Jesus – Page 3

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

August 20, 2017 by Cam Miller

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

July 16, 2017 by Cam Miller

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 1^st century agrarian wisdom
as the core narrative of a 21^st 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 21^st 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

July 9, 2017 by Cam Miller

“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 Sunday 2017: The Tao of Jesus

June 11, 2017 by Cam Miller

TEXTS FOR PREACHING

Genesis 1:1-2:3, as told by Marc Gellman in “Does God have a Big Toe?”

“Partners”

Before there was anything, there was God, a few angels, and a huge swirling glob of rocks and water with no place to go. The angels asked God,

“Why don’t you clean up this mess?”

So God collected rocks from the huge swirling glob and put them together in clumps and said, “Some of these clumps of rocks will be planets, and some will be stars, and some of these rocks will be…just rocks.”

Then God collected water from the huge swirling glob and put it together in pools of water and said, “Some of these pools of water will be oceans, and some will become clouds, and some of this water will be…just water.”

Then the angels said, “Well God, it’s neater now, but is it finished?” And God answered…“NOPE!”

On some of the rocks God placed growing things, and creeping things, and things that only God knows what they are, and when God had done all this, the angels asked God, “Is the world finished now?” And God answered: “NOPE!”

God made a man and a woman from some of the water and dust and said to them, “I am tired now. Please finish up the world for me…really it’s almost done.” But the man and woman said, “We can’t finish the world alone! You have the plans and we are too little.”

“You are big enough,” God answered them. “But I agree to this. If you keep trying to finish the world, I will be your partner.”

The man and the woman asked, “What’s a partner?” and God answered, “A partner is someone you work with on a big thing that neither of you can do alone. If you have a partner, it means that you can never give up, because your partner is depending on you. On the days you think I am not doing enough and on the days I think you are not doing enough, even on those days we are still partners and we must not stop trying to finish the world. That’s the deal.” And they all agreed to that deal.

Then the angels asked God,

“Is the world finished yet?” and God answered, “I don’t know. Go ask my partners.”

Matthew 28:16-20

The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

SERMON

“What’s a partner?”
“A partner,” God answered, “is someone you work with
on a big thing that neither of you can do alone.
If you have a partner,
it means you can never give up,
because your partner is depending on you.”

Or, to put it in Gospel-language
instead of Marc Gellman’s Midrash:
“Go, therefore,
and bring all people to the water,
baptizing them
and teaching them
to live life as I would have.
And remember:
I am with you always,
your partner,
to the end of the age.”

Let’s try to hear these two voices,
God’s and Jesus’,
with the tonal quality and hushed ambiance
with which they are pregnant.

So retrieve, if you can, the echo
of an old sensation you have known,
when you felt so much love
that you could not even speak it.
Or a moment you felt so much joy
words not only failed you,
you knew that to speak any words
would diminish the feeling.

I hope there is a moment or two
within reach of your memory,
when you felt so full of God or life or love or joy
you just wanted to gush,
but could only stutter or flap your lips like a fish.
Now that kind of intensely infused ebullience
is not an every day occurrence,
but once in a while
we may get a full-to-the-brim amazement
for the graciousness of God
or the magnificence of life.

That is how I imagine Jesus felt
saying good-bye to his friends in Matthew.

Standing on the edge of knowing,
seeing but not quite touching
the God-of-all-creation,
he scrambled for last words.
They were not dying words,
but last words.
He had to say good-bye
when he knew it was not forever
even though it was final.
And it is no coincidence
that Jesus’ last words in Matthew,
the most Jewish of Gospels,
also mirror God’s first words –
at least the first words we put into his mouth in Genesis:
“And God looked around
at the stars
and the planets in their courses,
at the earth and oceans,
at microbes, insects, and even a bald ostrich trying to fly,
and God whispered in reverently hushed amazement:
“This is good.
This is really good.”

For God, who is apparently a god of few words,
such a short, terse proclamation
is downright ebullient.

As we might imagine it,
“This is really good,”
was so full of joy and love and laughter
that God, wanting to share the moment,
turned to the nearest animal
and impetuously shouted,
“Hey, be my partner in all of this, will you?”

And that was us.
And here we are, still working at it,
because when you’re a partner
you can never give up.

Now the only way we could ever imagine
that kind of moment with God,
in that particular way,
is because we have felt that way ourselves.

Maybe we have not felt that way
since Christmas Eve when we were five years old
and couldn’t sleep.

And maybe we have not felt that way
since we stood with our arms around our greatest love,
gazing into his or her eyes
with the taste of their lips on ours.

