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7 Pentecost: Hospitality & Prayer

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However many people there are
listening to this sermon
is how many opinions there are
about prayer —
and what it is or is not.

I do not know.
I know nothing about prayer.
I pray
but I don’t know
anything more than that.
I have never heard anyone
talk about prayer
that I thought knew anything
more than I do about it either.
I have heard a lot of people
who seem to be experts on prayer,
but they never convinced me.
Maybe I’m just a hard case.
It might be useful for us to listen
to what a First Century Palestinian rabbi,
named Jesus,
had to say about prayer.
But first…
that parable about the late night knock at the door
is too delicious not to headline
today’s sermon.

Now 1st Century rural Galilee
and 21st Century America
are as far apart
as ancient subsistence farming
and American consumerism.

So there are a few things we need to know
about the world Jesus told his story in
or the wisdom of the parable
won’t ring loudly.

First, hospitality
was the centerpiece
of 1st century Judea and Galilee,
the same way that consumerism
is central to our culture.
Hospitality was even
an engine of their economic life
just as consumerism has been for ours.

To undermine the strict
and intricate
rules of hospitality
would have been to unravel
the whole social fabric
with severe economic consequences.

Secondly, anyone
who traveled overnight to anyplace
was utterly dependent upon family,
friends or friends of friends,
for a place to stay –
an Inn was either a Brothel
or an otherwise impossible place
for observant Jews
to spend the night.

Third, (and I don’t know how many
numbers there are)
if you did not welcome a guest
into your home
you would face an intolerable shame
– a shame that could literally
be carried against you
for the rest of your life.
And in that culture,
to drag an injured reputation
was to be sorely disabled.

But at the same time,
while the door to your home
was always open
during the day,
it was always closed
and locked
at night.

To disturb the rigidly held
privacy of the home at night
was to risk a different kind of disabling shame.

So with that information,
we can see that this parable Jesus told
was really about how a neighbor
risked shame for the sake of hospitality.

That should be the subtitle of this parable:
Risking shame for the sake of hospitality.

Here is the scenario
behind the parable,
just to make it clear
because the parable itself
is a little complex and confusing.

The first neighbor
had unexpected guests,
apparently at night.

The first neighbor
was unprepared for guests
and had nothing in the house to feed them.

Left un-remedied
he would have been shamed.
So what could he do?
Dare he add more shame upon himself
by disturbing his neighbor at night
in the hope he could barrow some bread?
The second neighbor
was then faced with a different dilemma.
Should he answer the knock
on the door at night
or not?
And if so,
should he then save the neighbor
from his shame
by giving him some bread?
Or
should he add to his neighbor’s shame
by giving nothing
in addition to being offended
for having his nighttime privacy disturbed?

Our sense of hospitality and privacy
are wholly different,
and so much less formal
and static.

So it interesting to note
how this intricate protocol for hospitality
required an intense sense
of inter-dependence;
something that was born
of both economic need
and religious values.

(Assistance from Texts For Preaching, Cousar, Gaventa, McCann, and Newsome)

Jesus seems to be saying:
Well, if perfectly ordinary human beings
like the neighbor
who offered bread late at night
could be so generous,
how much more generous
will God be with your needs?

Or another way to frame it is this:
While we often operate out of guilt,
social obligation,
and self-interest,
God operates out of absolute
compassion and love.

So I think the punch line of the parable is this:
There is no risk in asking God for anything.
Forgiveness,
bread,
joy,
healing,
a new bicycle for Christmas…anything!
Feel free to ask for anything
no matter how selfish or silly.
And then to prove the point,
Jesus offers us his
blueprint for prayer
that has this encouragement
to ask for anything sewn into the lining.

Jesus begins, “ABBA.”
But as we know,
we can change it to anything we want:
Mother,
Eternal Spirit, Earth-Maker,
Beloved,
Creator…even Our Father.
Jesus won’t mind
if we change his original, “Abba”
to “Our Father”
or something else
he didn’t say.
It’s a blueprint
not a prescription.

My theory about “Abba”
and the uniqueness of it,
is that Jesus
was trying to say
that God need not be approached
the way Dorothy and the Scarecrow
groveled before the Wizard of Oz.
Or more particularly,
the way peasants
were forced to grovel
before Pontus Pilate or Herod.

But unfortunately,
God as Oz
is how many of us were taught,
especially in the liturgical churches.

We were given only one language for prayer,
the formal language of corporate worship.

Jesus was offering
something more intimate
even though we have been saying it now
for so many millennia
that it seems formal.

But to go back
to my former point,

Jesus’ blueprint for prayer
is mostly a “gimme” prayer.
In fact, five times
Jesus asks God
to do something for him –
“gimmie” an actual, basic need.

