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All Saints’: Force Multiplier

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Link to Marie Howe poem, “My Dead Friends:” https://poets.org/poem/my-dead-friends

Isn’t this the most wonderfully
personal public intimacy —
All Saints’ Day I mean.
We create this moment in time,
one spot in one place,
with other people,
when we are surrounded
by personal saints who entered
our lives,
left profound and lasting
influences and love,
and then left us —
always, we think, too soon?

It is such a soft moment, isn’t it?
Grief and gratitude intermingle
with fond memory
to give us back those saints
if just for a moment.
Here they are — with us.

Take a deep breath,
maybe even close your eyes
and see and feel this sanctuary full
of so many wonderful people
who we keep with us over time.

Take just a moment to welcome them in,
their presence in our memory
and beyond.

“I have begun,
when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question

to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear…”

That Marie Howe poem
is so straight forward and matter of fact
and yet captures something
so thin and vaporous.
There is an old values-clarification exercise
I used to invite people to do,
those who came to see me
for help with an issue
they were struggling with.

Imagine, I would invite,
that you have a board of directors
for your life — people whose vote
would be meaningful and influential
even if not the final say.
Pick three or four of five people
who have influenced you —
people whose love blessed you
or whose example amazed you
or whose quiet presence always comforted you.

Once they had the image
and people in mind,

I would ask if anyone was missing
or needed to be replaced.
Then I would invite them
to have their “board” discuss the issue at hand.

Sometimes it worked
sometimes it didn’t
but my point today is that
we all have one:
a group of folks who speak to us
even beyond the grave
because we know what they would say
or we can even hear them say it.

They join, at least the helpful ones,
the angels of our better natures.
They become, inside us,
the board of influencers who help
guide and comfort,
challenge and strengthen us
to live with greater integrity.

I am too Protestant
to have saints with a capital “S.”
I like what The Episcopal Church does
and names historic figures
who deserve special attention for what they did
or how they lived,
and give them a day on the calendar.
There is no spookiness and smoke
surrounding them. Just folks
like we have folks,
who guide and comfort us.

So what I would like us to think about
is what a force multiplier
saints with a small “s” are.
We have approximately fifty people
in our micro-church here on Castle Street
and an additional hundred to two-hundred
who connect with us online.
But that is not all.
We have saints.

We have everyone here, now, in this place,
and with each of us
are those who have come before
and shaped us
and taught us
and imbued us with love and wisdom.
They are part of us
and they are force-multipliers
for any small group of people
who aim to be agents of God’s love.

When someone questions
the value of a micro-church
I tell them that any community organizer
would love to have fifty people
who invest money and time
in a common mission.
With that size group
a good community organizer
could change a neighborhood,
maybe even a city.
And while that is not our mission
or our aim,
our micro-community
is full to the gills
with saints squeezing through our pores
with wisdom, love, commitment,
and challenges
for us to live our lives
and empower our ministries.

I think that’s pretty cool.

I’m going to ask Lisa to play
a brief interlude just now
and invite us all to take this time
to gather our saints —
bring them to mind,
offer up thanksgiving for them,
touch our grief with the balm of gratitude
and just hold our saints for moment.

19 Pentecost: In Conflict with God

by

Don Diego del Corral y Arellano por Diego Velazquez (a 17th c. judge)

Scroll down for video version of the sermon

Texts for Preaching

Genesis 32:22-31

The same night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” So he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.

Luke 18:1-8

Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, `Grant me justice against my opponent.’ For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, `Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.'” And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Some of you have been around
The Episcopal Church
and this congregation
long enough to remember the lament
over the absence of the 1928 Prayer Book
and Elizabethan English.
”Oh, the poetry and beauty of it all”
the sense of grief gushed.
Some even had a sorrowful sadness
about “the missing Victorian language
of these awful new hymns.”

I confess to internally rolling my eyes
whenever I heard those laments.
And don’t get me started on the King James Version
of the Bible — what a horrible translation!

Well those horses are out of the barn,
and thank goodness.

I have zero interest
in rehabilitating 16th century
British culture and religion.
In fact, the further we can outrun that past
the better.

The readings today
conjure up a basic conflict
between our British ancestors
and the Bible they corrupted.

