Trinity Church Geneva

You are here: Home / Archives for Sermons

Proper 25B 2018: A Story Full of Characters

by

The Gospel of Mark
is the shortest and most dramatic
of the four authorized gospels.
Mark is not only the first and earliest
of the four gospels,
he creates the pattern for the others.
But most importantly,
he is the best story-teller.

The tale I just read is not much to bark at,
just a homely little story
told in ten sentences,
but those ten sentences we just heard
are the hinge
upon which Mark’s whole Gospel swings.

Here is what I mean.
Mark takes ten chapters
to tell us about the last three years
of Jesus’ adult life.

Remember, Mark does not bother
to include all that mythology
surrounding Jesus’ birth.
Instead, Mark begins with a fully-grown
and mature Jesus
who is suddenly swept up
into an amazing spiritual awakening
at his baptism.
It starts with a bang –
all of a sudden, one day a spectacular
event changes his life
and the history of the world going forward.

Then Mark takes ten chapters
chocked full of stories that
leads up to Jesus’ fateful decision
to take his road show to Jerusalem.
Mark takes TEN chapters
to tell us about three years in the life
of the adult Jesus.

But then, he takes SIX chapters
to describe the last WEEK
of Jesus’ life.

So, ten chapters for three years
and six chapters for seven days.
The hinge, between these two episodes,
is the story of Blind Bartimaeus.

This ten-sentence story
is a microcosm
of everything in the ten chapters
leading up to it;
and it is a foretelling of everything
that will be told in the next six chapters

Here are the pertinent bones on this skeleton.

First, the story of Blind Bartimaeus
takes place on a stage dripping with drama.
Jericho was an incredibly opulent resort city.
It was, in Jesus’ day,
home to the summer palace for King Herod.
We have descriptions of several palaces
in Jericho, where even just some of the homes
had magnificent sunken gardens.

It is no accident that the hinge
upon which the big story swings
takes place in Jericho.

Jericho was the intersection of the world
in those parts. Literally.
No kidding, at Jericho two Roman roads
met like cross hairs in a sniper’s scope.
There were only a few roads in the world
that could host chariots
and heavy traffic, not like today
when we need GPS just to decipher
which varicose vein
will take us where we need to go.

One Jericho road
went straight to Jerusalem and Damascus,
while the other Jericho road
went all the way to Rome.
It was the point of decision –
for Jesus and his followers.
It was the very moment
that split past and present,
safety and danger,
control and vulnerability.

Turn back, and they could go home
to the people and places they knew best:
the smaller villages and towns
where Jesus’ rural images
and down-home zingers
aimed at the principalities and powers
were appreciated.
Turning back
would take them to the people among whom
he was popular and well loved;
it would be safer and wiser.

But if he turned the parade toward Jerusalem,
that urban citadel of Roman occupation
and religious authority,
it was unclear what might happen.

In that caldron of political and religious power,
Jesus would be viewed with suspicion,
and it would be dangerous
because trouble-makers and agitators
were rubbed out like bugs on a picnic table.

So, the stage could not have been
more dramatic or evocative:
opulent playground of military
and political power
where past and future intersect.
It was the very moment, we could say,
where Time stood still.

There are such moments
in human history,
those with a longer hang-time
in which momentous events seem to stand still
just a little longer,
and just a little more pulsating
than the moments surrounding them.
Though we do not have any real-time record of it,
Blind Bartimaeus and Jericho
was that kind of a moment.

Lurking in this thickened moment
are several of Mark’s central actors
who I want to shout out.
These are important characters
who actually tell the story
throughout the chapters of Mark’s gospel.

First, the Roman Empire is a character
and is always lurking around between the lines
in all of Mark’s stories.

The empire does not always have a line to deliver,
but it is always there
because it was a foreign occupying force
making every day miserable
for Jesus and every other peasant.

Another character of course, collectively,
are ‘the disciples:
Jesus’ students and close associates.
We know the twelve famous ones
who were important enough to be named,
but there was also a bigger group –
sometimes numbered at 70.
In Mark’s stories,
the disciples are almost always present
and, whether an individual or group,
they serve as a foil or the brunt of humor.
Mark caricatures the disciples
as bubble-heads
who should know better, yet never do.

The disciples, above everyone else,
should “get it” but they just don’t.

Then there is ‘the Crowd’
which is also a unique feature of Mark.
It is another collective character,
a legion of faceless, nameless, odorless people
who are dependable in their demeanor.

The crowdis especially graphic
in this Bartimaeus story.
Jesus and his disciples AND the large crowd
were leaving Jericho, it says.
The crowd, as in many of Mark’s stories,
serves here as a narrative witness to the events.
Butthe crowd,
whether in Jericho, Nazareth
or Jerusalem, also share common characteristics.
Usually they are hungry and thirsty,
if not for food thenfor a miracle or a magic trick.
And ‘the crowd’
won’t take “no” for an answer.
In this sense ‘the crowd is also a foil.

Jesus, according to Mark,
routinely tries to flee or avoid“the crowd”.

So, there are the bad guys: the Romans.
There are the clueless guys: Jesus’ disciples.
And there are the needy guys: the crowds.

Then, just to make it a little more complex,
there is the marginalized guy,
often a female or child,
poor or ill, and in this case, Blind Bartimaeus.

There is always a Bartimaeus in Mark’s Gospel
but usually unnamed:
a leper,
a bleeding woman,
a woman with a dying daughter,
a widow…
a quadriplegic carried on a mat,
a possessed lunatic exiled to a cemetery.
They are quite colorful,
and often these marginalized ones
are the key to the punch line.

