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9 Pentecost: Forget about worship…worry about where your treasure is

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We should feel alarmed and threatened.

Isaiah is telling us,
with the voice of God
on his lips no less,
that formal, public worship
should be eliminated.

Luke is telling us,
on the voice of Jesus no less,
that we should sell everything we have
and give even the proceeds of that sale
to the poor.

Now, I could perform a little dance
around these two voices
and explain away the radicalism
in favor of a more mainstream view,
but it would just be a dance.

So let’s go a little deeper
and see if there is something for us
in these two prophets
that lived more than five hundred years apart

Isaiah is a poet extraordinaire,
a second generation prophet-poets,
with Amos, Hosea and Micah
being among the first.

Isaiah leans on Amos and Hosea,
and Jeremiah leans on Isaiah,
and on and on until we get to Jesus.

Then Jesus leans on Isaiah and Micha
and on and on
until we get to the prophets and martyrs
of our generations.

We must always remember
that Jesus did not just appear out of nowhere,
and teach what he taught
as if it began with him.

Rather, Jesus swims in the river of wisdom
that flows from the earliest
human encounters with the holy,
all the way to you and me
where that wisdom meets up
with the still small voices we hear
within the silences of our own lives.

Basically, Isaiah had the unenviable task
of speaking truth to power
at a time when everything looked pretty good.

The Northern and Southern Kingdoms
we associate with Israel
were getting along for once,
and they were prosperous
with strong armies
and even some newly invented
military technology
that none of their neighbors possessed.

Uzziah had his own stable of in-house prophets –
seers, dream weavers,
and oracles
that mostly told him
what he wanted to hear.
The Temple had a caste of clergy
who regulated a pretty tight ship,
and served the power of the king.

Their attention was on doing ‘good church’
as seminarians would say
about worship.

But the prophets like Isaiah,
did what poets are supposed to do:
they saw.

Not only did they see,
they described what they saw
in powerful language
that was often threatening
to the king and clergy.

It wasn’t all dark and terrible either.
Some of the prophesies
were magnificently hopeful
and encouraging.

But in today’s reading from Isaiah,
what we have
are words that pierced the armor
of prosperity and power.

Basically what Isaiah is saying,
or what God is saying on the lips of Iaiah
if you wish to believe that claim,
is that what really matters
is not religion
but integrity.

What God wants from us,
Isaiah seems to be saying,
is not worship but integrity.

Now, integrity is measured
by the distance between
what we say we believe and value
and how we actually live day to day.

It is a really scary word
when if we think about it that way.

What God really wants from us,
Isaiah says, is our integrity.

Scholars and theologians of good will
argue about whether
Isaiah is suggesting
that all worship
be thrown out with the bathwater, or not.
The Temple,
whether in Isaiah’s day or ours,
has a vested interest
in keeping the Temple
at the center of the religion
and the prophets
often seemed at tension
with the temple, which
they accused of lacking integrity.

But I think it would be a reach for us
and most church-folks today,
to think about eliminating worship
since worship is often
the only element of spiritual practice
that many people engage in.
But we could make a case,
based upon the prophets,
that instead of calling for a new prayer book
or better music,
we should be calling
for the elimination of worship.

That’s right: eliminate worship
in favor of lives of justice and compassion.

When worship gets in the way,
cut it out Jesus might say,
as with the offending eye.

Or as Isaiah wrote:
“…learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.

Come now,
let us argue it out,
says the Lord…”

But calling for the elimination
of worship
is the same as Jesus’ tough talk
about selling all our possessions
and giving the proceeds to the poor.

Like that is going to happen.

But let’s back up
on this Jesus talk
because there is something
hiding here in plain.

There is no way Jesus
would tell his audience
of highly deprived and impoverished listeners
to sell all they have
and give it to the poor.

They were the poor!

I’ve described the situation before
but it is worth reminding ourselves
when we hear Luke tell a story like this one.
Wealthy Roman citizens
who lived in Italy
and likely didn’t travel far,
engaged in real estate speculation and development
out on the outer margins of their empire.