It is a conflict between a radical 1st century
Palestinian peasant,
and the well-educated
upper class culture of Britain
that had a lust for the appearance of order.

It is a conflict between
British Enlightenment thinkers
who cherished so-called pure reason 
that defined a well-ordered universe,
with ordinary 21st century people like us
whose brains are crowded with information
and whose growing sense of chaos
pushes us to question
the supremacy of reason.

It is a conflict between
the perspectives of Biblical people,
who mostly experienced the harsh margins
of powerlessness and violence
at the hands of empires,
and Imperial England
that raped indigenous cultures
in pursuit of colonization.

Painfully, we also remember
that Colonialism had a willing partner
in the Church of England
because it confused Christian faith
with British and European civilization.

The language of worship and theology
that The Episcopal Church inherited from England
is a domesticated religion
that cleansed the conscience
and stands in conflict with the radicalism
of Jesus in particular,
and the Bible in general.

Now this is an old story,
which you have heard me yammer on about
many times before.
I can’t help it
because today’s readings require it.
(But…
I think it has an added word for us
at Trinity Place
in 2022.
More about that in a minute.)

So I am picking on our British past
but it is also true that European civilization
from the Roman Empire to German Theologians
all engaged in the domestication of Christianity.
They had to
because the Bible,
particularly the Wisdom and Prophetic traditions,
of which Jesus is a part,
is radically subversive.

Biblical Christianity
is subversive of Imperial culture
regardless of who the emperor is.

Where we would add refinement
the Bible is course;
where we would add gentleness
the Bible is militant;
where we would add reason
the Bible never considered it; and
where we would translate into proper English
the Bible speaks in vernacular.

Enter Jacob and Jesus.

Jesus, like the sages and prophets before him,
argued and wrestled with God,
and in the process
sometimes changed God’s mind.

Our Enlightenment ancestors
standing inside a windowless cube of reason,
could not imagine a God
who ever changes anything,
especially God’s own mind.

We have stopped telling
the most important stories in the Bible
except to very young children, who,
if it weren’t for the fact
they are allowed to watch “Halloween 2, 3, 4, and 5”
would be terrified
by the God in those stories.

We have domesticated the Bible
and the Biblical characters
because they are subversive partisans
who engage in combat with God
as much as they do with Pharaoh and Caesar.

So, we should know
that God expects a good fight from us
not a polite prayer
with impeccable syntax
that whimpers our neediness.

God expects a fight from us,
so we need to push back
and not accept things as they are.
God’s perspective

is just a whole lot more vast than ours,
so our little issues
do not amount to as much as a pimple
on God’s galactic radar.
That means we better be prepared
to kick up some dust.

It is all right there in the text
if we pay attention to it.
In our polite, well-educated
and culturally filtered version of Luke’s story,
the judge says:
“I will grant her justice so that she may not wear me out by her continual coming.”

But a translation
more faithful to the Greek text, I’m told, says:
“I will grant her justice
so that she will not pummel my eye.”

So she will not give me a black eye!
Really?
See how we domesticate the message?

If you are translating Luke’s story
from a position of privilege and power,
one in which you respect the arbitrators of justice,
because they are your kind of people —
then you want this parable to suggest
that the poor old widow is a nag
and the judge,
tired after a long day’s work
finally gives into her.

But that is not the emotional content
behind Luke’s story.

The judge gives in
because this widow is scrappy
and will give him a black eye
if he keeps denying her justice.

This is a story Jesus tells
with a punch line as clear as day:
our relationship with God
and our spiritual practice
is laden with conflict.
We need to be tough…spiritually tough.

We need to be like Jacob
who wrestles with God
and won’t let go without a blessing.

As I said a few weeks ago,
our very definition of faith
is rooted in that Jacob story:
Emunah, “to hold onto.”

Moses argues with God more than once,
and more than once
he changes God’s capricious mind.

The prophets
insist that God live up to God’s promises
of justice and mercy
and they do it
with some of the most passionate language
in human history.

Jesus scorns,
scorns,
the frilly formal Temple worship
and the polite customs
that the educated and privileged enjoyed.
Instead he insists upon
a more earthy,
a more passionate
kind of prayer.

Our worship and prayer language
needs to become wilder
not more refined;
crazier and more passionate
not more formal and orderly.

