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Proper 25A 2017: A Non-random Act of Kindness – Lower the Toilet Seat

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Link to Matthew:https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2022:34-46

The Liturgical Poem for This Week:

From “The Forms of Knowledge”
by Kenneth Patchen

Calling to each other across the graves,
the beautiful and strong whom
horror eats, whose bones are already
bleached in city deserts, whose stars
and moons bestride another world –
these, these few, these holy –
they are not drowned by the great white rains
of this winter; they are not trampled
by the horses of murder and death;
instead, they try to live above life,
as the birds above their flying,
as the dead beyond their dying.

Leviathan’s scales sparkle in the heavens
and the whole fist of the universe
turns on the enraptured spit of God.
Through the flames I can see the lowered faces
of creatures that watch us in amused love.
We live on only one side of the world.

Sermon

There are hints today –
whispers up the sleeve if you can hear them,
of saints and stewardship to come.
We’ll just let those things roll in slowly and
mosey in with the tide of November.

As today’s poem by Kenneth Patchen concludes,
“we live on only one side of the world.”

We imagine,
or think unconsciously if we don’t imagine,
that everything we see and do
is all there is.
We imagine,
but not very imaginatively,
that what we are aware of
and what we can smell and taste,
and what we can think about and know,
is all there is.

Meanwhile,
“…Leviathan’s scales sparkle in the heavens
and the whole fist of the universe
turns on the enraptured spit of God.
Through the flames I can see the lowered faces
of creatures that watch us in amused love…”

Still, the distance between knowing and unknowing,
between the lustrous and luscious
heaven on earth, and the earth of daily bread,
is love.

Even a small love, as poet Ann Sexton mused.
According to her, a thin vein
is all God needs to cover that distance,
a thin vein with even a small amount of love in it.

That is the distance
between those creatures who watch us
with loving eyes and kindly smiles,
their faces smashed against of the glass of heaven.
Only a thin veil away;
only a thin vein with a small love in it.

As a preacher in a techno-world,
where religion is irrelevant at best,
and in which preachers are pie-in-the-sky schemers,
it is difficult for me to stand up here
and preach about “love” without feelig self-conscious.

From Billy Sunday to Elmer Gantry
every Christian bible-thumping crook
has tried to cash in on love.
Yet underneath
the muck of self-interested misuse and abuse of love;
and underneath
the fluffy clouds of yellow smiley-faces that trivialize love;
and underneath
the blackwater of despair and cynicism from those who have
given up on love;
underneath all of that detritus,
there is powerful and practical wisdom
in those two little sentences from Jesus.

While on this side of the glass,
in the cottoncandy Valentine’s Day world
of Disney and Wal-mart,
love is a noun.
But in that teaching of Jesus,
rooted in the rich moist soil of Moses,
love is a verb.

While we write, sing, and speak of love as a feeling,
an emotion to be consumed,
Jesus speaks of love as an action that embodies
one’s total posture toward another person.
Love is concrete
and muscular –
and as such,
sums up Torah from Jesus’ point of view.

To get persoal, even homely,
my mom taught me about love as a verb.
It caused me no small amount of consternation at the time,
but through the wisdom of years
I have found myself grateful more times than I can count.

My mom’s first commandment was be considerate.
She was fanatical about it.
She convinced me, slowly and over time,
that being considerate is a core requirement of being loving.
I will offer one, very humble and earthy example
I often inject into pre-marital conversations
with those who are about to be married.
To the husband-to-be I say,
if you leave the toilet seat up and don’t flush,
the message is clear:
You are not thinking of the person who comes after you,
and if you are, you expect them to clean up after you.
That is not loving.

It is only a small pithy example,
but it points to love as a verb –
love embodied in actions more than words.
Even small actions, even a thin vein.

In this sense, love is sacramental:
and outward and visible sign
of an inward and invisible reality.

In the end,
and from the beginning,
all we ever have is the opportunity to love.

We begin life as mostly hairless,
drueling, and utterly dependent.
All we have throughout those months and years
of infancy and beyond, is the opportunity to love
and to receive love.

In the end, as we drift toward death,
we are once again mostly hairless,
drueling, and utterly dependent.
And still, all we have is the opportunity to love
and receive love.

In betweeen, love is the best of what we have:
the opportunity to love
and accept the love that is offered us.

It is easy to conceptualize:
Let us imagine that the stock market crashes –
it is not so hard to imagine, is it?
The banks close – all of them.
ATM machines flash, “System Shut Down.”
There is no money, other than what is in your pocket
or squirreled away under your mattress.
When the money is gone,
your job, if you have one, is not far behind.
Or your pension,
or your social security, or your IRA.

When our job, the work or profession
through which our identity was nurutred;
and our money, the means
by which we purchase safety and security
and everything else big and little;
are gone, what we have left
is the opportunity to love and be loved.
It is so simple and true
that it seems ridiculous to say out loud.

Let’s take it an uncomfortable step closer
to that glass veil of heaven.

Imagine being in bed
during the last days of life.
Our muscles shriven,
unable to walk or even void by ourselves.
It is not a very pleasant thought, I realize,
because such dependency is the worst of all indignities.
And yet, as life fades from our body
like the thickening gray of the evening sky,
here come our family and friends.
Gathered around the bed,
they smile and make small jokes from time to time,
an effort to clear away the pain.

They fight back tears
and their eyes grow more swollen by the hour.

What is left then, at the end of our life?
The very same thing that was present at the beginning
when our eyes first opened
or we learned to walk and fall down again:
the opportunity to love and be loved.

To love God
withour whole life, and to love ourselves
and one another,
with the service of our body,
is not just the greatest thing, it is the only thing.

To love God with our life,
is measured by what we do with our relationships,
and by what we do with our money,
and by what we do with our labor,
and by what we do with the talent we have been given.
All of it reflects our love of God…or not.

To love God with our lives
and to love ourselves and one another,
is to be guided by the knowledge that our choices
are never just about us.

