Sermons – Page 3

1 Advent: Poetry…the Bible

December 1, 2019 by Cam Miller

At great risk of an empty table
for TheoEd today, the topic is “The Bible as Poetry.”
I say that because poetry – like Jazz and classical music –
has an infinitesimal audience of about 3% of adults.
Beyond that little pool of devotees
is 95% who simply say,
“I hate poetry…or jazz or Bach.”

That leaves 2% undecided.

I am making up those numbers,
because poetry actually had an uptick
from 7% to 12% of the public who read a poem
the last year.
But it is still 3% for jazz and classical music.

Why do I know such arcane fun facts?
Because I have a book of poems coming out in July
and I fear not even my friends will buy it.

But I am bringing three great poems to TheoEd to share today,
and the unit will tell you something about the Bible
you probably never thought about before –
but that’s just a teaser, or maybe begging.

Here is the thing: Advent is nothing but poetry.
Advent is not a story –
not a coherent narrative
with a conclusion that takes us someplace.
It is a poem,
a four-week poem.

Gwendolyn Brooks,
the Pulitzer Prize winning former US Poet Laureate,
defined poetry as “life distilled.”
Think about distilling.
Some of you will want to think about whiskey
but I would prefer a more Wendell Berry
or Mary Oliver image.
Take a mudpuddle for example:
the color of coffee with cream
filling a gloppy depression
that your grandchild wants to splash through
and you want to avoid at all cost.
That water –
invisibly, miraculously, in front
of our very eyes –
disappears but is not obliterated.
It evaporates with heat,
becomes vaporous
and rises into the air.

Then, as the sun is tucked into
the clouds for the night and goes to sleep,
the cool vapor
made of molecules from that yucky
mudpuddle,
alights upon leaves
and blades of grass
as sweet poetic droplets
of dew.

The same is true for making whiskey,
by the way.
But the question is, what does Advent distill –
you probably are anxiously waiting to know?

It begins in a liquidy,
windswept deep
called Genesis 1.
“In the beginning when God createdthe heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void
and darkness covered the face of the deep,
while a wind from Godswept over the face of the waters.
Then God said, ‘Let there be light’;
and there was light. And God saw that the light was good;
and God separated the light from the darkness.”

Those words – that poem –
then rises as vapor to something less visible,
something more abstract that we cannot
quite see or touch or comprehend,
called John – as in the gospel of – John 1.
“In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him,
and without him not one thing came into being.
What has come into being in him was life,
and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness did not overcome it.”

In between the cosmos
arriving with a big bang
and it disappearing into stardust
and water molecules
that reappeared billions of years later
on a blue-green planet
incarnate in something called human beings,
we-simply-had-to-wait.
Distillation takes time
between visible liquid and invisible vapor,
and visible liquid again.
There is nothing to be done
during the waiting – other than waiting.
So, between Advent 1
and December 25^th–
which is the amount of time
is takes to age Christmas –
the distilling requires
waiting.

And the way we wait
during Advent,
at least the way the Lectionary
and liturgy invites us
to wait,
is with poetry.

Isaiah, if
the very idea of a prophet
is to be believed,
is God’s poet.
Each Gospel from Matthew,
whether about John the Baptist, Jesus,
or Mary,
harkens back to Isaiah-the-poet.
Every week is poetry.
Every week is life distilled,
not into a mood-altering substance
but into life-giving droplets.

Forget what your middle school teacher
inflicted upon you about poetry –
it is not a fixed form
with a fixed meaning
derived at by literal interpretation
agreed upon by scholars.
Poetry is life distilled.
The poem wants to grab you
by your ears
and pull you into an experience
that you have had before
but had differently,
and it wants you to experience it again
and then arise.
It does it
with your participation,
or more hopefully,
it does it because you fall into the puddle
and say, “Oh yeah, I remember this
but I never saw it from down here before.”

The liturgy wants us to come in here
on a Sunday morning
with mental fog
and mind-numbing shopping lists,
and grumpiness with the people we live with
or the driver who took our parking space,
and leave with:
“Today God gives milk
and we have the pail.” (From Anne Sexton’s poem, “Snow.”)
Life distilled.

The liturgy
and the poetic readings
want us to fall into Advent
and get distilled with it.

The liturgy wants us to be vaporized
and then somewhere between now
and the new year,
alight as new life
among all the lives around us.
That’s not too much to ask, is it?

So, Isaiah.

I am what they call in Vermont,
a flatlander.
And in fact, most of Indiana
is flat-on-flat.

So, it is no surprise to me
that ancient peoples
thought the house of God
was on a mountaintop.

When you live in flat farm country,
wherever there is a slight rise in the land
there will be a house
or a small cemetery.
It is all relative: in Vermont you climb or ski
the highest mountain
and in Indiana, you find and occupy
the highest hill, even if it is only a pimple of dirt.

What do we see from up there,
however high or low up thereis?
Well, perched on a hill above Seneca Lake
or on a mound above Prairie Creek Reservoir
in Muncie, Indiana,
or on Jay Peak or Bald Mountain in
the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont,
you see the same thing
astronauts see from their perch
way up in space.

No borders.
No political parties.
No divisions other than the contours of the land.
That is the perspective
from which swords can be beat into ploughshares.
“Today God gives milk
and we have the pail.”

