Sermons – Page 2

Lenten Meditation: Christianity Without A Cross

February 25, 2018 by Cam Miller

This sermon was delivered at a mid-week Lenten service at Geneva (NY) Presbyterian Church.

“Cross Culture: the cross we wear, the cross we bear.”

Well, Deb knows me well enough
to know I can’t draw a straight line – even with a ruler.
And I can’t follow directions
unless they are written in blood, and even then
maybe not so well.

But she invites me any way,
and for that I am grateful to have such a friend.

So, I am thinking that what I am about to say
will resonate with about 25% of you,
and offend another 25%.
The rest of you? Hard to say,
you guys in the middle
are kind of tricky to figure out.

What I am going to talk about is the cross itself,
and I will preface my weird and crazy remarks
by acknowledging that that cross around your neck,
if you have one, may have deep personal meaning for you.
I am not trying to call your baby ugly, so to speak.
In fact, you should know, we use a processional cross
at Trinity every Sunday,
even though I wish we didn’t.
But that is because I know it is meaningful to lots of people.

That said, I don’t wear a cross. Ever.
In fact, I wish the cross
was not the symbol of Christianity.
And while that was once a kind of lonely perspective,
I am happy to say, I am no longer
quite so alone.

As some of the Trinity folk know,
I’ve been heard to say that wearing a cross
is like hanging a little gold or silver electric chair
around your neck.
It is the symbol of state murder –
execution for crimes of capital offense.

Now on one level,
I am politically rambunctious enough
to like the idea of Jesus
as a reminder of State-sponsored violence
and oppression.
That works theologically.
It slaps us in the face the way Jesus did.

On the other hand,
defining Jesus’ life and ministry
by the last brutal act in his life,
inflicted upon him by the full weight
of an empire, causes us to give short shrift
to the most important parts of the gospels.

We ought to be focused on his wisdom
not his criminal sentence.
We ought to be amazed by the radical hospitality
and inclusion of his table fellowship,
rather than his torture.
We ought to be stunned by the elements
of the spiritual practice he shared with us
over the last three years of his life,
instead of the last gruesome three hours.

I think it is so interesting to notice,
that what the Church likes to stutter over the most
are the birth narratives – which
Jesus had little to do with as a passive participant –
and his crucifixion, which was also beyond his control.
By that, I mean he had no more power over saving himself
than John the Baptist did.
When an empire decides to rub you out,
more often than not, it happens.

Now some people still believe
that God set Jesus up to be tortured and executed
in the most painful and inhumane way possible,
just so that people like us 2000 years later
can sleep easy with our sins.
If that is true, we have a very problematic god
and the cross becomes an ugly reminder of that god
instead of Jesus’ execution.

So, my own theology
gravitates to the Jesus stories, and
the Jesus sayings, and
the events abundant with stunning wisdom,
and provocative counter-cultural customs.

I do not think Jesus died on the cross
because God set it up that way,
and I do not think Jesus died on the cross
because Jesus thought that was the best way forward.

I think Jesus died on the cross
because that is how WE do things.

I say “we” because we haven’t changed much
since the first century.

Our technology and life-style are very different,
but more often than not, still today,
when the prophets and messengers of God
meet up with us,
it does not end well for them.

In a nutshell, when we hear the Passion story
told in the shade of that terrible cross,
what I think we should be remembering instead of Jesus
is our place in that story.
You and I are never mentioned in the gospel accounts
of the last week in Jesus’ life,
but we are in there between the lines.
We are the Romans.
You know, the ordinary Roman citizens
who didn’t know diddly about Judah or Jerusalem,
but who benefited economically from the Roman occupation
of those foreign lands, and the
exploitation of its farms and people.

They didn’t know about Jesus when he was alive,
but their agents and their military
tortured and executed him for their benefit.

So, to my strange way of thinking,
instead of pretty, polished crosses
I think we would be more true to the gospels
if we looked out into the world all around
to see who is getting exploited
and who is getting smashed
by agents of our government
and our military,
and wonder about how we are benefiting
from all that violence.

That is what the cross means to me.
I can only stand to think about it so much,
and just so often,
because it is so painful and overwhelming.
It will bring me down, to be sure.
So instead, I focus more on the gospel wisdom
and the spiritual practice Jesus invited us into.
That way, I think I am working on turning things around
even though I know there are still lots of people
getting smashed by a cross
in my name and for my benefit.

I have to believe that if I keep my focus on Jesus,
how he lived
and what he did
and all those juicy wisdom stories he told,
then there will be fewer crosses in the world
and fewer people paying the price.

I want to focus on the Jesus who lived,
and moved,
and had his being among us.
It is quite easy to die in our world,
but to live like Jesus lived?
That’s something worth trying.

1 Lent B 2018: Imagination

February 18, 2018 by Cam Miller

~~Today we are going to challenge a popular understanding of “imagination.”~~

Webster’s has three definitions:
“…the ability to imagine things that are not real.”

Or more specifically: “the ability
to form a picture in your mind
of something that you have not seen
or experienced.”

The second definition is, “something that only exists or happens in your mind.”
And the third, “the ability to think new things.”
“I imagined it,” in our world, is more often
than not construed as, “I made it up.”

In popular parlance, imagination
has to do with movies
and fairy tales and make believe –
“pretend” as we call it with children.

“Use your imagination,” we might say,
“and pretend you were there.”

But as a way to kick off Lent this year,
I want us to reverse the order of those definitions
and claim that the dominant definition of imagination, should be:

“the ability to think of new things.”

