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5 Lent B, 2021: Reversal Wisdom

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While the story we heard from John
this morning,
does not appear in the other gospels,
one of it’s sentences does
and is clearly a preserved Jesus saying.
Here is that Jesus-saying as it appears
somewhat differently
in each gospel.

Mark: For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.

Matthew: He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it. Similar to Mark but without the gospel reference.

Luke: For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it. Exactly the same as Mark but leave’s out the gospel reference.

John: He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Quite different.

There is a semantic difference
between these four versions of a Jesus saying
but there is also a significant difference
in meaning – a theological difference
if you don’t mind my using that term.

The semantic difference
hovers around the verb used:
whoever would save his life…
find his life…
love his life…
Or conversely, whoever would lose it
or hate it…

We could make mountains
out of mole hills over those differences
but without much significance.

Then there is a big fat difference in meaning.

Mark was the earliest Gospel
by perhaps half a generation
before Matthew and Luke,
and as many as two generations before John.
Matthew and Luke use Mark
to tell their stories,
and more often than not
following Mark’s chronology of events.
But then they make changes,
and when they do
they often make the same changes.

For example,
Matthew and Luke
have this saying from Mark
but they change it
and they change it in exactly the same way:
they cut off, “for the sake of the gospel.”

Mark’s Jesus says,
whoever would save his life will lose it;
and whoever loses his life for my sake
”and the gospel’s”
will save it.

Matthew, Luke, and John
leave off “and the gospel’s.”
That could be a coincidence
or happenstance of history –
because the version they received
didn’t include it –
or it could be intentional.

I think it is intentional
because it reinforces a difference in emphasis
between Mark and the other gospels.

Mark’s Jesus is fully human –
no miraculous birth story.
He has a spiritual awakening
at his baptism as a young man.
He comes into the awareness
of his special relationship with God,
just as any of us might.
At the end of the gospel
there is an empty tomb, period.
No resurrection stories
just the promise
that God will have the last word.

In Mark’s telling of Jesus’ ministry
there is special attention given
to Jesus training his students
to go out two by two
and do what he does:
preach and teach about the kingdom of God
that is breaking into the world
even here
even now.
Jesus is always pointing
to the Kingdom of God
that we are to create
”on earth as it is in heaven.”
Matthew and Luke echo this somewhat
but they also increase the pointing to Jesus.

Whereas Mark features Jesus
always points to the kingdom of God,
Matthew and Luke start pointing more to Jesus,
and by the time we get to John
it is a full-blown emphasis on Jesus.

So John’s Jesus
is talking about eternal life
with that saying,
rather than Mark’s Jesus
who is talking about this life.
John says, “…he who hates his life in this world
will keep it for eternal life.”

If Mark was standing alone
without these other versions of the Jesus saying,
especially John’s,
it could be a proverb
about how to live a more meaningful life
in this world.

As you likely know by now,
I am biased in favor of Mark’s Gospel
and of the four,
find John’s the most problematic.
That often puts me at odds
with the more orthodox elements of the Church
because it loves John.

But I want to turn toward John now
and appreciate the rich metaphor
he has given us –
because it is as apt
for living our lives focused
on this life
as it was to him about living this life
with an eye toward the next life.

First of all, I have to tell you
that the pulpit I preached from for ten years
had a little plaque underneath the light
which rested just above where the preacher
would place his or her notes.
It quoted today’s reading from John:
”Sir, we would see Jesus.”
I don’t know which predecessor put it there
but I suspect it is still there
at St. Stephen’s on the campus
of The Ohio State University.

No pressure, just show us Jesus.

The irony is that John doesn’t tell us
if Jesus ever meets with those Greeks.
Instead, he delivers to his students
one of the most insightful lines
from John’s gospel:
”I tell you the truth,
a grain of wheat must fall to the ground
and die to make many seeds.
But if it never dies, it remains only a single seed.”

I would like to divorce that metaphor
from its literal meaning,
by which John understands it,
and extend its connotation to life as we live it.

Think of the various grains or elements
of our own lives that could,
if we allowed,
enrich our lives
rather than in John’s sense
of life as defined by its ending.

For example, when we hold onto things we love
or that have been especially meaningful to us,
it can often spell its demise.
Change comes to all things
and all lives
and all relationships
but when we try to hold them in place
and resist the change and transformation
that is natural to everything,
we break –
or we break the thing we loved.

Resisting change makes us brittle
and the more brittle we are
the more likely we are to shatter
when changes we did not seek or want
come into our lives and relationships.

Parents watch as their children change
and become their own special free agents
with allegiances and values and activities
their parents may not share or even like.
When parents try to hold their children in place
and refuse to let them change,
the relationship will break
or become terribly toxic.