We can read Isaiah
as if it were by-laws or a resolution
and think he is proclaiming something
that does not exist
and never has.
Or, we can allow him to be a poet
and find ourselves distilled
within its verses.

We have been to the mountaintop
and we have seen the blue-green earth
without borders and division
and “we may not get there with you,”
but we know that beginning with Noah,
God planted an arc of history that bends across the universe
toward justice.

See how that works?

Now the alternative to poetry
is to take the bible literally,
and that is becoming more and more difficult
for 21^stcentury, secularized people
like most, if not all, of us.
I know that we were taught bible stories
as children, the same way
we were taught history.

But then again, given our ages here,
most of us were taught with a straight face
that George Washington never told a lie
and Christopher Columbus was the first American hero.

So, if we do not read the bible as poetry
then we are left to embrace
the Christmas story as a creche scene –
with cattle lowing
and shepherds mumbling
and poor, exhausted, and in pain Mary
smiling serenely with an infant that does not cry.

If we do not enter Isaiah as poetry
then we are left to wonder about a God
that promises peace
when we murder and are murdered
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Hong Kong, Rochester,
Sandy Hook, and just about everywhere else.

If we do not enter poetry as poetry,
and lick it for literal meaning like a lollypop,
then Anne Sexton
is eating snow
rather than stuttering over the goodness of life
she has awoken to
one fresh morning.

I know there are millions and millions of Christians
who read the bible as history
or as a how-to book of moral mastery,
and that most of us here
were raised that same way –
even if the adults around us
winked at it
like they did Santa Claus on the roof.

But personally, and it may only be me,
I cannot ignore what I know
about distillation,
the big bang,
the biology of conception,
the physiology of birthing,
the history of the first century,
or the archeology and literary construction of the bible.
I cannot close my eyes to what I know,
and more importantly,
to what I experience
as we enter into Advent
and Christmas.

So poetry, for me anyway,
is a gift.
It is a new pair of glasses
with which to enter the liturgy,
and the season, and eventually the holiday.
In the same way that jazz is music,
and Bach is music,
and Reggae is music,
so poetry is a lens for reading the bible
every bit as much
as the ways in which it has been read in the past.
And poetry is a form of theology
as much as the way theology was voiced in the past.
And poetry is a form of liturgy
and sharing faith, every bit as much
as the ways we have come to think of liturgical expression
brought to us from other centuries.

So today, with the first Sunday of Advent,
we are about to be distilled –
vaporized over the next four weeks,
only to reappear fresher than before
to give new life to the world around us.

That’s poetry by the way.

Thanksgiving 2019: The Art of Dying – and Living

November 24, 2019 by Cam Miller

George Harrison of Beatles fame,
wrote a song called, “Art of Dying.
In it he describes death as life’s greatest opportunity.
Most of us don’t think of death
as an opportunity, rather,
as some kind of fearsome ending.

“Art of Dying” ends with this line:
“There’ll come a time
when most of us return here /
brought back by our desire to be /
a perfect entity /
living through a million years of crying /
until you’ve realized the Art of Dying.”

…A million years of crying
until you’ve realized the art of dying.
The art of dying,
according to this formula,
is to lose any desire
to be a perfect entity.
And if you think about it,
what is a bigger buzz-kill than perfectionism?
What is more ruinous to a grateful heart
than a perfectionistic mind?

So, this is a very Hindu idea,
and Harrison was himself a Hindu.
As such he gave great credence
to this idea of the art of dying.

Harrison struggled against cancer,
and while he deeply valued life
he also refused to cling to life at all cost.
When it was clear that treatment could no longer
resist the progression of his disease,
he limited the number of painkillers he would receive
so he could be fully conscious and aware while dying.
He wanted to be in what he called
a state of God consciousness
at the moment of death.
“Death,” he said, “is just where your suit falls off
and then you are in your other suit.

At the end, George Harrison went to Los Angeles
with his wife, and invited their closest friends
to be present at his death.
Ravi Shankar, the renowned
sitar musician and his daughter,
played as Harrison laid dying
and was surrounded by burning incense
and candles.
His favorite images of Krishna and Rama
adorned the room,
and they say he chanted
all the way to his last breath.

When he died, Harrison’s body
was burned immediately,
his ashes taken to India,
and poured into the sacred Ganges River.
Only then did the world hear of his death.

But even more interesting than how Harrison
managed the circumstances of his death,
was the near-death event earlier in his life
that came along without warning.

Quite a few years before he died,
a knife-wielding intruder broke into Harrison’s home.
A fight for life ensued
between George Harrison and the intruder.
But then, in the midst of the struggle,
Harrison had the presence of mind
to realize that if he were killed while fighting
he would not end his life in God consciousness.
So, amazingly, he just stopped fighting.

He simply stopped fighting
and focused his mind upon God
and the goodness of life.
He was severely wounded
but lived to die another day.

But stop and think about what George Harrison did.
He did not want to die fighting,
so he focused his mind on God
and the goodness of life.

Boy, that is some super-charged gratitude!

You are dangling on a cliff,
there is not much chance you are going to live.
Is your mind overcome with terror
or thanksgiving for the goodness of life?

The reality is
we are always dangling over a cliff,
we just don’t know
whether the ground gives way today
or tomorrow, or thirty years from today.
So that question about the choice of terror
or thanksgiving –
anxiety over our lack of control
or gratitude for the goodness we have known –
is not really an academic question.