If prayer is only an act of last resort for us
then we need to find another way to pray.

If we are afraid to put it all out there
and insist on a little justice or mercy
then we need to find another way to pray.

We need to look again at the Bible.
We need to reject the domesticated version
that upholds the pillars of polite society
and public order.
Tenacity
toughness
anger
passion
lament…
these must be the active ingredients
in our spiritual practice.

Now before I turn specifically
to what this might say to us
here at Trinity Place,

I want to put a period on the end
of this tough-guy sentence from Jesus.

It is really because once
every three years
I get to drag out a sentence of the Bible
no one ever notices.
It never comes up in the lectionary,
but it is in the Gospel
immediately preceding
today’s story from Luke.

Someone asks Jesus,
“Hey Jesus, where will the reign of God arrive?”
to which Jesus answers,
“Where the corpse is, the vultures will gather.”

“Where the corpse is, the vultures will gather”
is not one of those popular lines
Evangelicals learn to memorize
or that appears as a chorus
in Victorian hymns.

But it is another example
of the extreme difference
between the Jesus of the Gospels
and the Jesus of polite religion.

Now, how might we hear Jacob and Jesus
and the undomesticated gospel
in relation to Trinity Place?

What I would say,
is that we need to stop thinking about Church
as the model for what we are.

We have inherited a model
from the 19th and 20th centuries
that is clearly dying —
gasping for air, especially in our part of the country.
”Church” as we imagine it
is a corpse where the vultures are gathering.
It isn’t dead yet
but Church as it has existed
really is dying.
What form it takes next is not clear yet
and we may be — may be — a pioneer.

We already made a radical break
by giving up our building
and believing we could be church
without owning property.
But that was only one skin
we needed to shed.

I do not pretend to know
what travels into the future
and what gets left behind,
but I am convinced that the form
and the model we have known
and that we haven’t really let go of yet,
is one of those skins
we need to consider shedding.

Well that is a lot to digest:
A tougher relationship with God
that includes conflict,
and an even more dramatic separation
from our past
with how we do and be
Church.

But I know you didn’t come here
to be put to sleep.

17 Pentecost: Leaving the 100 Acre Woods

by

A video is available when you scroll to the bottom of the text

I go away for one week
and someone slips in two awful readings.
Billy Collins is a saving grace, however.

Psalm 137 has an iconic beginning
and an horrific ending.
And Luke’s gospel story
has Jesus, who is talking to slaves
and horrendously poor peasants
who are de facto slaves,
and using them as fodder
in his parable.
I’m going to slip the noose
with these readings
and sneak into territory they imply
even if not directly.

There is that haunting cry:
”By the waters of Babylon
we sat down and wept…
How shall we sing the Lord’s song
in a strange land?”

This is a cry,
a lament for what has been lost,
and a grief
transformed into bitter,
violent resentment
as we see at the end.

It is the lament of the exiled,
those who look back
to what was
and should have been
and land in a pool
of nostalgic vengeance.

We hear it today in our own world
rising up from the rubble
of lost manufacturing jobs,
union members who remember
how it used to be
before they were exiled
to a gig economy.

We hear it today
among Christian church-goers
who used to be a majority
with bulging congregations
and have been exiled to a secular culture,
in which one religion seems much like another
and none of them quite fit
with modernity.

We hear it today
among Liberal Arts academics
that used to carpet the floors and walls
of the academy
before their forced march
into a STEM wilderness where big incomes
for engineers and programmers
replaced pure knowledge for its own sake.

We hear it today
from the fear-festering pockets of White America
calling for or demanding a return to “normalcy”
when power and privilege never had to be
thought about because they were assumed,
and a multi-racial, mutli-cultural nation
sounds to them like exile.

Whoever or whatever brought us
to the places
we do not want to be,
“dash those little ones on the rock!”

Nostalgia soon morphs into resentment
leading to bitterness,
and arriving at vengeance.

But authentic faith,
the little mustard seed kind,
is a bulwark against nostalgia
for the way things used to be
and against the anger
that arises when brittle beliefs
crumble like autumn leaves.
Faith, as we know,
has nothing to do with beliefs.
Beliefs are things we pad our minds with
in the hopes they will protect us.
Faith is something else altogether.
In that whacky and weird parable
Luke has Jesus tell,
there is a similar kind of bitterness
beneath the apostle’s plea
for Jesus to increase their faith.
They want more…they want protection.
When they don’t get it —
when faith turns out to be something else —
they will be bitter
and wander away.

