wandering around without sight.
That is just a little aside
that the story of Job has for us,
but that isn’t the main point.
Here comes the good stuff in Job.

So God has listened for thirty-some chapters
to both well-reasoned
and superstitious explanations
from Job’s family
and his friends
and from Job himself.
Finally, after demonstrating amazing patience,
God speaks.

It says that God speaks out of a whirlwind.
That’s a pretty cool image.
As if a batter that had been returning soft lobs
suddenly hits a line-drive with horrendous force,
God hits Job between the eyes.

“Who darkens counsel by words without knowledge?”

Words without knowledge…
Hold that now: Words without knowledge.

Let’s stop and think about how often
we make statements and declarations
without knowledge.
Here is just one little innocuous example
we hear all the time in everyday conversation,
and we may have said it ourselves.
“Everything happens for a reason.”

Really?
Everything happens for a reason?
That is an arrogant Job-statement
if ever there was one.
How do we know everything happens for a reason?

It is said so glibly
and with such earnestness
that Job himself could have said it.
But what do we know?
“Everything happens for a reason?”
Those are clearly words without knowledge,
said to make us feel better about our ignorance.

Anyway, after smacking Job with that opening line
God goes onto say,
“Pull up your pants, boy!
It’s my turn to question you
and your turn to answer me.”

Gulp.

In the 21stcentury
we don’t like God talking to us like that.
It seems a little too much like bullying
and we don’t like our god with a hard edge.
We like our god to be serene,
an Earth Mother,
ever-so-gentle and unconditionally kind.
I am so very glad
that the Bible was not written in the 21st century.
Instead, what we have in Job
is a cigar-smoking prosecutor.
God, with a Churchill-like posture,
chomps down on the nasty wet end of his stogy,
squints hard as he stares Job in the eyes,
and barks:

“Okay pup, you answer me this:
Where were you
when I rolled out the universe?
Huh? Where were you?
If you know so much, tell me:
Where does it all begin
and where will it all end?
Does the universe end?

When the morning stars sang
and the heavenly bodies shouted for joy,
did you hear it?

Hey Job! I’m talking to you.
Have you even heard the stars sing? Ever?
Well son, where were you then?”

It is a brilliant scene, just brilliant.
What a story.
Job is a story that creates dissonance
inside our heads.
If we allow it,
it will create dissonance
inside our lives.

And that is what biblical wisdom does:
it’s not a comfort pillow,
it is a source of dissonance that,
if we allow it to,
creates for us a new vision
or the ability to see something
that has always been in front of us
but from a startling new perspective.
For example, the story of Job was told to a people
who could not understand why God
had abandoned them.

Israel had been a people
and a religion
based upon the promise of land;
for over a thousand years
Israel was defined by the land.
God had promised they would be in covenant –
in a special relationship with God –
and that the land
was the physical proof of that relationship.

The landwas like a wedding ring
that is a symbol of the vows
by which two people enter into marriage.
But suddenly, the people of Israel
were in exile without the land
and with no foreseeable way to ever get it back.
To them, it was as if the ring
had been ripped off their finger
and given to someone else –
someone they hated,
someone they feared,
someone they thought was beneath them.

It seems to me that the United States is suffering
from that kind of cognitive dissonance right now,
and that instead of looking in the mirror
we are pointing fingers of blame at each other,
and of course immigrants from other countries.

We have always told ourselves
that the U.S. is the biggest
and the bestest
and the richest
and the most just and righteous
of all nations in the world.
If we are not the best
we are nothing at all –
that’s the way the logic was constructed.
But then things happened
to create dissonance with that self-image.

When there is dissonance between what we believe
and what we see and hear,
it slaps us in the face with a choice.

When our view of reality
does not match up with the reality we are living,
then we can either
go on pretending – which means
denying our actual experience –
or we can open ourselves up
for a new discovery and a new perspective.
But I want to get back to Job,
and underscore this particularly powerful
and pointed tip of the Job story,
which is the very soil of spiritual growth.