That said, there are times
in which gratitude for the goodness of life
is a hard-fought struggle.
There are dark times each one of us here
has endured, that requires
our last bit of strength and resiliency
to get through.
So gratitude for the goodness of life
is no gimme –
sometimes it is a gut-check
and onerous
grasp.

Even so, gratitude
is the one thing I know
that has healing in its wings.

Happiness,
satiation,
thrill,
pleasure,
pride,
even joy
are sensational
and have a very brief shelf-life.
But gratitude
heals the chapped, rough edges
that bleed
and cause us pain.
It does not do it miraculously,
all at once –
it does it with small, steady doses.
Even the stubbornness of grief melts
beneath the press of gratitude –
slowly, of course,
but surely.

That lovely, rhythmic piece
from Philippians has gratitude
as its webbing
or canvass.
The sentiments behind each word
are like waves lapping the beach –
cadenced,
calming,
almost hypnotizing.

But what an amazing ego
Paul must have had –
to tell everyone
to keep doing
what they saw him do and say:
“Keep on doing
what you learned
what you received
what you heard, and
what you have seen medo.”

On my best day ever,
I could not have told my children
with unshakeable confidence
they should do what I do
and say what I say.
Perhaps some people are so very good
that they could point to themselves
as the iconic measurement of integrity and goodness
but I am not one of them.

Paul’s arrogance aside,
what he wrote is a lovely
and profoundly wise
invitation to us.

Do not worry about anything…
(instead) the peace of God,
which surpasses all understanding,
guard your heart
and protect your mind.

Whatever is true,
whatever is honorable,
whatever is just,
whatever is pure,
whatever is pleasing,
whatever is commendable –
think on these things.

If I were of a mind to get a tattoo,
I would have the last part of that invitation
written as if on a scroll
down the middle of my back:

Whatever is true,
whatever is honorable,
whatever is just,
whatever is pure,
whatever is pleasing,
whatever is commendable –
think about these things.

You see, if I had that written on my back,
then, when I get monkey-minded
and the angels of my darker nature
wander out from the shadows
and start acting like it’s their turn to take over,
I could point over my shoulder
and remind all those squirrely voices
of what the script is.

Paul’s onto something here
as he describes the dance
between thinking and doing.

We tend to go hog-wild for one or the other
and allow them to drift apart.
But it is a dance between
the two partners.
“…if there is any excellence
and if there is anything worthy of praise,
thinkabout these things.”
That is what Paul writes
just after his litany of lovely things.
And then he adds:
“Keep on doingthe things
that you have learned
and received
and heard
and seen…
and the God of peace will be with you.”

“Think about these things”
and then, “keep doing them.”

So, the way I translate this,
is that half our task
is to keep framing our lives with gratitude
for the goodness we have known and tasted.
The other half
is to keep sharing
what we have been given
and what we ourselves
feel grateful for.

It is not a very complicated formula
but it is deeply transformative.
Keep framing our lives
with gratitude
and keep sharing
the very things
for which we are grateful.

Honestly, if I had to boil down
the Christian spiritual practice
to one sentence, it would be that:

Keep framing our lives
with gratitude
and keep sharing
the very things
for which we are grateful.

I am convinced
that the human community
and the planet we share,
would be radically different
if even half of us
lived more fully
by this principle.

I thank you for your gifts
to Trinity Place –
this community and our ministry together.
Have a blessed Thanksgiving.

23 Pentecost: Eschatology or the Theology of Framing

November 17, 2019 by Cam Miller

Okay, this is about eschatology.
Yep, I knew that would move you
to the edge of your chair!

So, we are sitting between
Isaiah and Jesus this morning,
and it is like pulling at both ends of a cherry popper
or snap dragon – the fireworks are in the middle
and you have to pull at both ends.

Isaiah is all dreamy-eyed
and gushy
while Jesus is dark and morose.

Both are eschatological,
which traditionally is a form of theology
focused upon death, judgement,
and the final destiny of humankind.

Eschatology is a lens
through which we look at life on this planet
and proclaim what it all means.
We are tiny neck hairs
on a small planet lost in space
and with a growing sense
of just how infinitesimal and vulnerable we are.
Eschatology reels that in a little bit.

It can be grand and inspiring to sit on a mountain top
and savor the blue-green vista
and feel awed by the beauty
and intricate balance of nature
and our small part in it.
But it is another thing altogether
to sit naked beneath the stars
and recognize that beauty
is actually massive hot gaseous explosions
into which everything we know
will be incinerated
in a Nano-second.

It is a deep well of ponderance
we can easily fall into
and never come out of,
which is why taking one step at a time
is such sage advice
for little creatures like us.

So eschatology is a lens we inherited
to help us see the enormity of life
a little closer.
Like those funny glasses
used to look at a solar eclipse,
our eschatological lens
allows us to stare into something
that might otherwise harm our soul
if not our mental health.

A lot of Christian tradition
has treated biblical eschatology
as if it were the Farmer’s Almanac of Earth time,
a kind of folk art
that can predict with precision
what science can’t quite get right.

But eschatology
is not a sundial of the universe
that will tell us
how and when or why
all things come to an end.
Rather, it is an act of imagination
that seeks to understand
how and why the events of the moment
are connected to the movements of God.