It should give us pause, as a church and religion,
that when Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment,
he did not answer:
To believe in God,
or believe in the Trinity,
or believe Jesus was the son of God,
or believe in any doctrine or creed.

Rather, Jesus said to love God
with our whole being, that is,
body, mind, and spirit.

We are to love our neighbor,
not for what he or she can do for us,
but as ourselves –
as if our neighbor is us.

Jesus said loving God is physical,
and that God loving us is mystical.

I am not saying anything new here.
We all know,
deep in the pit of our stomach,
that this religion of ours is about action –
about doing love, not believing in love;
about doing love, not defining love;
about doing love, not feeling love.

And right here, on this doorstep,
is where I am going to leave the baby today.

If you were to ask me
why I am a Christian, instead of one of the other
religions I studied, explored, and found compelling,
it would come down to this:
We are incarnational.

We know,
and we experience,
and we act out – with ritual and in our lives –
the improbable love of God
that requires only a thin vein,
and a small love
to bridge the distance
or lift the veil between us.

In the world of religious ideas,
the notion that God is embodied –
is present in human flesh,
probably seems nutty and ridiculous.
And I am not talking about Jesus,
I am talking about God embodied
in your flesh
and mine.

That our flesh and blood is good and wonderful,
precisely because we embody God,
is a unique idea.

That the earth and stars and oceans
are filled with gooness
rather than the source of suffering,
is a strange idea to millions of other people.

That food and sex and emotional intimacy,
and the sensual beauty of art and music
are meant for our joy –
and not simply as a lesser reflection
of the joys of heaven,
would seem a peculiar idea to millions of other people.

But that is what we claim.

God is incarnate in human life, we say,
and not our life only,
but animate and inanimate substance,
seen and unseen,
throughout the entire Cosmos –
all of it infused with God.

We claim that and more
when we embrace the love of God with our whole selves,
including our woeful, imperfect
yet fantastic bodies.
We claim that and more
when we embrace the possibility and desireabilty
of loving our neighbor as if loving ourselves.

God’s love
and our love of God
are incarnational: in the body,
our body.

The Creation is an act of God’s love.
The presence of God among us,
even here and even now,
is an act of God’s love.

Likewise, how we spend and share our money;
and how we use and share our resources;
and how we live out our relationships;
and how we act toward others, even those we do not know;
and how we care for others, even those we do not see; and, how we care for the earth, even the air we do not breathe;
all of that is the measure of how we love…or not.

You see, our religion is mystical at its core.
But it is both mystical AND phsyical.
To love God with our whole self
is a mystical experience.
To pop open and suddenly know
that we are less than a sub-atomic particle of God,
and still feel loved sweetly and serenely by that same God,
is a mystical experience.

It can happen when we stand in the presence
of the awesome natural wonders around us,
and it can happen all of a sudden in the heart of worship,
and it can happen when least expected
in the darkness of despair,
or in the silence of prayer,
or at any time or place.

When suddenly we know,

know it in our bones
or in the soft tissue holding our heart,
that God loves us,
it is a mystical experience.
It need not be big and flashy.
Even a small love coursing through a thin vein
is enough to deliver such a mystical moment.

And that is the astounding physicality of our religion:
that the mystical presence of God,
everything bugeoning on the other side of that veil
between us and God,
is made known in our bodies.

And we embody it, make it known,
with our bodies
when we commit small acts of love.

It is astounding; it is
fantastical; it is an
amazing and a speechless
wonder.

 

 

Proper 21A: Forgiveness Without Repentence

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“Is God among us or not?”

This screeching lament
from the freshly escaped slaves
encountering the down-side of freedom,
is not to be confused with the opening refrain
of our Eucharistic Prayer from Kenya:
“Is God present? God is here;
Is Christ among us? God is here;
Is the Spirit moving? God is here.”

But honestly, there is not much distance
between proclamation and lament.
Take an acclamation of faith
or declaration of hope, like, “God is here,”
and add a pinch of severe thirst
or extreme discomfort,
or any kind of fearful deprivation,
and the declaration becomes a curse.
The distance from light to darkness,
hope to fear,
satiation to deprivation
is measured in seconds and even nanoseconds,
because that is how fast our situation can change.

Our attitudes toward God are likewise as vulnerable –
that is just who we are.

There is almost no point in apologizing for it
or pretending to repent,
because our attitude can turn on a dime
and even if we aren’t acting surly and hostile now,
we will, or would,
should circumstances become altered.

In all fairness to the people in the Exodus story,
if you have ever been in the desert with limited water,
then you know the panic of thirst.
Ironically, thirst is akin to running out of air under water.
Thirst in the desert
causes the walls of your mouth
to become like dust,
and you become desperate to gulp,
and all you want is to drown your tongue and throat.

“What the heck am I supposed to do with these people?”
Moses grimaces to God, and
it is more of a statement than a question.

To Moses’ people, it is a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately
kind of story.

I knew a guy who owned an international business,
a high-end, boutique kind of manufacturing enterprise
that was recognized as the best of its kind around the world.
Still, the competition was fierce.

Business being business,
his customers were driven by their bottom line,
and it mattered little that he had filled their need last year.
The question was always what he would do this year,
and for how much?
It was a one-way relationship
in the sense that he was always catering to their needs
and never the other way around.

So in the Exodus story,
when the people are thirsty,
it is of little consequence to them
that God has just performed panoramic miracles
that totally altered the face of the geopolitical landscape.
Even though God literally picked up thousands of slaves
as a lioness carries her cubs by the scruff of the neck,
to those thirsty people it was: “what have you done for me lately?”

I mean, really, who has ever done enough for you?

We are voracious,
and we are made that way.
If we eat too much, our stomach stretches outward
and the next time we’re hungry
we’ll want even more than before.