Crushed by grief,
endangered by trauma and tragedy,
raked across loss
as all of us have
or will be,
how can we have faith?
How can our faith survive
the ordinary ravages
of an ordinary life?

This is the question
posed by Psalm 137
and Luke’s funky little parable.
(Well, maybe it is the question posed
and maybe it is just my take on them.
But either way,
this is where we arrived today).

It takes us back to bedrock,
to the place we cannot dig any deeper.
So let’s revisit it.

We start with an ancient Hebrew word.
You will remember it
because I bring us back to it often:
‘Emunah (em-oo-nah).
It means a fierce
and ferocious holding onto.

‘Emunah
was a word they used
to describe the experience
— the experience not the idea — of “faith.”

You see, faith
was not an intellectual set of beliefs
for our ancestors,
it was ‘Emunah:
a holding onto God.
It indicated a fierce and ferocious
grasp on the experience
of God.

‘Emunah – holding onto God
and not letting go.

And of course, holding onto
and letting go are choices.
Faith is a choice.
More about that in a moment.

Billy Collins helps us
describes
that wonderful yet
melancholy border
between childhood and the next phase,
whatever we want to call our next phase.
It is the phase in which
we choose faith or not,
because before that phase
we don’t have to choose.
In post-childhood
we have to choose to hold onto
a power greater than ourselves
in a life that is bigger
and more ferocious
than any single belief we ever have.

Do you remember the last scene
from the original Winnie the Pooh?

In it Christopher Robin
leaves the 100-Acre Wood
for the last time.
The 100 Acre Wood
is a metaphor for childhood
and reading it as an adult to a child,
we know he is never coming back.
The child we are reading to
doesn’t know it yet,
but we know
Christopher Robin
is never coming back.

At turning 10,
that first big number,
when we discover that we bleed,
and that mom and dad can’t always fix it —
and by extension
that mom and dad
cannot always protect us —
suddenly the world
seems a more dangerous place.

On the day we turn 10 — metaphorically —
or on the day we leave the 100 Acre Wood,
or on the day our parent dies
and we are still a child,
or on any day when the magic light
drains out of our bicycle for the last time
and we bleed,
is the day we arrive
at the border of ‘Emunah.

That is the day
when you and I have to decide
for the first time,
to choose God
or retreat into our nest of beliefs.
It is the day we know there is a choice.

Now please do not misunderstand me:
I am not talking about believing in God,
as in all the things
we were ever told about God
in Sunday School
or from the Nuns
or the Preacher.

I am talking about choosing God:
choosing
to hold onto
our “experience” of God.

You see, young children
do not have difficulty believing
that Mohammed moves mountains
and Jesus walks on water
and God protects us from disaster.

We do not have to work
to believe such things
because there is magic everywhere
when we are small.

The world is a magical place
before we arrive at that border.
But at that border
and beyond,
‘Emunah — holding onto God —
is that tiny mustard seed
of faith
that Jesus tells us
is powerful.

Holding onto God no matter what:
no matter how painful the loss,
no matter how depressing the outcome seems,
no matter how bleak the options appear,
no matter how confusing the events shake out.
Holding on…holding on…holding on…no matter what.

You see, faith is not a thing that protects us —
that if we have it
we will be safe
or rewarded
or protected.
It is a thing we hold onto…no matter what.

Faith is rooted
in our experience or experiences of God.
It doesn’t come
from what someone told us about God
or Bible stories about God.

That is where our beliefs
come from.

Our beliefs
are the ten thousand images
of how we want life to be
that cover the walls
of the cave or hut or house we live in.
Beliefs come from others
and are made up within our minds
and they help us make sense
out of a world
that probably does not make a lot of sense,
and beliefs help us to feel bigger
in a universe in which we are so small
as to be insignificant.

But when we have faith —
the kind the ancient Hebrews meant
when they used the word, ‘Emunah —
we know that our beliefs
are just beliefs.
We know it
and though it is a little scary
we can still live forward
because we are holding onto
God.