Here is what Jesus’ prayer asks for:

  1. Daddy, keep me in awe
    and inspired by your magnificence.
  2. Mommy, I need you
    to get more active in this crazy world
    and bump these power-mongers out of the way.
  3. Eternal Spirit, Earth-Maker, I need you
    to help me get my basic needs met
    – and maybe you could throw in
    something beyond subsistence too.
  4. Beloved, I need you to forgive me
    for my failures and my evil,
    and I need help forgiving
    the people whose failures and evil
    have hurt me.
  5. And please, non-gender specific God,
    or non-binary gendered God,
    whatever you do,
    do not keep testing my character –
    I’ve only got so much character!

Amen.

But let’s not be literal.
Jesus’ blueprint
does not require that we ask
for these five gimmies all the time.
We have different gimmies.

One of mine right now
is to ask God to stop Putin.
Do I think God will,
the way the Bible says Israel was saved
by Cyrus, King of Persia?
Not really, but I ask and ask and ask.
Gimmie.

We do not copy how Jesus dressed
or how he wore his hair
or limit ourselves to what he ate,
so let’s not be so simplistic about prayer.

We don’t have to use
the same words
and the same gimmies
over and over and over again.

It is a model, not a prescription.
The model is this:
God is Mommy or Daddy
– intimate,
immediate,
safe,
present,
trustworthy.

Ask for real needs
– basic,
sensual,
earthy,
real needs.

Expect a kind
and generous response
– healing,
hopeful,
appropriate,
and genuine.

Prayer is an art not a science.
It is a relationship not physics.
It is meant to fit us
like a comfortable old shoe
not a specified suit or dress
we have to fit into.

And the thing about prayer
that is actually a little disconcerting
is that it depends upon
a listening
and responsive God…
even more than on our willingness to pray.

So here is my take-away.

Pick a name for God that fits.
Is yours formal and public
or up-close and personal?

Ask God for the gimmies-of-your-heart
not the same old things
that you think you should be asking for.

And finally, if we only pray at dinner or in bed,
then our prayers will always be competing
with our hunger for food,
sex, or sleep.
Prayer doesn’t win very often with that competition.

Really, this is not rocket science
or the Three-fold Blissful Enlightenment
of a Kung fu Master.
It is just prayer.

5 Pentecost 2022: Dig Deeper

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This is a real sermon this week.
By that, I mean
standing back
and letting the texts
speak for themselves
without a lot of interpretation
or 21st century chiropractic adjustment.
Of course, it isn’t every week
I have Martin Luther King, Jr. helping me out.

Just as the culture has secularized Christmas
and Easter,
we have secularized
The REV. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
He’s known as DR. King these days,
when not MLK.
People forget he was
a preacher by profession first,
and then of course, a prophet
by his actions
and his sacrifices.
The secular world —

which is largely an economic arena
in which people and things
are monetized
to measure their value —
doesn’t really have a way of measuring
the value of preachers and prophets
so they just don’t mention them.

But because they teach this speech in schools,
almost everyone in the USA
knows the “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech —
even though it was as much sermon.

It was delivered
on the eve of the Memphis
sanitation worker’s strike,
a civil action that King was warned
not to attend or participate in,
but that he felt compelled to do.

So even though he didn’t know it,
the sermon he preached that night
and what he said,
turned out to really about him.
He stopped
to help the man on the road
and was killed for it —
which of course, he noted,
the priest and Levite
were precisely afraid of.

But King’s last speech
was indeed a sermon
and I will prove it
by reading some of it to you.
It is better than anything
I could tell you about the Good Samaritan story.
In a couple of paragraphs
King nails it.

So, this is an excerpt
from The REV. Martin Luther King’s sermon
on April 3, 1968
at Mason Temple, which
was the Church of God in Christ
headquarters in Memphis.

King says this:
“Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.

One day a man came to Jesus, and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters of life. At points he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew and throw him off base….

Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho.

And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn’t stop to help him.

And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the “I” into the “thou,” and to be concerned about his brother.

Now you know, we use our imagination a great deal to try to determine why the priest and the Levite didn’t stop. At times we say they were busy going to a church meeting, an ecclesiastical gathering, and they had to get on down to Jerusalem so they wouldn’t be late for their meeting.

At other times we would speculate that there was a religious law that “One who was engaged in religious ceremonials was not to touch a human body twenty-four hours before the ceremony.”

And every now and then we begin to wonder whether maybe they were not going down to Jerusalem — or down to Jericho, rather to organize a “Jericho Road Improvement Association.” That’s a possibility. Maybe they felt that it was better to deal with the problem from the causal root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effect.

But I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It’s possible that those men were afraid.

You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, “I can see why Jesus used this as the setting for his parable.” It’s a winding, meandering road. It’s really conducive for ambushing.

You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles — or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you’re about 2200 feet below sea level. That’s a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the “Bloody Pass.”

And you know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over at that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure.

And so the first question that the priest asked — the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”

I don’t know if you
feel like I do
when I read that sermon,

but it calls me into a kinship
with Rev. King
that is intimate —
as intimate as we are
sitting around this worship space.
Maybe it is because I am a preacher too,
but to me, it is like seeing the ordinary
in the midst of the extraordinary
and realizing the sacred
has been there all along.
Because, you see,
it is just an ordinary old sermon
about a story we have heard a thousand times,
and he reminds us of what it is about
in ways both unique to him —
to his stature —
and also as familiar and cozy
as old shoe to us church-goers.
It is familiar old church-talk
and a familiar old story
wrapped in an extraordinary moment
that the whole world
would come to know
and remember.