They would wait until
drought or floods caused real hardship
to peasants farming their little plots,
and then their agents would arrive
offering loans
to help the peasants buy seeds for the next cycle.

Because they were desperate
and had no recourse,
the peasants took the loan
and almost without fail,
would eventually default on it.

Then, all of a sudden,
their land,
which was the one thing
that peasants had to keep them from slavery,
belonged to an absentee landlord.

The peasant then became a tenant farmer
or worse,
was kicked off the land with nothing.

Heck, that is a scenario
that happens in the United States.
In my home state of Indiana
and elsewhere in the breadbasket,
most of the farmland now belongs
to large corporations
who have repeated that same ancient pattern.

The reason I mention this
is because Jesus was talking to the bottom 99.99% —
which in that society
and in that time,
were desperately poor
and without the slightest social safety net.

“Give away your possessions?”
What possessions?

“Give alms?”
With what?

It just doesn’t make sense for Jesus
to say such things to the audience
with whom he was speaking.

BUT…Luke’s audience
would have contained people
who actually had slaves,
and people who worked for people
who had slaves.

Luke did not know Jesus,
but he was speaking to Gentile Romans
in a society removed by time
and geography
from Jesus.

And that is true for all the Gospel editors –
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Luke and the other Gospel editors,
along with Paul,
are speaking to people like us.
That was their mission.
They sought to take
the stories and teachings attributed to Jesus,
and interpret them for the distant,
non-Jewish,
more affluent
people of the empire…us.

But be that as it may,
there is a gem of a sentence
in today’s reading from Luke,
that has Jesus written all over it.
It is the very prophetic sounding phrase
about the contrast between our heart
and our treasure.

That, by the way,
is a hallmark of an authentic
first century Jewish parable:
a spare, single point of contrast
unfettered by all the fluff
of an allegory.

Luke’s words on the lips of Jesus
boil down to a question of integrity:
“…where our treasure is,
there our heart will be also.”

Where our treasure is,
there our heart will be also.

So simple.
So eloquent.
So exquisitely truthful
in such a poetic way.

Our treasure, our heart.

Where we place our treasure
is where we plant our heart.

We know that is true.
We know it is true
even without having to verify it in a laboratory.
We know it is true
before the words are even spoken.
We know it is true
in the marrow of our bones.

We know where
we want our heart to be,
and we know
what and where
our treasure actually is;
and we wince to acknowledge
the distance between them.

So here is how Isaiah and Jesus come together.

Maybe we won’t have to eliminate worship
if we can manage to create
and sustain
worship traditions and practices
that challenge
and nurture
our integrity.

Maybe worship could be a good thing
instead of a vestige of empty religion
if it led us to examine
and see
the distance between
our values
and our practice.

Maybe worship could be a good thing
if, when we gathered
and did it,
the experience nurtured
and strengthened our integrity.

Let’s work on that, okay?

8 Pentecost: Pushing the pause button – or alt/delete

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As most of you know,
I had a traumatic event in May.
The surgery I had to fix my back
was followed in three days
by an emergency surgery
to remove a blood clot on my spine.
Like so many people do,

I spent an eternity in the emergency room
before I was diagnosed and treated.
I was in what I can only describe as a cocoon of pain.
Thankfully I recovered and am doing great now
but the reason I mention it
is because, like most such events,
it was a forceful hitting of the pause button.

Kind of like hitting alt/delete on your PC
or Command/Delete on your Mac,
it cleared everything else before it
and left an empty space
within which to hold an unadorned view of life.
All of us have likely had such moments,
not always from trauma, thankfully.
Hiking or camping,
loss and grief,
self-imposed deprivation…
there are times when we clear the space
in the field around us
and within our hearts and minds,
or have it cleared for us.

When that happens,
we suddenly see thing anew
or from a different angle,
or even from underneath
or looking down as if from above.

I think that is what Jesus
was trying to do with his proverbial saying
and follow-up parable
that we heard this morning —
to clear the space
within and around
those who were listening.

Since Jesus issued his warning
much has grown up in the world around us
like weeds and undergrowth
crowding out his words
and making them seem so, so unrealistic
or impractical — so,
pie-in-the-sky.