And maybe we have not felt that way
since the painful veil of childbirth had burst
and there upon our skin laid the freshest flesh on earth
to whom we could only coo.

And maybe we have not felt that way
since we stood silent at the edge of Letchworth canyon
or Seneca Lake at sunset,
or the mighty Niagara pouring itself through
the ancient narrowing funnel.
But sometime,
whenever it was,
we have known that sensation –
the wordless,
tearful,
unutterable ebullience
upon which creation was formed.

Truly, upon which creation was made.

Like a spoon balancing on the tip of a finger,
the creation balances upon God’s ebullience
and it courses through us,
filtered as it is
by the hard edge of pain we have known.
But nonetheless it there within us,
there to be called upon
like some ancient, deep oasis in the sand.

We need moments
and rituals and people
in our lives,
that remind us of our partnership
so that we don’t forget how to draw
upon that river of ebullience
deep down within our memory.

We can and do live long stretches of life
without that sensation of wordless joy,
and so we need special events,
and special people,
and special rituals,
to remind us it is there
and where to find it.

It being “Trinity Sunday”
there might be some expectation
that I would talk about the doctrine of the Trinity,
and proclaim or celebrate it.
But then again,
talking about the creator,
and the partner,
and their ebullience
may be all I have to say on the subject.

I think when we come to that imagination
about the beginning,
when God uttered in hushed amazement,
“This is really good”;
and when we try to hear
the reverential tone in Jesus’ voice
when he says good-bye;
that we need to remember something very basic.

Christianity is not a theology;
in fact, there a lots of theologies around.
Christianity is not a religion;
in fact, there are goo-gobs of religion around.
Christianity is not a moral system;
in fact, we have lots of moral systems.

Instead, Christianity is a way of life.
It is what that first generation of Jesus-followers
called “the way,”
and what we might call,
in our time of greater cultural fluidity,
The Tao of Jesus.

Our baptism,
if we will remember and contemplate
that baptismal covenant we often recite,
amounts to a partnership document.

“Will you travel the Tao of Jesus,”
we could just as well ask,
and our response is,
“We will with God’s help.”

And just as there are many ways of interpreting
and following the Tao of Buddha,
and the Tao of Mohammad,
and the Tao of Krishna,
there are many known ways to interpret
and to follow the Tao of Jesus.

And yet, every authentic Tao of Jesus
is fundamentally a partnership with God.
And every Tao of Jesus will take us,
if we are faithful and courageous with it,
to a moment or moments
of wordless ebullience.

No matter what it is
that brings us here to this place today –
whether we are seeking
or weary
or poor
or lonely
or simply following a routine –
what awaits us is the reminder of our partnership,
and an invitation to rejoin the path we lost
in the tangle that is our life,
and the hope that the partnership
and the path
will lead us to at least one more
incredible moment of ebullience.

That’s all I got, but really, it is a lot.

7 Easter A: Catching Fire!

May 28, 2017 by Cam Miller

Texts for Preaching

Acts 1:6-14

When they were together for the last time they asked, “Master, are you going to restore the kingdom of Israel now? Is this the time?”

He told them, “You don’t get to know the time. Timing is God’s business. What you’ll get is the Holy Spirit. And when theHoly Spirit comes on you, you will be able to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all overJudea and Samaria, even to the ends of the world.”

These were his last words. As they watched, he was taken up and disappeared in a cloud. They stood there, staring into the empty sky. Suddenly two men appeared – in white robes! They said, “You Galileans! – why do you just stand here looking up at an empty sky? This very Jesus who was taken up from among you to heaven will come as certainly – and mysteriously – as he left.”

So they left the mountain called Olives and returned to Jerusalem. It was a little over half a mile. They went to the upper room they had been using as a meeting place: Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James, son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, Judas, son of James.

They agreed they were in this for good, completely together in prayer, the women included. Also Jesus’ mother, Mary, and his brothers.

Liturgical Reading
Excerpt from “Holy the Firm” by Annie Dillard

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth’s wings vanished in affine, foul smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a splattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away and her heaving mouth parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far a I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax – a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle’s round pool.

And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth’s head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.

She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning – only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.

Good morning.

I want to begin with something
that may be obvious to some
and startling to others,
but needs to be said now and again.

On the Church calendar
this is not Memorial Day weekend.
Today, this year anyway,
it is the last Sunday of Easter season,
and on that Sunday we always hear a piece
of Jesus’ farewell in the Gospel of John.

The bigger point is,
in the Church, on Sunday,
we do not celebrate national holidays.