To think new things
is what humankind is all about.
More often than not, scientific and technological discovery begins with imagination.
If we think of all those great
Leonardo da Vinci drawings of helicopters
and tanks centuries before they could be built,
we can see how imagination outstrips technological abilities by light years.

The imagination usually travels ahead of us,
or takes us to places we cannot go
in the immediate moment.
Our imagination is a basic,
essential human faculty –
it is one of our primary senses
and it informs life
rather than a trick of the mind that deludes us.

Human imagination
not only shines a light on the way forward
and allows us to use our creativity
to discover ways and means
we never had before,
but human imagination also reveals
what we believe…what we believe in our bones.

Good theology is always a cocktail
made from two parts of imagination,
one part revelation,
and one part experience –
shaken not stirred.

This special power we have
that often gets dismissed as child-like fantasy,
is in fact essential in order for humans to thrive.

Mark’s story of Jesus in the wilderness
leaves a great deal to the imagination
and is NOT the basis for the season of Lent.
Jesus in the wilderness
is a one-sentence story in Mark’s gospel,
so Luke and Matthew re-imagined Mark’s story
and it was upon their accounts
that the season of Lent was formed.

But the point is,
we get to choose how to imagine Lent
and we get to choose
how to imagine our own narrative
and we get to choose
how any of this fits into God’s imagination.

You and I have been given,
by history and circumstance,
the task of re-imagining Christianity.
But we are in a long line of folks
who have had to re-imagine their religion –
allow me just two examples.

Twenty-five hundred years ago,
give or take a couple of generations,
there was a society of several thousand people
who were violently taken from their cities,
towns,
villages,
and farms,
and who were then enslaved
in another country hundreds of miles away.

I want us to think about that in personal terms, which means activating our imaginations.

So, imagine the residents of the Finger Lakes (NY)
were invaded by the fierce tribes
of the Five Boroughs
of that city-state with tall buildings.
Once captured, we were all to be forcibly taken
to a fate worse than death –
meaningless existence on Long Island.

But some of us put up resistance,
so right away a third of us were killed
That resistance infuriated the Manhattans
so they skinned the rebellious leaders alive,
and hung strips of skin from a flag pole
at the courthouse in Canandaigua.
Then, just to makes sure the rest of us
got the message and were pacified,
they cut off the heads of several hundred
of our leading citizens.

But that still wasn’t enough,
so they strung those severed heads
around the necks of wives and mothers
and made them march to Brooklyn that way.
You get the idea. Brutal. Very brutal.

(And by the way, this horrid scenario
is not so imaginative, because that is what
the Babylonians did).

Anyway, back to the Invasion of the Finger Lakes. Those of us who survived the ordeal, and end up
in meaningless existence on Long Island,
begin to ask ourselves, “Why us?”
“What did the Finger Lakes ever do
to deserve this?”

And then, then we began to remember
all the things we have ever been ashamed of.

We begin to catalogue all the mistakes
we ever made, and all the secrets we ever kept.
Then, we remembered
so hard and so vigorously,
that we started remembering things
that never happened –
that’s because we reached for anything
to make sense of our terrible tragedy.

The more we remembered our failures
and the more mistakes we recalled,
the worse we felt about ourselves,
which, given our predicament,
makes our exile and slavery all the worse.

In the midst of our despair
we start to tell stories that give us hope.
We imagine how we might get out of this fix.
We imagine how God might get us out of this fix.

We tell stories
about how it was back in the Finger Lakes,
even though, by this time,
none of us actually lived there.
But we remember the stories our moms and dads
and grandparents told us
about the beautiful Finger Lakes and vineyards.

One of our favorite stories,
as we slump in our Long Island exile and slavery,
is about how God had warned us ahead of time,
and tried to get us to stop our evil ways.
In that story, God kept looking for some way
to turn it all around,
but we kept ignoring the warnings
until God finally found someone who would listen.
His name was…Noah.
We know the rest of the story.

That is how such stories,
as powerful acts of imagination,
came to be meaningful spiritual narratives.
The story of Noah and the Ark
did not evolve until seven hundred years
after Moses.
Maybe even longer.
A lot of people assume the Book of Genesis
was chronologically the first story in the Bible –
since it is at the first book in the Bible.
But Genesis is not the oldest book of the Bible,
and the story of Noah
is a story from when Israel was exiled in Babylon.

By the time Noah and the Ark was told,
in the imaginative version it is told in Genesis,
Israel had already had a civil war
and been conquered
and would never be heard from again
as a sovereign nation until modern times.

So, you see, Noah and the Ark
was an act of imagination
on the part of people in exile
who were trying to figure out
what went wrong
and how they could ever get back on track.

Such an imaginative interpretation
of actual historical circumstances
was powerful for those marginalized people.

Here is the second, and a brief example,
of powerful imagination.

It is thirty years since Jesus died.
He is dead and gone.
For thirty years, the people who had known him,
and the people who had been attracted
to his teachings
but never knew him, have been predicting
he will show up again.
But he hasn’t.

Now new people are showing up
and they want to know what all the fuss is about.
Who was this Jesus?
Why are people in this secretive cult
risking their lives
to follow the teachings of a dead man?

If you were a Roman citizen telling other Romans about Jesus,
you don’t want to tell them
Jesus was like Hercules.
Your guy is different.
Everyone knows the Roman religions are dying,
and everyone knows that even the people
who still go to the temples
don’t really believe all those legends and myths.
So you don’t want to compare your guy
to all those old, pale
domesticated Greek and Roman heroes.
You want something more exotic –
more authentic.

So, you excite your audience
with stories from the ancient and mysterious religion of Israel.
You tell them about how Noah
endured forty days of rain
and battled the elements to survive,
and how he saved all humankind.