He was one of us,
just an old preacher
doing what Christians do
when they tell a story that is primal to the memory
of what we are all about.
So this story

it is now a touchstone
to a man who did what Jesus did —
died for us
or because of us.
Died because he asked
the right question
instead of, “What will happen to me?”

The irony of course,
is that the Good Samaritan story
was all about race —
even though race didn’t exist in Jesus’ day.
Race is, of course,
a made up construct
to monetize people and enslave them.

But in Jesus’ day
there was indeed, historic hatred
between Judeans and Galileans
and people from Samaria.

It was a hatred that went back centuries
to the civil war that divided Israel
when Israel had actually existed as a nation.
So it works
as a story about racism
even though race didn’t exist yet,
because it is about crossing the stupid boundaries
human beings erect
for selfish and evil purposes.
Then there is Amos.

Amos might be my favorite prophet
but we don’t get to hear from him much
in the Revised Common Lectionary.
He is perhaps the first
of the great prophets
and gets buried under the amazing
poetry of Micah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah.
But Amos adds a perfect bookend
to the Good Samaritan story,
framed by Martin Luther King, Jr. on the other side.
The thing about Amos
is that he wasn’t a prophet.
He was a migrant worker —
the guy who picked fruit in the orchard
or vineyard.

He was out doing his work one day
and God, out of no where,
told him to go to the northern kingdom
of Israel, and prophesy
against the king up there.
Amos,
a lowly peasant laborer
was to go into another territory
and preach
to the king of another tribe,
a sermon
that that king
would not like.

Come to think of it,
that is not unlike
what Martin Luther King, Jr. did.
He was preaching to white clergy
and white church folks
about something
we did not like to hear.

Anyway, this bit we read from Amos today
is him telling King Jeroboam
that his whole kingdom would be smashed
and he, the king, would die.

The king and his kingdom
was a wall
that the the plumbline of righteousness
showed to be falling down.

Think about it.
It is kind of like God showing up
in front of that guy who is our neighbor
who sits out on the front step smoking cigarettes.
It is as if God would tell him
to go to the Supreme Court
and say God has issued a judgement
upon those nine robed vectors.
First of all,
he couldn’t get near those nine justices.
And the only way Amos
got near King Jeroboam was through trickery.

That is another part of the story I really like
but we’ll have to save it
for another day.

Anyway, the Revised Common Lectionary
played a trick on us this week.
By pairing Amos
with the Good Samaritan
it makes it impossible
to romanticize the Good Sam story
as if it is just another example
of Jesus being a nice guy.

Amos being sent
to be a truth-teller
of hard truths
even into the court of a king
stands this Samaritan story up
to be the tough
hard truth that it is.

The people Jesus was telling the story to
hated Samaritans
the way some white folks
hate anyone who isn’t white.
Or like any one of us
who hate anyone
who we don’t think
should be allowed to be
in the United States.
Or hate anyone — anyone —
and then act it out
socially, politically, or economically.

It is a story
told against hate,
and told against righteous indignation
and told against,
anyone with a sense of moral superiority.

Our wall isn’t straight
and we are falling down
if we are built on hatred,
or built on keeping people out,
or built on keeping people down,
or built on holding people back,
or built on seeing any other human being
as somehow less than
or signficantly different than
we are.

When the question we ask
is what will happen to him or her
if I do not act,
then any presumed
and ridiculous boundary or border
between us
is stripped away.

What will happen
to him
or her
or them
if I do not act?
Just that one question
narrows the boundaries
we have drawn or been given
and gets us close
to being the neighbor
Jesus invites us to be.

“We shall love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul,
and with all our strength, and with all our mind;
and our neighbor as ourselves.”

So if we are here
saying to ourselves,
”Well I don’t hate anyone,”
dig a little deeper.

If we are here
saying to ourselves,
”Well I don’t keep any boundaries
between myself and
any other socio-economic,
racial, or ethnic group,”
dig a little deeper.

If we are here
saying to ourselves,
”Well I wouldn’t be afraid
to go help a downed Samaritan,”
dig a little deeper.

That is part of what we are meant to do
as a spiritual community
gathered in the name of Jesus:
dig a little deeper
in thought, word, and deed.

Any group that has the chutzpah
to gather
and invite
Amos, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jesus
to preach to them,
has the Chutzpah
to dig deeper
and to measure itself
with a plumbline
of righteousness.

4 Pentecost: “The end is different than the beginning…”

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I have to warn you,
this is one of those strange, abstract
highly metaphoric sermons.

You will either get it
or you won’t.
It has a punch line —
a “so what?” as someone likes to say.
But it is a punch line
not a prescription,
so do not expect
a “How To” instruction sheet at the end.
You’ll have to figure it out for yourself.