Faith
is holding onto God
even when the pages of our beliefs
flutter by
and we no longer know
what to believe.
Not knowing what to believe
is okay
because we are holding on…holding onto God.

You see, most of our religious mistakes
come from the fact that we live
in an economic culture
in which everything of value
is transactional.
We ask of everything:
”What good is it?”
”What can I get for it?”
”How much is it worth?
”What will you give me for it?”

Which is what we also ask of faith.
But faith has no answer
for transactional questions.
Faith
does not buy us anything.
Faith
does not protect us from anything.
Faith
does not have value beyond itself.
Faith is simply the ability and choice
to hold onto our experiences of God
regardless of how far
they recede into the rear-view mirror.

Can we step into any hurricane
that surrounds us
and know, deep
in our bones,
that no matter what happens
it will be okay?
Not even that we will survive,
but because of God,
because God is good
and we are part of God,
we are and will be okay?

I think that is what it means
to hold onto faith.

No theology professor or spiritual director
ever told me that, but
it seems to me,
that mustard-seed faith
is about that kind of holding onto God
while letting go of beliefs
as our foundation.

Now I know we have to have beliefs,
it is part of the life of the mind
and human beings were given
beautiful minds.
But beliefs are not faith
and most of them will dissolve in a storm.
But an experience of God,
small or large
dramatic or quiet,
is enough to hold onto for a lifetime.

‘Emunah — hold on to it.

9 Pentecost: Forget about worship…worry about where your treasure is

by

We should feel alarmed and threatened.

Isaiah is telling us,
with the voice of God
on his lips no less,
that formal, public worship
should be eliminated.

Luke is telling us,
on the voice of Jesus no less,
that we should sell everything we have
and give even the proceeds of that sale
to the poor.

Now, I could perform a little dance
around these two voices
and explain away the radicalism
in favor of a more mainstream view,
but it would just be a dance.

So let’s go a little deeper
and see if there is something for us
in these two prophets
that lived more than five hundred years apart

Isaiah is a poet extraordinaire,
a second generation prophet-poets,
with Amos, Hosea and Micah
being among the first.

Isaiah leans on Amos and Hosea,
and Jeremiah leans on Isaiah,
and on and on until we get to Jesus.

Then Jesus leans on Isaiah and Micha
and on and on
until we get to the prophets and martyrs
of our generations.

We must always remember
that Jesus did not just appear out of nowhere,
and teach what he taught
as if it began with him.

Rather, Jesus swims in the river of wisdom
that flows from the earliest
human encounters with the holy,
all the way to you and me
where that wisdom meets up
with the still small voices we hear
within the silences of our own lives.

Basically, Isaiah had the unenviable task
of speaking truth to power
at a time when everything looked pretty good.

The Northern and Southern Kingdoms
we associate with Israel
were getting along for once,
and they were prosperous
with strong armies
and even some newly invented
military technology
that none of their neighbors possessed.

Uzziah had his own stable of in-house prophets –
seers, dream weavers,
and oracles
that mostly told him
what he wanted to hear.
The Temple had a caste of clergy
who regulated a pretty tight ship,
and served the power of the king.

Their attention was on doing ‘good church’
as seminarians would say
about worship.

But the prophets like Isaiah,
did what poets are supposed to do:
they saw.

Not only did they see,
they described what they saw
in powerful language
that was often threatening
to the king and clergy.

It wasn’t all dark and terrible either.
Some of the prophesies
were magnificently hopeful
and encouraging.

But in today’s reading from Isaiah,
what we have
are words that pierced the armor
of prosperity and power.

Basically what Isaiah is saying,
or what God is saying on the lips of Iaiah
if you wish to believe that claim,
is that what really matters
is not religion
but integrity.

What God wants from us,
Isaiah seems to be saying,
is not worship but integrity.

Now, integrity is measured
by the distance between
what we say we believe and value
and how we actually live day to day.

It is a really scary word
when if we think about it that way.

What God really wants from us,
Isaiah says, is our integrity.

Scholars and theologians of good will
argue about whether
Isaiah is suggesting
that all worship
be thrown out with the bathwater, or not.
The Temple,
whether in Isaiah’s day or ours,
has a vested interest
in keeping the Temple
at the center of the religion
and the prophets
often seemed at tension
with the temple, which
they accused of lacking integrity.