So, all these characters appear
in the ten little sentences of this hinge story.
Each one has at least a cameo
in this scene so thick with drama
it is a bug in amber perfectly preserved for us.

Bad guys,
clueless ones,
the urgently needy,
and the outsider:
All on the same stage of history
all at the same time.

But of course, there is one more character
we haven’t named yet: Jesus.
Jesus represents God’s agenda.

So, we have all the characters
in their places
all on the same stage
where history and time are about to intersect.

Let’s see what happens.

The bad guys are indifferent.

The Romans merely observe the festivities
at Jericho, benignly, and only later,
in the days ahead,
when it perceives a threat,
does it act.

But when it does act, it acts swiftly
and with sufficient violence
that the irritant is immediately snuffed out.
Coercive authority, Mark may be telling us,
does not risk its hold on power.

Less in the background and holding the moment,
The crowd also watches.

The crowd, amoeba-like,
moves around the scene
and gives definition to its edges.
Dogs bark.
People shout.
Children kick.
Some jeer some cheer.

The crowd is content so long as it has
a good show.
It gets surely though,
when it does not have enough
to feed its attention.

The crowd in this story,
is following along being fed,
holding in its fingers the insiders,
the outsiders,
the bad guys, and
the hero.

The insiders, of course,
are the dunderheaded disciples
who play the fool.

How many times
have the disciples witnessed Jesus
respond to people at the margin?
How many times
has Jesus lectured them
about their indifference to suffering?
How many times
has Jesus reminded them
that the first will be last and
the last will be first?

Still, even after ten chapters
and moving into the crescendo of the narrative,
their knee-jerk reaction to Blind Bartimaeus
is to stifle him: “Shut up!” they bark.
All they can see is their own parade
and that Jesus is too busyon the stage of history
to stop for some miscreant beggar.

It is as if all of Jesus’ words and deeds
have been to no avail, and
have not changed those disciples one iota.
Mark might be saying
out of the side of his mouth, that insiders always
have a steep learning curve.

The outsider, of course, is Bartimaeus.
He will not shut up.
He may be marginalized but he is not powerless.
He does not whine.
He does not fall back under his coat
or cover his face
or whimper “Woe is me.”

He refuses to act like a victim
even though he has been victimized.
In fact, he takes a huge risk.
Here is one of those details
that can be easily missed
if we only read the story from 10,000 feet.

The only thing Bartimaeus owns
in the whole wide world,
is his coat.
That was standard for beggars
and just about any outsider in those days.

Your coat was your blanket,
the only thing you had to sit on in the day,
and the only cover against the cold at night.

It was priceless.
For those who had nothing else,
their coat could be the difference
between life and death.

Given that he was also blind,
for Bartimaeus to throw off his coat
and run forward,
where he may never find his coat again,
was an act of radical trust or bold desperation.
It was an all-or-nothing kind of play.

For Bartimaeus, Jericho that day,
was an earth-shattering moment of decision –
just as it was for Jesus
in relationship to his future.

Okay, everybody is in place
and we are frozen in that moment
when history and time
hang like LeBron James
for an extra second or two: Jesus stops.
On the stage of history,
at the intersection of Past and Future,
Jesus stops.

Jesus stops for one lousy beggar.

Like the more ancient story of God
hearing the cries of puny Hebrew slaves in Egypt,
Jesus hears;
through the noise of the crowd
and through the protest of the disciples,
Jesus hears.
And like God in that Exodus story of old,
once he hears,he stops.

Jesus turns his attention away from history,
away from the drama of the moment,
and asks, “What do you want me to do?”

That is the nub of the story.
There are all kinds of possible conclusions
we could draw from Jesus stopping,
and among them could be,
that Mark wants us to act on our stage in history –in our own stories –
the way Jesus acted in Mark’s story.

In other words, we need to be listening
as Jesus did,
and when we hear,
we need to be stopping
as Jesus did.

To act like Jesus
instead of the other characters in this story,
our focus needs to be lifted away
from the drama of our own parades,
and with keen ears,
listen to hear the people and events
for which our stopping, and our acting,
may be needed.

I do not know what that looks like
in your life
any more than you know
what that looks like in my life.
But both of us know, that in those rare moments
when we have listened and heard,
and when we have actually stopped
our own parade to respond to others in need,
that we suddenly found ourselves
on new avenues we never expected to travel.

I think, if we really want God in our lives,
that is how to make it happen.

Proper 24B 2018: Agnostic Faith

by

The woman in the red dress
“…shook a fist, then opened hands in praise.”
(Last line from “Job’s Question on Nevis” by Grace Schulman)

As I finished this sermon,
closed my computer,
and watched a man and his son
walk their Golden Retriever down the sidewalk,
I realized I was about to preach a sermon
that goes against 21stcentury secular wisdom
as well as a great deal of Christian theology.

It is also a sermon that is none-too-linear,
like faith itself is not really a shape we can define.
So I will just tell you straight out the conclusion
in case I lose you while trying to get there:
Acceptance of ignorance,
the humility of smallness,
and an agnostic faith.

What I love about that piece from Job
we heard this morning,
is that God turns Job’s questioning around on us.
It is such a beautiful prosecution
of the human mind,
and it so graphically answers
our indictments against God –
all those times we shake our fist
and demand to know “Why!”

God answers Job’s long river of questions,
and it says God answers him, “out of the whirlwind.”
God always talks to characters
in the Hebrew Scripture
from out of something wild:
a burning bush,
a smoking mountain,
a whirlwind.

“Who is this
that darkens counsel
by words without knowledge,” God asks.
What a great line.