You tell them the story of Moses
and the escaped slaves
and how they survived forty years in the desert,
and how they battled every temptation
known to humankind on their way
to the Promised Land.

You tell them about the terrifying flight of Elijah who just barely escaped into the wilderness
after all the other prophets
were beheaded by the king.
You tell them he survived forty days
with the help of angels who fed him,
and then went on to save Israel.

Then you tell them about Jesus.
You tell those Romans about Jesus driven
into the wilderness by a whirlwind just like Elijah.
You tell them that while he was there,
John the Baptist was arrested
and beheaded
just like the prophets in Elijah’s day.
And you tell them about that Jesus too,
who survived in the wilderness for forty days
with the help of angels, just like Elijah had.
And you tell them how, like Elijah, Jesus
re-emerge from the wilderness
more vigorous than ever
and saved all of humankind
just like Noah had.

What you have done, through an act of imagination, is compared Jesus
to the greatest of the greats: Like Noah,
like Moses,
like Elijah…
there was no one greater to compare Jesus to
and it was a brilliant act of imagination
on your part,
to weave into Jesus
all those other spiritual heroes.

And that is how imagination works.

It is not pretending but rather, the ability
to think new things
and move forward into new places.
Israel, exiled and desperate for understanding,
had the courage to re-imagine their situation.
The story of Noah re-interpreted their religion, and by re-interpreting their past
they also re-imagined their future.

Likewise, the followers of Jesus
were faced with the same challenge.

All those who followed Jesus in the beginning were Jews,
but they soon found themselves
cut loose from Judaism,
even as they tried to export their old religion
into an alien Gentile culture.
So, they were faced with re-interpreting Jesus
for a new generation,
and re-imagining their future
because the assumptions of the first generation
turned out to be wrong (Jesus did not return).

Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John were brilliant,
each with their own flare and agenda
took to the task
of re-imagining Jesus.

But here we are, so many generations later,
and so few with the courage to re-imagine Jesus.
We are still working off theologians
and story-tellers from a 2000 years ago,
people who did their job with gusto and power.
But they did the work of imagination for their day
and their generation
and their circumstances.

So, our task is to re-enter the text
and roam around in it
with the wisdom of our own experiences,
and discern what is going on.
All we need to do is turn on our imaginations.

We know wilderness, you and I,
we’ve been there.
We know the depths of depression
or the pain of deep loneliness
or the grief of terrible sorrow
or the despair of hopelessness.

We know the fear of abandonment
or the burn of rejection
or the darkness of self-hate.

We know the prison of addiction
or the cave of self-centeredness
or the trap of blind ambition.

We know the cusp of poverty,
the hand of brutality,
the grip of illness.

We know wilderness, you and I,
and we know every beast of temptation
that hawks its promises of freedom
from the desert inside us
as well as the desert around us.

We know what it is to succumb to temptation
and we know what it is to rise above it.

Jesus did not do anything
we have not done
or could not do.
What Jesus does
is show us the way through.

Like all the people who came before us,
sometimes we forget the way
or deny that we know the way
or refuse to choose the way.
So, Jesus, in this ancient, sacred text
is like the lighthouse on the shoals
helping us get through the fog
which is usually a fog of our own making.

What I am talking about here
is not rocket science, it’s imagination.

We know the wilderness,
we know the temptations,
we know which way to go;
and if we forget
and if we deny
and if we obfuscate,
there is always Jesus in the ancient text
to show us which way to go.

Last Epiphany 2018: Biblical Narrative and the Pale Comparison of Reality

February 11, 2018 by Cam Miller

I must be getting older
because these stories don’t freak me out any more.
Or at least, not as much.

Fantastical stories like Elijah
being carried up to heaven, by-passing death
in a cloud of sparkled smoke and a hearty Hi-O Silver,
used to embarrass me.

For most of my thirty-eight years as a preacher,
I wanted to pull my hair out – or rub
my bald to a shine –
when I heard Christians talking about these stories
as if they were historical events.

At Trinity Buffalo, on the chancel wall,
there was a huge panel of stained glass
like this one up here.

It included an artistically significant John LaFarge window
with the image of the Transfiguration –
Jesus hang-gliding on a cloud with Moses and Elijah.
It cast a shadow on the back of my neck every week
as I preached from the pulpit.

It is worth noting for Christians,
that Jesus is also a central figure in the Quran and Islam.

In the Quran, Jesus, like Elijah in the Hebrew text,
was taken up to heaven without dying.
Because Jesus is a great prophet in Islam too,
and because it is inconceivable in Islam
that Allah would kill his own prophet.
So unlike the traditional Christian interpretation
of the Passion, the Quran
indicates that Allah saved Jesus from the cross.
Up he went, by-passing death,
and he will appear again at the appointed moment.
Muslims believe that when Jesus returns,
he will kill the anti-Christ and bring a reign
of peace and justice.
Then, at the end of his forty year reign, Jesus will finally die –
because all humans must die.
In fact, there is an empty burial site waiting for Jesus
right alongside the place where Mohammad
and the first two Sunni caliphs of Islam, are also buried.

Just one more nod to the fantastic
before moving along to the point of this sermon.
There is a great Tibetan Buddhist saint of the tenth century,
named Milarepa.
Besides being able to run faster than a horse,
levitating so that his feet never touched the ground,
his death at age eighty-four has a familiar description to it.
It is said that goddesses cremated his body
and carried away all remaining material substance of his life.

The only things left as they disappeared,
was one small piece of his robe, a lump of sugar,
and a little knife.