That story from Exodus is as much about us
as it was about those thirsty dust bunnies in the Bible.
It never ceases to amaze me,
that a three-thousand-year-old story
can deliver a crystal clear snapshot
of our own human character,
that has finally brought us global climate change
and a toxic environment.
We are “never enough” kind of creatures,
and on top of it, “never good enough” people;
and apparently it has always been that way.

As that delicious Paula Gunn Allen reading says about stories,
Biblical narratives tell us who we are,
where we came from,
and occasionally, how we got to be this way.
Of course, in our materially-driven,
science-only,
twenty-first century mindset,
those stories get dismissed as fairy tales
while stories from Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky
are allowed to retain truth.

But I digress, sort of.

What has authority to speak truth
pops up in the gospel story too –
yet another narrative that offers us a mirror.

The religious authorities in Matthew’s story,
know who and what their authority comes from
and they quiz Jesus about his authority.

The religious authorities operated on coercive power,
as presidents, and generals, and
CEOs do in our world.
Coercive power was and is,
the ability to force people to act a certain way,
or manipulate, move, and
restrict certain resources
as deemed appropriate.

The religious authorities in Jesus’ day
were granted authority by birthright –
being born into one of the reigning priestly families.

By birth they were given the resources and responsibility
to operate the Temple,
which was considered to be the one and only place
from which the power of God was exercised.

Today we would call that a monopoly.

As the story goes, the religious authorities
test Jesus with a question.
It is actually not a real question,
because by asking it, their intention is to belittle Jesus.
They know how much authority they have
and in comparison, anything Jesus tries to say,
will seem anemic.
“So little man, what’s your authority?”

But Jesus is smarter than to simply answer tit for tat.
When you are smaller and weaker than the bullies,
you have to get fast and agile, and sneaky.
You see, John the Baptist
was far more popular than Jesus,
and the person-on-the-street
believed John the Baptist had been a messenger from God –
a prophet.

In short, John had the authority of God
while the religious authorities only had coercion.
That is why King Herod had John beheaded,
because the authority of God was too powerful
and threatened the King’s power.

So, if the Temple priests diminished John’s authority
they would have less credibility and therefore less authority,
in the eyes of the people.
If they confirmed John as a prophet,
then they would have the wrath of King Herod
down upon themselves.
Oops.

So Jesus won’t answer their question
but he will tell them a story.
There it is again – the power of story.

So the point of Jesus’ story is a hot poker for us too.
As I have said before, the religion of Jesus’ day
was all about purity.
Even John the Baptist was all about purity,
he just challenged the Temple priesthood’s monopoly
on the ability to forgive and heal violations of purity.

The religion of Jesus’ day orbited around the question
of how to remain pure
when the slightest violation of purity rules
made one unclean.
To be clean was the moral and religious task at hand,
and was enormously important.

If you were not clean,
and if you did not do anything to purify yourself,
then you could not remain in association
with those who were righteous.
And remember, the covenant with God
was communal not individualistic.
Individualism had not appeared
on any scene in human history yet,
and the idea of personal salvation would not show up
for another thousand years or so.

So an individual needed to remain in communion
with the community of faith.

But eat the wrong food,
or eat the right food at the wrong time,
or eat the right food with the wrong person,
or any combination of the above,
and you became unclean.

But purity and impurity
were scrupulously delineated by more than consumption.
Touch, ever so slightly,
a woman while she was on her menstrual cycle,
and you became unclean.
Touch a dead body, and you became unclean.
Enter the house of a gentile, or any unclean person,
and you became unclean.
Have a blemish on your skin – even a simple zit –
and you were unclean.
Touch someone who was considered diseased,
and you were unclean.

And the size or degree of your violation
did not really matter –
impurity was impurity regardless of degree.
The nature of rehabilitation and recovery
varied by the degree of violation,
but not the requirement to get treated
before being allowed to return to communion
with the religious community.

There was nobody more unclean in Jesus’ day
than tax collectors and prostitutes.
Matthew uses them as a metaphor for the worst of the worst.
Both tax collectors and prostitutes
worked with Gentiles –
they were collaborators with the Roman oppressors
and to do so, they had to violate the rules of separation
from Gentiles.

Tax collector did not refer to the big money guys
who owned and operated the structures of taxation.
It referred to the middle men,
the agents of the big money guys.
They were the people hired to collect the taxes
and they were commissioned with whatever they could gouge
from the people they collected taxes from.

In other words,
if someone owed a 2% tax on their flock of sheep,
the standard rate by the way,

then the tax collector might charge them 4%.
They were racketeers and extortionists,
the bagmen for the taxing authority.

So tax collectors were considered extremely unclean
and morally diseased.

Prostitutes, besides engaging in sexual activity
that was expressly forbidden,
did so with Gentiles – who were likely their primary customers.

Roman soldiers and civil servants
were the principle people with money
and so they were the target market of prostitutes.

Tax collectors and prostitutes were considered, ‘as Gentiles.’
They were permanently stained
by their despicable service
to the Romans and other unclean populations.

So, the idea of eating with tax collectors and prostitutes,
not to mention a wide variety of lesser
but still obvious violators of purity laws,
was an interesting one-upmanship on John the Baptist.

You see, John had subverted the Temple monopoly
by using baptism to cleanse people of their impurities.
Instead of depending upon the Temple,
with its expensive means of reconciliation –
requiring as it did the purchase of sacrificial animals
or payment to the clergy –
John offered baptism that cost nothing
in terms of money and time.
It was a brilliant sabotage of Temple authority.

But Jesus went a step further.
By hosting an open table
to which all manner of people were invited,
tax collectors and prostitutes included,
he seemed to be saying that people were forgiven
even before they asked for it.

Jesus offered acceptance and community to the unclean
even before they acknowledged their guilt.

The festivities to which Jesus invited the unclean,
or in which he participated as a guest,
were not dour, begrudging, dinners with relatives.
They were parties.
They were feasts.
They were festive celebrations.
Unclean, toxic people yucking it up with Jesus –
that is what it would have looked like
to those watching from the outside.