Likewise, adult children
see their parents change, and often,
witness their parents making choices
they don’t like or understand.
When children try to keep their parents
from breaking out of their childhood mold,
the relationship can shatter.
In our city of Geneva, as in many places,
the relationships between the police department
and the general public, as well as
activists and government,
are changing.
The parties involved can become rigid
and resistant, and so end up brittle,
or they can accept that change has come
and seek to grow into new relationships
that are mutually beneficial
even if different from the past.

When something we have thought
or believed
or valued
has been buffeted
by countervailing ideas
and beliefs
and values,
we can cross our arms and say “NO”
to any and all challenges…or we can wonder.

We can get curious about how and why
other people are seeing things
differently from the way we
have always assumed
things should be.
We may not have a revolution of thought
but softening and opening
may teach us more
and allow for more growth
than brittle resistance at all costs.

The palpable fear and anxiety
about becoming just one minority among many
in various parts of the
White, Euro-centric community,
is leading to wicked efforts
to repress voting rights.

Rigid resistance to the change that is coming,
that is in fact happening now,
is leading many to extreme and ugly behavior.

That rigidity is poisoning them on the inside
and leading to a threatening toxicity
among all those around them on the outside.

Letting the way things have always been
go through their natural life-cycles
and die,
allows for vibrant
and surprising new life
to blossom.

This is true for us as individuals
with regard to our values and ideas,
as well as with our relationships.
But it is also true
with our institutions and social order.

Not all change is good
but all things change.

Not all change is what we want
but all things change.

We may be able to influence change
and be the architects of change
instead of its victim only,
but resisting it carte blanche
will mangle us
if not kill us.

”I tell you the truth, a grain of wheat
must fall to the ground
and die to make many seeds.
But if it never dies, it remains only a single seed.”

That’s a pretty good proverb.
John may have meant it about life after death
but it seems to me
pretty good advice –
maybe even a warning –
about how we live life now.

Peace be with you,
and may your curiosity lead to many deaths
with abundant life that follows.

 

 

 

Last Epiphany 2020: Under our noses

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Text for Preaching: Matthew 17:1-9, “The Transfiguration”

I know people forever changed by battle,
both on the ground splattered by blood,
and in the air singed by fire
while beholding a face through the glass
of another cockpit.

I know people forever changed by childbirth,
those for whom it was inside out
and the ones for whom the experience
was outside in.

Accidents and catastrophe
have transfigured and disfigured and re-rendered
more humans than can be counted,
lives ripped open and
torn asunder without warning.

The angel of death tip-toeing near,
touching the spine or whispering in the ear,
has changed many lives
for both good and bad.

Millions are enraptured almost weekly –
a Pentecostal fever
shivering the brain and racking the body
until encased in a dead faint.
Whether such drama has ever changed a life
I cannot say.

Few of us can point to a single moment,
a pencil spot in time
upon which everything changed for us –
upon which nothing going forward
would ever be the same.
And yet…all of us – all of us – have turned on the dime
of such moments.

We probably did not recognize
the gravity of the moment
the geography of the spot
the singularity of the minute or second
the separation of before and after,
but it was there
when we were.

In fact, all of us
have more than one moment
that changed everything going forward
and rendered everything we left behind
as just so much history.

It is surely a measure of grace
that we do not recognize those moments in real time
because we might never have chosen
what we did choose
and our lives would be lesser for it.
But that is how it is with us:
nearly every moment
transforming
and transfiguring,
and thanks be to God,
we do not even know it.
Moses,
Elijah,
Buddha,

Jesus, and Mohammad
were each taken up
and rendered differently –
changed in an instant
of enormous transformation.

Not only them,
but mystics in every religion
write poetry and songs
about being changed in a razor-thin trice –
a twinkling flash of power
beyond forethought
or control.

This is how we live,
you and me even,
but we just hate to see it
as it actually is.

Ironically, we would rather pretend
that our lives are routinely ordered
because in that kind of world,
we call the shots.
We try to see randomness, change,
and transformations as unusual,
unique,
the exception
to all those plans
and the likeliest of scenario
we imagine for our futures.
That child we gave birth to,
the only one
that could have only been created
at the very moment that his or her conception took place,
a moment we likely never noticed,
became the child we have grown accustomed to
and may even imagine we planned.

That spouse we chose
and probably do not associate with randomness,
took place as a result of endless choices
by so many other people,
known and unknown,
that to call it “our” choice
seriously underestimates the role
of other people
making other choices,
many of which were random and ridiculously
improbable.

The concept of the self-made man or woman
singularly carving out
his or her own destiny
is laughable.

The thin vision
of our lives as chosen and ordered
and the result of a good plan,
is dim vision at best,
and more truthfully, blind.

I have nothing to say about the so-called
“Transfiguration” story we hear twice a year
in the lectionary readings.
As far as I can tell,
it was told to one-up Moses and Elijah,
and later, among Gentiles,
as some kind of evidence
that Jesus was the biggest
and bestest of them all.
As a story it has very little,
if anything, to say to us
about the lives we lead.

