Sermons

22 Pentecost 2019: A Data-Driven Theology

November 11, 2019 by Cam Miller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are three ways spiritual community
nurtures and empowers redeemers.

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

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

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

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

So that is the first thing – an encounter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 3, 2019 by Cam Miller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Proper 25C 2019: Wisdom v. Reaction

October 27, 2019 by Cam Miller

From: Documentary Portraits of Mississippi: The Thirties, Selected and Edited by Patti Carr Black

I am going to zero in on something
I almost never talk about.
See if you can figure out what it is before I get there.

When I read that poem, “Hitchhiker”
a dozen contradictory voices
immediately echoed in my brain.
Don’t pick up the hitchhiker!
Okay, but don’t stop feeling badly about not picking up the hitchhiker.
Okay, but don’t live your life based upon feelings.

And the same thing happened
when I thought about Jesus’ parable
pitting the Pharisee against the Tax Collector.

Even though he is the foil in the story,
I think most of us would prefer
to FEEL like the Pharisee, who after all,
was quite pleased and at peace with himself –
even grateful for his well-being.
Isn’t that what we seek on some basic level:
to feel right with the world
and grateful for our blessings?

And yet, we need a good, loud tax collector inside
to rend us from within
and beg for mercy
because we also know
that our lives have tipped the scales of justice
against us,
and in ways we do not even recognize.

We want to feel like the Pharisee
but we need the agitation of the tax collector.
There are all these competing voices
inside our heads
and rummaging around in our poor little hearts,
and there are also plenty of live voices
filling the air around us
with ideas, accusations, admonitions, and cautions.

For many of us,
the hard part is not hearing voices,
rather, the hardest part
is not reactingto the voices.

Each voice wants us to react,
to respond and conform
to whatever he or she is espousing.

And yet, the wisest response
is not to react
to any voice.
…So many voices.

We hear the mom and dad voices
that live on in echoes
decades after mom and dad are dead and gone.

We hear the various voices of authority
that have steered us wrong in the past,
and we know it,
but still our knee-jerk reaction
is to follow them, at least at first.

We hear the voices of our professional training
that tell us the way the world is
and ought to be,
and we follow those voices
like a horse led with blinders
and so miss all kinds of other ways of seeing.
We get fitted with that professional training
and even long after we stopped doing that work,
we first and foremost we are
the banker
the accountant
the doctor
the lawyer
the professor or teacher
the musician
the therapist
the Ironworker
the social worker
the cop…and that is the way
we are trained to see the world.

We hear political voices,
religious voices,
ethnic and racial identity voices,
gender and sexuality voices –
all kinds of voices.
And often, perhaps most of the time,
we react to those voices
and our reactions lead our action
instead of our wisdom leading the way.

Having quick and precise reaction-time
is a good thing
when we are driving along
and another car runs a stop sign.
Quick reflexes
and automatic response
is a good thing
in an emergency
when immediate action save lives.

But in the everyday,
standing amid the myriad voices,
being reactionary will kill us –
maybe not immediately but slowly, over time
it will take us down
and fragment us.
At the very least, being reactionary
to all those voices
will repress our wisdom
and quite literally, depress us.

From where is wisdom to come?

What is the wisdom
that is the more trusted guide
than reaction
to the voices?

While I am just another voice to you,
the voice that I want to guide me
is God’s best dream for us.
Surrounded by the swirl of many voices,
each with its own neediness
and each with its own great ideas,
we need a filter:
one through which we can empty all those voices,
and in the end hear the voice
in which we recognize
God’s best dream for us.

It is in that voice we can be led by wisdom
instead of reaction.
At least, that’s been my experience.
When I am fortunate enough to be on top of my game
and the voices are coming at me fast and furious
and my reactions to them
swirling with chaos within me
and causing great turbulence,

I somehow find a way to step back
with a kind of gentle detachment
and allow wisdom
to filter all those voices.
Then – when I am at the top of my game –
I can let go of all my internal reactions
and be led by wisdom.

So, that is how I describe prayer.
And that, by the way,
is what this sermon is about – prayer.

In the last two weeks the Gospel of Luke
has supplied us with three models of prayer.
Last week was the feisty,
persistent,
even aggressive pray-er
who grabs hold of God
and won’t let go.

This week there is the supremely self-confident
Pharisee who approaches God
with the mindset of a well-trained professional
who believes that spiritual wellness
is an equation:
break it down into the right parts
and the sum of the whole will follow.

In contrast to the Pharisee,
there is the Tax-collector.
His strategy is to throw himself
on the mercy of the court –
believing and hoping
that even more than justice
God loves mercy.