So we have these stories
that hold a mirror up, and
in which we can see ourselves more clearly.
Old stories, smudged by time
and discredited by our twenty-first century,
one-dimensional thinking, as Marcus Borg says it.

They remind us of our propensity to judge God and
the goodness of the world around us,
by the current state of our own comfort and satiation.
In other words, we evaluate good and bad
on the basis of extreme self-interest.
And these stories also push us to see God,
not as the source and means of meeting our needs
and insuring our self-interest,
but rather, as a lover of souls with an open embrace,
one who invites us to do likewise.

So we can put up barriers and restrict access
to people from other parts of the world;
and we can insulate ourselves by class, ethnicity, and race;
but we cannot do those things
and still claim to be faithful followers of Jesus,
or that we are upholding the spiritual practice
he commended to us.

Stories tell us who we are,
where we came from, and
how we got to be this way.
That is the power of story.

And biblical stories, perhaps even especially
the Jesus stories,
remind us who we are
and whose we are;
and they also show us
when we have strayed far away
from the truth and love we claim.

 

 

 

Proper 15 2017: Learning From A Perfectly Human and Imperfect Jesus

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Link to text for preaching (Gospel of Matthew): http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=155

This sermon, like the story in Matthew that we heard,
is bound to challenge an assumption or two
and make some, if not all of us, uncomfortable…
maybe even angry.
You can let me know.

You and I are sealed in an invisible,
tamper-resistant chrysalis
enveloping us as a second skin.
Most of the time we don’t even know it.

We get out of bed,
shower and dress,
eat a bowl of gruel
or feast on a sumptuous breakfast,
and all the time we are surrounded
by this soft, pliable membrane
so strong it protects us
from innumerable injuries
and incalculable harm.

This invisible substance
is a synthetic weave of
thousands and thousands and thousands
of ordinary assumptions.

Many of the assumption we wear were inherited,
given by others who feathered our nest with them.
Some of the assumptions were given to us
by contemporaries, and some
garnered from our own personal experience.

Let me throw out a few easy examples.
A bank is a safe place to keep money.
A gray sky means rain.
Certain kinds of people should be avoided.
Kale is good for you but tastes terrible.

Our assumptions may or may not be true
but we act as if they are.
They often form the lines of the coloring book
we live within, or try to anyway.
We make thousands of assumptions every day
without even thinking about it –
we have to in order to get by.

Some people navigate their entire lives
by the assumption that people are out to get them.
Other people assume everyone deserves
the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise.

The fact is, neither assumption is factual;
neither one universally true or false.

Some assumptions are stronger
or more elastic than others,
while some are more dominant
even than our own experience.

For example, there is an age-old,
Christian theological assumption that God is perfect,
and divine perfection means
God is unchanged and unchanging.
But stack that up against our scientific
and flesh and blood experience of Life:
Every thread of knowledge we have
about the Creation,
is that everything changes.
We know, in fact,
that life is evolving,
forever adapting,
and even mutating.
So, if the very nature of the Cosmos
to which God gave birth,
is change,
then the assumption that God is unchanging
seems odd.

An unchanging, unchangeable God
would defy our experience.
But still, it is a pernicious assumption
to which popular Christianity clings to,
as if someone flailing overboard with a lifebuoy.

That is how powerful assumptions work.

The story in Matthew’s Gospel is a wonderful example
of just how blinding our assumptions can be.
You see, for nineteen centuries
the common read on this story
was as an example of how benevolent Jesus was.
“SEE!” the previous preaching narrative went,
“Jesus even lowered himself to address the needs
of a common Canaanite woman.”

This story we heard today,
was lumped in with all those stories about Jesus touching lepers,
and engaging in risky behavior
in order to befriend or advocate for poor,
marginalized people.
In short, they were hero stories
that marked Jesus as the best of the best.

But something doesn’t add up
between the traditional interpretation of this
Matthew story, and the story itself.

It begins with Jesus ignoring the woman.
But that is not all.
His bigotry toward her is pretty obvious.
He as much as calls her a dog –
in fact, he does call her a dog.

Christian tradition ignored this obvious
and dark side of the story
because of an assumption:
that Jesus was perfect after all.

Jesus would not be so mean, it was reckoned,
but also, changing his mind mid-story
would suggest he had been wrong in the first place.
Our assumptions about Jesus
prevented us from embracing the story
as it was being told to us by Matthew.
The traditional interpretation was
that Jesus condescended
to meet the woman’s need,
and so it was an example of him humbling himself
because of his profound compassion.

But for the past fifteen years or so,
I have heard a new narrative about this story,
one that is not limited
by more traditional assumptions.
The new interpretation is based upon the assumption
of Jesus’ humanity instead of his perfection.
If Jesus was fully human,
as we have said in mainstream Christianity,
then he was also subject to human brokenness.

So if we presume that Jesus was truly human,
it means of course, he was imperfect.

Once we recognize his humanity,
we can read this story
in a way that makes more sense.
Here is an interpretation
that assumes Jesus was fully human.

A mother, desperate to save her child, accosts Jesus.
Now consider what we know
about the plight of peasants in those days.
There was no social safety net.
No medicine;
and without the do-re-mi,
not even access to spiritual healers.
It was a social caste system
that left poor women utterly powerless.

It was a society that placed children
on the absolute bottom rung of the ladder
where their value was measured
by their potential for labor,
and if a female child, for her marriageability.
As a matter of fact, a poor female child
possessed by a demon –
or with mental illness if you prefer –
was truly a life without value or worth.
She would have been completely vulnerable
to all forms of human cruelty.

The mother must have been beside herself;
woeful in her fear about what would happen
to the daughter she loved.

Most such mothers
would chase down any and all options.
So despite the social and ethnic wedge between them,
she goes after Jesus.
Clearly, she had already learned not to be too polite –
that would get her nowhere in the first century.
So she charges toward the crowd of men
and shouts.