But it does serve to remind us,
or at least it can,
that every next moment
is ripe with possibilities
we do not expect
and likely do not see
because of the assumptions we make.

The events
and people
and experiences we live
are braided with singular moments
and delivered to us
via people and events
we did not have control over
and receive often without input.

This is obvious to us
when something big comes along that we were not expecting
but it is equally true in every moment,
even though we are asleep to it.

We probably could not tolerate
hyper-sensitivity to this truth
but it would bolster our humility
and open our minds
if we were a tad more awake.

While we do get to make plans
and work toward goals
and anticipate rewards and accomplishments
for our efforts,
we should also be keenly aware
that nothing we have done, accomplished, or will do
is without the participation of countless other people
contributing to the trajectory of our lives
and the triumphs and defeats we have known.
In everything we do
and plan to do,
both randomness and serendipity
play a role.
And so we are changed,
transformed even,
by singular moments in time
we did not recognize
and often cannot trace back
or put our finger on.

I really do believe
that were we to ascend a mountaintop
from which we could see all the moments of our lives
spread out in detail before us,
we would be blown away by what we saw.
The crazy whacko-mystical story
about Jesus, Elijah, and Moses on a cloud
is nothing compared to the transformations in our lives.

If only we could see our lives
as they actually unfolded
and suddenly recognize the patterns
and interconnected events and people
we have always considered unrelated,
we would be speechless.

There is no real “so what?” to this sermon,
it is more like a sunset
or a dramatic spray of the milky way
on a perfectly clear night.

Just something to look at and say,
“Wow, we’re really small, aren’t we?”
And then bow our heads,
hold our hearts,
and say, “Thank you.”

 

 

 

2 Advent 2017: A Bald Face Challenge

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TEXTS for Preaching

Isaiah 40:1-11

“Savior” by Maya Angelou

Petulant priests, greedy
centurions, and one million
incensed gestures stand
between your love and me.

Your agape sacrifice
is reduced to colored glass,
vapid penance, and the
tedium of ritual.

Your footprints yet
mark the crest of
billowing seas but
your joy
fades upon the tablets
of ordained prophets.

Visit us again, Savior.
Your children, burdened with
disbelief, blinded by a patina
of wisdom,
carom down this vale of
fear. We cry for you
although we have lost
your name.

Mark 1:1-8

SERMON

“Visit us again, Savior.
Your children, (are) burdened with
disbelief, blinded by a patina
of wisdom…”

Burden – a heavy load.
Disbelief – an inability to accept something as real.
Patina – a film of calcification
covering old implements and metals.

I realize that while “patina”
may not be an ordinary word,
“burden” and “disbelief” enter our speech
with such routine they go without notice.
But examining the average, mundane,
humdrum,
and tediously dull
can stir up a little gold.

Much of our religion
is a film of calcification, a patina,
that is burdening the generations with disbelief.

Much of our religion
is a film of calcification, a patina,
that is burdening the generations with disbelief.

While that may not be a controversial statement at all,
given that secularism
and other historic whirlwinds
have beaten bare the stone institutions of religion
like a thousand-year tempest,
I do recognize that it may be hurtful
and cause pain.

It is the kind of thing
I said prophetically forty years ago
as a young preacher
but without too much compassion.

Now, as a preacher standing on the dock
and able to look out and see old age,
I wish I had been more kindhearted earlier.

To say that much of our religion
is a patina, a calcification,
burdening our children with disbelief,
is surely a hurtful thing to say
to those of us who are deeply grateful
for what we have received from the church.
Many of us have invested great parts of our lives
in the community of faith
and supporting the institution of our religion.
To call much of it a green scale of film
obscuring the beauty of our ancient wisdom,
may feel painful and disrespectful.
And yet, standing here between Isaiah
and John the Baptist this morning,
saying so seems an apt way to honor those prophets.

Here is what I mean.
Isaiah steps forward
and preaches a counter-intuitive message
to his peers.

First, we have to understand,
that for 39 chapters,
Isaiah has been preaching discomfort.

For 39 chapters, he has been warning
his peers that their social and economic injustice
will be their undoing;
and he has castigated
the political and religious leaders,
for being purveyors of greed and self-interest.
Death and destruction are coming, he warns,
and now is the time to reform.
The people do not see it,
and they think things are good.
Isaiah is a weirdo.

Then, on a dime, Isaiah suddenly,
at the beginning of chapter 40,
begins preaching the comfort of hope.

But now, at chapter 40,
it is a time in which the people have been suffering
and nothing is good,
and nothing will ever be good again,
and hope feels like mocking their pain.
Isaiah is a weirdo.

The reason for this sharp change
is that the Book of Isaiah is actually several books,
written and compiled
over one-hundred and fifty years or more,
and so the historical circumstances of each section
represent how the world changed over time.