Looking at this kind of thing from a slightly different angle,
apparently the U.S. military disposed of Osama Bin Laden’s body
by dumping it somewhere in the ocean
so there would be no grave to memorialize.
That is a strategy used by empires across human history
to limit the potential of pesky martyrdom cults.
But truly significant prophets and martyrs
seem to have a buoyancy
that defies even the most efficient of empires.

One element of Roman crucifixion
we do not hear much about in the Christian narrative,
was that the Romans did not allow their victims’ bodies
to be buried. Instead,

they were cut down and disposed of slowly
by vultures, hyenas, wild dogs, and insects.
Anonymous bones at the base of a cross
simply added to the terror, and the prospect
of not being buried made the punishment
all the more horrifying.
We know for a fact, that there were thousands
of crucifixions in Judah during the first century.
Yet, of all those crucifixions, so far
only two archeological remains have ever been found.

Oppressive rulers, empires – even our own –
do all they can to ensure that the memory of enemies
either disappear into nothingness or live on only in infamy.

Even so, some live on in the myths and legends
that elevate their lives above the victor’s historians
and the natural dust of history.
There is official memory
and there is folk memory.

The only way that folk memory survives official memory,
is if it has something seeded in it
that resonates as truer than official truth.

The histories of the Roman Emperors remain,
even those of many Egyptian Pharaohs,
but I dare say, the stories of Elijah and Jesus
have been shared more broadly
and been far more influential on subsequent history
than any emperor or pharaoh.

It is hard to know
what corrosive effects secular, post-modern culture
will have on our ancient stories,
or even our more modern ones, like the legends
surrounding Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Martin Luther King, Jr.
I cannot imagine there will be new
and fantastic supernatural events
attributed to any modern historical figures.
The fantastic is an element that seems to have disappeared
from our common cultural capacity.
How folk memory will be carried forward from here
is a mystery.

So here we are, on the Sunday every year
we read the Transfiguration story,
and through it, also remember the supernatural Elijah story.
What are we to do with them?

First, I think we acknowledge openly,
that these stories were told to imbue
the prophets with credibility.
They are stories that said to those who heard them,
this is no ordinary person –
this is someone with God in his or her DNA.
How God got in there
would become topics of other stories,
and different for each prophet and martyr.

But clearly, if the story is to be believed,
it was evidence of immense and intense holiness.

We also have to acknowledge,
that for a majority of people living in our culture,
it is just the opposite: these stories are a source of disbelief.
You or I may not feel that way,
but I suspect even most of us here,
do not read these stories as proof of anything –
as if they are factual, verbatim, historical accounts.

But whether you do or don’t,
acknowledging that while the stories remain the same,
the historical and cultural context
in which such stories are now told,
makes a huge difference.
We could go the Fred Buechner route,
which I think is both true and charming.

But the distance between “barefoot in the sand”
or a “Saturday baseball game in July,”
and a golden chariot in the sky
or Moses and Elijah on a cloud with Jesus,
makes for a pale comparison.

But that is the central challenge for faith
in the 21^st century: the pale comparison
between Biblical narrative,
and the still small voice
or brushed by a butterfly evidence of God
we have in our own lives.

While some of us ordinary Christians have visions,
dreams, assurances, and moments of being held in peace,
they are private memories that fade
rather than the spectacular supernatural events
narrated in the Bible and depicted
with cheesy detail by Hollywood.
And so in times of crisis,
or even in dry spells when there is nothing
but the rote prayers and rituals we walk through,
the contrast between Biblical prose
and ordinary experience
can grate like fingernails on a chalkboard.

This Epiphany, the gospel readings
and these sermons,
have been focusing on our baptismal ministry –
the ordinary practice of Christian spirituality in our world.
Dealing with the distance
between our hopes and desires
and our actual routine experience,
is a crucial aspect of our spiritual practice.

To put our arms around it,
we need to think of our primary human relationship.

Managing expectations is a fundamental aspect
of healthy human relationships.
If our expectations are either too high or too low,
or in any way inappropriate to the person
or the relationship,
it leads to tension, conflict, and
if left unaddressed, alienation.

Clear, honest, and routine conversations with one another
about what we can and cannot expect,
is a healthy practice.
Here is a very homely example.

Katy commutes 45 minutes, one way, every day to her job.
She leaves early and gets back late.
I have two jobs, but both of them
allow for tremendous flexibility.

There was a time in our lives, when she
was a stay-at-home mom with
primary parenting responsibility,
and I had a job that routinely demanded
seventy or more hours a week.
If we did not re-negotiate our expectations of one another,
and who is responsible for what in our household now,
it would be disastrous.

Another example, all of us can relate to
from one side of the relationship or the other –

and some of us both sides –
is the parent and child relationship.
As our children age,
we as parents need to constantly re-negotiate
our roles with them, and theirs with us.
Children, adolescents, and young adults
go through rapid changes
that they may not even be aware of at the time.
So parents – having been there and done that –
ought to be highly aware of how the dance with our children
requires us to move back,
or to the side,
and even away, from time to time.
We lead the dance, in other words.

But then, we the parents, age
and our children move into slower, more stable
decades of development.
As we get older, we may lose some self-awareness
of our situation and capabilities,
while our children are able to see those changes
taking place on our bodies and in our minds.
So then, they need to be aware of leading the dance,
where and how to manage the relationship
so that we have independence and dignity
yet still an appropriate level of care and security.

It is a back and forth dance,
and if we never talk about our expectations for one another,
it can be very clumsy and even become hostile.
Talking out loud and thinking about our expectations,
what is fair and appropriate given the circumstances
of our lives, our relationships, and our capacities,
can make all the difference in the world
with how healthy and vibrant our relationships are.