That’s important: she shouts.
She yells at Jesus
to stop and have mercy.

I like the image here
of Jesus as a deer in the headlights.
He is accosted by a strange woman demanding mercy.

We should remember too,
that mercy was a special feature of his stump speech.
So, just to fix the scene in our imagination,
a yucky-poo woman begs Jesus for mercy
and the first thing Jesus does, is ignore her.
How human.

Ignore it and hope it goes away.
Haven’t we all done that before?

But his disciples did not allow Jesus
to follow an avoidance strategy.
Instead, they begged Jesus, and I quote,
‘get rid of her.’
“Uh, um, I’m not here to help Canaanites, lady.”
Jesus says, motioning her to move on.
“I was sent to help the lost sheep
among my fellow Galileans and Judeans.”

Again, let us remember
what Jesus has said just prior to this event,
at least in Matthew’s version of the story:
“…What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions…”

Something dark has just slipped from Jesus’ heart.

In fact, he pretty much contradicted with actions,
everything he had just preached with his words
only a little bit before.
Hypocrisy is pretty human too.
All of us have violated our own values,
and veered far off the walk of our talk.

But the question for Jesus –
and for us – is what will we do about it?

Now in the more traditional interpretation of this story,
the one that assumes Jesus was perfect,
this bit of nastiness
is regarded as a “test” of the mothers’ faith.
Of course it is – blame the victim.
Jesus was just testing her
(he didn’t really mean it).

But if instead, we assume Jesus was human,
in the same way that you and I are human,
we begin to realize he was subject
to the bigotry and prejudices of his own day,
just as we are to ours.

So instead of testing her,
the story reads more like a test of Jesus, that he fails:
“Go away lady, you are not my concern.”

But wait.
Give Jesus a break.
There are good reasons for Jesus to ignore her
and to want some immediate distance between them.

Judeans and Galileans
saw Canaanites as morally unclean,
socially despicable,
and ritually filthy.
Keeping a distance from such low-life
was integral to the practice of good faith.
For Jesus, social distance and bigotry,
in this case, was “good faith.”

Plus, she is an unattended woman
and so Jesus had plenty of reasons not to get close.
Social and religious policy dictated that men
not enter into conversation or deal with in any way,
an unrelated woman –
especially one that was not with a man.

Jesus just wants her to go away.

He does not want to help her.
He may even have been disgusted by her.
His compassion was not aroused, nor his mercy.
He was likely repulsed instead, and closed off.
And on top of all that,
everything in the culture justified and reinforced
his rejection of her.

That is the reasonable interpretation of this story
if we do not begin with the assumption
Jesus was perfect.

Now allow me to hit the pause button on this story,
and briefly take a peek into our story today.
(I did not pick this reading from Matthew by the way,
even though it could not be more apt
for this week of horrendous discourse
over the pro-white supremacy rally in Virginia).

I am not going to preach at Donald Trump.
Clearly nothing I could say will reach him
so it is pointless for me to subject you to that.

Nor are there any Confederate War hero statues
in Geneva, at least that I know of,
so some Northern know-it-all preacher
squawking about something going on elsewhere
is not our issue today either.

But for those of us here today who are white,
we do have a renewed opportunity
to reckon with ourselves
and one another –
and I do want to take that opportunity.

We have the opportunity to curl our fingers back
from pointing at anyone else;
and to stifle our criticism of any other
group, class, or race of people,
and look solely into our own prejudices,
and take stock of our own privilege,
and how our prejudices
and our privilege
have been used, by us and by others,
to marginalize people.

We have a renewed opportunity,
right now,
to once again recognize
that God created us as inter-dependent creatures
that need and require us to be in relationship
with one another for wellness.

We have a renewed opportunity,
right now,
to recognize that race is a social construct,
an erroneous assumption
that European and North American Caucasians
have used for several centuries
in order to justify our colonialist foreign policies;
and we have used race
to establish so-called social sciences
that elevate people with our skin tone
and ethnic background over others;
and in ways we haven’t even recognized yet,
we have used race to marginalize people.

We have a renewed opportunity
right now,
to dismiss the wasteful emotional ballast we call guilt,
about those things done and left undone
by previous generations,
and dig into our own current moment in history:
and look at ourselves,
at our own speech,
and at our own behavior,
and then make changes.

We have a renewed opportunity
right now,
to look at ourselves and talk about our prejudices
and our privilege,
and how we can walk into the future
with better behavior.

Jesus faced this same choice,
the same opportunity for renewal
as we have right now.
Let me end this sermon by observing what he did
and then maybe we can take our cue from Jesus.

For nineteen centuries,
in spite of our own experience that tells us
we all are all bigoted in some way,
and that we all carry with us prejudices of some kind,
the assumption of Jesus’ perfection
would not allow us to see and hear
what is actually happening in this story from Matthew.

We know darn well that our bigotry
and our prejudices
block mercy and cloud any impulse
toward compassion.
That is our experience…over and over and over again.
If we begin from that assumption
then this story takes a different turn.

It is a measure of the mother’s desperation
that she responded as she did:
“But Jesus, even the dogs
get to lick up crumbs
under the master’s table.”
Imagine the pride she had to swallow.
Imagine the anger and resentment
she had to manage
at the very moment she needed this man the most.

She did not believe she was a dog,
and certainly not her daughter.
Canaanites did not view Jews as their superiors
any more than modern day Palestinians do.
But she was desperate.

How many people and places
had she already tried
and yet her daughter still lived at the edge of survival?

It is her willingness
to subject herself to degradation
that finally pierces Jesus’ bigotry.

The woman’s fierce love and devotion
has revealed something to Jesus
that he did not want to see in himself.
Jesus knows in his bones,
that there are no dogs
when it comes to the love of God.
Jesus knew above all else
that God is compassionate and merciful
and that therefore,
his spiritual task
was to be compassionate and merciful also.