God says the same thing to
Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica,
and Rabbi Kushner’s, “When bad things happen to good people” –
and all the sophisticated
and unsophisticated
efforts to explain the existence of evil
and suffering
and darkness
in a world created by a loving God.
“Who is this
that darkens counsel
by words without knowledge?”

About such things we have no knowledge.
What we are asked to do is just rest
in that splendid agnosticism of faith
and truly trust God,
as God asks to be trusted.

Yes, agnosticismof faith;
the acceptance of ignorance
and the humility of smallness…
Swallow that just once:
the acceptance of ignorance
and the humility of smallness.

In other words…there are things
we do not get to know
and making up beliefs
that fill the gaps in our knowledge
is an act of faith-less-ness
and a radical MIS-trust of God.
There are things we do not get to know!

But we are like the Zebedee boys
and host a restless child within us,
the one that never actually grows up
and who haunts our adulthood unto death.
That little kid inside
is always angling for a better place
and more knowledge
and more privilege
and more blessing
than we ever really get.

No matter how mature,
wise, and worldly
we become, there is always
that child within us
asking for more
and better and safer.

That same sad presence within us gets furious
when our smallness
and vulnerability
is revealed.
When we are confronted with uncontrollable outcomes,
and unfathomable ignorance,
plus our clear and absolute limitations,
that child within gets as angry and rageful
as any actual child with a temper tantrum.

But God is indifferent to our rage,
and God seems to be detached from our anger.
Instead, in Job and through other
sagely antiquity, God asks:
Where were you
at the beginning,
when the waters covered
the face of the earth?

Where were you when the sky was void of light,
and not a single heartbeat
could be heard
in the vast expanse
of interstellar space?
Where were you?

It is as if God says to us,
“Look, you are too small
and your perspective is too limited,
and your capacity to understand is outsized
by your desire to know.

“You can trust me or not,” God says,
“but there are some questions
you must live without the answers to,
so get on with it.”

Religion, deeply authentic religion,
the kind with a soul of depth,
is able to hold agnostic faith in its arms
and cradle it with tenderness.
Such faith is what the Hebrew Psalmists wrote –
what we call, ‘Laments.’

The ancient lament,
found in psalms like the one
Jesus quotes while hanging on the cross,
does as the woman in the red dress
when she tossed her spiked heels
and entered the ocean waves:
she shook her fist, then opened hands in praise.

It seems like a contradiction
but it is not.
It is the ultimate act of trust.

The lament that ends in praise,
is the moment of agnostic faith
when we rage against senseless suffering
or mindless evil and destruction,
THEN accept that we are in the humble position
to trust God or not.
At that moment,
at that intensely inflated moment,
we move forward
with a fierce and relentless hope
toward the world we are supposed to create, or,
we move forward with total cynicism
and resignation
that we live and then we die.

I am talking about a grown-up faith here,
not the religion of that inner child.

I am talking about a grown-up faith
that can stand to listen
to God prosecute our arrogant complaints:
“Where were you
when the earth was created
and a formless void?
Tell me, if you know so much,
how the Cosmosshouldwork.”

And so we are left on the beach
or outside a hospital room, at the grave,
or watching the madness unfold on television,
and all we can do
is shake our fist
then,
open both hands in praise.
And then…get on with it.

“Why!” we rage,
and then,
in the ultimate act of trust –
the deepest knowing there is –
we open that fist,
both of them,
in praise to a God
who loves us
and whom we are left to trust or not.

That, my friends,
is the acceptance of ignorance
and the humility of smallness
and an agnostic faith.

By agnostic faith,
I do not mean “no faith” or faithlessness.
Agnostic is actually a modern word,
first used in the late 19thcentury.
It is rooted in a Greek word, gnosisor knowing.
But it is a-gnosis,
in other words, not-knowing.

The most radical faith of all,
like the one that allowed Jesus to be arrested,
is to know
and to accept
that we do not knowthe mind of God –
but we will move forward
with relentless hope
and rock solid trust, anyway.
We do not know,
and we do not get to know,
and we refuse to make up answers
to fill the gaps in our knowledge.
Instead, we trust God and move forward.

That is a big, pull up your pants kind of faith
that puts in check the child within,
and accepts our ignorance and smallness.

So, I have just spent ten minutes
telling us what we do not know,
and encouraging us to resist pretending
we know more than we do.
Fine, so what can we know?

We have to shift our understanding of gnosis.
The definition of knowledge in our world
sounds quite a bit different than anything
we can know about God.
Knowledge today is defined as,
“facts, information, and skills acquired
by a person through experience or education;
the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.”

Knowledge in our world is fact-based
and is defined by understanding.
The kind of faith the story of Job commends to us,
is without understanding – but it is experiential.

The gnosis of God,
knowingGod,
is an experience
and not knowledge as we now define it.
Whether it is a still small voice
silently speaking to us from out of the whirlwind
of chaos in our lives,
or a loud and ecstatic Pentecostal explosion
of religious rapture,
knowing God is experiential.
There is no one language
and no single medium
through which this gnosis is received.
It can emanate from the verdant slopping bluffs
holding the rounded bowl of a teal blue lake,
or it can be received in the cacophonous chatter
of urban noise in which the crush of humanity seems too miraculously absurd to be accidental.
The poetry of life in all its forms and mysteries
whispers and shouts the gnosis we want most.

To be held by God
for even a nanosecond,
is to be marked forever.

We may question the experience
as it fades in the memory over time,
but even the thinnest of such holy moments
will not disappear as a mark on our soul.