But I think it would be a reach for us
and most church-folks today,
to think about eliminating worship
since worship is often
the only element of spiritual practice
that many people engage in.
But we could make a case,
based upon the prophets,
that instead of calling for a new prayer book
or better music,
we should be calling
for the elimination of worship.

That’s right: eliminate worship
in favor of lives of justice and compassion.

When worship gets in the way,
cut it out Jesus might say,
as with the offending eye.

Or as Isaiah wrote:
“…learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.

Come now,
let us argue it out,
says the Lord…”

But calling for the elimination
of worship
is the same as Jesus’ tough talk
about selling all our possessions
and giving the proceeds to the poor.

Like that is going to happen.

But let’s back up
on this Jesus talk
because there is something
hiding here in plain.

There is no way Jesus
would tell his audience
of highly deprived and impoverished listeners
to sell all they have
and give it to the poor.

They were the poor!

I’ve described the situation before
but it is worth reminding ourselves
when we hear Luke tell a story like this one.
Wealthy Roman citizens
who lived in Italy
and likely didn’t travel far,
engaged in real estate speculation and development
out on the outer margins of their empire.

They would wait until
drought or floods caused real hardship
to peasants farming their little plots,
and then their agents would arrive
offering loans
to help the peasants buy seeds for the next cycle.

Because they were desperate
and had no recourse,
the peasants took the loan
and almost without fail,
would eventually default on it.

Then, all of a sudden,
their land,
which was the one thing
that peasants had to keep them from slavery,
belonged to an absentee landlord.

The peasant then became a tenant farmer
or worse,
was kicked off the land with nothing.

Heck, that is a scenario
that happens in the United States.
In my home state of Indiana
and elsewhere in the breadbasket,
most of the farmland now belongs
to large corporations
who have repeated that same ancient pattern.

The reason I mention this
is because Jesus was talking to the bottom 99.99% —
which in that society
and in that time,
were desperately poor
and without the slightest social safety net.

“Give away your possessions?”
What possessions?

“Give alms?”
With what?

It just doesn’t make sense for Jesus
to say such things to the audience
with whom he was speaking.

BUT…Luke’s audience
would have contained people
who actually had slaves,
and people who worked for people
who had slaves.

Luke did not know Jesus,
but he was speaking to Gentile Romans
in a society removed by time
and geography
from Jesus.

And that is true for all the Gospel editors –
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Luke and the other Gospel editors,
along with Paul,
are speaking to people like us.
That was their mission.
They sought to take
the stories and teachings attributed to Jesus,
and interpret them for the distant,
non-Jewish,
more affluent
people of the empire…us.

But be that as it may,
there is a gem of a sentence
in today’s reading from Luke,
that has Jesus written all over it.
It is the very prophetic sounding phrase
about the contrast between our heart
and our treasure.

That, by the way,
is a hallmark of an authentic
first century Jewish parable:
a spare, single point of contrast
unfettered by all the fluff
of an allegory.

Luke’s words on the lips of Jesus
boil down to a question of integrity:
“…where our treasure is,
there our heart will be also.”

Where our treasure is,
there our heart will be also.

So simple.
So eloquent.
So exquisitely truthful
in such a poetic way.

Our treasure, our heart.

Where we place our treasure
is where we plant our heart.

We know that is true.
We know it is true
even without having to verify it in a laboratory.
We know it is true
before the words are even spoken.
We know it is true
in the marrow of our bones.

We know where
we want our heart to be,
and we know
what and where
our treasure actually is;
and we wince to acknowledge
the distance between them.

So here is how Isaiah and Jesus come together.

Maybe we won’t have to eliminate worship
if we can manage to create
and sustain
worship traditions and practices
that challenge
and nurture
our integrity.

Maybe worship could be a good thing
instead of a vestige of empty religion
if it led us to examine
and see
the distance between
our values
and our practice.

Maybe worship could be a good thing
if, when we gathered
and did it,
the experience nurtured
and strengthened our integrity.

Let’s work on that, okay?