Whether it is Columbus Day
or Veterans Day,
Memorial Day
or Mother’s Day,

Independence Day
or Presidents Day,
on Sundays we do not mix
the celebration of Holy Eucharist
with any nationalistic holiday or cause.

That is because Christianity
and the Gospel of Jesus Christ,
has no nation.
Christianity has no national loyalty.
Christianity,
and our vows as baptized Christians,
does not recognize nationalism, internationalism,
partisanship, or any other secular ideology that exists.

In fact, every time in history a church or religion
has aligned itself with a national ideology
it created ugliness and spawned bitter violence.

Now all of us live with divided loyalties
and divided minds, and multiple commitments.
That is normal, expected, and understood.
But in this space, in this sanctuary,
there is no flag of nation
and no pledge of allegiance to party or constitution.

Therefore, while all of us
may well have loved ones on our minds
and in our prayers today,
and especially those who may have died
in the service of their country –
whether on a battlefield,
or in the line of duty,
or as a servant and advocate for justice –
we are celebrating Eucharist today.

So I hope no one is surprised
or disappointed
if they arrive on Mother’s Day
or Memorial Day
or 4^th of July weekend,
and the theme of the Eucharist on such days
does not even mention the holiday.
Instead, our focus will always be
on the theme of that liturgical season,
or the sacred moment itself,
or on the open table we offer,
or the spiritual practice of our baptism.
It does not mean we do not care about
other cultural and civic events,
but simply that we let those be celebrated
elsewhere and on other grounds,
while on this holy ground
we gather for this sacred meal.

(Even that most special of all days
will not be observed here in a few weeks:
Father’s Day).

Now for the real sermon.

The editors of the Gospels had a problem.
It is one routinely faced in Hollywood and on television.
What were those Gospel editors supposed to do
for the last episode
after the amazing surprise ending
created by the resurrection?
How were they going to have Jesus exit
a second time?

It’s not unlike the dilemma faced
by television serials,
in which the season ends
with a main character getting killed.
What we often discover
at the beginning of the Fall Season
is that the character wasn’t actually killed as we thought,
and we are shown how he or she was saved.

Jesus is executed on the cross,
dies, and is buried.
The level of physical abuse
from the flogging alone was enough to kill him,
let alone the grueling physical torture on the cross.
His bloody body was laid in the tomb
and a big rock rolled over the doorway.
The tomb was sealed.

It was over.
It was finished.
But wait!
Unexpectedly, the stone is mysteriously dislodged
and the tomb is shown empty.

Jesus’ three-year ministry
is act one;
the betrayal, arrest, trial, and execution
act two;
the resurrection is act three.

But the author of the Book of Acts,
who is also the author of Luke’s gospel,
has a dilemma.
The Book of Acts
is the story of the earliest followers of Jesus,
and it has to figure out an exit for Jesus
before the next chapter can be written.
So the author of Luke-Acts creates an epilogue,
and has Jesus exit
the way other great prophets of Israel exited:
into the clouds.
Elijah did it
and so did Moses.

It is such a natural way
for a holy man or woman to exit
that Buddhism is full of ascending mystics too.
And in Islam, Jesus disappears like that as well.
In fact, the Quran tells us
Jesus did not really die on the cross.
It suggests that in fact,
he may have passed death altogether
when he was lifted up and taken directly to God.
That is because it is inconceivable in the Quran,
that a prophet chosen by God for such purpose
would ever be allowed to be tortured and executed
at the hands of enemies.
So of course he was taken up.

Figuring out a fitting exit for such godly humans
is a difficult challenge
because, let’s face it,
death is messy.
A torturous death is the messiest,
not to mention the most shocking and scandalous.

It strikes me that Jesus’ death is like that moth
in Annie Dillard’s pericope of illumination.
Jesus’ messy, torturous
and grotesque death
is a wick of holiness…for us.
His death continues to illuminates the darkness
long after,
as does a star that burned out
a hundred million years ago
yet flicker in the night sky tonight.

To appropriate Annie Dillard’s
exquisite description and apply it to Jesus:
The spectacular skeleton on the cross
acts as a wick.
Jesus keeps burning.
The holiness that fuels this fire
rises in the dead Messiah’s body
from his pierced and soaking abdomen
to his thorax
to the jagged holes in his hands,
and he widens into a flame –
a saffron-yellow flame
that opens a bud of light in our darkness
as if a bloom into the light of spring.

I love that image
because it reminds us of a hard
but spectacular truth
residing at the core of our spiritual wisdom.
It is a wisdom that may be so obvious,
so brilliantly radiant,
that we live in its light
but forget about its presence.