The woman held up a mirror of sorts
and in it, Jesus could see and hear
his own moral failure.

We all have a moment like that, don’t we?
Don’t we have a little hidden box of horror moments
when our own prejudice and bigotry,
or lack of compassion and mercy,
have been revealed – even if only to ourselves?
Isn’t it powerful to see Jesus
with such a moment?
Even Jesus?

Pick a prejudice, any prejudice.
Rich
poor
black
white
w.a.s.p.
Hispanic
Chinese
Muslim
Roman Catholic
Fundamentalist Christian
male
female
homosexual
heterosexual
transsexual
Iraqi
Israeli
Republican
Democrat…

If it is a prejudice, a bigotry,
then it dilutes our compassion
and tarnishes our sense of mercy.

That is the implication of this story from Matthew.
If we delete our assumption that Jesus was perfect,
and come to this story with eyes wide open,
then this story makes a lot more sense.

Opening our eyes
to our assumptions and prejudices
is a core spiritual task for any Christian.
Our assumptions usually close our eyes
and keep us from looking
for what we have not yet seen.

Opening our eyes
is a natural consequence
of removing assumptions
and the filmy cataracts coating our vision.

Not all of our assumptions are wrong,
and many of them protect and defend us
in ways we cannot even fathom,
but all assumptions are worth visiting,
and all assumptions can be examined for the impact
they have on our compassion and mercy.

Opening our eyes
means inspecting our assumptions
and reviewing their influence upon us.

Opening our eyes
in such a way that it frees our compassion and mercy
to encompass more and more people,
is a core spiritual task for every one of us.

Proper 10, 2017: Mad Farmer of the Cosmos

by

Link to Matthew 13:1-9; 18-23, today’s text: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+13%3A1-9%2C+18-23&version=MSG

There are some problems with 1st century agrarian wisdom
as the core narrative of a 21st century urbanized info-culture.
But that is what we have so let’s make the best of it.

Jesus’ parable about God as a whacko,
impetuous farmer
is awesome and spot on.
God is not OCD –
there is nothing about God
that is obsessive-compulsive
because, as we see, life is scattered
throughout this tiny little planet of ours – and perhaps across the cosmos.

Life, and stupendous, marvelous,
spectacularly awesome miraculousness
is everywhere and willy-nilly.

Life, love, and abundance is scattered;
thrown to and fro,
not planted in neat little rows.

God, it turns out, farms
with a higher degree of randomness rather than order.
I find that simply awesome – and strange.

Think on it.

God is not even an Amish farmer
who we might expect to at least
carefully plant within the lines of Nature.
But unlike the Amish, who harvest a prodigious yield
with only the bare strength and ingenuity
of humans and domesticated animals,
God’s creation now brings forth the bloom of Life
from Petri dishes,
and abundance flows from synthetics drugs
and hybrid energy sources.
Up, and up, and up it comes
percolating from mechanical extensions
of the human mind,
and mathematical models
reaching far beyond our limited capacities.
I find it simply astounding – and disconcerting.

God is most definitely not a Monsanto farmer either,
as if scrupulously planting by cost-benefit ratio
and slavishly chasing the highest productivity
for the least investment of capital and labor.

We see this unorthodox God in Evolution,
itself a much more trial-and-error system –
if even a “system.”
Evolution leaves behind a wake of victims, wastefulness,
and failure.

In Evolution, we can see that God
is spectacularly wasteful,
spilling abundance even in the face of scarcity.
I think this is simply amazing – if not unbelievable.

If Jesus’ parable is apt,
then God is indeed a lousy farmer –
indiscriminately tossing seeds wherever they land.
And, in fact, we see evidence of this everywhere.

When hiking in higher elevations above the tree-line,
where it is often as barren as a moonscape
and even the most athletic human
finds him or herself huffing and puffing and sucking air,
it is not strange to stop suddenly,
arrested by astonishment
from a sight seemingly miraculous.

Perhaps you have seen it too.
I saw it again yesterday,
at Chimney Bluffs on Lake Ontario.
The wind,
or a bird,
will have deposited a seed.

No, not in fertile soil,
but on a lip of a rock,
a flat space no bigger than a child’s hand.

There on barren stone,
a spoonful of soil like a layer of crumbs
where a cake once sat,
blooms a tender, brilliant flower.

How could something so lovely,
so beautiful and seemingly fragile,
eek out life
from so very little?
And yet there it is.
Awesome.

But that is not all.
Those who trod the painfully bleak paths
of human extremes,
will witness the same thing.

Go, venture toward the ragged and harsh plains
where gather the lives of victims –
those crushed and scarred by violence or neglect.

A child once brutalized by abuse,
routine violence or extreme neglect –
even from someone who should have protected them –
and instead of barren scar tissue in that grown-up child,
there also blooms joy and hope
as sweet as any gentler life could issue.

How is it
that all sweetness and gentleness
is not snuffed out by indifference or cruelty?
Under pain and betrayal
that would crush many of us –
that does in fact, crush most of those in its wake,
still there can and does bloom love
and loving-kindness more powerful than suffering.
Miraculous.

But we need not look only to
the magnificence of Nature
or in the intimacies in other people’s lives.

Even in our own lives,
yours and mine,
the cuts and scarring of deep grief, ordinary abandonment or neglect,
rejection,
hurt,
sorrow and wounding;
even in all of these
the mad farmer of the cosmos
has planted seeds.
They grow there, in the bleakness.

Even there, even in us,
we have witnessed the bloom of joy,
the blossoms of hope,
the tiger lilies of love,
without our own intention or effort tending them.
They just grow.
Incredible.

Lewis Thomas, the famous biologist
and one-time director of Sloan-Kettering Cancer
Institute urged,
that now and again we should direct our attention
away from the 20% of smokers who get lung cancer,
and be astounded and amazed by the 80% who do not.