“Every butterfly knows that the end

is different from the beginning

and that it is always a part

of a longer story…”

You see, this is a sermon in three parts
striated by that Stuart Kestenbaum poem
that, if you forget the title,
seems to be about how to live.

And then you remember the title, “Joy”
and say, “oh yeah. Joy.”
(But also, it is how to live.)

We are perhaps
someplace between
butterflies and geese
when it comes to graceful flight
or graceful living,
since in our case
we are mud creatures
who have only learned to fly inside machines.

Otherwise we are rooted to the earth,
unable to even live underwater
without a thick hull
surrounding us
and pumping in air.

So I take it as a poetic metaphor,
these joyful
grace-filled
winged subjects
who just know how to live
the way they were designed to live.
But we, without wings
have not yet figured out
who or what we were designed to do —
and so we try to do everything.

But now that gospel reading —
the one from Luke
where Jesus gives his team
a pep-talk before the game.
John Dominic Crossan,
theologian and cultural anthropologist,
postulates
that the reason Jesus turned into a movement
after he was crucified,
and John the Baptist became a mere memory
once he was beheaded,
is hidden in this very story.

John the Baptist was more popular than Jesus
when they were both alive,
and well into the decades after.

But the followers of Jesus
turned him into a movement
that spread across the world
while John’s disciples did not.

Crossan thinks it is because
Jesus, a charismatic figure himself,
focused on equipping his followers
to do what he did,
while John
became the object of veneration
by his followers.
One group was told to
”go out and do”
while the other group
went about proclaiming
the personality of their dead leader.

Every butterfly knows that the end

is different from the beginning

and that it is always a part

of a longer story…

…in which we are always

transformed. When it’s time to fly,

you know how, just the way you knew

how to breathe…

One of the mistakes
I think Christian preachers and teachers make
is parroting Jesus’ supposed words
from stories like the one we had today.
Take for example,
that whole bit about “eat what they set before you”
and “shake the dust”
and “carry no purse,” etc.
That is not the pep-talk
Jesus would need to give you and me today.
I don’t pretend to know
what that pep-talk would be
but I’m pretty sure it would be vastly different
from a first century, agrarian peasant speech.

Even so, modern Christians
still seem to hang onto the peculiar
first century peasant’s context
and hang on every ancient word,
which is about like our trying
to use butterfly wings to soar.
Instead, I think we need
to focus on what Jesus did:
he sent his students and followers out
two by two — in other words,|
no heroes
no solo practices
no superstars
just partners —
to do the work they could do
where they could do it.

To do the work they could do
where they could do it.

They were not going out to be Jesus
they were going out
to be themselves
among others
and practice what they had learned to do.

They went out
to be themselves
among others
to practice what they had learned to do.

In other words,
over time
they were

“…transformed. When it was time to fly,

they knew how, just the way they knew

how to breathe…”

I’m sure some of them
flew like a butterfly
and stung like a bee. (Muhammad Ali)

Some soared high…”Whoever they were
calling like wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing their place
in the family of things.” (paraphrase of Mary Oliver)

There were eighty-two of them —
forty-one partners —
and without a doubt
there was a mixture of grace and awkwardness,
successes and miserable failures,
starts and stops
and everything in between.
There is no reason to imagine
there was anything but the human condition
at work in those pairs:
the good, the bad, and the ugly,
going out and being themselves
among others
and doing what they were able to do.

So let’s not romanticize this story.
Let’s not pretend there wasn’t a lot of
trial and error,
joy and sorrow,
cooperation and conflict,
rejection and embrace.
And this is part three, where the story now turns
toward us.

…the way the geese know when to depart,

the way their wings know how to

speak to the wind, a partnership of feather

and glide, lifting into the blue dream.

What is a church?
It certainly isn’t a building.
It is not an institution
with a constitution and canons.
A church is not a bungalow
built by doctrines and laws
for an ordained few to live in.
A church is not an organ
and choir
performing for their own enjoyment
and whoever else happens to be there.

What is a church?
It is a spiritual community
sent with partners
to be themselves
and do what they can do
in the places
and among the people
they find themselves.

Let me repeat that:
It is a spiritual community
sent with partners
to be themselves
and do what they can do
in the places
and among the people
they find themselves.

If you are hearing or reading this sermon online
and you are by yourself
and do not have a spiritual community,
then get a partner.
Two by two is fine.
Just remember, you can’t do it alone.
Get a partner,
however you can,
and go be yourself
and do what you can do
among the people
you find yourselves among.

It is not rocket science.
It need not be complicated.
It doesn’t even have to cost money.
It doesn’t have to be a big program.
It doesn’t have to be recognized.

It needs to be with a partner
or partnerS,
doing what you can do
where you are
with people who you and your partners
are among.

That is a church.

A church does not require worship.
Please hear that,
because in my not-so-humble opinion,
our Episcopal Church
has screwed that up so much.
Worship is not the core of the community.
It may be what the community does
to nurture itself
so it can go

do what it can do.
Worship may be the thing we really like
to do together, but it is not the core practice.
It is the grease,
the glue,
the lotion
that helps us stay supple
but not the thing itself.