Just like physics wants to understand the Big Bang
and everything that has taken place
between then and now,
biblical eschatology
wants to understand God
and the relationship of God’s best dream for us
with all that has happened
and is happening now.

It has to be an act of imagination
because we are too small
to truly comprehend the massive whole
in which we are but a teeny tiny part.

So Isaiah is imagining how it all works out
given the horrendous history he is navigating.
Jesus is imagining how it all ends,
so that God’s best dream for us
can finally come to pass.

Where they are standing
in the context of their own lives and nation,
and their own moments in history,
effects what they see
and what they say.

When Jesus pushes before the faces of his friends
his shocking and traumatic vision
he is standing at the end of his life.
His context is grim.
He is about to go toe to toe
with the Roman Empire
and get rubbed out.

His compatriots may not have understood
the trajectory of Jesus’ prophetic ministry,
but he surely did.
Jesus also likely understood
that many of his friends
were living close to their end too.

In the midst of such a grievous moment,
someone makes a stray comment
about the beauty of the stained-glass windows
– oops, I mean the glory of the Temple.

Their ogling at the glory of the architecture
sends Jesus into a wild-eyed explosion of emotion
with him muttering all kinds of images
related to his and our mortality.
It was as if to say,
“Stop!
Focus on what is important!
This thing you think is so great
is nothing.
This building
you think is so awesome
is meaningless and irrelevant.”

And then…that’s it.
That is literally the end of Jesus public statements.
He’s done preaching.

His dark prediction
about the demise of the temple
is end of the story for Jesus.

Now, every story has an ending.
We tend to think of the Gospel
as ending with the resurrection –
a kind of tortured happy ending.
But that is not how Jesus chose to end
the story of his public ministry
in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
His last public story
in each of these Gospels,
is the one we heard in part today.

It is a story about the end of time
and it is pretty dog-gone dark.

And in all three Gospels
Jesus’ last story is provoked
by a knuckle-headed pilgrim to the city of Jerusalem ogling at the Temple
and exclaiming over how beautiful it is.

Something about marveling at the Temple
sends Jesus into his darkened depths
to forecast what is going to happen
at the end of time
when God runs out of patience
or humans run out of options.

But honestly, we actually do not know if
Jesus ended his public teaching
with this little apocalypse,
or if the editors of the gospels
were the ones to use it as a period
at the end of his public ministry.

Here is what I mean.
If it was Jesus predicting the Temple would be destroyed,
then he was doing it
in the year 30 or so of the first century.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke
are editing their Gospels 45 to 60 years
AFTER Jesus is already dead and gone.
In-between Jesus’ death
and the writing of the Gospels,
there is a terrible Jewish/Roman war.

The war lasts for three years
and ends with nearly every Jew in Palestine
killed or fleeing for their lives.
When the Romans march into Jerusalem
they destroy the Temple.
So, in the year 70 of the first century,
Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the Temple
comes to pass – forty years after he made it.

Now, the descendants of those first followers of Jesus
remember his prediction.
“Wow, it happened just like he said it would”
they marvel forty years later.
So all those early Christians
begin to attach other signs and meanings
to Jesus’ original prediction,
things like warnings about being arrested
and persecuted.

They attach those warnings
to the memory of Jesus’ prediction
because they are being arrested and persecuted.

The fact that Jesus’ prediction is born out
in their present moment,
even though it is through repression
and violence,
is a kind of twisted hope for them.
“Nation will rise up against nation,
and kingdom against kingdom…
and there will be dreadful
portents and great signs from heaven.”

So IF this dreadful apocalyptic vision
was something the editors
put on the lips of Jesus,
instead of some kind of verbatim memory
of his last teachings,
then they were saying it to their tormented
and targeted generation:
“There is hope.
After death comes resurrection.”

They can say that
because they know how it turned out
after Jesus was tortured and executed.
So it helps them FRAME their moment
and face their struggles.

What is happening here
is that the original prophecy
is contextualized
by the succeeding generation
to FRAME the crisis of their own day –
and as always,
each generation thinks its crisis is the last crisis
of human history.

Framing or contextualizing
is exactly what should happen with the bible.
Each generation
should take the ancient words of our wisdom
and contextualize them
for own day
and own crises.
The words of Jesus or Isaiah
are not to be pheasant under glass.
This wisdom is not frozen in time
with a meaning limited to a single historic occasion,
rather, it is to be made present
in each new generation.

The “So What?” in this sermon,
as with the implications
of the poem from Wendell Berry
and the visions of Isaiah and Jesus,
is to ask ourselves
how we are framing OUR moment?

How are we framing our lives
in this moment,
and is the way we frame it
empowering us to act
or disempowering us?

In every single moment
we face a life
and a world
that is at one and the same time
Isaiah and Jesus –
both hope and dread,
both life and death.
They are always the possible next moment,
and every breath we take
holds both possibilities.
How do we frame that?
In fear
or commitment?
In anxiety
or resolve?
In resignation
or passion?

How we frame the moment,
how we frame our lives in any given moment,
and how we frame the opportunities and challenges
of the moment we are in,
makes all the difference in the world.
It makes all the difference to the world.

I want to end with one of the primary
ways I frame my life –
especially when things get dark and wiggly.
It is really just a metaphor,
probably one you have heard me use before
in one form or another,
because it is my eschatology.

The light from the star closest to our sun
(Proxima Centauri)
takes four years to get here.
Light from the most distant stars we see at night
has taken up to ten millennia – ten millennia –
to reach us.