But we know in our heart of hearts
that his warnings are wise
and every once in awhile
the space within and around us
gets cleared
and we hear him agian.

Jesus says three things
we might want to pay attention to
in that reading from Luke.

First, in response to someone complaining
about his stingy brother,
he says: “Watch Out!”
Guard against greed.

Secondly, with his parable
he warns that an abundance of possessions
does not create an abundance of joy.

And third, which seems like the background
upon which his parable is told,
he reminds us that security is an illusion.

First, watch out for greed.
Secondly, money can’t buy you joy.
Third, there is no such thing as security.
With those three,
simple,
pithy points
we are at the front door
of spiritual wisdom.

If we take any of this gospel stuff
seriously at all
then we need to approach
this subject
with gentleness
and reverence
rather than with scolding,
shaming, or guilt.
You see, all of us live in house of cards
created by our life within the kingdom of stuff.

So let us proceed
with a sense of our own fragileness.

This Greek word for greed
is translated into English
as “the yearning to have more.”
So when Jesus issues his warning,
“Take care!  Be on your guard
against all kinds of greed –
for life is not about the abundance of possessions,”
he is warning us
about the hazards of our always
yearning to have more.

“Guard” against it
is all he says.
He doesn’t say “don’t feel it.”
That would be silly
because we yearn
from the first moments of hunger at birth,
and don’t stop yearning
until we can’t breath any more.
”Guard against it,” he says.
He gives no rule or plumbline
by which to measure greed.
He simply says,
“Hey, this is real
so pay attention to it.”

I wonder what he would say in our world?
In 2022 every strand of electronic data
that swirls around us on radio waves,
through optic cables and wifi,
even filling every visual void
on billboards and cereal boxes,
is charged with highly sophisticated efforts
to excite our greed
and seduce our yearning for more.

We are invited to be perpetually dissatisfied.
Think about that for a moment.
We are urged
to be perpetually dissatisfied.

We are taught
to be chronically hungry.

Our weaknesses and vulnerabilities
are taunted and teased.

We are titillated constantly
by the hawkers of “More!”
and they are very good at their trade.

“Watch out!” Jesus warns.
”Guard against your greed.”

So how do we do that?
Well, in the midst of our yearnings
if we can remember the difference
between joy and happiness,
we can guard against greed.

Happiness is something we can manufacture
or momentarily create
but joy is something we must open ourselves to
and allow its visitation
when it comes along.
We do not create joy, it happens.

We know how to make ourselves happy
when we need a pick-me-up:
For me a bike ride will make me happy,
for someone else it may be a walk.
Calling a friend,
delicious chocolate,
some people shop to make themselves happy
others drink a beer.

We can make ourselves happy
with things we do,
but there is nothing we can do
to make joy.

We get visited by joy instead.

It happens sometimes when we least expect it.
Driving down the highway
and suddenly
we are filled with a sense of calm serenity
that we did not invite or invent.

Or we are with a friend or lover
and what was at one moment
a normal conversation
suddenly becomes a joyful intimacy
that we did not invite or invent.

Joy visits us
but we must be open to it.
We must be predisposed
to be taken over by it when it arrives
and not try to clutch it
and keep hold of it as it leaves.

Of course we will yearn for more of it
once it passes,
but we smile and let it go,
and think, “That was nice.”
A simple moment of gratitude
rather than fretfully trying to keep hold of it.

The way we live without greed
in spite of our yearning for more,
is a deep and pervasive
presence of mind
that an abundant life
is discovered
and sustained with joy
rather than happiness.

It turns out
that abundant life
is not about the capacity
to take the next breath
or keeping the heart beating a little longer.

Abundant life
is not about what we come to own or achieve.
Rather, like joy,
abundant life is measured
in what we see and know
rather than in what we have and do.

And so, in this, we are at the nexus of Jesus
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only those who see take off their shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries…”

The presence of mind
to know that abundant life is about joy
has to do with what we see when we look around.

Most of us, most of the time,
see and touch the life that surrounds us
as if it is an object for our use.
Instead of being awed
by how crammed full everything is
with a holy presence,
we see things as an object
for our consumption
or ownership.