And as for the thing we go to do
we should not assume
it is feeding people
or building houses for people
or lobbying school boards, legislators, or Congress
with our impassioned voices.
It could be those things
but it might be quieter
and more subtle
and unnoticed.
It might be reading to somebody
or visiting
or eating with someone
who usually eats alone.

It can be anything
so long as it allows us
to be ourselves
among others
and we do not do it alone.

What is a church?
It is just two or three gathered together,
perhaps with a bunch of other partners
networked and woven together in community,
figuring out
what it means to be themselves
among others
wherever they are
and with whomever
they have been given
to be with.

“…Every butterfly knows that the end
is different from the beginning

and that it is always a part

of a longer story, which is always

transformed…”

Well, we are certainly
part of a longer story
and we have been transformed
many times —
whether we are talking about
the historic church
or our own little community.
And it is safe to say
we are being transformed now,
probably already shaped
and changed
more than we know.

We should be like the butterfly
and know that his thing we do,
this thing we are a part of
that we call, “Church”
has a different ending
than beginning,
and that we are part of a longer story
which is always about transformation.

We read the ancient stories
and sayings,
and we know about the historic
chapters we’ve been told about along the way,
and we know about
what the people just before us did
and how they did it.
What we don’t know,
what we haven’t heard yet,
is about our transformation and how
our story ends.
But “when it is time to fly…we will know how…”

3 Pentecost 2022: Little prophets

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Don’t you just love euphemisms?
Check out that first line of Luke’s Gospel:
”When the days drew near
for him to be received up…”

By “received up” he must have meant
tortured,
stripped naked,
and nailed to a cross.
”Received up” does sound better.

So this little series of dark sayings
is positioned at the hinge of Luke’s gospel
in which Jesus turns away from the rural areas
where he is well known and popular,
toward Jerusalem
where messiahs like him
were a dime a dozen
and ended up as goo on the bottom of a Roman sandal.

Both Matthew and Luke have the sayings
we heard today,
while Mark and John do not.
The theory is
that Matthew and Luke
had a common source of Jesus sayings and stories
that Mark, being the earliest gospel, didn’t have.
Who knows,
but these sayings sure are hard to contend with.

9:59 To another (Jesus) said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”

9:60 But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

9:61 Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.”

9:62 Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

So this strikes me as warrior talk.
That is, the Jesus
who knew there was a target
on his back
and was dodging Roman patrols.
Jesus the warrior
who found himself up against it
and needed to know
that whoever was with him
had his back.
”Forget about those
who have already been killed
and forget about your mom and dad,
because you probably won’t see them again anyway.”

That said, I am not certain
there ever was a Jesus warrior,
but the kind of rhetoric
Luke has coming out of Jesus’ mouth
is not an every day kind of banter.

Let me just say, that I realize I talk about Jesus a lot
from week to week.
I don’t know Jesus any more than you do.
I know you know that
but I just need to say it once in awhile.

I probably read more about Jesus
and Gospel commentary than most of you do,
but talking about what Jesus said
and thought
and did
is an educated guessing game,
and anyone who pretends otherwise
is a delusional lout.
Not to put too fine a point on it.

That said, I’m going to talk about Jesus.

Okay, here is my take on today’s gospel.
The Jewish primal narrative
almost from day one,
was torn apart by dueling traditions:
the purists
and the prophets.
Jesus was a prophet.

Purists — represented by the priestly class —
saw the world
as a set of god-given rules.
Keep those rules and all is well.
Break the rules and all is lost.
When the rules were broken
then there were more rules
for repairing the fracture.
Every offense had a prescription
and every prescription
had a secondary solution.
It was a tightly constructed world,
built like interlocking Lego’s with a hierarchy of rules.

The prophetic tradition
saw the world differently.
The prophetic vision was of a human landscape
that operates within a standard of equality,
where goods and services should be
distributed evenly,
and the good guys lead
while the bad guys get punished
and then reformed.

The prophetic
can be infected with a purity virus also,
but often the very rigidity of the purity faction
acts as its own corrective.

Jesus the prophet, was a peasant.
He was impoverished by circumstance not by choice.
That makes a huge difference.

We are told by the Gospel of Mark that
Jesus lived in Capernaum.
He had a house there,
and he likely had some kind of business
in his house,
at least before he became a preacher.
Jesus also had some friends with more means
than he had, friends
who funded his public ministry.

Lazarus, Martha and Mary,
and perhaps others
must have provided capital
to supplement whatever collections
were taken at sermons.
We don’t often think about
how Jesus was funded
but it is worth thinking about.

As you may remember,
I spent a little over a decade
as a regular visitor to El Salvador.
On one of my visits
I went to a Church with over 150,000 members.

The pastor and his son, who was a co-pastor,
held ten services each weekend,
each service with about 10,000 people in attendance.
All along the streets
on every side of the compound
are vendors selling food,
beverages, and clothing
from carts and booths.
The market is not there during the week
as it is a shaded residential neighborhood.
But on the weekend
it becomes a crammed and jammed
mishmash of commercial enterprise.