So while we see those sparkling orbs up there
the light we are seeing from them
was actually created
between four and ten thousand years ago!

In other words,
we are not actually seeing those stars
when we look up;
instead we are seeing the past.
Think about that…just hover on it for a moment.

What we see is not what is, rather,
what we see is what was –
what was years and years and years ago.
In some cases thousands of years ago.

We think we are seeing those stars
and that light as if in real time,
but we are only seeing what they once were.
In fact, some of that light
is emanating from sources
that no longer exists.
Some of that light is but the ghostly image
of what was
but is no longer.
And yet that light,
even the light we see from the sources
that no longer exists,
has lasted longer than all of human history
and will outlast any of us here.

If you will forgive a movie reference here,
it is Rick’s line to Ilsa at the end of Casablanca,
when he explains why he is suddenly
going to act against his own self-interest
and risk everything
to join the Resistance:

“Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble,
but it doesn’t take much to see
that the problems of three little people
don’t amount to a hill of beans
in this crazy world.”

Our lives are small
and our smallness is in fact,
part of the beauty of God’s creation.
What WE imagine is hopeful
or dreadful,
is not the last word.
And the point is,
we do not get to know the last word.
So how we frame our lives
on this planet, and in this vast cosmos,
will make an enormous difference
in how we live our lives.

As weird as it is to say, eschatology matters.

How we frame this crazy life
and our place in it,
really does make a difference.
And here is the money part –
since this is stewardship season
and I am really supposed to preaching on money.

What we do with our money,
at least that which is somewhat discretionary,
reveals better than just about anything else,
how we frame our lives.
Time and money are the currencies
in the economy of God.
How we spend them
and what we spend them on,
declares our values far better
than any words we use.

So it is worth thinking about
and actually doing a little research on
how we use our money
and what it may say about our values
and even our eschatology.

22 Pentecost 2019: A Data-Driven Theology

November 11, 2019 by Cam Miller

“I know that my redeemer lives.”
That line in Job seems pretty clear
and it forms the heart of the anthem
that begins the Episcopal burial liturgy.
Clearly the Lectionary Committee
that fastidiously pairs these readings
as if entrées with wine,
wants us focused like a laser on resurrection.

But that is not what Job is about,
and it is not what even this line from Job is about.
And even the translation of the lines before
and after “I know that my redeemer lives,”
is totally uncertain.

I am not a Hebrew or Greek scholar
and so all I can tell you is that those who are
have a lively debate
and serious disagreements
about this very passage from Job.

I don’t have a dog in that fight
so that is not where I want to spin our tires.
But here is what I think is amazing
about this section of Job.

Listen to an abbreviation of some lines
that come immediately before the part we heard today.
“(God) has put my family far from me,
and my acquaintances are wholly estranged…
my serving girls count me as a stranger…
My breath is repulsive to my wife;
I am loathsome to my own family.
Even young children despise me…
All my intimate friends abhor me
and those whom I loved have turned against me…”

THEN, Job turns around and says,
but still “I know that my Redeemer lives.”

Much of what we may have learned
about the Book of Job
is written, preached, or taught
through the filter of Christian beliefs.
That filter misreads Job
in favor of using it as proof of Christian ideas,
like resurrection.
That is not what Job is about.
What Job is doing here
is standing up to God,
and standing up to his own friends
who he accuses of siding with God
instead of performing their obligation –
which is to be HIS “Goel.”

Goel is a Hebrew word and core concept
in the ancient Hebrew religion.
It was and is a big word –
like resurrection is a big word.

Goel represented a worldview,
and at the same time,
a detailed prescription for living life.
Goel could refer to a human being or God.
A Goel, or to be a goel,
was to be a vindicator,
an avenger,
a protector of the family line,
a redeemer of lost lands or fortunes.
A goel looked after the vulnerable,
like widows and orphans
who had no natural protector or redeemer.

Every family had a goel,
someone whose task it was
to continue the family line
or avenge the blood of someone in the family
whose life or limb was taken from them.

If an individual within the family,
or the family itself,
lacked the power to redeem losses
or avenge injustice
or protect the family line,
then another family
or another person
or another God for that matter,
was recruited to be a new or additional goel.

A goel required power
and power sufficient to protect the family.
It comes from the Book of Leviticus
and is deeply rooted in the DNA of Israel.

When the prophet Isaiah comes along,
he makes the bold imaginative leap
to claim that the God of the cosmos
is Israel’s go’el – literally, “Go’el Yisrael”.

So when Christians talk about Jesus as “Redeemer”
and sing Handel’s “Messiah,” it springs from Goel.

Job is declaring then,
that he will get another god
to stand up for him as his avenger
against the god who has wronged him
because he is an innocent man.
Job is standing toe-to-toe with God
and with maximum confidence and hubris,
declaring his innocence
while prosecuting God as a wrongdoer.
Now prosecuting God
may not seem like a wise thing to do
for a human being,
but that is what Job was doing.

Nowadays we have a difficult time
allowing the text to speak for itself
because we want to harmonize it
with our preconceived notions.
How could there be more than one god
we ask from our 21^stcentury perch.
How could a Biblical text
suggest more than one God?

So, we harmonize it by declaring
it means something else even though it does not.
And because early Christians
were always on the lookout for Hebrew texts
to reinforce their ideas
about redeemers and resurrection,
Job was a low hanging fruit to pick
and pretend it was about Jesus and resurrection.