But that being said,
the preaching and the poetry
associated with the name, Isaiah,
often walks upstream from the real-time experience
of the people the prophet is preaching among.

He points out their selfishness and corruption,
preaching reform, when things seem good;
and then he offers the love of God and hope,
even in the midst of their brokenness and suffering,
when things seem bad.

Likewise, with Maya Angelou:
Much of our religion
is a film of calcification, a patina,
that is burdening the generations with disbelief…
is to challenge the foot-dragging
institutional self-interest that resists reforming Christianity, while also
pointing toward a real-time hope.

“Visit us again, Savior,
your children are burdened with disbelief…”
is a plea dripping with the experience
of our own moment in history,
AND the presumption
there is an alternative experience
both possible and expected.

So I think Isaiah,
both the reform-minded one
and the hopeful comforter one,
would look at our moment of anxiety –
when there is a swelling disbelief
in institutional religion
even as there is a strong, if generic,
desire for spiritual connection –
and point to both the need of reform, and hope.

So Isaiah stands on our left side today,
listening for what we might say –
listening for what you and I
will preach from a high mountain.
On the right side then, is John the Baptist.

John the Baptist was a weirdo too,
less poetic than Isaiah, but a fierce reformer.
Mostly we know about John
through the filter of those writing about Jesus
fifty to eighty years later,
after both John and Jesus had been executed
by state power.

Let us first of all, acknowledge
that John the Baptist did not see Jesus
as Number 1 to his being Number 2.
That is early Christian theological propaganda.
We know this from an outside historical view.
John had many more followers in Judah
than did Jesus did.
Even after John was dead,
his followers were more numerous than Jesus’.
In fact, there are still people today
for whom John the Baptist is their primary prophet –
they are known as Mandaeans.

The followers of Jesus and the followers of John
were in competition with one another for followers.
But Jesus likely had a deep appreciation
for the ministry and work that John began.
John too was a reformer
and what he did was hugely important.

You see, John figured out how to bust a monopoly –
a theological and spiritual monopoly.

The temple, and the temple clergy,
had a monopoly on God’s power and authority.
Every important aspect of the religion
was centered in the one-and-only temple
in Jerusalem.
All acts of piety,
all rituals of contrition and repentance,
all corporate acts of worship,
were focused in the temple.

That meant that those in charge of the temple
possessed a great deal of power.

So much so, the temple priesthood
had become an inherited privilege
passed on from generation to generation.
It was a closed world of power and wealth,
managing a hugely important
religious and economic center of the society.

John the Baptist busted that monopoly.

His practice of baptism,
a ritual cleansing for the forgiveness of sins,
sidestepped the religious institution
and provided an alternative spiritual practice
for ordinary people who could not afford
the high price of religion at the temple.d
John’s baptism was cost no money.

You see, John the Baptist wasn’t just some crazy
preacher doing weird things out in the wilderness,
he was organizing a rebellion
and busting a religious and economic monopoly.
Jesus was down with it too.
Jesus was so down with it, he went and got baptized.
Jesus was all about what John was doing,
even though Jesus was not quite the purist
John was when it came to being a vegetarian
and anti-materialist.

So now, I hope,
you can see the connection
between Isaiah on our left side,
and John on our right side:
both preachers, prophets, and reformers.
It’s not a bad place for Maya Angelou
to be standing either,
because she was a prophet, poet, and reformer too.

“Visit us again, Savior.
Your children, (are) burdened with
disbelief, blinded by a patina
of wisdom…”

That brings us to our need to scratch off the patina
and reveal the spiritual truth and wisdom
that will unburden our children,
that will move them within reach of belief
instead of burdening them with disbelief.
And it begins with the Christmas story.

The Christmas story is a refugee story.
It is a dark tale of oppression
and the dangers of living as an illegal citizens
among a people who do not believe in,
respect, protect, or even care
about their dignity.
That is Joseph and Mary.

We tell the Christmas story
as a romanticized Victorian sentimental journey,
with jingle bells and a gentle falling snow.
There is nothing whatsoever
cozy and comforting
about the manger.
It is a dark tale,
of skulking around in the night
to avoid agents of the government
bent on hunting them down
and threatening their very existence.
The Christmas story
is a story of exile and repression
and the whispers of an alternative being born,
a divine spark of liberation
that will bring down kings and empires.

We have wrapped Christmas
in gaudy paper and pretty bows and the way we tell it,
it is simply unbelievable to our children –
associated with the fantasy of Santa Claus.
And that is what we have done
with the entire Jesus story –
created a protective film
that distorts or hides the real Jesus.
Jesus is a threat to our institutions
not Mr. Nice Guy carrying lambs on his shoulders.
Jesus and John the Baptist
did not get tortured and executed
because they used the wrong fork at dinner!
Something about what they were up to,
and what they preached,
and what they did,
was threatening to the powers and principalities.
They were prophets
and reformers,
and they preached an alternative reality.