The pastors showed us the church’s spreadsheet
for the month of June,
and each week
the collection was $70-100,000 dollars.
That is roughly five million dollars a year
collected from extremely poor people.
Attending one of their services,
I witnessed people putting quarters in the baskets.

Five million dollars…
a few quarters and dollars at a time!
When Jesus drew a crowd
his disciples also probably passed the hat.
I wish we could get a quarter every time
someone visits our website,
Facebook page, or YouTube channel!

Jesus is so often depicted
as a sweet, lamb-holding
shepherd
who wandered through this world
healing, and making nice
to everyone he met.
A kind of haphazard ministry
that ended up with him mistakenly crucified.
Not likely.

He was an organizer.
He was strategic.
He was a reformer with an agenda
and probably had some lofty goals.
He was also notorious
for breaking purity rules.

It is hard to imagine Jesus dining
with a Roman collaborator one day –
a tax collector who made his money
demanding imperial taxes,
and extorting extra for himself –
and the next day
rebuking a would-be follower
for wanting to say good bye to his parents.
I am betting that was Luke’s editorial bias —
but I could be wrong.

But herein lies the problem for us.
Jesus becomes a purity figure
even though he was a prophet.

Jesus is a huge canvass
upon which we project
our own desires
beliefs
and hopes.
Whether it is Luke’s projection
of a militant-healer
or my projection
of a reform-minded organizer,
or Paul’s projection
of an eternal Christ-figure
or someone else’s standard bearer
for moral purity,
we do not get to know
the original Jesus.

When it comes to Jesus
there is no purity.
Within Christianity
the purity parties have captured Jesus
and imprisoned him under glass,
so that he is now
the litmus test of purity
and divine acceptance.

Meanwhile, Jesus’ prophetic vision
languishes in domesticated Christian churches
that have become the pillars of class and culture,
or purveyors of American Nationalism.

Too often when America looks at Jesus
in the 21st Century, it sees itself
and its own aspirations.
It does not see the prophet,
and instead sees the silhouette
of it own standard for purity.

It does not hear a vision of equitable distribution,
it hears a justification for individuality
and a prosecutor for private property
and gun ownership.
If I were to tell you that Jesus
was in fact, an evangelist of basketball
and a passionate partisan of the Boston Celtics,
you would rightly dismiss it as bunk.
And yet, the Jesus we hear
in the public square these days
is as ridiculous
and a lot more dangerous.

Whatever Jesus we want to espouse,
needs to be reconciled
with the soil within in which Jesus is rooted.
Standing alongside Jesus
is an ancient vision
born on Mt. Sinai,
handed down from Moses and Joshua,
to Elijah and Elisha,
to Ruth and Naomi,
to Elizabeth and Mary,
to Peter and Paul…
and all the way down
to Dietrich Bonhoeffer
and from Bonhoeffer to Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is a vision
to be debated, interpreted,
argued and shaped over time,
in every time.
It is not a vision to be prescribed
or force-fitted
or purified.

So where does that leave us?

Obviously, if you asked someone else
you would get a different response
than the one I have.
My take is this:
While I wouldn’t go so far as to say
the concerns of the purity gang
are irrelevant and retrograde…
I will say
that we are not
a purity institution.
Not if we hold Jesus
as the central teacher
of our movement.

Rather, we are meant to be
a prophetic movement.
But that is a pretty big umbrella
and doesn’t narrow it down too much.

One of the questions
we face as a spiritual community
is what kind of spiritual community are we?
I am guessing,
based on my experience with you,
that we do not have a lot of difficulty
choosing between
the purity faction
and the prophetic tradition.
But it is the next step we need to take.

And we will be taking that step this summer
for those of you who are part of the Geneva community.
The vestry is gearing up
for a mission development retreat
and inviting the whole congregation
to take part.
Date to be announced.

What kind of prophetic community are we?

We have been using three separate tag lines
the past seven years, none of which
were voiced by the whole community.

One is, “open, inclusive, and challenging.”
Another has been to say,
”We are a spiritual community in the tradition
of the Episcopal Church.”
And finally, on our windows, we declare
that Trinity Place is “an open space for growth, healing, wellness, and the arts.”

Clearly we are a hybrid of some kind,
a new creature on the evolutionary tree
of the Jesus movement.
But what kind?
What are our core values?
What do we name
as the most important things we do
or aim to do?
What would diminish us
beyond recognition
if we could not do it?

These are questions
every community, and certainly
every spiritual community,
must ask itself
in every new generation.
We are that new generation
in the life of Trinity Church Geneva.

Unlike Luke, I believe we are allowed
to turn our faces back
and remember
even as we move forward with the plough —
digging up and planting the future.

I also believe we can bury our dead
and grieve them too,
while still being faithful
to our newness.

And I do believe we can go home
and say good bye to whoever
or whatever it is
we are leaving behind,
while still being fully engaged
as a new kind of community
in the Jesus movement.

But if we hover too long
or too much
on the past
or on our grief,
Jesus will challenge us to stop it
and keep moving forward.