Once we experience God
in nature,
in the touch of a friend,
mingled with the love we most desire,
encountered in a moment of despair,
arriving when least expected,
in beauty,
in suffering,
in a burst of hope,
in a sacrament,
in transcendental majesty in a whirlwind…

Whenever,
wherever,
however, we encounter
that power so much greater than ourselves,
it is a gnosis that never completely disappears.
It is a knowledge-without-understanding
that leaves its kiss inside forever.

Acceptance of ignorance,
the humility of smallness,
and an agnostic faith –
which is a faith that knows without understanding.

That kind of faith is powerful,
indelible,
without understanding
yet enough to move forward with hope.

 

Proper 22B, 2018: It’s not about the legality of divorce, rather, the nature of marriage

by

Those readings from Job and Maya Angelou
are juicy and wonderful:

“We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.”

Man, just that sentence alone, is enough
to stutter over for a goodly amount of time.

Then from job,
we could spend this time
debunking the myth of Satan
the way I de-mythologized the idea of Hell last week.
But that would be boring
compared to Maya Angelou,
even if the story of Job is fascinating.

What we are stuck with, however,
is Jesus’ words on divorce
which cannot be left
unexplained and unchallenged.

Last week Jesus told folks
to pluck out their eyes
and cut off their hands and feet,
but I felt no compunction
to tell you that was bad advice.
I was pretty sure you wouldn’t go home and do it.

This week, however,
because divorce is common among us,
and because The Episcopal Church
clearly contradicts Jesus’ strict admonition
against divorce, I feel the need to address it.

Now, when I do this –
cover territory we’ve traveled down before –
I feel like I am repeating myself and
doddering on senility.
But that is not what’s happening.

It is because some things
cannot be allowed to go unsaid –
they are too raw or too much present
in and among us.
Like I said, there was little danger
that anyone was going home
to pluck out their eye last week,
but today’s excerpt from Mark on divorce
can set our teeth on edge
and also leave us with a very wrong idea
about Jesus and divorce.

In addition to all of that,
it is useful to consider today’s topic
in the context of how we treat Scripture differently
than fundamentalist Christians do,
and how we can arrive at a very different
conclusion about divorce,
than Roman Catholics do.

We can engage in coherent dialogue
with Fundamentalist Christians
about how to live in peace and wellness
as we share the earth together,
but we cannot have a coherent dialogue
with Fundamentalists about Scripture.
The reason is, we would be having an
apples to oranges conversation.

Today’s reading from Mark
is a portal through which to see
this very difficult problem
that faces many of us on a very personal level
as we find ourselves in uncomfortable
and even painful circumstances
with family members, friends and co-workers
who are Fundamentalist or Biblical Literalist’s.

The first huge divide between us
and those who believe
the Bible is the literalword of God –
given or even written directly by God –
is that they believe whatever is said in the Bible
is absolute, just as God is absolute.

Secondly, they believe the Bible
is the sole revelation of the mind of God –
that what is written in the Bible
is the only way we have to know for certain
God’s intention and hope for us.

But for The Episcopal Church
and progressive Christians,
the Bible is only onesource of revelation –
and the Bible is notabsolute.

Because of what Fundamentalists and Literalists
believe about the Bible,
their world is a closed system:
it is as if they live in a stone house
with each stone a dictate of the Bible,
held together by the mortar of authority
and fellowship with their Christian community –
emphasis on theirChristian community.

Take out even one stone,
such as Jesus’ words on divorce,
and the whole house will eventually fall down.

The Fundamentalist way of thinking about the Bible
it is truly an all-or-nothingproposition.

So, any discussion about theology
between our two perspectives on the Bible
is a comparison of apples with oranges –
in other words, we are not
even talking about the same fruit.

In talking with people who believe
that every word of the Bible is literally fact,
we imagine we are talking about the same thing –
the same kind of fruit –
but in fact, we are talking about
wholly different things
even though we are both talking about the Bible.

How our tradition understands the Bible
as distinct from Fundamentalism,
is clearly seen in how we understand
Jesus’ teaching on divorce.

First of all,
when we hear the words of Jesus
we must begin by listening to them in the context
of his century and his generation,
rather than begin by hearing them in our context.

Here is how we do that today.
“Some Pharisees came to test Jesus,” which means it was a hostile question.
“They asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’”

The question being asked of Jesus
that you and I do not hear,
because we are Christians
living in the 21stcentury, is this:
“Hey Jesus, do you agree with Rabbi Hillel
or are you on the side of Rabbi Shammai?”

I’ve talked about Hillel and Shammai before
because they were the elephant in the room
whenever Jesus was teaching.
They were the greatest thinkers of their day –
the leading authorities on how to interpret Torah.

Shammai was the conservative,
and what we might call today a Torah Literalist.
Hillel was the liberal,
who believed that
interpretationof Torah
was necessary and not otherwise absolute.

Shammai taught that Chapter 24, verse 1
in the Book of Deuteronomy
allowed a man to divorce his wife.
Hillel also taught that Chapter 24, verse 1
allowed a man to divorce his wife.

But they disagreed
upon the grounds and requirements
of divorce.

Shammai taught that adultery
was the only grounds for divorce,
while Hillel said that any reason was legitimate,
but that the man could only divorce his wife
if done in the proper and humane way.
Both taught that only the husband
could sue for divorce.

So that is the context
in which Jesus is asked this question.

We need to recognize that the legality of divorce
is not in dispute –
only the groundsfor divorce.
Jesus does not disagree with the legality of divorce;
he makes a theological comment
about the nature of marriage.

And by the way,
we should also understand that polygamy
was still legally practiced in Jesus’ day.
Having more than one wife
was not illegal,
irreligious,
or adulterous,
and Jesus never makes a case against polygamy.