So here is what I think that means for us,
on this second Sunday of Advent 2017.

We need to scratch the patina of religion
to see if we can discover
a credible
compelling
whisper of God
that does not
and will not
feel like a burden of disbelief to our children.
Where, in the our body of ancient wisdom,
does the voice of Jesus
pierce the butcher paper we have wrapped it in?
Where does it leak out,
drip down and leave a trail on the floor
for us to follow?

How can we keep doing what we value
and have loved about our religion,
and at the same time, unleash it
from the protective cage
it has been jailed in for all these years?

I am not up here with a “How-to” book of answers,
even though I have my own ideas
about what to do.
Instead, this is an invitation,
and bald-faced challenge:
Let us use Advent for what it is,
a time to get ready for change.

Let us enter into the new year
expecting change
and nurturing change
and looking for what God is doing
in the midst of change.
Let us get out our wire brushes
and our brass polish
and go to work on the tarnish
so that the generations might know
the liberation of belief.

 

3 Easter 2017: When you stop is where you stop

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“How could I know the moment I moved
within except in retrospect?”

In seminary
we are given the analytical tools
to put small passages and stories of the Bible
through an historical and literary MRI.
The hope is such tools will help us see
the soft tissue on textual bone,
so that we might be able to decipher:
what the original author’s intent was,
and how the original audience heard and understood it,
and even how many contributors there might have been
as the text evolved over time to its present form.

Then there is the question of how the text
was understood over the centuries by later theologians,
and doctrinal advocates,
and eventually preachers and teachers and scholars.
All of that is 20th century scholarship
and it is still being taught
and touted
and valued.
But it now seems like a wobbly WWII bomber
compared to a 21st century stealth wing.

That kind of 20th century biblical scholarship
is still valuable as a counter-weight
to the whacky biblical literalism
that arose in the 20th century,
in reaction
to academic theological analysis of the text.

But we are light years away
from pre-WWII German biblical scholarship
like Karl Barth;
and where we stand in 2017
is an experiential leap away from
the great 20th century theologians like Paul Tillich,
C S Lewis,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
Reinhold Niebuhr,
and Jürgen Moltmann.

They now represent the big ideas
and eloquent rhetoric
of a world long dead and gone.

Think of the intellectual,
psychological,
and imaginative distance
between the world before Hiroshima
and Auschwitz
and the world after it.

I am not talking about the physical world
so much as the human perspective –
the mind’s eye.

Or another example: take just a moment to consider
the difference between the political context
before the assassinations of JFK, MLK,
Bobby, and Malcolm,
and then the post-Nixon context.

There is an awesome and terrifying distance
between perspectives on the human condition
before the Moonwalk
and more recent images of the ice shelf melting.

Stand for just a moment in your memory,
or your imagination if you are younger.
Conjure up the difference in worldview when,
in your left ear you are waiting minutes
for an operator to connect you with another party,
and in your right hand,
with your thumb,
you posted a tweet…
that two thousand people
on six continents will read
within seconds.

My friends, those are different worlds,
and they are just barely connected,
like a spinal fracture
exposing a thin strand of nerve.
The distance is so great
it has utterly changed the human mind
and what the brain sees and imagines.

Now, if you are touching the enormity of that distance
and can feel our historical dislocation
from what came before us,
even though just a little bit ago –
even though you may have lived through it yourself –
then let’s add one more layer.

At this present moment in the history of humankind,
we have at least three centuries of human mindset
double and triple exposed
one on top of the other.

At one and the same time,
looking around the world
and even in our own country,
we have people living within the assumptions
of the 19th century,
and others within the worldview of the 20th century,
and still others in the 21st century.
At one and the same time,
we have human beings sharing the same planet
but seeing the world around us
from totally separate experiential frames –
even though sometimes
all of us are using the same super modern technology.

So, for example,
Educational institutions designed in the 19th century
are straining to hold together
like hundred-year-old bridges carrying the weight
of more traffic than we ever dreamed of.

A two hundred year old financial system
is doing things that it can’t control,
known and unknown,
unexpected and unanticipated,
because the speed of wealth and capital transfer
makes much of past institutions irrelevant.

The international Christian denominations,
what we call “The Church” –
like Roman Catholicism, Anglican and Episcopal, Orthodox, and Lutheran –
all of which were originally designed
from the prototype of an empire…
now seem like a dry, dead coral reef
where the ocean has receded and left it as a ghost
of a once vibrant ecosystem.

Change can be merciless like that,
especially to those organisms,
structures,
and ideas
that tether themselves
to stationary objects
in hopes of preventing change.

Let me use a painful Church example
that I know is near and dear
to many hearts here.
Classical music.
3% of the population
listens to Classical music.