We are reminded of it
in our baptismal promises
every time we recite them,
and Jesus burning luminously upon the cross
reminds us of it as well.
In fact, anyone who has ever loved
has been reminded of it
with each painful sacrifice exacted by loving.

The wick of holiness
siphoning God into our hearts
like an artisan well draws water to Earth’s surface, is this:
a willingness to disappear
so that someone else may live.

Think on that for a moment.
…a willingness to disappear
so that someone else may live.

The first-responder that enters a burning building
to save the life of an utter stranger –
what is that?

The human rights advocate
who lives precariously on the margin
of deprivation and violence,
and who may even get murdered while trying to
non-violently defend those even more vulnerable –
what is that?

The health professional
that enters the quarantined zone to care for dying victims
or to help figure out what is killing them –
what is that?

Enlisting to serve in combat, knowingly going to war
to defend one’s country and preserve a way of life,
even for people never known. What is that?
Risking one’s life
in a particular moment
in order that a stranger may live,
is to illuminate the darkness
with an idea about life
that is greater than oneself.

To disappear
that someone else may have life,
is a powerful idea
greater than any single self.

It is an idea as well as an act
that defies the logic of survival
and self-preservation.

To willingly, perhaps even unnecessarily,
risk one’s life on behalf of others
or even on behalf of an idea, is stunning.
More than stunning.
it is confounding and astounding.

And yet, there it is
at the very heart of our spiritual wisdom.
Right there at the bull’s-eye
is an invitation to give it all up.

It is not a demand –
even God could not make such a demand.
It is an invitation.

It is an invitation to live life on behalf of others,
and it is the encouragement
to live life in such as way
as to create a more abundant life for all people.

At the heart of what we say and do
as Christians –
as people baptized into a particular
spiritual practice –
is the invitation to become a wick,
a conduit for holiness
between God and others.

It is an invitation to be willing
to give it all up if need be –
the ‘it’ being everything from life choices to life itself.

To get specific,
the baptismal covenant we have been saying
throughout Easter season,
is an insistent contradiction
of what most of us were raised to think and believe.
We were taught to be individuals and individualistic;
encouraged to be consumers in fact,
with insatiable appetites.
We were taught to care more about our own people,
and our own neighbors,
and our own nation,
and our economy
more than any other people or nations or economies
anywhere else, as if we are an island
that could survive without an ocean.

We have been taught to look out for #1
and that those with the most toys at the end win.
We have been nurtured to believe that success
and achievement is measured in dollars,
and power, and fame.

But in baptism,
yours and mine,
we are invited to reject those ideas as rotten
even at the cost of our own lives if necessary.

We are invited to
use our lives –
to use them up if need be –
in defeat of those rotten ideas.

We are invited to
use our lives –
to use them up if need be –
to supplant those rotten ideas
with new ideas that are not self-centered at the core.

We are invited to use up our own life,
if need be,
to illuminate the darkness
created by rotten ideas
as a moth burning brightly against the night.

Anyone who has even briefly strolled through Christianity
as it is articulated in the gospels,
knows this invitation.
If Jesus is about anything
it is about this invitation to use our lives
to illuminate the darkness.

And yet we take it for granted.
Jesus burning at the center,
wicking the love of God up his own mutilated body,
is so right there at the center of it all
we can easily forget,
and ignore, and deny it.
But when we juxtapose the baptismal invitation
to use our lives to illuminate the darkness,
up against our economic and cultural
measurements and standards for goodness,
it is startling –
crazy even.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
once challenged us, ironically as it turned out,
that the question is not
what are we willing to die for,
but what are we willing to live for?
Our baptism,
yours and mine,
challenges us with the same question:
“What are we willing to live for?”
What, in fact, are we living for?

In economics,
we would measure what we are living for
by what it costs us,
and its value would be determined
by the cost-benefit ratio.
That is not the baptismal standard,
and in fact,
that kind of economic standard
actually diminishes our lives.

What are we living for?
Once we know,
we can go out and spend our lives on it.
And it doesn’t matter how much life we have lived already, whether we are twenty or ninety,
the challenge is still the same.

In our baptism
we have been called to reject
rotten ideas about what our life is for
and instead, to use our life
on behalf of ideas bigger than us,
and for people beyond us.

It is a one-day at a time kind of thing,
and sometimes,
a one-moment-at-a-time kind of act.
Our spiritual practice,
described in our baptismal covenant,
invites us to become a wick of God’s love
that we may illuminate the darkness with our very own lives.

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

Proper 10, 2017: Mad Farmer of the Cosmos

Proper 9, 2017: Reversal Wisdom

Trinity Sunday 2017: The Tao of Jesus

7 Easter A: Catching Fire!

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