Now God.

Obviously, I cannot navigate that relationship for you,
nor tell you what is appropriate given your experiences.
But I can tell you that for me, personally,
I try to manage my expectations for God very carefully
and intentionally.

Another homely example.

I have vivid memories of praying at night,
sitting on my children’s beds as they slept.
It was a routine of mine to check on each one,
and to sit down on the bed of whichever was the youngest,
and pray for each of them.
My prayer was always something about protection.
But here is the thing about those prayers.

I did not expect that God would actually protect my child
in some way that other children the world-over
were not also protected.
But I did know that I was powerless to protect them.

Sitting on their bed in the buttery light of a doorway ajar,

I knew that the next day they would leave the house
and I would no longer be able to protect them.
I knew that in the house even, that very night,
there were events and illnesses
well beyond my power to defend.
What else could I do, powerless as I was,
but to ask a power greater than myself, to protect them.

Such prayers did not take away my anxiety
because they did not take away knowledge and awareness
of my powerlessness.
But somehow, standing at the abyss with God,
was better than standing there without God.
I did not and do not expect supernatural interventions,
but I do fully expect God to be with me
in the midst of my powerlessness.
For me, being clear about that expectation
has strengthened my spirituality over time.

I do in fact, perceive and experience
wild and mysterious things happening
in a cosmos that we demand should be orderly and scientific.
But I do not expect the fantastic.

I look, I notice, I wonder,
and I embrace the sacred in our midst,
but I try never to expect it.
That is how I navigate the distance
between the fantastical Biblical narrative
and the ordinary routine of holiness in my life.

Managing our expectations for God,
so they are appropriate to our actual experience,
is a central element of a vibrant spiritual practice.

Next week, Lent,
and that is a whole different thing.

5 Epiphany B, 2018: Squeezed Between Mom & Mother-in-Law

February 4, 2018 by Cam Miller

Find the Gospel text from Mark at this link: https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu//texts.php?id=64

This sermon
is about the healing nature of tension.
Yes, you heard that correctly:
the healing nature of tension.

I begin with the small tension I had to navigate
between the ways of my mother-in-law
and those I was raised with, by my mom.

I was raised in a feminist household
even though my mother would never
have used that word,
and she exhibited the inner conflict
of a divided mind
when any of her three daughters
voiced overt feminism.

In our house,
unlike many of my friends and neighbors,
each child took a turn at every chore, the work
was mostly gender-neutral.
In spite of herself and her generation,
my mom was a natural feminist.
The boys cooked and washed dishes
along with the girls,
and the girls emptied garbage,
shoveled snow and cut grass
along with the boys.

When my parents got married,
sometime in the late 1930’s,
my mom instructed the Episcopal priest
to remove from the 1928 prayer book ceremony,
the words from the bride’s vow: “and obey.”
While she did not consider
editing the prayer book like that a feminist action,
she was a feminist by nature.
So, it is impossible for me
to read this story about Simon’s mother-in-law,
and not critique it
from the lens my mom helped give me.

I mean the poor woman is deathly ill
and up she jumps to start serving dinner!
Two thousand years of patriarchal preaching
has told us that Simon’s mother-in-law
was exhibiting pious devotion
in her desire to serve Jesus.
But in fact, she was being reactionary
to the circumstances of her day,
in which she was obligated
by rigid convention to serve her guests.

The better story, one might argue today,
would have had Jesus take Simon’s mother-in-law by the hand –
AND she would have also been given a name
instead of just, “mother-in-law” –
and bring her to sit next to him at the table.

To make this story personal
with a personal tension,
my mother-in-law, Mary,
for many years placed me in the tension
of Mark’s story.

You see, when Katy and I were courting,
and for years and years after we were married,
her mother would not let me near
the kitchen sink,
or stove,
or anywhere else
work needed to be done.

Given my upbringing,
Mary’s refusal to allow me to help
was very disconcerting.

What you also need to know about Mary,
as loving and sweet as she is,
you don’t mess with her.
My mother-in-law is every bit as strong
and determined
as my mom ever was,
only in a quieter and sometimes
scarier way.

It was not until we started having
our own children,
who then often occupied Mary’s arms,
that I could sneak to the sink
and start doing dishes
without being shooed away.

So, I relate to Simon’s mother-in-law
as someone who might actually have insisted
on the role of host and care-giver
the way my mother-in-law has always done.

Peter’s mother-in-law may have chosen it
even if she was free to do otherwise,
because some people really do like and believe
that radical hospitality is a core value.

In fact, I see radical hospitality
as the cornerstone of Jesus’ community.
I suspect Jesus of seeing
in Simon’s mother-in-law,
something of himself.
I suspect Jesus of harboring
radical hospitality as his anchor
because he chose,
when others around him did not,
to host an open table for feasting.

His choice to host an open table
was the source of accusations
that he was nothing more than a party boy.

They ridiculed him for ribald dinner parties
in which he ate with socially and morally
unacceptable people.
We know the litany:
prostitutes,
tax collectors,
lepers,
and a disheveled assortment
of reputationally-challenged,
debauched low-life’s.

I mention it
because valuing inclusion
is not new to the 21st century.
Practicing radical hospitality
is not counter-intuitive for Christians
even if it is not what we are known for.
It is right there at the very heart of our story,
in the very beginning
and everywhere we look
and listen to the gospel.
So, it is even stranger
that we became so obsessed with exclusion,
limits, and litmus tests on purity and beliefs.