What happens then,
to a Church with worship
that is tied exclusively
to European Classical music tradition?
It becomes that dry, exposed reef
whose watery environment receded.

But misery loves company.
Evangelical mega-churches
that adopted American pop music formulas
with which to create praise music
and love songs to Jesus,
are having the same struggles –
in part, because,
while they innovated twenty years ago
they have not continued to shift with the culture.
Music and culture never stops evolving.

But church growth
and church survival
is not really the tail I want to wag today.
It is just an interesting implication
I wanted to point out
because you and I will be facing decisions
about what to do about it
sooner rather than later.
And just to ease anyone’s anxiety about music,
it never has to be either/or,
rather, it can be both/and.

But I mention all of this
because what we call “secularism”
is something that every person of faith
needs to contend with,
sooner or later,
and with varying degrees of intensity.

It is not about science and technology
erasing the need or capacity for faith in God, either.
That is a giant misnomer
and misunderstanding of both science and faith.

Many of the most brilliant and agile minds
in the world of science,
retain deep personal reservoirs of awe
in which they also can imagine God.
Some of them have personal faith experiences.

The threat to faith
is not science and technology
it is neglect.
When we neglect to expand,
adapt, and change
the mindset and imagination of our faith as we change,
then our faith becomes brittle,
dry, and eventually, lifeless.
There is a reason
that ritual and sacrament
can become rote,
and then empty of content.
We must refresh it
even as we are refreshed by change.
We must bring our new
and renewed imagination
to the questions
and rituals of faith
if indeed we want them to survive
as powerful influences in our lives.

We have to work at it,
and do something about it,
and give it attention,
and nurture,
and exercise.
When we stop is where we stop.
When I was a freshman in college
I was struggling to keep up,
and one of my professors offered her students
a speed-reading course.

When I was tested at the beginning,
I had an 85% retention rate
but my speed level was at 3rd grade.
I felt humiliated when I found out,
but was told it wasn’t unusual.
In part, I was told,
it is because we stop teaching kids
“how” to read in 3rd grade.
So many kids like me stopped learning to read
around 3rd grade and and simply read.

So when did you stop your intentional learning
about spirituality and religion? Or did you?

Most of us were taught
that faith is a fixed point on the horizon –
a particular idea
that when we come to embrace it,
THEN we “have” faith.
But that is not faith;
that is a belief.

We “believe” in ideas
but faith is something altogether different.
It is experiential, as I said last week,
and it is something that is an organic part of us
that grows as we grow
or shrivels with neglect as the rest of us grows.

“How could I know the moment I moved
within except in retrospect?”

Faith grows in the imaginative,
intuitive,
psychological,
and emotional sphere
of our personhood.

We must constantly tend to it,
seeking new metaphors to embody it
just as we continue to collect
new music we hadn’t heard yet,
or new poems
or new novels we hadn’t read yet,
or ingested new visual art we hadn’t seen yet.

God as envisioned by CS Lewis
probably isn’t big enough in 2017.

And Christian spiritual practice
as articulated by Dietrich Bonheoffer
might continue to inspire us
but isn’t voiced quite right for 2017.

Imagining God as a cosmic ecosystem though,
given what we know about biology
and environmental science, might work for us.

God as an improvisational jazz musician,
riffing on familiar as well as unique patterns
but always unexpected and mysterious,
instead of than controlled and rationalistic – that
might work for us.

But keeping our faith vibrant in the midst
of a highly secularized culture,
requires us to be intentionally
and continually reflect on our experiences –
“How could I know the moment I moved
within except in retrospect?”

Being open to new experiences is vital,
but then reflecting on them
and allowing those experiences to form and change us
is also crucial.

The fact is,
mostly I do not care any more what Luke
wanted his audience to believe,
and mostly I do not care any more
how our understanding of this text
has changed over time.

What I care about
is whether or not this text
speaks to us
now –
in the highly global,
rapidly shifting
technological environment
that threatens us
with a wide array of human-sourced hazards.

What, if anything,
can Cleopas and company
shout to us
that we can still hear
across the chasm of time?

It is the reminder
that when we keep our imagination fresh,
our hearts and minds open,
and we actively attempt to adapt
to the changes taking place around us,
that God will be able to pierce even our resistance.

Mostly in retrospect,
we will be able to see the shadow and outline
of a presence we didn’t quite register at the time,
and we will be amazed and grateful.

Knowing it,
whenever we see it,
will change us
and keep us supple, adaptive, and open.

That is as true for a congregation
as it is for each of us as individuals.

So fire up
the imagination;
open up
the heart and mind;
start stretching now
and get that spiritual muscle flexible.

We’ve got change to ride
and it’s a bull!