Each of these is of course a caricature,
a kind of cartoon exaggeration
of different personalities
and what we are like when standing on the cliff
of our common brokenness
and looking down.

Personally, I do not look at prayer
as some pristine form into which we can slip
and suddenly all become of one nature –
a perfect little Jesus
or Buddha
or Catherine of Sienna.
We come as we are
and pray as we are.

We drag our rumpled old personality
with us into prayer,
and that shapes our praying –
and that is as it should be.

What is most important
is not how we pray
but that we do pray.

Prayer is what distills the voices
so that we can follow our wisdom
instead of our reactions.
Prayer is the process of discernment
in which we listen
for God’s best dream for us.

We think that prayer is about telling God
what we want
and what we think
and what we wish.

There is nothing wrong with telling God what to do,
but petitionary prayer
represents our reactionary self.
Our petitions are frequently our reactions
to things that are happening all around us.
There is nothing wrong with sending them up
like helium balloons
in hopes that God will hear them –
and do something about them.

But then…it is time to listen.

The kind of prayer I’m urging here,
is the process of listening
and eventually,
if we listen well enough,
hearing the wisdom that can lead us
through our reactionary-ness.
If we listen well enough
we will discern God’s best dream for us
for this time,
and in this place,
and for this particular circumstance.
Wisdom is never for-ever and all time;
like manna,
it doesn’t store or keep.
It is renewed in each new dawn.

So whether we are the tough and belligerent widow
from last week’s story,
or the Pharisee
or the Tax Collector –
and in truth we are all three –
the act of prayer
allows us to distill those voices
and be led by wisdom
instead of reaction.

Having a sense or inkling about
God’s best dream for us,
means that we don’t have to be led
by what the person sitting across from us
happens to like or not like,
or by what some other voice
thinks are good or bad.

Rather, we will have a sense
of God’s best dream for us
in that particular situation or concern
and we can be led by that instead.

Prayer it is not about the voices,
of our desires,
or our reaction to all the voices,
whether within or among us.

Prayer is the act of listening
and figuring out God’s best dream for us
here
and now
and in this place.

It is how we become led by wisdom
instead of reaction.

If that sounds good to you,
then you may want to know how to pray like that?
I really don’t know.

There is no gimmick.

There is no how-to.
There is no one-size fits all formula.
Walking,
sitting,
laying down,
slow yoga
fast running,
hands folded,
eyes open
eyes closed,
music,
no music,
deep breathing
big sigh.
The form is not the prayer, the process is.
THE FORM IS NOT THE PRAYER.
It is a listening process
and whatever helps us to listen
is the best form.
And the prayer is not completed
until we hear
or imagine
or somehow apprehend
a sense, or even an inkling,
of God’s best dream for us.
That means our prayer
may last hours, days, months
or even years.
Whatever sustains our ability to listen
is the best form for us,
and then doing it.
Just doing it.

So next time those voices are raging inside,
or coming at you fast
from all around,
it is time to pray.
That may mean getting quiet
and still – if
that is how you listen best –
it may mean going and getting a milkshake.
Hey, there are weirder things.

But whatever, doing what helps you listen
and then listening
is what prayer is.
I commend it to you.

19 Pentecost: Get Ready to Rumble…with God!

October 20, 2019 by Cam Miller

Today, once again, the gospel reveals
the uncomfortable dinner table argument
between a radical first century Palestinian peasant
and the well-educated
upper class Westernized Christianity
that uses the Church
as a sheath for preserving its artistic achievements.

It is a conflict
between the perspective of ancient wisdom embedded with common people, and centuries of ruling classes.
One is rooted in the experience of life
at the harsh margins of powerlessness
and subject to violence wielded by empires.
The other perspective is from that small cadre
of the powerful in imperial Rome,
within later European colonialism,
and still later American imperialism –
all of which ruled over the social equivalent
of Jesus and his friends in later times.

It is a conflict
between zealous first century Jews
suspicious of granting authority and power to anyone,
and zealous patriots
of 21^stCentury American Civil Religion
too eager to grant religious significance
to their own righteousness.

The language of worship and theology
practiced in popular Christianity –
whether conservative Evangelical,
traditional Roman Catholic, or Mainline Protestant –
is a domesticatedreligion.
It stands in contrast to a rough,
earthy,
non-institutional,
subversive to coercive authority religion
that comes to us from the margins.

But this is nothing new –
either in Christianity or other religions.
In every civilization,
from imperial China
to the Ottoman empire
to contemporary nationalistic Hindus and Buddhists –
religion gets domesticated
by the principalities and powers.
In order to incorporate and support
the interests and idols of culture for nationalistic purposes,
kings, presidents, prime ministers, generals,
legislatures, and corporations,
must cool religion down.