We have this great and gregarious
standard of behavior
in which we are expected to host
a radically open table
with food,
and feasting,
and a joyful, spirited
communion of friends.

The spiritual community, when it is
vibrantly hospitable,
is a healing organism.
It works for the healing of those held within it
and sometimes even for those around it.
But healing is a fragile process,
and can be corrupted in any number of ways.

One of the primary ways spiritual community
becomes corrupted,
is when it succeeds in doing away
with the tensions within it.

There are plenty of sad and tragic of examples
of spiritual communities gone wrong
that may have begun with healing
but morphed into something else.
David Koresh and the Branch Davidians,
as well as Jim Jones and Johnstown,
are well-known examples
of spiritual communities that began
with healing in their wings
but crashed and burned.

They are examples, at least in part,
of a community that militantly jettisoned
the traditions in which they were rooted.
Then, without an anchor, they became
a lopsided horror crashing as a free-floating radical
to a dead fall.

Spiritual community,
as with individual spiritual practice,
requires rootedness in a tradition
bigger than itself.
It requires the wisdom of the ancients,
and traditions of elders,
and customs and rituals
handed down generation to generation.

But likewise, and here is the tension,
there are many examples
of historic spiritual communities that ossified
as they resisted with power and determination
the currents of change within them.
Even as rootedness is vital,
so is the energy of adaptation,
and the movement of new visions
struggling to be heard within the urge
for preservation.

When preservation becomes all-encompassing
and a rigid limitation on possibility,
there appears on the horizon
a period at the end of that tradition.

Take the Shakers, for example,
but also what has been happening to many
Mainline Protestant congregations
including Episcopal ones.
The spirituality of the community
hardens and dies
long before the congregation
finally closes its doors.
This happens
when preservation dominates
at the cost of all the other energies
that would enliven it.

Paradoxically, it is the tension
between these two competing urges
that feeds vibrancy and heals.

Both the historic community
and the current one,
are more than the sum of their parts.
Past and present
must hold in tension
the currents of change
and the energies of adaptation
and the movement of new visions.

At the same time, the drive
and will for preservation,
must be willing to hold the reigns of connection
between yesterday and tomorrow.

It is a furious tension than must not break.
It is a tension that must actually be nurtured.

If preservation decimates innovation
or innovation erases
the desire for preservation,
the healing nature of spiritual community
is gone with the wind.
It sounds counter-intuitive, I know,
but remove the tension
between preservation and innovation,
and the organism shrivels.

The healing community
is the one that stops seeking
to resolve the tension,
or to break the tension,
or end the tension
and instead,
learns to fly with the energy of that tension.

The healing community
is pulled forward by the currents of adaptation
and also anchored by the love of preservation.
That tension does its healing work on us
and sometimes,
if we’re really fortunate,
it migrates out to those around us.
It is almost miraculous.
This tension we really do not like
and would not invite, is
the source of healing in our wisdom.
The Gospel of Mark is a veritable cookbook
of the tensions that heal.

I mentioned Mark’s “Messianic Secret” last week,
and it is one of the most profound tensions
in his recipe for healing.

In Mark’s gospel, the good guys –
Jesus’ family and friends –
are precisely the ones
who do not understand him.
Meanwhile the bad guys –
the demons, the Romans,
and the religious authorities –
are actually well aware of who Jesus is
and how dangerous he is to their self-interests.

Throughout the Gospel of Mark,
bad guys tell the reader who Jesus is
and what his mission is,
while good guys reject the news
and try to hold Jesus back
from what he came to do.

The tension of this Messianic Secret
represents that tension within us.

If we are honest about it,
the angels of our darker nature
know well, and fear, Jesus;
while the angels of our better nature
often wrongly assume
they are best-buds with Jesus,
even though they do not really know him.

But there are other tensions in Mark
in addition to the Messianic Secret.

Jesus is the celebrity
who everyone wants to touch
and be touched by.
In tension with this desire
on the part of the masses,
is Jesus’ desire to run away to be alone.
We heard it in today’s story.

Jesus is the host of a community
that energizes him, yet it is his deep thirst
for solitude that grounds him.

He is a healer who cures
the blind, the lame, and the possessed
but what he really wants to do,
his mission,
is to preach and teach.
He is pulled by his passion (to preach)
and tugged by his com-passion (to heal)
Tension, tension, tension.

Such niggling tensions
are not only annoying but they are healing too.
Not only are they healing, but
they are absolutely necessary
if we are going to be a healing community.
Without such tensions, we shrivel
or worse, darken and explode.

Honest to God, I do not know why
tension is so integral to healing,
but I do know,
as sure as I know anything,
that such tensions are the source of healing.

And so, these and other tensions,
are sewn into the lining of our worship.
Allow me to offer a few examples.

Our worship is designed to hold the tension
between private and corporate,
personal and communal,
introverted and extroverted.
It is designed to be a tension
rather than remove tensions.
Lose the tension,
and we lose the quality and value
inherent in our worship tradition.

Think about it.
We enter this place
as a chaotic bunching of individuals
and individual households.
We come from north, south, east, and west,
literally, through those big wooden doors.
The funneling through those doors,
or the smaller one over there,
symbolically squeezes us into the same place.

For some, the thirst is for that “quiet, deserted place,” while for others, it is
an extroverted gathering of friends and colleagues they haven’t seen
for a whole week or more.

The Prelude is for gathering,
and allows both the personal and communal.
In many congregations there is a power struggle
between those who want absolute quiet
as people gather, while others,
often parents, want a more welcoming embrace.

Then comes the Opening Hymn
in which we sing together.
Singing is a communal enterprise –
whether we can barely be heard
or we are that person belting it out back there.
The organ and choir weave us together –
the virtuoso and the demure mumbler.