Proper 26 C: A Sense of Abundance & a Garden of Gratitude

by

Texts for Preaching

“Isn’t the Creation Wasteful?”
by Helder Camara

Lord
isn’t your creation wasteful?
Fruits never equal
the seedlings’ abundance.
Springs scatter water.
The sun gives out
enormous light.
May your bounty teach me
greatness of heart.
May your magnificence
stop me being mean.
Seeing you a prodigal
and open-handed giver
let me give unstintingly
like a king’s child
like God’s own.

Gospel: Luke 19:1-10

Sermon

We wouldn’t know it
from the way it gets told in the churches
but the Gospel is a manifesto of class warfare.
The Gospels, especially Luke,
are full of stories about God’s activity
among ordinary human beings
told from the bottom of society up,
not down from thrones or the head of the dinner table.
UNLIKE our own political discourse
and public myth making,
the Gospels and the rest of the Bible,
are full of self-critique
and honest confessions of wrong done with malice.

Odd little Zacchaeus is an example.
We get fixated on the fact that Zacchaeus
was short and climbed a tree,
but the action hovers around his social standing
not his height when he is standing up.
The folks telling this story hated Zacchaeus.

He was a collaborator.
Zacchaeus was like one of those Vichy French
that collaborated with the Nazis
and got fat doing it.
Or closer to home,
a greasy executive of a credit card company
getting rich off of obscene usury
from people that can’t really afford it.
You get the picture; he was hated.

When Luke tells us Zacchaeus was a tax collector,
he doesn’t mean someone that works for the IRS.
A tax collector in the Roman system of occupation
was a local that squeezed his neighbors
like a loan-shark break knuckles.

Tax collectors went around exacting whatever the Roman’s charged at the time,
but were also allowed to charge excess
to pay themselves and their cronies.
It was a despicable act of self-enrichment
at the expense of neighbors.

Luke tells us that Zacchaeus
was the “chief” tax collector.
He was the guy
over all the other guys that everyone hated.
He was therefore the most hated guy.
Then, just to make sure we get it,
Luke says, “and he was rich.”

Do you hear the class warfare now?

This story does not come from patricians in Rome
or the small niche of well-off Judeans,
it was a story told by hard scrapple peasants
who hated anyone rich
and especially those who got rich from Rome
at their expense.

But the storyteller understands
such hatred is not pretty.
In fact, that class hatred also becomes a target
in the story.
To everyone’s dismay,
the hero of the story, Jesus,
picks Zacchaeus to hang out with.

But there is even more here to read between the lines,
and to see underneath the obvious.

To eat at the table of a tax collector
was not just socially obnoxious
and a clear betrayal of class solidarity,
it was spiritually impure.
Tax collectors mixed with pig-eaters, heathen,
and made themselves religiously impure doing so.
They had to interact with gentiles
and exchange money with them,
and enter into their homes and establishments.
Tax collectors were therefore filthy and dirty
and not to be socialized with
by those who cared anything about their standing
with the temple or with peers.

By going to hang out with Zacchaeus,
and actually eating a meal at his table,
Jesus was violating social, spiritual, and religious taboos
more powerful than any social norms we have today.

We can hear the outrage and dismay
in the tone of the story
even two thousand years later,
translated into an alien language,
and filtered through multiple historic cultures.
“Jesus, what are you doing with Zacchaeus?”

Then the storyteller does something interesting.
He or she does not tell us what happened
but simply shows us what happened.
Zacchaeus changed.
We do not get to know anything other than that:
Zacchaeus changed.

He gave back what he extorted from people,
and gave away half of what he had
to those who had nothing.

That is all we know.
Jesus ate with him and he changed.

We don’t even get to know
if that changed how people viewed Zacchaeus
or if they went on hating him.
We don’t know if he stopped being a tax collector.
All we know is that Jesus ate with him
and at least on that one day,
Zacchaeus changed from despicable to generous.

Seeing you a prodigal (Oh God)
and open-handed giver
let me give unstintingly.

Man, is that difficult –
the Camara poem is likewise haunting in its challenge.

Obviously it is more difficult for some
than for others,
but for everyone
there are times when giving our stuff away
is like trying to slide a heavy couch over carpet.

In other words,
lots of grunting and groaning
just to pry a little bit out of us.

But the universe is not a zero-sum game.
We often act like it is;
we act like anyone who gets something
gains it at our expense,
as if we live in a world of scarcity
that is necessarily a dog-eat-dog environment.
That is the way we act,
and it is the way we have set the stage
for the life we live,
but that is NOT the way of the Creation.

In the world God made
there is abundance
and the problem is not scarcity
but distribution.
We muck up the abundance
by hoarding and over-accumulation,
and the refusal to distribute much of anything equitably.

But my saying that won’t convince you of abundance
if what you see is scarcity,
and what you fear is loss,
and what you want is absolute security.
Nevertheless, examples of Creation’s abundance
drip from every medicated leaf of the rain forest,
and well up in the sands of every desert
within which minions of miraculous creatures
live and work and play
in that oven-baked crust of the earth.