What Jesus says,
is that Deuteronomy 24, verse 1
was given to us because God understood
our hardness of heart.
In other words, God ‘gets’ human beings.

God understood that we are human
and that there is no perfection
among human beings,
and that human beings may begin a venture
with the greatest of intention
but there is no guarantee we will finish it.
God, in Deuteronomy 24, Jesus says,
was letting us off the hook –
giving us an out and a backdoor, so to speak.

Now I can hear the perfectionist in me,
and those who are terribly scrupulous
and very hard on ourselves
about the slightest failure,
feeling uncomfortable that such huge backdoor
only leads to complacency.

But allow me to remind us
about the fundamental meaning
of one of the 10 Commandments
most associated with this issue.
“Thou shall not take the name of your Lord God in vain.”

We have been wrongly taught
to trivialize this commandment to mean
we are not supposed to saydamn
and other unsociable swear words.
That is not what this commandment was about.

What this commandment tells us,
is that we should never swear an oath
in the name of God.

For us, in our 21stcentury context,
that means we should use the Civil Oath
in the court of law, for example.
Why?
Because we are human.
Any oath we take,
no matter how earnest we are in our intent,
is never a sure bet.

We may mean what we promise
but not be able to keep our promise.
There are always forces beyond our control
that we cannot foresee.
And besides that, we are human
and we have frailties
and sometimes…we just don’t keep
the promises we make.

So, according to this commandment,
we are not to trivialize God-the-absolute,
by taking an oath in God’s name
that is anything but absolute.
In other words,
do not promise what you cannot guarantee.
Those ancients were very wise.

We need to be disabused
of the idea that when someone gets divorced
they have broken a promise to God.

In the Episcopal wedding ceremony,
we ask God to blessour promise to one another,
but we do not promise God
that we will never break our marriage vows.

So you see how interesting, complex,
and rich this seemingly absolute teaching
actually is?

But, having said all of that,
Jesus isn’t content to let us off the hook.
He always leaves us with some unique wisdom
on the subject,
elbowing his way to a position in between
Hillel and Shammai.

God understood you, Jesus says,
and gave you Deuteronomy 24, verse 1,
but remember Genesis?
God also created us male and female, one flesh.

Jesus insists that any conversation about divorce
include a reminder of the purpose of marriage:
which is to enjoin us
in a union that makes us one and interdependent.
And though the verbiage of Genesis
is male and female,
we have now said that this is also true
for men who marry men
and women who marry women.
Just another example that, for us,
the Bible on its own is not absolute.

What Jesus is pointing out
actually seems like an obvious truth:
marriage makes us one flesh
and even though we may get divorced
it literally rips us apart.

We know this to be true:
Whether we have been divorced
or had a deep and intimate bond broken
outside of marriage,
we know that divorce is not a separation
but an amputation.

Jesus is simply telling the truth.
The dissolution of a relationship
that follows the union of two people
in body, mind and spirit,
is an amputation.
It is painful and grievous
even when done for all the right reasons;
and even when the best possible healing takes place,
that missing limb will be with us in the next relationship
like an amputee’s phantom arm.

That is just the nature of things, Jesus reminds us.

It is his shorthand way of saying
we bring all of who we are
into this most intimate relationship,
so those with whom we have been intimate
will travel with us into the next relationship
whether we want them there to or not.

And as an aside,
this is also true of other profoundly intimate relationships,
like family – all of whom
migrate with us into our marriages.
Even if we were disowned by our parents,
and maybe especially if we had such a fracture,
they are a phantom limb in our marriage
still throbbing and sending signals
to our nerve endings.

So you see,
Jesus does not question the legality of divorce –
that divorce is legal is presumed
throughout the whole conversation.
But neither does he deny
the deep and pervasive truth of marriage,
and its physical and intimate union:
It makes us one flesh
and stays with us wherever we go
and with whomever we are with.

And there is one more thing
in these words of Jesus.
People were bringing little children to him
in order that he might touch them;
and the disciples spoke sternly to them.
But Jesus went ballistic and said:
“Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God
like a little child will never enter it.”

On the surface of it,
the debate about divorce
and the little kid-thing
would seem to be totally disconnected.
But they are not.

As I pointed out recently,
in another such Gospel story,
in the ancient world children, like women,
had no rights.
They were on the bottom rungs
of a rigid hierarchy of social caste.
Children had nothing to give
and therefore they had little worth.
They were vulnerable and needy
and merely a necessary hassle.
Children were like women,
who men could dismiss and replace.
But Jesus says, “No.”

Jesus tells the powerful and the insiders,
all of whom were men,
that when we stand on the margin
with women and children
and all others who are marginalized,
that then we will become open
to the Kingdom of God in our midst.

That translates to us this way:
When we recognize our power,
and then willingly enter into our powerlessness,
and stand with others in their powerlessness –
it will open us to God
in ways we have never known.
It is our presumption of power and control,
and our lust for perfection,
that keeps us from knowing God’s presence
even though it is always present
within and among us.

Jesus’ teaching on divorce
is really about the nature of marriage.
And his teaching on marriage
is really about sharing power and powerlessness.

21 B, 2018: An Ugly Protocol

by

Iron prosthesis 1560-1600

I had a recent facetime call
with a friend who is in seminary.
She was exhilarated by the intellectual stimulation
of learning about the Hebrew Scripture
as well as New Testament literature,
discovering all kinds of things she never knew before.

Biblical scholarship and archeology
is alive and thriving these days,
offering us new and renewed perspectives.

She did not seem troubled
by the startling implications her new knowledge has
for doctrines and long-held beliefs.
But it did make her nervous to realize
she would eventually be a preacher
who would be called upon to share things
that might be troubling
to members of her future congregations.