8 Pentecost: Pushing the pause button – or alt/delete

by

As most of you know,
I had a traumatic event in May.
The surgery I had to fix my back
was followed in three days
by an emergency surgery
to remove a blood clot on my spine.
Like so many people do,

I spent an eternity in the emergency room
before I was diagnosed and treated.
I was in what I can only describe as a cocoon of pain.
Thankfully I recovered and am doing great now
but the reason I mention it
is because, like most such events,
it was a forceful hitting of the pause button.

Kind of like hitting alt/delete on your PC
or Command/Delete on your Mac,
it cleared everything else before it
and left an empty space
within which to hold an unadorned view of life.
All of us have likely had such moments,
not always from trauma, thankfully.
Hiking or camping,
loss and grief,
self-imposed deprivation…
there are times when we clear the space
in the field around us
and within our hearts and minds,
or have it cleared for us.

When that happens,
we suddenly see thing anew
or from a different angle,
or even from underneath
or looking down as if from above.

I think that is what Jesus
was trying to do with his proverbial saying
and follow-up parable
that we heard this morning —
to clear the space
within and around
those who were listening.

Since Jesus issued his warning
much has grown up in the world around us
like weeds and undergrowth
crowding out his words
and making them seem so, so unrealistic
or impractical — so,
pie-in-the-sky.

But we know in our heart of hearts
that his warnings are wise
and every once in awhile
the space within and around us
gets cleared
and we hear him agian.

Jesus says three things
we might want to pay attention to
in that reading from Luke.

First, in response to someone complaining
about his stingy brother,
he says: “Watch Out!”
Guard against greed.

Secondly, with his parable
he warns that an abundance of possessions
does not create an abundance of joy.

And third, which seems like the background
upon which his parable is told,
he reminds us that security is an illusion.

First, watch out for greed.
Secondly, money can’t buy you joy.
Third, there is no such thing as security.
With those three,
simple,
pithy points
we are at the front door
of spiritual wisdom.

If we take any of this gospel stuff
seriously at all
then we need to approach
this subject
with gentleness
and reverence
rather than with scolding,
shaming, or guilt.
You see, all of us live in house of cards
created by our life within the kingdom of stuff.

So let us proceed
with a sense of our own fragileness.

This Greek word for greed
is translated into English
as “the yearning to have more.”
So when Jesus issues his warning,
“Take care!  Be on your guard
against all kinds of greed –
for life is not about the abundance of possessions,”
he is warning us
about the hazards of our always
yearning to have more.

“Guard” against it
is all he says.
He doesn’t say “don’t feel it.”
That would be silly
because we yearn
from the first moments of hunger at birth,
and don’t stop yearning
until we can’t breath any more.
”Guard against it,” he says.
He gives no rule or plumbline
by which to measure greed.
He simply says,
“Hey, this is real
so pay attention to it.”

I wonder what he would say in our world?
In 2022 every strand of electronic data
that swirls around us on radio waves,
through optic cables and wifi,
even filling every visual void
on billboards and cereal boxes,
is charged with highly sophisticated efforts
to excite our greed
and seduce our yearning for more.

We are invited to be perpetually dissatisfied.
Think about that for a moment.
We are urged
to be perpetually dissatisfied.

We are taught
to be chronically hungry.

Our weaknesses and vulnerabilities
are taunted and teased.

We are titillated constantly
by the hawkers of “More!”
and they are very good at their trade.

“Watch out!” Jesus warns.
”Guard against your greed.”

So how do we do that?
Well, in the midst of our yearnings
if we can remember the difference
between joy and happiness,
we can guard against greed.

Happiness is something we can manufacture
or momentarily create
but joy is something we must open ourselves to
and allow its visitation
when it comes along.
We do not create joy, it happens.

We know how to make ourselves happy
when we need a pick-me-up:
For me a bike ride will make me happy,
for someone else it may be a walk.
Calling a friend,
delicious chocolate,
some people shop to make themselves happy
others drink a beer.

We can make ourselves happy
with things we do,
but there is nothing we can do
to make joy.

We get visited by joy instead.

It happens sometimes when we least expect it.
Driving down the highway
and suddenly
we are filled with a sense of calm serenity
that we did not invite or invent.

Or we are with a friend or lover
and what was at one moment
a normal conversation
suddenly becomes a joyful intimacy
that we did not invite or invent.