Then the opening prayer, collect, or call to worship, invites our attention
to a common theme.
We are being coaxed
and pulled and tended into
a communal herd.

But then we sit and listen.

We immediately drift back into our private selves
as we listen or allow our minds to wander
through the readings and sermon.
The “Centering Song” or a hymn
calls us back into the communal,
but we are always wandering away into the private
as soon as the music is over.

Then the prayers come along after the sermon.
It is an awkward meshing of
togetherness and separateness.

We are put in the position of placing
personal and private prayers
right alongside those of a bunch of other people
whose prayers we may not like,
or care about,
or think are the right prayers.
That group-praying thing
really teases up the tensions,
especially when people get bold enough
to name their prayers out loud.

But again, we get called back into the corporate
by being asked to say together
an Affirmation of Faith.
Now there is a tension if ever there was one.
“We believe…” is a huge presumption
in our highly individualistic and literalistic culture.
My god is not a “Father,”
and your god may not be a “son” or “Holy Ghost.”
We may even stumble over
the more contemporary Affirmations.
But there we are, yammering out loud
with a bunch of other people
what “We” say we believe
but that “I” may not believe.

Then, abruptly, as if from nowhere,
comes the onslaught of The Peace!
Holy cow,
suddenly we are pulled into an excessively extroverted moment, whether or not
we are introverts.

It is also a difficult test of our hospitality.

Do we take pains
to greet people we do not know,
or do we seek the comfort of those we do,
or simply not decide
and wait to see who comes over to us?

Then music again,
pulling us back from chaos
into a common voice.
It also covers over
the tension of those dang plates.
Everyone is free to come here
and yet really coming here,
really being invested and part of the community,
costs us.
It turns out, we are open
but not free.

Then we arrive at the tension
that cuts deeply into Communion.
It is the most awkward combination
of private and communal.
Is communion about me
or is it about us?
Is it my meal or it is our meal?
Is it about what I believe is happening
or what we believe is taking place?
Can I be fully a part of what is going on
even if I choose not to receive communion?
Do I have to eat that bread
if I have an allergy,
or do I have to drink that wine
if I do not drink alcohol,
or simply don’t want to put my lips
on a common cup?
It is never quite clear
and the answer can change from week to week…
even moment to moment.
Communion is a narrow balance beam
with one foot on “we” and the other foot on “me.”

Finally, in the end,
we go out as We into the world,
as We to change the world,
but when we leave
it feels like me who is leaving,
because you are not with me
and either is We.
So, if you feel any of those tensions…Good!
We are supposed to.
It is not supposed to be a private experience only.
It is not supposed to be a communal event only.
It is both/and
and it is the very tension
that nurtures us.

The veil we hope is lifted from time to time,
is lifted amidst the tension.
The face of God we seek in private prayer,
will come to us in the face of another.
The communion we seek in intense fellowship,
will take place when we least expect it
in the extraordinary aloneness of our own heart.

The tension heals us,
and the tension ensures the spiritual community
will be a healing one.

4 Epiphany B, 2018: Holding Hands With Our Demons

January 28, 2018 by Cam Miller

TEXTS for Preaching

Gospel of Mark 1:21-28

The Decision
by Jane Hershfield

There is a moment before a shape
hardens, a color sets.
Before the fixative or heat of kiln.
The letter might still be taken
from the mailbox.
The hand held back by the elbow,
the word kept between the larynx pulse
and the amplifying drum-skin of the room’s air.
The thorax of an ant is not as narrow.
The green coat on old copper weighs more.
Yet something slips through it —
looks around,
sets out in the new direction, for other lands.
Not into exile, not into hope. Simply changed.
As a sandy track-rut changes when called a Silk Road:
It cannot be after turned back from.

SERMON

Do you know when
that moment thin as a patina
came and went?

Not an exile, not a hope,
simply the change
between then and now?

Do you know when it was for you?
Do you know when it was for us?

Not that it really has anything to do with you or me,
but I think we know that moment for Jesus –
that instant in time as narrow as the thorax of an ant,
when the shape hardened
and the color was set.

History is helpful like that,
as long as it is kept
and we can look back over it.

Actually for Jesus,
we have to notice two distinct moments
when past and future went through the deli-slicer
and were separated forever from the loaf.
The first moment was when it all changed for him;
and the second, was when everyone else recognized,
because of him, life would now be different.

In the Gospel of Mark,
just before the reading we had today,
there is a little throwaway line few people notice.
It is the next paragraph after Mark describes
Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness.
It says simply, “After John was arrested,
Jesus went to Galilee…”

The moment before and after
was severed by the arrest of John.
For Jesus it is was Herod arresting John the Baptist
that made all the difference.
That was it.
He had heard enough.
He left the house and walked into his future.

But no one else noticed until…
until that moment we read about today,
when he encountered the legion of demons.
“What have you to do with us?”
Not one demon but a cohort, a gang,
a festering minion.
“Have you come to destroy us?”

Did you know, that according to
the Mental Health Foundation (in the UK),
as many as “28% of the general population
hears voices that others do not.”
And that three-quarters of those
who hear such voices,
do NOT have any kind of psychotic
or schizophrenic disorder?
(https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/a-to-z/h/hearing-voices)

In other words, just because you hear voices
doesn’t mean you are crazy!

And guess what, every single one of us has demons.

Even if the Mental Health Foundation
hasn’t realized it yet,
all of us suffer from angels of our lesser natures
that work like hell to get us doing things
the angels of our better natures
would never want us to do.
Most of us probably do not spiritualize those demons
as if they have a life of their own,
but sometimes they can be so pernicious
that is sure feels like it.