If you ask me,
and I realize you didn’t,
I would say that every single one of us
was commissioned as a little prophet
when we were baptized.
Our task now, as a community,
is to nurture and challenge each other
in that ministry.
As individuals, our task
is to engage with a community
and nurture and challenge
the community forward,
because being prophetic is a movement.

While we were baptized
to become little prophets,
Christian spiritual practice
is not something individuals do
it is what a community does.
The individuals within the community
are its gifts
and its charisms
that shape what and how
the community practices.
That is why we are a movement
rather than something that was.

 

2 Pentecost: True Story

by

We just heard my favorite Gospel story.
To my way of thinking about it
it is the most wonderful of many, many
wonderful stories.
So I am not going to preach today,
I am just going to unwrap a few things
you may not have noticed in the story.
In other words,
the story preaches itself.

In those days everything had spirits
and demons
inhabiting them: tables, trees, stones and people.
Stub your toe on a rock?
It’s the demon of the rock
that just struck you.
Schizophrenia,
psychosis,
dementia,
epilepsy…all 21st century names
for 1st Century demons.

By the way,
I know the poem doesn’t exactly match
the story — it goes with Jesus
stilling the storm.
But think of the wild man
in the cemetery
as a storm — as a killer storm —
and the Mary Oliver poem
works beautifully

Now, we do not know
what hour of the day
Jesus and his crew arrived
on the shore of the Gerasenes.

For dramatic effect
I like to imagine it was dusk.

No 1st Century Judean or Galilean
in their right mind
would willingly go to Pigsville
if they didn’t have to.
You hired someone to go there for you if you could.
The country of the Gerasenes was pig country –
where Gentiles like us lived.
You know, Goi or pig-eaters.

To put it mildly, such people
were spiritually filthy.
No one with an ounce of spiritual wisdom
went to Gentile country
where they would become defiled
simply by association with pig-eaters.

That makes me think
that Jesus and crew got becalmed
out on the lake
and finally ended up
drifting to the wrong side.
Maybe it was late and they were tired,
so they figured on sleeping on the beach
until dawn and then shove off.
But that’s not how it came down.

Immediately,
as soon as they took that first step
onto the beach
they were met by the demoniac.

Here is one of the first little details
I just love about this story.
In the translation we’re using today,
Luke calls him, “the madman from town.”
Translations that stick closer to the original
say “a man from the CITY who had demons.”

Think of the severe social and political rupture
we have now between urban and rural America.
Jesus and his disciples were mostly
country peasants.
The demoniac was a urbanite
who had fled into the wilds.
It is worth noting
that Jesus was popular in the countryside
but found himself crucified in the city.
This story may be a fore-shadowing.

The demoniac was also naked.
Public nudity was not allowed in Judaism.
And living among the dead was a defilement as well.
Luke says he’d been naked for a long time,
by which he might have meant
the wildman didn’t have any tan lines.

So a big, naked, hairy guy
met them on the beach
probably smelling to high heaven,
and immediately begins shouting at the top of his lungs

Another cool detail.
Spiderman, Superman, or Batman
would have beat up or killed the guy
because that is what our superheroes do.
Our Gospel story guy…heals the enemy.

Compared to Marvel Comics
or James Bond,
Jesus is kind of boring.

Confronted by this wild,
screaming mass of ferocious energy
Jesus does something truly astounding.
It is something that even you and I could do,
but usually don’t have the presence of mind to do it.

In response to this loud, menacing figure
Jesus simply asks for his name.
But it is not just practicing good manners
on Jesus’ part.
In that culture,
to know the name of someone
or something
was to know its essence —
it was to know its power.

Whether a god, spirit, demon,
person, place, or thing,
its name gave it meaning
and the meaning described its power.

If you wanted to utilize the power
of that god, spirit, person, or place
you had to know its name.

When Moses meets God for the first time
and God tells Moses to go back to Egypt
and free the slaves –
an adventure that would likely get him killed –
Moses insists on knowing God’s name.
“What kind of God are you,” he asks,
“because I know what kind of god Pharaoh is
and what kind of other gods he has backing him up.
And if your just a little old fertility god or something,
I am not going.”

In the Gospel of Mark,
when Jesus meets God for the first time,
which is at the Jordan River
with John the Baptist looking on,
God names Jesus, “the Beloved.”

Joshua was a very popular name
and meant, “YHWH saves.”
But through Mark’s story,
Jesus is the Joshua who is God’s “Beloved.”
That’s a big name.

Even for us, in our 21st century sophistication,
when we can name something that is bothering us,
we suddenly have a new grasp on it.
When we finally have a firm diagnosis,
or arrive at an “Ah Ha!”
that fills in a nagging blank,
there is an almost immediate sense
that we can do something about it.

Naming the problem is the first step in solving it.
Naming the enemy is the first step
in reconciling with them.
Naming the illness is the first step in treating it.
To know the name
is to know the power,
and in the end, this story is really about power.
In the end, of life that is,
the question for all of us is,
“How did we use our power?”