I told her not to worry too much about that, I don’t.

It is possible I have become jaded
as a result of preaching too long.

You see, when I re-read Jesus
as he appears in today’s Gospel,
and think about all the biblical commentaries
and sermons over the years
that bend themselves into complicated yoga
positions in order to make Jesus
sound better,
I feel like a parent
peering into the kid’s room in total chaos
and thinking, “enough of this!”

“If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off;
if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off;
if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out.
Better to maim yourself than go to Hell.”
But kids, don’t try this at home.

Couple Jesus’ very bad therapy protocol
with the story from the Book of Numbers,
and it is a real horror show.
We have a scene in which thousands of people
are weeping with hunger
and in response to their pitiful vulnerability
and serious discomfort,
God gets “very angry.”
Not only is God without compassion here,
Moses is too!
He wants to know why he has been
saddled with these woeful people –
if I am supposed to change the diapers of these
whimpering, needy people,
just kill me right here, and right now, he says.
Nice.

Jesus’ diatribe from Mark,
and the grumpy Oz behind the curtain in Numbers,
are like an abstract painting we keep turning
to figure out which way is up and which way is down.
I want to use this moment to pick on “Hell.”
Hell is an idea used by bad religion
as a fear-mongering cudgel.
If Hell is anything, it is poetry
not a piece of supernatural real estate.

The word Hell comes from the word, Gehenna,
which actually was a piece of real estate.
Gehenna was the site of ancient Canaanite sacrifice –
ritual human sacrifice.
Children were sacrificed at Gehenna.
Not to be too gruesome about it,
they were cut open and bled like a lamb
in order to access the Canaanite gods.

Israelites were horrified by such a brutal custom
and as they became the dominant culture in Canaan,
human sacrifice was outlawed.

Remember the story in Genesis,
of God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac
and then in the nick of time,
replacing Isaac with a sheep?
That was an anti-child sacrifice story.
It was told to explain why Israelites
did not sacrifice their children
the way some of their neighbors did.

Take a leap forward 700-1000 years,
and we have essentially the same story
told about Jesus being sacrificed for our sins –
this time God did not intervene
and Jesus replaced the sheep
only to became the lamb that saved us from Hell.

The idea of a ritual sacrifice to God or the gods
is not very compelling in the 21st century,
but it was an idea powerful enough to
change the world in the 1st century.
Mixed up in the midst of that idea about
human sacrifice, is also the idea about Hell.

Let’s go back to those ancient Israelites for a moment,
the ones who scorned the idea of child sacrifice
and rejected human sacrifice altogether.
They created a garbage dump at Gehenna.
They created a garbage dump
on the very spot where Canaanites
practiced child sacrifice.
That is a pretty dramatic denunciation
of the Canaanite practice.

In Jesus’ time,
Gehenna was still a garbage dump,
but at that point it was the municipal dump
for the city of Jericho.

So imagine if you can,
the image of an arid climate
in which dirt is baked by the sun
to a clay-fired hardness.
With no modern earth-movers,
imagine what that municipal dump looked like,
and maybe more disgusting,
what it smelled like.

In the ancient world,
that was the place where dead bodies
were abandoned by families too poor
or indigent to claim a space in a burial cave.
Human and animal carcasses
rotted and were burned with other refuse there.
Gehenna was an endlessly smoking pile of trash
baking in the sun
where charred and worm-eaten human remains
fueled a fire that was never quenched.

While Dante is still the primary source of images
used for the threat of Hell,
they are images rooted in actual real estate,
in a smoking pit of nastiness
outside of Jericho.
It is a bitter irony in today’s international politics
to realize the very idea of Hell,
of a place of eternal judgment,
actually comes from Persia, modern day Iran.
It was an idea that exiled Hebrews
brought back with them from Persia,
and to which images of Gehenna came to be applied.

Hell as a piece of real estate
somewhere in the supernatural,
where a vindictive and parsimonious God
condemns the misbehaving for all eternity,
really ought to be updated
if we are going to continue to wield it.
Images of Hell based on an ancient trash heap
should become those of Buchenwald, Auschwitz,
Cambodia, Rwanda, and Sudan.
We have too many graphic and terrifying images
from within our own generations
to remain content with Gehenna.

Personally though, I reject the idea of Hell.
It seems absurd to me
and I simply cannot make sense of it.
Pew Research indicates a majority of Americans
still believe in Hell, even as a majority also,
conveniently, believes they will not end up there.

Mostly I cannot get my head around a god
who balances the scales of justice
in ways we would insist on them being balanced.
A god sadistic and vindictive enough
to torture us for our moral failures,
including the mentally deranged
who were victims of their own physiology.
That is a god who stands in painful contrast
to the ancient prophetic notion
of the God of Israel who loves mercy more than justice.

But on top of that, we live in the 21stcentury
when the idea that human beings occupy
the center of God’s attention
seems as odd and quaint as a flat Earth.
Knowing what we know about the Cosmos,
and knowing how much we do not know
about the Cosmos,
the image of God as a moralistic accountant
keeping score on our lives with a golden abacus,
seems, well, it seems utterly implausible.

But who knows? I could be wrong
and that is exactly how God manages things.
Still, I doubt it.

I could, and have in the past,
found ways to make these stories
from Numbers and Mark
rest easier with our 21stcentury domesticated religion,
but these days I find myself disinterested
in trying to perform such reconciliations.
The common theme between these two stories
is not a bad one,
even if surrounded by troubling imagery and ideas.
Clearly, the punchline that comes from
Eldad and Medad,
as well as the stranger casting out demons
in the name of Jesus,
is that we need not be from
the same tribe
or the same party
or the same group
in order to all be about the same mission.
Our socio-economic status,
our ethnicity, gender, and race,
all are neither here nor there
when it comes to serving as agents of God’s love.