Whatever the hot burning coal
that formed a religion at its beginning,
it must be formed into a cold iron statue
in order to serve the institutions of social control.

That is because the origins of religion,
its prophets and sages,
are subversive to the principalities and powers.

Biblical Christianity is subversive of imperial culture
regardless of who the emperor is.
Where we seek refinement
the Bible is rough around the edges;
where we appreciate gentleness and couth
the Bible is militant;
where we insist upon reason
the Bible is outrageous and miraculous;
where we craft high-toned language, art, and music,
the Bible speaks in vernacular.

Today’s gospel offers a spectacular example.

That reading from Luke
is proceeded by a verse attributed to Jesus
that I bet few, if any of us, would recognize.
In fact, I can’t remember it ever coming up
in the lectionary.
In the verse just before the story we heard today,
someone asks Jesus,
“Hey Jesus, where will the reign of God arrive?”

That in itself is not an unusual question.
People always wanted to know
when and where to expect the big transformation.
Jesus answers,
“Where the corpse is, the vultures will gather.”

I am not making that up,
go look in your Bible at the end of chapter 17
and you will see it for yourself:
“Where the corpse is, the vultures will gather”?
I can’t remember a single Victorian hymn,
or contemporary praise song
with those words from Jesus:
“Where the corpse is, the vultures will gather.”

The Biblical Jesus was combative,
subversive, undermining of authority,
and dismissive of formality.
But not just to the religious and Roman authorities,
he was that way with God!
Jesus, like the sages and prophets before him,
argued with God,
and wrestled with God,
and in the process
sometimes changed God’s mind.

Our Enlightenment ancestors who formed
the Christianity we have more or less inherited,
were captivated by what they called pure reason,
and so they could not imagine a God
who changed anything –
especially God’s mind.
They lusted for a universe
that operated with order and predictability.

So our images of Jesus
are crafted upon the high arts of literature,
music and architecture,
and they transform Jesus
from peasant to King.
Yet we hardly notice the painful tension.

We have all seen it:
Jesus with his arms spread straight out on the cross,
not hung there and suffering,
but his own body forming the stiff shape of the cross
and wearing the royal crown of a European king.
Usually in such Christ-the-King images,
Jesus is also wearing an embroidered chasuble,
that poncho-like vestment of priestly gear,
and so morphing him
from reformer to company man.

That is an iconic example of what I mean
about the Bible and Jesus being domesticated.
Think of the Bible stories you learned as a child
and how rarely we talk about them now.
If we did not allow our children to watch
“Silence of the Lambs” and “Halloween XXVII,”
they would be terrified by the Biblical God in those stories.

We have domesticated the Bible
and the Biblical characters
because they are subversive partisans
that engage in combat with Pharaoh and Caesar.
And that means they are subversive to us
and to our way of life
because we are endlessly entangled
with the self-interests of Pharaoh and Caesar.
But they also engage in combat with God
and that is useful information for you and me, too.
God expects a fight from us
not a polite prayer
with impeccable syntax
that whimpers our neediness.

God requires a fight from us,
and where there is resistance
we need to push back.

The fact is, our little issues do not amount
to so much as a pimple on the back side of the universe,
so if we want some attention from God
we better be prepared to kick up some dust.

Now please, don’t just discount what I am saying
as some aggressive spiritual testosterone
from a cranky old male priest.
The Judeo, Christian, and Islamic traditions
are rife with women mystics and saints
every bit as passionate and tough
as what I am describing about biblical spirituality.
Just so you do not think I am exaggerating,
let me take us by the hand
and drag us back to today’s text.

In our polite,
well-educated
and culturally filtered
New Revised Standard Version of the Luke’s story,
the judge says:
“I will grant her justice,
so that she may not wear me out
by her continual coming.”

But listen to a translation
that is more interested in capturing
the original sentiment in the Greek text
than being literate:
“I will grant her justice,
so that she will not pummel my eye.”
In other words,
so she will not give me a black eye!

That is a huge difference!

If we are translating Luke’s story
from a position of privilege and power,
in which we respect the arbitrators of justice
because they are our kind of folk,
then we want this parable to suggest
that the old widow
gets what she is asking for
because she is a nag.

If our position in society is at the top or the middle,
rather than the bottom or the margin,
then we want to imagine that the judge
is tired after a long day’s work
and does the right thing by giving into the old gal
even though she is clearly a disagreeable sort.

But this story was told by an illiterate peasant
with a very different experience of people in authority,
especially the police and judges.

Jesus’ experience of authority
is from the bottom up,
not sharing a Church pew with them.
So in Luke’s story, the judge gives up
because the widow is scrappy
and likely to give him a black eye
if he keeps denying her justice.
Again, I am not making this stuff up!