We measure it
and value it
by whether or not
it tastes good to us
or how much we want to have it
or our own for ourselves.

In so doing
we deaden our sense of the holiness
that pervades everything.
The magnificence of an apple
becomes its sweet taste
that satisfies a yearning.

The sensual beauty of an orange
becomes a vehicle for Vitamin C.
A tree becomes a house,
a forest becomes a park,
a person becomes a clerk,
a cow becomes a steak.

I do not mean
that we should deny the utility of things,
nor the certainty of our basic needs,
but must our need
and their utility
transform the holiness of that life
into an object for our use?
The way to guard against greed
is to keep a presence of mind
about the holiness of life:
The bush is crammed with God –
not because the blackberries taste good
but because it is infused with God.
We are infused with God.

All that we seek to possess,
all we yearn to own,
all that we desire to consume
is crammed with God.

Keeping a presence of mind
about the holiness of life,
while surrounded on all sides
by messages about the utility of life
and objectification of all creatures,
will help us guard against greed.

That is all we need do, Jesus said,
”guard” against it.

We need not be immune to greed
but on guard
with a presence of mind
that the sacred
is hiding in plain sight
all around us.

The last of Jesus’ three point,
and the punchline of his parable
about the foolish farmer,
is that security is an illusion.

It is a fascinating little story.
Jesus does not critique the farmer’s wealth.
He does not critique the man’s good fortune.
There is no hint of a critique
of the farmer being type-A and goal-oriented.

The critique
is that the farmer
confused safety with security.

The mistake is in imagining
that there comes a time
when we will be safe
because we have achieved something
or arrived at something
or created a particular life-style for ourselves
and all will be well.

But there is no such thing as safety.
Naturally we spend a lot of time and energy
trying to figure out how to be safe,
and such precautions
allow us to then pretend we are safe.

But Jesus’ point
is that in spite of our best efforts
we are always vulnerable.
The better diet,
the safer neighborhood,
the nicer school,
the bigger income,
the giant SUV —
none of those things
will make us safe.
We are vulnerable to all the ravages of life.
Period.

Our sense of security in life
should not be derived from how safe
we think we are
because sooner or later
that safety will be revealed as an illusion.

Our security
must come instead,
from something or somewhere else.
In the storms that swirl around us –
whether it is a personal crisis of grief,
the experience of trauma in an emergency room,
or in the midst of social and political chaos —
where are we centered?

If the Gospel is to be believed,
at our center – our core –
is a common bush afire…
with God.
True.

At the very core of your body,
at my core —
at the nexus between
your heart and your mind,
we are crammed with heaven.

We are crammed with heaven.

If we know that,
if we really know it,
then we will be secure
in any storm.

Don’t get me wrong,
we may not be safe —
we may even perish.
But if we know that at our core
we are crammed full of God,
we will have perished with an awesome
sense of security.

  1. Guard against greed.
  2. An abundant life built upon openness to joy
    more than making ourselves happy with stuff.
  3. And the security of knowing
    we too, are crammed with God.

Just some more subversive wisdom
from the rabbi
who lives at the center of our tradition.

7 Pentecost: Hospitality & Prayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first neighbor
had unexpected guests,
apparently at night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But to go back
to my former point,

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

Here is what Jesus’ prayer asks for:

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

Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here is my take-away.

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

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

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

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

5 Pentecost 2022: Dig Deeper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by

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

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

“Every butterfly knows that the end

is different from the beginning

and that it is always a part

of a longer story…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every butterfly knows that the end

is different from the beginning

and that it is always a part

of a longer story…

…in which we are always

transformed. When it’s time to fly,

you know how, just the way you knew

how to breathe…

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

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

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

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

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

In other words,
over time
they were

“…transformed. When it was time to fly,

they knew how, just the way they knew

how to breathe…”

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

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

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

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

…the way the geese know when to depart,

the way their wings know how to

speak to the wind, a partnership of feather

and glide, lifting into the blue dream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is a church.

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

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

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

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

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

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

and that it is always a part

of a longer story, which is always

transformed…”

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

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

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

Trinity Place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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