So back to the story.
Jesus asks the demoniac his name
and here Luke gets in a little dig.
“My name is Legion.” he says.
Our weird translation says, “mob.”
Legion is the name of the oppressor.

If you are a 1st Century Jew
living at the margins of the Roman Empire
and hating them with every fiber in your body,
Legion is the name that personifies your hatred.
A name with the essence of hatred
is indeed a powerful name.

A Roman legion was 4,000 to 6,000 soldiers
which was more than enough
to subdue a rural backwater like Galilee
where Jesus was from.
6,000 Roman soldiers
could crucify, rape, and pillage a lot of peasants.

6,000 Roman soldiers could tax
and bankrupt
and dispossess an awful lot of people.
So to call the Gentile demon Legion
was both a description
of the demoniac’s power
and a commentary
on the Roman Empire.

Trigger warning for Animal Rights people,
a whole bunch of pigs die.
Jesus doesn’t actually send the demons
into the swine herd,
he just insists that they leave the naked man.
So in a reverse of COVID or the Swine Flu,
the legion jumps out of the human genome
and into the swine.

The pigs here are obviously a metaphor
for everything that is wrong with Gentiles.
But the fact that Jesus is engaged in healing a Gentile
was incredibly radical.
The fact that he has anything to do
with people like us
was also incredibly radical.

To truly pick up on this story
we have to think Bernie vs MAGA,
Iranians vs Saudi Arabians,
Pakistanis vs Indians,
Palestinians vs Israelis.

The implication of this story for 1st century
Judeans and Galileans,
was that all borders can be crossed
and no boundaries will be kept
and no limits will be acknowledged
to the love of God
around the table of community.

You and I can intellectually
assent to this idea
but if we truly lived it out,
if we truly believed it,
we would not live
in segregated neighborhoods
and lead lives or hold friendships
so thoroughly segregated by
class,
ethnicity,
non-genderfluid,
race,
age,
and sexuality.
If we really bought into this ideal
of diversity and inclusion
that is so often touted in the least diverse settings,
then building congregations and institutions
with deep and meaningful diversity
would not be so difficult.
Rather, it would be the natural thing to do.
So if we are really honest
this story has as much bite now
as it did for those who first heard it.

Well there are two more little nuggets
tucked into the end of this story
that are my two favorites.

The Garesenes are scared to death of Jesus
and they ask him to leave their country.
It doesn’t say why Jesus scares them so,
but I think it was the fear
of Jesus’ impact on the economy.
If Jesus would so easily
allow the devastation of private capital
for the sake of one naked, flailing demoniac,
then there is no telling
where Jesus’ influence would lead.

Clearly his values were inverted
if he thought that the cost-benefit ratio
of the demoniac to a valuable herd of pigs
was acceptable.
They didn’t need an influence like him around, especially one with the kind of power
that they couldn’t control.
The demoniac was bad enough,
but clearly Jesus
was more powerful than the demons.

Finally, and to tell you the truth,
my favorite part of the story,
is the surprising ending.
It ends just like it began,
on the beach
with Jesus and his pals
getting into their boats,
and the now-healed demoniac
right there in their faces.

By the end of the story,
the healed-demoniac has
showered, shaved and dressed,
so he is more pleasant to be around.
But still, when he asks to go with Jesus,
Jesus says, “no.”

The poor guy begs – begs it says – to go with them.
But Jesus says “no.”
”No, you can’t come with me.
Please?
No, you cannot get into the boat and go with me.
Please?
No, you cannot follow me.”

What I love so much about this ending
is how subversive it is to evangelical
and even mainline Christian thinking.
No, not everyone has to follow Jesus.
No, not everyone gets to follow Jesus.
Jesus tells the the sad and downcast man
to stay at home
and tell the people he lives with,
the ones he works and plays with,
about how good God has been to him.

In other words,
Jesus sends him to be
where he has the most power –
with the people he knows.

I told you this was about power.

Power is the ability to influence,
and the ability to influence change.
MAGA enthusiasts don’t have much ability
to change the hearts and minds of people
who are absolutely hostile to them,
but they do have enormous power and influence
to change the hearts and minds of those
who are true believers with them.
And vis versa.

Most of us have far more power
to influence prejudice
among our peers
than we do influencing strangers.
So the punchline of this story
is go where your power is.
Use your power
to influence change
among the people who you know best
because that is where you are most powerful.

Finally, and really finally,
just one more little detail to note.
Jesus tells the guy to go back to his people
and tell them how good God has been to him.
What does he do?
He goes back, Luke says, and tells them about Jesus.

I think the truly amazing nature of the Gospel
is that it is not about Jesus –
we have corrupted it to be about Jesus
but that is not what it is about.
Jesus was about God
and changing the world
through the love of God.
Jesus was always pointing to God
and not himself.
But the succeeding generations
made it all about Jesus.

The clear message of this story
is that we do not have to be followers of Jesus
to be agents of God’s love.

What a great story — so unexpected.
It’s all about using our power
to change the world
as agents of God’s love.

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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