Rather, we are who we are
and we need not attempt to be someone else
so long as we do not harden the membrane
of our community
to only welcome and include people like us.

I dare say there are agents of God’s love
in every army of every nation on the planet;
agents of God’s love
in every religion,
in every political party,
in every tribe;
there are agents of God’s love
living among the billionaire class
and among those poor as dirt;
agents of God’s love
living every life-style imaginable,
and those life-styles we can’t imagine.
They may not look like us,
or talk like we do,
or have the same ideology or theology,
but if they are doing the work of God’s love,
we are with them
and they are with us.

It would be a very simple truth to agree on
if only we were better at recognizing one another.

 

18B 2018: Baggage

by

I once served a church located on the campus
of The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.

I don’t know if it is still true,
but when I was there in the 1990’s
there were a lot of homeless people living in the area.
One of the local itinerants was named, Annie.

Annie had a grocery cart full of newspapers.

I mean full, as in over-flowing
in the same way a giant mound of ice cream
falls off its waffle cone.

Newspapers of every kind:
discarded office papers, wrappers
she found on the street,
paper bags,
signs…
Each item of paper was meticulously flattened out
as smooth as she could get it.

She was scrawny with a petite frame that bowed,
but she had big guns for biceps.
Even so, driving by Annie
as she pushed her cart up the street,
you had to wonder how she had the strength to do it.

After a hard rain, Annie would
use the plentiful number of steps in front of the church
to lay each of her papers out to dry.
The church was U-shaped with three distinct
rectangular buildings forming an open courtyard
facing the front street.
Running the full length of the front of the building,
were two tiers of steps,
each tier about half a dozen steps.
In other words, copious amounts of concrete stairs
upon which to dry all of the contents of her cart.

One Saturday afternoon I pulled up to the Church
to get ready for a wedding,
and there was Annie with all her papers on the steps.

I never really got used to those kind of situations
even though they happened with frequency.
Once, as a wedding party and all the guests
poured out of the church,
there was a man lying on a bench in the courtyard
buck naked.
That was great for the wedding photos.

Anyway, you get the picture of Annie:
slowly,
laboriously
she pushed her grocery cart
full of heaviness
all around the neighborhoods of the Church.

In at least one way, we are all Annie:
We are all Annie carrying the heavy freight
of personal baggage we have with us
into every situation.

Even right here, even right now.
If you had the eyes to see it, you would be able
to discern the enormous backpack I have on,
and the messenger bag slung over my right shoulder
opposite the canvass bag in my left hand.
Why do you think I sweat so much?

And if I had the eyes to see,
I could behold the incredible array of heavy baggage
you carried right through that door
into this sacred space.

Some of it, I am certain,
is very fine luggage you bought at Brookstone,
while others carry burgeoning brown paper bags
and assorted totes.
I imagine there’s a garbage bag or two in here also.

What we carry in our invisible baggage
is our life experiences that shape
what we expectto see and feel
in every given situation.
In the bulging chaos of the past
we carry presumptions,
pre-suppositions,
prejudices,
and peculiaritie
we are not even aware
are prejudicial or peculiar.

It’s just our baggage.
We have been carrying it so long
we don’t even realize how heavy it is.
One of the benefits of a spiritual community
ought be that we discover
bits and pieces of our baggage,
and unload it.

Of course, that is easier said than done.
And God-forbid anyone else
should try to unload any of our baggage for us!

On that wedding day at that church in Columbus,
the sexton tried to collect Annie’s papers off our steps.
You never heard such screaming and profanity!
She was drying her papers,
and they weren’t dry yet,
and she didn’t care whether we wanted to use
the church or not.

No one was going to moveher papers
or takeher papers
until she decided it was time.
She could roar like a lion,
and scream like a banshee,
and swear worse than a sailor.
All of which she did.

Well, you and I are just like that too.

You and I have stuff in our baggage
that we know we need to get rid of,
and that maybe we are even embarrassed
or ashamed about.
But, by God,
no one else is going to touch it but us,
and we will NOT unload it
until we are doggone ready.

One of the amazing things about the Bible,
it seems to me, is in addition
to having its own baggage,
it also does not try to hide the embarrassing baggage
that even some of its heroes carry with them.
For example, in today’s reading from Mark
Jesus’ baggage is unmasked.
You see, Jesus brought some loaded baggage
into his encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman,
just as all of us would.

I think the lesson we learn
when we watch Jesus embarrassed by his baggage,
is that to love –
whether it is loving our neighbor as ourselves,
or our self as our neighbor,
or loving our partner,
sister, brother
or children,
or even our dog –
to love well
is never done without also unloading some baggage.
Let me show you what I mean.

Here is warning:
in order to see what I’m about to say,
we might need to let go of some baggage
we received as a child that said Jesus was perfect.
We know that Jesus was human,
and no human is perfect.

So, Jesus encounters the said woman, where?
Alone in a house.
Even today, in our free and open society,
a well-known public figure,
a religious figure no less,
is in hazard if found alone in a home
with an unrelated woman.

In Jesus’ day the taboo was more powerful
and more dangerous
than you and I can possibly understand.
It violated an untold number of religious purity laws
as well as the rigid moral caste system
of a tightly stratified society.
It was bad all the way around.

Never mind that he went there to escape strangers,
or that he went there to be alone.
Never mind that he went there to get away
from people like her…
people like you and me…needypeople, that is.