But whatever was going on in that story from Mark,
Jesus’ talk-therapy
resolved the schizophrenic episode
faster than an intravenous dose
of the antipsychotic Asenapine.
It was that moment,
a single break between seconds
that split the before and after, for Jesus.
The next story in Mark
is about how the whole city lined up at his door
begging to be fixed or healed or otherwise improved.

For Jesus, personally,
it was John being arrested that changed everything.
For those inhabiting the world with him,
and the rest of us since,
it was that single moment
with the crazy guy in the synagogue
that changed everything.

Do you know when it was for you?
Do you know when it was for us?

This is the Sunday of our Annual Parish Meeting
and so it may be a good time to look back
and notice when that moment was for Trinity.
When was that moment,
thin as a patina,
before the shape was hardened
and the color of the present set?

I can’t answer that because I wasn’t here then.

I can tell you about another such moment
that congealed in my throat
and whirled in my stomach.
It was the day they put up the words, “Trinity Place”
on the windows of 78 Castle Street.
“Uh oh,” was my feeling, “the die is cast.”

It may feel like we are betwixt and between
because we are worshipping here
and beginning to meet down there.
But we are no longer in between –
we are there, at Trinity Place.

Even though we worship here
on Sunday mornings, now,
the building is no longer really ours.
It belongs to the future
and it belongs to what it will become,
not by our hands but under the control of others.
Even though we will eventually
be able to worship here again,
in the future sometime,
when the peeling plaster is repaired
and the leaks and heat are overhauled,
we will be visitors.
It will have changed.
It has changed already.

Do you know when it changed for you?
Do you know when it changed for us?

In Biblical history,
there was a marked difference
between the generations that sojourned
and infiltrated the Promise Land,
and all that came after
once there was a throne and a temple.

In Christianity, the first
three to four hundred years,
were markedly different
from the centuries when the faith
became one with the empire.

That is how it has always been.
We flow toward constancy
and the permanence of stone and monolith,
then ebb out again into sojourn
and the mobility of tents.
In and out it goes, wave after wave
of history, sometimes tossing us
and sometimes lulling us.
We are in the flow now;
a time of creativity, mobility, impermanence,
and really, who knows what?
Like Simon and Andrew
and the Zebedee brothers,
we had only just caught up with Jesus
when all hell broke loose.
Now we will see what happens.
The ending has not been written –
so far as we know.
But we can be brave,
and faithful, and listen for the voices
not everyone hears.

I think one of the voices we hear
from this, and other stories, in the Gospel of Mark,

is that our demons,
the very voices we fear the most,
have something to tell us that we need to hear.

If we think of the demons
as that part of ourselves we are afraid of,
what might we discover if we ask, “what”
are our demons afraid of?

It is a bit like a double negative:
If we identify what our demons fear
will it lead us to something good?
I tested it out.

One of my demons is the voice
of the “Critical Parent.”

The Critical Parent is fault-finding
and never satisfied.
It is a voice that rains on our parade
when positive feedback or affirmation arrives:
“Yeah, but he or she didn’t see what you
missed, or what you could have accomplished,
if you had done it right in the first place.”

I suspect this Critical Parent
may be one of the voices you hear
that no one else does at the same time.
It may be a quiet little voice in your brain,
or, as in mine, it may sometimes grow
to Halleluiah Chorus proportions.

So I asked this Critical Parent of mine,
the one inside, “What are you afraid of?”

This hyper-critical voice
that I am calling the Critical Parent,
generally operates from a rigid world-view.
There is usually a recognizable prescription
being issued for how to do something.
What prescriptive thinking fears most,
is its own undoing.

Think about this now.

To accept that we are loved and affirmed
with all our imperfections
and foibles
and failures,
is to unravel the brittle mold
of right and wrong,
good and bad,
perfect and incomplete,
demon and angel.

What the Critical Parent fears
is the loss of control and security
glued in place by its own prescriptions,
or those prescriptions it inherited
from generations of critical parents.

To listen to what the Critical Parent fears
gives us a hint of where we might need to walk.

If our demon fear the light,
then perhaps that is where we need to go.
If our demon demands we stand in the light
because it fears the darkness,
perhaps we should enter the shadow.

In the Gospel of Mark,
it is the demons and bad guys
that guide us to discover who Jesus is
and what Jesus came for.
It is an ingenious literary device Mark employs.
But low and behold,
in an odd and sneaky way,
that may be true for us as well:
Our own demons,
by knowing what they fear,
can lead us to know ourselves better
and what we are really here for.

So that is just an example
of listening to our demons,
and seeking to know what they fear
instead of fearing them so completely.
It is the kind of paradox
that gospel wisdom often rides on.

So I asked myself,
standing there on the outside looking in
at Trinity Place, what are you afraid of?

“Failure,” came the answer loud and clear.
“So what,” I replied, “you’ve failed before, and
no doubt, you will fail again?”
“Then we will just have to learn from our failure,”
came a chorus of voices in return.
They were too loud and too many
to decipher angels from demons,
but I suspect it was both.

Truly, I do not know what the future is for us,
but I do know, that the moment
the shape was hardened
and the color set,
has come and gone.
We’re moving on.

Lenten Meditation: Christianity Without A Cross

1 Lent B 2018: Imagination

Last Epiphany 2018: Biblical Narrative and the Pale Comparison of Reality

5 Epiphany B, 2018: Squeezed Between Mom & Mother-in-Law

4 Epiphany B, 2018: Holding Hands With Our Demons

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