But that is not what the Book of Job is about.
Rather, it is about God put on trial
by an innocent man
standing up to the god, family, and friends
who done him wrong.
It would make a great Country Western song.

Don’t worry, no spoiler alert here.
If you haven’t read it yet,
I am not going to tell you how it ends.
But I do want to hunker down
on that idea of goel, redeemer,
in a very specific and very 21^stcentury kind of way.

I think the data is pretty convincing
that God is not going to save us from ourselves.
The notion that God is our goel
who will protect us from environmental disasters
provoked and enflamed by human behavior,
seems a foolish theology
based in nothing we have ever seen.

On the other hand,
the idea that God empowers us to be goel
for the planet earth and forone another –
the protectors and care-givers of our own garden –
seems much more plausible.

If we want a data-driven theology
it seems pretty clear: When we are good stewards
of the land and the resources that come from it,
and when we live in community
that takes it upon itself
to care for all its members,
and especially the most vulnerable within it,
then the garden grows pretty well
and so do we right along with it.

Conversely, the evidence is also clear
that when we simply use the earth
and do nothing but gluttonously consume it,
and when we create a steep hierarchy of privilege
with justice for those at the top
and injustice for everyone else,
then things go badly for us as a species.

It is not a big spiritual secret and there is no magic to it.

We may have a redeemer in heaven
that makes it all better in the afterlife,
but we will never really know until then.
On the other hand,
we are the redeemer
when it comes to doing what Jesus
asked us to do:
which is midwife the kingdom –
the one that is to spring forth
on earth
as it is in heaven.

We keep looking at Jesus as the redeemer
but Jesus commissioned us as goel.
Indeed, we are co-creators with God,
authorized and assigned
as stewards of the garden.

So, if we need to redeem the earth
and bring about the kingdom here –
instead of the miserable situation we have created –
then we better have each other’s backs,
and we better be “goel” for one another
in the here and now.

That brings us to what the heck we are doing here.
Whether we are a small group of people
working out of an old wine bar
in downtown Geneva,
or a small group huddled
in the holy darkness of a college chapel,
what is this thing we are doing
and why are we doing it?

It is essentially a stewardship question –
not necessarily a money question
but a question about who we are
and whosewe are,
and really,
underneath it all,
whywe are.
My theory of spiritual community is that
it nurtures and empowers us to be goel –
redeemers – in the places
and among the people
with whom we live and work and play.

Here are three ways spiritual community
nurtures and empowers redeemers.

First, it provides a thin-place for an encounter
with the holy.
Now there is not a lot to say about this part,
because God is quite mercurial
and will be who
and where
God will be,
and there is not much we can do
to force an encounter.

But we can soften ourselves
and become more open to being touched by the holy
in the places
and among the people
that foster it.
Because, truth be told,
all of us are like the haunting call of a loon at night
in that we live alone within ourselves
and deeply desire to be touched inside –
to touch and be touched
by a power greater than ourselves.
Within us is a dry thirsty voice
calling with a hope against hope
for a whispered response.

You may prove me wrong,
but I truly sense most of us come to a place like this
in search of an encounter
with a power greater than ourselves;
or a wisdom wiser than we are;
or a flame more passionate than our own;
or a hope more trustworthy than what we wish for;
or a vision so much clearer than ours.

We want it.
We need it.
We hope, often secretly, to find it
in a place like this.

So that is the first thing – an encounter.

Secondly, spiritual community
can provide another kind of connection.
I am thinking of the human connection,
touching and being touched by ‘the other.’

Just as we wander the universe
in our solitary bodies,
and we hanker for a deeper spiritual connection
with that power greater than ourselves,
we also wander about in human society
among our small,
fragmented bands of family and friends.

We often feel dislocated,
fragmented,
strangers in our own land.

Even those of us with strong, healthy families
can feel the vulnerability of the few.
Even the sweetest of small tribes
is but a molecule
in the ocean of humankind.

The painful irony of our sorrowful fragmentation
is that every single one of us
has been taught to believe
we should be self-sufficient.
We were nursed on a mother’s milk of individualism
that brainwashed us into believing
we are not quite mature enough,
not quite healthy enough,
not quite together enough
if we can’t make it on our own.

It was an awful socialization
that makes our desire for community –
for connection with people we may otherwise
have never known or cared about –
all the more confusing and complicated.
We are not supposed to need other people,
especially other people outside of our own tribe.

We were taught,
and it is likely still nagging at us,
that there is something wrong with needing it –
something not quite right.
And yet once we get a little taste
for that connection, it is really good.

Maybe we stumble into a friendship
with someone whose politics or lifestyle or background
are very different from our own.

Maybe we find ourselves in an unintended
conversation with somebody we don’t know well,
making self-disclosures we don’t normally make
to people outside our own family.

It is an encounter with a kind of power
greater than ourselves.
An encounter with community
that locates us as a small part of something bigger.

The power of community
is accumulative over time
and deepens its resonance within us
like an aged wine.

The more we get the more we want,
and the more we have of it
the more powerful its influence
and healing can be.
Community is in fact, redemptive
for the redeemers.

Finally, spiritual community is healing.
And who doesn’t need some of that?