Secondly, she is not even Jewish.
She is not Judean.
She is foreign.
She is a Gentile – like you a me,
dirty in other words.
Dirty Gentile – that is a redundancy.
She was a source of ritual impurity
so do not touch,
do not speak,
do not acknowledge her presence.

If we listen carefully,
we can almost hear Jesus thinking,
“Dirty, filthy, Gentile, pig-eating woman,
interrupting my quite time,
risking my reputation,
begging for special treatment…”

Well, who here has never had such angry,
resentful thoughts about the person ahead of us in traffic?
Or how about the Annie’s of this world
who will not budge in their idiosyncratic craziness
to make way for our business as usual?
Who here has never been in a hurry at Wegman’s
and gotten behind the wrong cashier
or the wrong customer,
and didn’t have to bat away some pretty ugly internal snarling?

Yeah, well Jesus had baggage too.
It is not that he was grumpy only because she was
Syro-Phoenician,
but because she was a woman!
A woman, a Gentile woman
a low-life Gentile woman.
He had baggage, he was human.
“Get in line, lady!” he might as well have said.

But look, we all have serious baggage, the dark kind.
We all have prejudices rooted in ethnicity,
race, gender,
sexuality, age,
nationality, even profession.
They are dark spots
in otherwise wonderful people
that keep us apart.

The point is not to be someone without baggage –
no one is without such baggage.
The point is to be open to seeing and feeling
the baggage we carry,
and to be willing to unload it
when the opportunity comes.

Indeed, we can unload such baggage.
We can unload prejudices and presumptions;
but we shouldn’t kid ourselves either –
there will always be more we still carry.

Anyway, the darkness in Jesus,
the ethnic bigotry and misogyny
that was part of his baggage,
endangered the love-your-neighbor ethic
he was trying to spread.
So, the darkness in Jesus,
his own neediness for space and nourishment
as well as his ethnic and religious prejudices,
endangered the love between him
and the nameless woman with an ill daughter.
But she would not budge
any more than Annie would budge.

That Lebanese Woman’s love for her daughter
was steel in her spine,
and she had more dignity and more guts
than Jesus has bigotry.
She challenged him.
She challenges him by rubbing his own baggage in his face
where he could smell it up close and gag.

Was he going to remain seated
in his own squalid waste?
Will the ethnic bigotry he had inherited,
the misogyny he didn’t even recognize,
the temper born of unmet needs
driving his judgments,
remain the driving force in that moment?
Or, was he going to unload some baggage?
Was he going to take that opportunity,
stinging as it was,
to unpack one of his suitcases
and move on a little lighter and wiser than before?

Of course.
Jesus, being Jesus,
saw precisely what she was holding up.
Being human, he must have felt defensive
and embarrassed, ashamed
and angry with himself, and tempted
to point that anger away from himself
and back toward her…but he doesn’t.
He takes a deep breath.
He takes a step back.
He wiggles a little distance for himself
to gather up the considerable resources
he has within himself
for just such a moment as this,
and then he swallows hard.
“Yep. I got baggage,” he admits to himself.

He may even have spent some time later on,
trying to figure out where that baggage came from
and how he could help others to see it as well.
But before he even understood it all,
he acknowledged it
and changed course right there on the spot.

In fact, the next paragraph tells us
that he changed course
and went home by way of Gentile territory –
an unusual route for a righteous rabbi.
He must have taken some time
to interact with a lot more Gentiles,
and to work with his prejudices
and unload them
by filling his baggage with new experiences
of people he came to love –
and see aslike himin every way,
as much as they may have been
different from him in some ways.

That is how we unload baggage, by the way,
by replacing it with new experiences
that teach us something different.
That is how heterosexual parents
suddenly become advocates for their GLBTQ children.
That’s how black and white teenagers
fall in love with one another.
That is how Afghanis or Iraqis
can learn to love even an American.
That is how the chasm of class can melt away
between people who have learned
to trust one another.

Whatever the boundary,
whatever the baggage,
whatever the prejudice,
whatever the bigotry…
it gets unloaded
when new experiences replace them.

You see, that is the big fallacy among wealthy,
educated liberal Americans
who imagine that education alone
can change the world.

If education alonecould change things,
then there wouldn’t be such a horrendous
drug, alcohol, smoking, or STD problem.
It is experience that finally transforms.

As long as we are segregated by
whatever thing separates us –
gender, race, ethnicity, class, religion, neighborhood –
we will have the heavy burden of our baggage.

We need the encounters–
the touch,
the feel,
and the sight of one another –
to learn that Muslims and Jews,
homosexuals and heterosexuals,
Evangelicals and Progressives,
Hispanics and African-Americans,
Caucasians and Asians
are just folks like us in most every way that matters,
even as we honor our differences.
Then, and only then,
can we begin to understand and appreciate
our differences.

We do not even have to like the differences
between us in order to love one another
and unload our baggage.

I think that may be the exclamation
at the end of this little story in Mark.
If so, I hope it helped us
unload a piece of paper or two
within you and me.

Amen.

 

 

 

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, An Open Space for Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts

“Open Space” means open and inclusive, welcoming the Geneva and FLX community to use our space, and to partner with us in building an inclusive community for spiritual inquiry and wellness. 

“Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts” means we are pointed toward a particular dimension of life, specifically that which strengthens the relationship of body, mind, and spirit. 

Trinity is a Christian community of worship and spiritual practice welcoming all, and an Episcopal Church in particular. However, we welcome all spiritual traditions and those who have no particular spiritual background but are engaged in a mission consistent with ours. We are looking for partners in mission not members (although we love to welcome new members too).

 

Like us on Facebook

Like us on Facebook

Newsletter

Coming soon!