We cannot turn our head
or look beyond our nose
without witnessing abundance
where we assumed scarcity –
unless of course,
we simply do not want to see it.

Something about God, and the agents of God,
causes us to change and see it.
I think it has to do with what we see
when we encounter God,
that we may not have seen before.

For some people,
after some moments of holy shock and awe,
it is a lifetime change,
while for others it is a momentary change.
But there is something about the presence of God
or being in the presence of an agent of God,
that changes us.

We suddenly get more generous than ever before.
We suddenly get less scared and more open.
We suddenly see the ill effects of our own behavior
in ways we never quite recognized before.
We suddenly want to be different
and make up for what we’ve done.
We suddenly listen to the angels of our better nature
and live out beyond our self-interest.
We suddenly,
when standing in the presence of God
or an agent of God,
want and need
to be different than we have been.

We could speculate all day long
and far into the night,
why God has that effect on us
but there is really no point.

Rather, we can simply recognize that such change
is part of the physics of God
and do what we can to position ourselves
to be open to God’s presence when it comes.
We can scurry up a tree and wait
or stand by the road and wait
or enter into a yoga position and wait
or come to a place like this and wait.

There is nothing we can DO
to make God or the agents of God come our way,
but we can prepare ourselves to be open
when it happens.

We can DO the things we need to do
to open ourselves to the actual and ordinary presence
of God in our midst, and so prepare ourselves
to accept the change that happens
when we encounter God.
We cannot make God present
but we can prepare ourselves to be open
to God’s presence when it comes.

While there a million ways
to prepare ourselves to be open,
I am going to name just two today,
in reference to Luke and Camara: Abundance and gratitude.

We know fear is a powerful emotion
and it is probably the primary cause of blindness
when it comes to perceiving abundance.

Lord
isn’t your creation wasteful?
Fruits never equal
the seedlings’ abundance.
Springs scatter water.
The sun gives out
enormous light.
May your bounty teach me
greatness of heart.
May your magnificence
stop me being mean.

We can train ourselves to see abundance
instead of fearing scarcity.
It is a practice like anything else.
When our frame of reference is NOT self-interest
it is much easier to see abundance.

When our self-interest
is merely one of our vantage points
instead of our only or primary lens
then we begin to see things all around us
that we never saw before.
That is what we need to do
to see abundance where previously
we feared scarcity.
It is darn near miraculous how it works.
You probably know that already.

Extracting our self-interest from the picture
suddenly reveals abundance in the background.

The other thing is gratitude.
It is incredibly difficult
to feel both gratitude and fear
at the same time.
It’s actually kind of weird,
like patting your head and rubbing your tummy:
it can be done, but it is not easy.

Gratitude for what we have,
or have had,
or have seen and done and known,
is an experience that is at one and the same time
past tense,
present tense,
and future tense.
It is a vibe
that resonates from wherever we are standing
and moves outward
to encircle where we have been.

Gratitude is down right spooky in its power
because it can start as something small
and grow to encase the moment before we even know it.
And that is all the room gratitude needs
in order to grow and expand –
just a tiny little note or peapod
within the heart.

So the practice of standing in vantage points
that have little or nothing to do
with our own self-interest
will give us the vision we need
to perceive abundance
where previously we feared scarcity.

And even a pinpoint of gratitude
within the arid land of resentment within our hearts
will sprawl into a vine that takes over
and changes us from the inside out.
Whether we are Zacchaeus
or those who hate Zacchaeus,
a sense of abundance
and a garden of gratitude
will open us to encounter God
or the agents of God
when they are present.
And when that happens
we change.

 

Trinity in Time of Pandemic

Our vision…to be known in the community as a welcoming home to everyone, responding effectively to the needs of our community, in collaboration with fellow Episcopalians and other faith communities

Our mission…to strive in our daily life and parish life to respect the dignity of every human being, and to treat each person entering our doors as if that person is Christ.

We are striving to be as open as the table Jesus hosted, in solidarity with the people of Geneva, and an accessible partner to others who share our sense of the gospel.

It also means we have opened ourselves to the future, and not only moved but adopted a new way of being church from the more traditional model. Join us at Trinity Place, 78 Castle Street in downtown Geneva, NY.

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

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

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

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

Trinity’s historic building and our adaptive reuse plan has been named and embraced by The Landmark Society of Western New York. Among thousands of worthy historic sites and projects, Trinity’s was selected. Follow this link to read more: https://landmarksociety.org/2019-five-to-revive-announced/

Visit “savetrinity.org” which tells the exciting story of historic re-use striving to be born. You can help us save this magnificent building by visiting savetrinity.org and signing a letter of support! Thank you.

https://www.savetrinity.org

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