There are all kinds of wounds.
Some deep, some shallow;
some mortal, some festering.
There are routine wounds –
the kind of dings and scrapes and dents
that are going to happen to anyone.
There are extraordinary wounds
that should never be inflicted on anyone.
There are in-between wounds
that are injuries awaiting us all
but that all of us do not receive.

Every one of us here has multiple wounds.
I dare say that every one of us here
has at least one wound that has been debilitating,
and that can be counted upon
to be debilitating again.

It might be some kind of limitation
that has been painful over time,
and that held us back.

Or maybe we have just been a round peg
placed in a square hole,
and over time the wedging and pinching
has rubbed us raw.

It could also have been a deep loss
and the grief of it
sits in the pit of our stomach like a tumor.

Whatever the wound
or more likely wounds,
we pretty much want to get rid of it.
We get tired of the pain.
We get sick of its onerous presence.
We want to be cured of it – to be free.

But what spiritual community
can help us discover
is that healing
is not the same thing as curing.

We want our wounds magically cured –
taken away as if they never happened.
But that is not very likely.
If we are lucky
and if we are open,
we may discover that a healing wound
is more like a fountain than a cut.
It somehow restores and transforms
more than it bleeds.

In redemptive community,
recovery from whatever hurt we carry
can become a source of wisdom and strength
even as it continues to be a wound.

All woundedness is like that:
offering the possibility of wisdom and strength
when we allow them to heal
instead of demanding
they just go away.

Spiritual community
can offer a safe place for healing,
and that is redemptive because it allows us
to be fully engaged in midwifing the kingdom
among the people with whom
we live and work and play.

So, when it’s working,
spiritual community
nurtures and empowers us to be a goel –
a source of redeeming presence
for the kingdom
that is to come on earth
as it is in heaven.

We can be redeemers to one another,
and to those who find their way to us,
by providing access to the holy,
an experience of deep community,
and a place of healing.

All Saints’ Day 2019: For All the Saints and Everyone Else

November 3, 2019 by Cam Miller

combatientes del erp en el norte de morazan en Perquin jul 90

I read those dog-eared and familiar old words
from the Gospel of Luke
and started laughing.

As if my preacher-life was passing before my eyes,
thirty-nine years of varied and contradictory commentary
on Jesus’ beatitudes,
started jawing at me from every direction.

It suddenly occurred to me
that ever since those words were recorded
everyone has been trying to make sense of them
AND trying to make them affirm or reinforce
the particular point of view
the reader brought to them in the first place.

The contortions,
tangled yoga postures,
and theological Jujitsu
performed on these words
are hilarious
when observing them from a neutral space
unconcerned about proclaiming or justifying.

These words from Jesus,
filtered through the generation after him playing Post Office
with his stories and parables,
are absolutely lunatic.
They make perfect sense
and they make no sense whatsoever.
“Blessed are the poor
and woe to the rich.”

No one wants to be poor,
and given the choice,
almost everyone would choose to be rich.

The wicked rich
do not get their comeuppance in life,
except by misfortune or stupidity.
It is just the opposite most of the time,
the rich get richer
and we would rather be one of them
than the poor that get poorer.

But the punchline is the most shocking,
difficult, and absurd:
“DO to others as you would have them DO to you.”

Everything in the first part of that paragraph
is an example of DOING something
we would like to have done for us
in a particular circumstance – even though
it would be as unlikely as a dog not chasing a squirrel.

We want our enemies to DO love for us more than anything they might prefer to DO to us. So, please enemies, in spite of hating us, DO something good. Make us a nice dinner, why don’t you?
What we want from the people who curse us, is for them to bless us.
What we really want from those we abuse, is a nice gentle prayer on our behalf – please.
If we were to hit someone, rather than punching us back, what we would really prefer
is for them to give us a little hug.
And, don’t you know, if we wanted to take a coat we really liked from someone, rather than get reported to the police it would be much better if they just gave us a shirt we thought was cool too.
We know that if we were ever in a situation that we had to beg for a living,
we would want every passerby to cheerfully give us some green. So, of course, we will do that any and every time someone asks something from us.

You see, this is crazy-talk.
It is not about refraining from bad behavior
or even holding back on justifiable retribution.
Rather, it is DOING something positive,
DOING something we would like done for us
to people we can’t stand
or feel bitter toward.

Rabbi Hillel, who as far as we can tell,
was the original author of the Golden Rule
from whom Jesus would have learned it,
taught just the opposite.
Hillel said,
“Do NOT do to others,
what you would NOT have them do to you.”

It is all about restraint.
Don’t do the bad that has been done to you.

Hillel calls for a strategy of disciplined detachment,
so that we don’t get ourselves in trouble
by returning violence for violence,
bigotry for bigotry,
dishonor for dishonor.
Hillel’s advice is doable –
we have all practiced it at one time or another.
But Jesus’ thing is not about restraint,
it is about proactive DOING
for people we would just as soon fell in a ditch.
Lunatic Jesus says we should DO something nice,
something we think is beneficial
for those who have done us badly or wrong.

This raised profound memories for me.
It conjured up stories I heard firsthand
about the situation in El Salvador
in the late 1970’s as it was building toward civil war.

Archbishop Oscar Romero argued
with some of his closest colleagues among the clergy,
those who were helping the leftist soldiers
in their fight against the fourteen families
that owned all the land and resources,
and whom the military protected.
Rightwing para-military death squads
were torturing, assassinating, and disappearing
civilians by the hundreds and thousands.
Something like 75,000 non-combatants disappeared.