Cognitive dissonance
is what a great deal of religious history
has not dealt with very well.
Galileo, for example,
was told by the pope to put the genie back in the bottle,
which he pretended to do for a little while.

But human history is rife with many such examples
of church or mosque
or synagogue or temple
being presented with new insights
that jar or crack open, even shatter
what the religion has declared
as orthodox (“right belief”).
And when that cognitive dissonance arrives
and our worldview
and our values
and our ideas and our assumptions…
are challenged by new information, new insight
or new understanding,
we can openly consider the possibilities
OR we can snap shut
and insist that things are the way we say they are.

But religion is not the only human endeavor
to resist openness.
It is also so very evident in our politics
and economics
and science –
all of which have a propensity toward dogmatism.

When the old answers have not had the intended effect,
but they keep getting declared louder
and with more vehemence anyway;
and still more resources are thrown at the problem
in the hopes of making the old answers work
even though it has little impact;
then we know we are at that place
of cognitive dissonance.

It seems to me that we are currently
wandering through a small epoch
of cognitive dissonance
in which many of our institutions
and tried-and-true solutions
are crumbling.
We can fiercely defend and blame
or we can open and listen.
Defend and blame or open and listen?

Back to Job.
To all of Job’s questions
and in response to his very sincere
and eager desire to have answers,
God offers…nothing.
All God does is show Job how small he is.

Reading it this time, reminded me
of what we are told these days about the Cosmos.
We are told by awesome and brilliant physicists
who study the cosmos
that twenty-five percent of the universe
is composed of Dark Matter.
Dark Matter is stuff we cannot see
and we cannot touch or study it.
As a matter of fact, they tell us Dark Matter
is the very substance that holds the universe together.

On top of that, they say,
seventy percent of the universe
is actually Dark Energy.
Dark Energy is what is pushing the universe
to expand outwardly from its core moment
at the Big Bang.

Plain old Matter – the stuff we can touch and feel –
not Dark Matter or Dark Energy,
comprises only four and half percent of the universe.

In other words,
the stuff we CAN actually see
and touch
and feel
and study,
is less than five percent
of what actually exists in the cosmos.

Now I don’t have a big problem with all of that
because, like most of you,
I haven’t got a clue about any of it.
And even though I love to read about it
my understanding of what I read
would not even fill a thimble.
So, if some really smart people
that spend their lives looking through telescopes
and creating mathematical models
tell me that ninety-five percent of the universe
is composed of stuff we cannot see
or feel or study,
and that we may never be able to see…
well then, I can live with that
in the same way that Job could live with God
when God was done
with God’s great and wonderful speech.

God gave Job no answers.
God said simply,
“I am God and you are not.”

Job did not turn around and create dogmatic answers
in order to fill his ignorance.
Instead, Job said,
“Hmm, it turns out I am very, very small.”
He did not stop believing
or seeking
or knowing God
simply because he received no answers.
Instead, Job learned to hold that place of silence.

Please, get this now,
because it is right there for us the reach and hold:

Job learned to hold that place of silence
in whichwisdom is not composed of beliefs,
and words without knowledge
are not spoken.

We live in a cloud of unknowing
that swaddles the thick darkness,
and if we can hold that place of accepting our ignorance
it will lead us to an encounter
with the mystical presence of God;
a presence that is always and everywhere
in our midst.

So here is my best advice
from one of the very few sermons I preach.
When we encounter tragedy;
when we smack up against a universe that seems
to prefer injustice to balance;
when we sit in the shadow of death
grieving for those we just want to hold again;
when we do everything we are supposed to do
and still things do not work out right…
please do not reach
for old answers
that have yellowed and cracked
and been made brittle by our dissonant experiences.
Instead, hold the silence.
Hold the silence and listen.
Hold the silence
and open up.

Hold the silence
and listen
and open up
to the mystery of a God that is present
here and now –
and even here, even now.

 

Our Vision

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

Our mission…to strive in our daily life and parish life to respect the dignity of every human being, and to treat each person entering our doors as if that person is Christ.

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.

 

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