Joy visits us
but we must be open to it.
We must be predisposed
to be taken over by it when it arrives
and not try to clutch it
and keep hold of it as it leaves.

Of course we will yearn for more of it
once it passes,
but we smile and let it go,
and think, “That was nice.”
A simple moment of gratitude
rather than fretfully trying to keep hold of it.

The way we live without greed
in spite of our yearning for more,
is a deep and pervasive
presence of mind
that an abundant life
is discovered
and sustained with joy
rather than happiness.

It turns out
that abundant life
is not about the capacity
to take the next breath
or keeping the heart beating a little longer.

Abundant life
is not about what we come to own or achieve.
Rather, like joy,
abundant life is measured
in what we see and know
rather than in what we have and do.

And so, in this, we are at the nexus of Jesus
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only those who see take off their shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries…”

The presence of mind
to know that abundant life is about joy
has to do with what we see when we look around.

Most of us, most of the time,
see and touch the life that surrounds us
as if it is an object for our use.
Instead of being awed
by how crammed full everything is
with a holy presence,
we see things as an object
for our consumption
or ownership.

We measure it
and value it
by whether or not
it tastes good to us
or how much we want to have it
or our own for ourselves.

In so doing
we deaden our sense of the holiness
that pervades everything.
The magnificence of an apple
becomes its sweet taste
that satisfies a yearning.

The sensual beauty of an orange
becomes a vehicle for Vitamin C.
A tree becomes a house,
a forest becomes a park,
a person becomes a clerk,
a cow becomes a steak.

I do not mean
that we should deny the utility of things,
nor the certainty of our basic needs,
but must our need
and their utility
transform the holiness of that life
into an object for our use?
The way to guard against greed
is to keep a presence of mind
about the holiness of life:
The bush is crammed with God –
not because the blackberries taste good
but because it is infused with God.
We are infused with God.

All that we seek to possess,
all we yearn to own,
all that we desire to consume
is crammed with God.

Keeping a presence of mind
about the holiness of life,
while surrounded on all sides
by messages about the utility of life
and objectification of all creatures,
will help us guard against greed.

That is all we need do, Jesus said,
”guard” against it.

We need not be immune to greed
but on guard
with a presence of mind
that the sacred
is hiding in plain sight
all around us.

The last of Jesus’ three point,
and the punchline of his parable
about the foolish farmer,
is that security is an illusion.

It is a fascinating little story.
Jesus does not critique the farmer’s wealth.
He does not critique the man’s good fortune.
There is no hint of a critique
of the farmer being type-A and goal-oriented.

The critique
is that the farmer
confused safety with security.

The mistake is in imagining
that there comes a time
when we will be safe
because we have achieved something
or arrived at something
or created a particular life-style for ourselves
and all will be well.

But there is no such thing as safety.
Naturally we spend a lot of time and energy
trying to figure out how to be safe,
and such precautions
allow us to then pretend we are safe.

But Jesus’ point
is that in spite of our best efforts
we are always vulnerable.
The better diet,
the safer neighborhood,
the nicer school,
the bigger income,
the giant SUV —
none of those things
will make us safe.
We are vulnerable to all the ravages of life.
Period.

Our sense of security in life
should not be derived from how safe
we think we are
because sooner or later
that safety will be revealed as an illusion.

Our security
must come instead,
from something or somewhere else.
In the storms that swirl around us –
whether it is a personal crisis of grief,
the experience of trauma in an emergency room,
or in the midst of social and political chaos —
where are we centered?

If the Gospel is to be believed,
at our center – our core –
is a common bush afire…
with God.
True.

At the very core of your body,
at my core —
at the nexus between
your heart and your mind,
we are crammed with heaven.

We are crammed with heaven.

If we know that,
if we really know it,
then we will be secure
in any storm.

Don’t get me wrong,
we may not be safe —
we may even perish.
But if we know that at our core
we are crammed full of God,
we will have perished with an awesome
sense of security.

  1. Guard against greed.
  2. An abundant life built upon openness to joy
    more than making ourselves happy with stuff.
  3. And the security of knowing
    we too, are crammed with God.

Just some more subversive wisdom
from the rabbi
who lives at the center of our tradition.

Trinity Place

 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).

 

 

 

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