Life and love and abundance
are remarkably resilient,
and we find example after example
of their relentless bloom
wherever we witness the debris of violence,
cruelty, neglect and abuse
on the landscape of human activity
or on the inscape of the human heart.

God seems utterly indifferent
to the borders we create for our neat little gardens.

We make,
and live our lives,
along well planned little rows.

We expect to harvest what we plant
and that it will grow where we planted it.
But often, very often,
that is not what happens.

We discover that what grows
is not what we planted
but something else.
And we encounter the fruits of our labor
in places we did not plant it.

Often when this happens, we reject it –
because we did not plant it
or because we did not plant it there.

We get angry and resentful
that it is not as we did it.

“It’s NOT how we planned it, God,
and by-god, we are not
going to harvest something we did not plant!”

And so we miss the awesome,
the miraculous,
the amazing and inspiring
that is growing all around us – and within us.

I want to end where I began:
to go back to that dilemma
of ancient agrarian wisdom
as the core spiritual narrative
for 21st century urbanized, commercialized,
and consumerized Christians.

We have made a mess of Jesus’ parables.
We have taken these little beauties
blooming among thorns and along the barren paths,
and tried to domesticate them.
But they are vibrantly wild products
of the mad farmer of the cosmos
that won’t be domesticated.

A parable
is a figure of speech
that bears one self-evident truth.

They are not secret rhymes or coded messages,
nor mystical puzzles with sublime punch lines.

They are blunt instruments
creating insight through blunt force trauma to the mind.
Jesus used parables to tell bald face truths
with no apology,
no need for spiritual guru’s
nor hired guns in priestly robes.

Over time Christianity,
like all religions,
learned the value of holding secret truths
and passing them out one at a time
to those who had demonstrated loyalty.

But Jesus told truths outright,
self-evident truths about God
and about life inside the human heart and mind.

For example,
the punch line for today’s parable
is the simple, homely little truth
that God is a lousy farmer.

God splashes holiness and love indiscriminately,
without concern for where it lands.
In contrast,
we parsimoniously, timidly, and fearfully
plant our love only where we believe it will grow
and bear fruit to our liking.

That is the parable.

We could get creative
and make up our own parables about the same thing:
God is like a whale blowing sea water like a geyser across the ocean.
We are like a squirrel hiding nuts for the winter.

God is like a sandstorm
burying everything in its path with generous abundance.
We are like a cautious whistle struggling to stay on tune.

God is like a flooding river
overwhelming its banks and changing the contours of the land forever.
We are like a church, offering communion and grace only to our members.

You see, there is no deep, dark, juicy secret here.
What we have is just a bald face truth.

We are being told
God is indiscriminant with the love that bears life,
so we should be little sloppier too.

That’s all.

It is not about being effective
it is about risking-taking with what matters.
It is not about being efficient
it is about radical hospitality.
It is not about cost-effectiveness
it is about reckless generosity.
It is not about conserving love
it is about scattering it.
It is not about getting it right
it is about practicing openness.
It is not about good order in all things,
it is about wild exuberance
in the midst of God’s amazing creation.

So…we are about to enjoy a lovely anthem;
a solo in which to pause and breathe in the moment.

I invite us to use it,
and allow the moment and
the mad farmer
to pry open our minds,
and shake loose our arms,
and limber up our fingers
and open wide our imaginations.
Where might you scatter your love?

On what little ledge might God have planted you –
someplace you may have had no idea about
until right now.

Where did you think there was not enough
nurture or abundance to grow or bloom?
Look again,
see if perhaps you’ve grown a little joy,
a sweet blossom of hope
you never imagined could have survived?

The mad farmer of the cosmos,
indiscriminant and radically generous
in astounding and stupefying ways,
makes our lives relentlessly open
to new scenarios
and new possibilities.
It’s crazy.

*Homage & thanks to Wendell Berry’s image of the Mad Farmer



 

 

Proper 9, 2017: Reversal Wisdom

by

“Come to me,
all you that are weary and
are carrying heavy burdens,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me;
for I am gentle and humble in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

 

Burdens and yokes – each of us have them;
and some of us, like old lumbering oxen,
are no longer even aware of the weight we carry
soldiering on as we do through life.

You know, Jesus was downright smart.
I mean really,
Jesus must have had a sky high emotional IQ –
able to read and understand people in depth.

Not only were his stories and parables penetrating,
rascally,
and insightful,
he also had reversal sayings and parables
that came in the back door
and smacked the listener upside the head.

The Good Samaritan – an oxymoron.
A camel threading the eye of a needle – an absolute impossibility.
Those who love their life will lose it and those who lose their life will gain it – a paradox.
Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth – an absurdity.

He seemed to talk like that all the time,
or at least within the residue of what we have left to us.
I am sure he said plenty of ordinary things too,
like: “Please pass the spuds.”
Surely he put his foot in his mouth more than once, too.

But on the preaching circuit he was pretty phenomenal.
And so it is, with today’s gospel from Matthew.

Imagine what that proverbial image meant to a peasant?

Seriously, a yoke that is easy,
a burden that is light?
A first century Galilean peasant,
burdened by debt and taxes to absentee Roman landlords,
would never have experienced a light burden
or an easy yoke – an oxymoron.
Oxymoron,
reverse logic,
Zen Koan…
a wisdom-teacher is waiting in the bushes of such ancient reversal-sayings,
ready to jump out and rattle the cage of our logic and open us up to new insights –
or slam our mind shut.
That’s what happens.

We can hear such proverbs and exclaim, “No way!”
But that is the beauty of Jesus’ way of teaching: open up the mind
and something new will drop in;
or if we choose to close the gate,
he will leave us alone.
An easy yoke?
A light burden?

I want to share a difficult storyabout burdens and yokes
and reverse-wisdom.

Before I became a priest, as you may know by now,
I worked in an inpatient Mental Health Unit.
It was a marvelously therapeutic environment –
a Camelot with a miraculous healing milieu
balanced precariously upon the politics of healthcare and psychiatry.
It has long since fallen into the realm of institutional psychotropic drug therapy, I am sure.