Some clergy took up arms when nothing else
seemed to stop the brutality waged against poor people.
Oscar Romero reportedly pleaded with them not to,
citing Jesus’ sermon on the mount among other things.
Instead of violence, Romero commanded
those in the military – almost all Roman Catholics –
to refuse to fire upon or do any violence
against fellow Salvadorans.

What happened as a result of his calling on soldiers like that,
was that Romero was assassinated
by one of the death squads.
Civil war broke out in full force
and we are still living with the consequences today –
even here in the United States.

And by the way, we funded the repression
by those fourteen families
to the tune of a million dollars a day for years.

I sat in community with mother’s who saw
their children massacred, beheaded even.
I listened to former soldiers,
some of them mothers,
talk about why they did not turn the other cheek.
I celebrated Eucharist with a nun
who was one of Romero’s secretaries
and who helped document the disappeared.

I marvel at the bravery of Oscar Romero
and his radical holding-onto Jesus’ lunacy,
but I am not so sure
which lunacy I would embrace
in the same circumstance.

I am not so certain as to what I would preach, even now.

When I think of another one of my personal saints,
Jonathan Daniels, it feels a little clearer.

I have spoken of him before, the Episcopal seminarian
and civil rights worker who was murdered
in Alabama in 1965.
He made himself a shield
against a deputy sheriff’s shotgun blast
in order to protect an African-American teenage girl.
That is a DOING for someone
that you would want them to DO for you,
and it seems a little less lunatic.
It is the kind of knee-jerk reaction
I would hope to have in such a circumstance –
an act of character
performed by bedrock instinct
rather than thought and analysis.
From the standpoint of Natural Selection,
or so-called survival of the fittest,
it is still lunatic –
but it is a lunacy that makes more sense
and is somehow easier for me to embrace
than willfully standing by and not taking up arms
against cruel and brutal repression.

In the case of El Salvador,
the DOING of good
that I would want others to DO for me,
was standing on both sides
right next to the DOING of bad
I would not want someone to do for me.
Jesus’ lunacy
is not always so clear or obvious,
in fact most often it is not so blatant –
and absolutes seem hard to come by in this world.

So, I comfort myself today, with that song.
“For all the saints
who from their labors rest
who thee by faith
before the world confessed
thy name, O Jesus, be forever blest.
Alleluia, Alleluia.”

This All Saints’ hymn,
sung at both my mother’s and father’s funeral,
for me brings forward the presence
of so many who have died –
and who did for me what they would want done for them,
as well as sacrificed for me
what they would surely have preferred not to.

All of us are surrounded by such a cloud of saints
who did for us, even when truly difficult,
what they would have wanted done for them.

And also, did for us
what they would have preferred not to,
but because they loved or cared about us,
they did it anyway.

You see, the problem
with picking out a saying or parable or story
and plopping it down
as if it is the last word on anything,
is that it is static
and contextual
and never the whole story.

Whatever Jesus was telling us
from that mount on that day,
it is not the only thing he told us
nor is it the last word he would have given us.
Had he not died on the cross
there may have been a lot more words
he would have offered on a lot of other subjects
that would have given us more to go on.

Whatever words we have from him,
they are a start not an end –
they begin to frame the conversation
but they do not define or limit it
once and for all time.
The sermon on the mount,
or the Prodigal Son, or the Widow’s might
should not be used as a cudgel
or an unamendable constitution
or a map of the world that is flat with a definitive edge.
Unfortunately, we often use them that way.
What would Jesus do? Honestly, we’ll never know.
What did Jesus say? Whatever it was, it is not
the alpha and omega.

Just because they are dead and sainted in our memories,
does not mean that the cloud of witnesses
has the last word in our world.
They are there
gathered at the table of our love,
to be in conversation with us
and offer us wisdom.
They are not to be forgotten
or neglected
because what they have given
and what they have taught
is sacrificial and courageous.

But neither is it to be a dictation
and final sentence for all time.
It is kind of funny,
in a sort of unnerving way,
what the presence of all those saints in my life
reminds me.
When they are present,
as they become when I sing that old hymn,
I realize how much there was and is
that I do not agree with them about –
in terms of ideas and beliefs and even values.
But what I can see so clearly
on days like today,
is how much they did for me
that they would have hoped I would do for them,
or for those with whom I live.

“DO to others what you would have them DO to you,”
is not always clear and obvious,
and may in fact,
have contradictory actions
depending upon who “the other” is
and which “other” we choose to DO for.

But it is a lunacy
that I can see in the lives of saints
who have come before,
many of whom I have known,
that looks to me a lot like love.

It is a lunacy
that may take you and me in different directions
from one another,
but it is a lunacy
worth following.

“And when the strife
is fierce, the warfare long,
steals on the ear
the distant triumph song,
and hearts are brave
again, and arms are strong.
Alleluia, Alleluia.”

Thank you, saints,
for doing for us what you would have liked us
to do for you…
and that you hoped
we would do for others.

1 Advent: Poetry…the Bible

Thanksgiving 2019: The Art of Dying – and Living

23 Pentecost: Eschatology or the Theology of Framing

22 Pentecost 2019: A Data-Driven Theology

All Saints’ Day 2019: For All the Saints and Everyone Else

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