But for a time a healer was at the helm, a Gestalt Therapist
with a mere Master’s degree in the land of the MD’s and Ph.D.’s.
She was a wizard of wellness.

Her name was Claire
and she would gather her staff each week,
those with large and small academic degrees
along with aids who may have only had a high school degree.

She gathered us to do our own inner work through dream interpretation
and the exploration of our own angels and demons.

One thing she would frequently do is invite us to name the patient on the unit that week
who was most difficult for us to feel empathy toward.

As it turned out, the patient we had the most personal difficulty with
was also often the one who evoked something in us
that was personally threatening.
In other words, and ironically,
the patient that was the most difficult to empathize with
was usually the one that evoked the deepest sense of personal vulnerable within us.

It was never that obvious of course,
and we had to work hard to figure out the source of our vulnerability because,
let’s be honest, who wants to feel vulnerable?

There was one thirty-something woman
that I just could not warm up to and often could hardly even care about.

The second time she was admitted she was on suicide watch
because she had tried to kill herself several times,
and judging by her efforts
she was growing quite serious about it.
We took away her belt,
her shoelaces,
her sheets,
her razor,
we even made sure she didn’t have
a plastic dinner knife.
Anything she might use to harm herself was kept from her,
or was keenly observed while she had it.

The woman was very quiet and introverted
and she bothered me a lot.
She bothered me because
I could never connect with her,
and I never had any sense
that I knew what she was thinking or feeling.

One day on my shift,
as I walked past her room,
I saw her hanging from the ceiling.

She had tied one sleeve of her nylon parka
to the sprinkler pipe on the ceiling
and the other sleeve around her neck.
She was still alive and adrenaline shot through me.
I yelled for help and ran into her room.

My first instinct was to grab the parka
and desperately try to tear it apart,
as if a string of yarn.
I don’t know how long it took me to come to my senses,
it may have been immediately or a minute
before I grabbed her by the legs and held her up as I called for scissors.

People came running,
the coat was cut, I lifted her down
and off she was taken to the emergency room.
She lived.

Instead of being elated or even thinking about having saved a life, I was angry.
My anger lingered and it confused me.

She made me so angry.
Everything about her aroused my anger and in that anger, I felt guilty,
ashamed and…well, angry.

In our group that week with Claire it became obvious why:
She made me feel powerless.
An otherwise large, strong and competent person,
she reduced me to impotence.
My immediate impulse to try to tear a nylon parka
revealed how much I depended upon my physical strength.
The fact I could never connect with her
diminished faith in my intuitive capacity.
My inability to get her to respond to me
and my growing anger about it, revealed how important it was to me
to have other people respond positively to my efforts.

All my normal abilities and the sense of power they provided me
were thwarted in her presence, and were intensified by the experience
around her attempted suicide.
The way Claire invited me into that exploration was like Jesus inviting peasants
to imagine an easy yoke and a light burden.

She asked me to intensify my anger.

Rather than trying to ignore it or moderate it
or numb it
or intellectualize it,
she encouraged me to intensify it: make it bigger, she encouraged.
When I made that anger bigger
I could suddenly see it.
It was powerlessness I feared
and that which drew me into my fear made me angry.

The invitation to intensify the anger
instead of keeping it at a distance
was an unexpected strategy that led to insight.
Likewise, that was Jesus’ strategy.

What is your burden?
What is your yoke?

Put it on and feel it’s heaviness.
Put it on and feel how it captures and constricts you.
Feel it in your shoulders,
let your knees and hips feel its weight.
What are you carrying – intensify its weight if it helps.
In the encounter and relationship with that which burdens us
our spiritual journey ripens.

Let me repeat that.

In the encounter and relationship
with that which burdens us
our spiritual journey ripens.

But please, do not hear more than is being said.

This is not about courting pain and suffering,
as in some crazy, masochistic medieval spirituality.
It is not about those who are going through
intense sorrow and grief,
or the depths of despair and depression
making themselves feel worse.

This is about those of us who are cozy;
those of us who are within the normal walk we walk;
those of us doing just fine
with a few bumps here and there.
To those with a truly heavy burden
and a cruel yoke,
Jesus stretched out his arms
and invited them to use him
as a comfort station.

To those who lived in the mainstream,
supported by the current of economic comfort
and buoyed by social status
while leaving the multitude in their wake,
Jesus had in mind
an invitation to try on a yoke and burden.

But do not fear,
the invitation is not even for the biggest or heaviest of burdens,
nor the most restrictive or crushing of yokes.
You see, even the little ones
have something to show us.

Even the ordinary and everyday kind of burdens we feel,
or yokes we carry,
can deliver an insight to us:
that job that seems routine,
our home that feels like a money-pit;
relationships that are grinding or pinching,
those simmering conflicts or disagreements,
and the demands or neediness of others;
debt, grief, chronic physical pain, or emotional angst;
decisions we do not want to make;
losses we do not want to incur;
obligations we dread fulfilling;
inordinate needs or desires or fears that plague us…

What is your burden?
What is your yoke?

Whatever it is,
it is likely something you do not want to do,
and likely it evokes a range of emotions
you do not really want to feel.

But you see, when we do not want to feel it
we tend to do whatever we can to manage it
with the least amount of contact.
We distance it,
deny it,
detach from it,
suppress it.
That is our usual go-to response
when it comes to discomfort and pain.

But Claire’s wisdom,
and that of spiritual director’s
and other guides throughout generations,
is to enter into it
and intensify it
in the hopes of getting clear with it.

We are invited to venture into our burdens
and shoulder our yokes
and feel their weight,
so we can name what it is that weighs us down
and makes us leaden.
That is how we lighten our load,
and liberate ourselves from our yokes.

It is a Jesus paradox –
the kind of reversal wisdom
Jesus was famous for.

 

Trinity Place

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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