You know as well as I do
that when we change the perspective on something –
see it from the top down instead of from the bottom up
or vis versa – it will look and sound differently.

The Bible is like that,
and our job is to hear it
from the bottom up now and again.

When we do,
one of the first things we bump into
is a rough and tumble relationship with God
rather than a passive, enjoyment
of a beautiful sunset or symphonic choir.

“The days are surely coming,” Jeremiah promises on behalf of God, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt– a covenant that they broke…(instead) I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. “

But, you know what?
That day isn’t here yet. Clearly.
So until it is,
we need to be like that persistent widow
and be ready to rumble with God.
And if we are to take Jesus seriously,
God ain’t the only one
we need to be ready to rumble with.

16 Pentecost: Hope

September 29, 2019 by Cam Miller

This is about hope.

It is about hope in hard times
when hope is hard work
even for people who are by nature optimistic.

It begins with a man
and a story
we might imagine
has absolutely nothing to do with us.
It was, after all,
nearly two-thousand seven-hundred year ago.

It is a story we have the chance to touch on
only every three years
when it comes around in the Sunday Lectionary.
But because many preachers do not focus
on the readings in the Hebrew text,
it is a story that may never get told
in some congregations.

It is the story of Jeremiah,
a prophet in Jerusalem.
He was not a wild-eyed fringe character
like Jesus.
He was not a poor marginalized migrant
like Amos.
Jeremiah was an insider.
He was from one of the ‘good’ families.
He was, as some might say today, “old money.”

According to the story,
God used Jeremiah
to speak to the power-elite of Jerusalem.
It was a time of dangerous international intrigue,
when it was not clear who the king’s real allies were,
or with whom the king’s loyalties were invested.
The Egyptian Pharaoh
was sweet-talking the king of Judah
and coaxing him and Jerusalem
into an alliance with the once powerful,
now faded Egypt.

Pharaoh told the king they had to stick together;
that Egypt and all the surrounding
small nations like Judah had to hold strong
in order to defend against
the big newcomer on the block: Babylon.
Support Egypt,
Pharaoh promised the Judean king,
and together they would defeat Babylon.
That appealed to Zedekiah, the king of Judah,
because he figured
he had a better chance
of holding onto his power
with Pharaoh ruling the region
than if the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar
took over his part of the world.

So, thinking of himself more than his country,
Zedekiah risked the lives
of all the inhabitants of Jerusalem
and the surrounding area of Judea,
in order to keep his throne
for himself and his sons.

Jeremiah watched and listened
to all that was going on in the upper echelons
of his society,
and then told King Zedekiah
it was a bad idea to dance with Pharaoh
against Nebuchadnezzar.
But Jeremiah didn’t just say it was a bad idea,
he said that “God” said it was a bad idea.
And he didn’t just say
that God said it was a bad idea,
he went around told everyone
that God said it was a bad idea.
Jeremiah had a big mouth and knew everyone
who was anyone in Judah.

Well, like all the kings of Judah,
Zedekiah had a stable of yes-men
clergy & prophets who argued against Jeremiah
and promised the king
that God would rescue Jerusalem,
and that God would use Pharaoh to do it.
But against all those voices,
Jeremiah kept telling anyone who would listen
that Zedekiah was making a big mistake
and his foolish clergy and prophets
were just telling the idiot-king
what he wanted to hear.
Then, when the Babylonian army arrived
and support from Pharaoh did not arrive,
people started listening to Jeremiah.
But it became even harder to listen to Jeremiah
because he was now predicting
the demise of Jerusalem
and the death of Zedekiah.
Even though no one really wanted to hear that,
the citizens of Jerusalem began to disappearing
like deserters from the Alamo.
People were sneaking out at night
to surrender to the Babylonian army
that was now surrounding the city.
The siege of Jerusalem
would last for 18 months and 27 days.
That is a long time to sweat.

So with the Babylonian army surrounding them
and Pharaoh’s army nowhere to be seen,
King Zedekiah could nor stand to listen any more to Jeremiah’s rants.
The king blamed the steady stream of
escaping citizens on Jeremiah.
So, someone conveniently accused Jeremiah
of trying to escape, which allowed the king
to arrest the prophet.

Still, it was complicated for King Zedekiah.
He couldn’t just imprison Jeremiah
because he was from one of the ‘good’ families,
and he was recognized as prophet after all.
So instead of prison,
Jeremiah was removed
to the courtyard of the guard,
and shackled – one step up
from a prison cell.

But Jeremiah, if not pleasant
was persistent.
He just kept declaring his message
even while shackled:
“Don’t believe government’s lies;
don’t listen to self-serving fantasies
from religious preachers;
don’t be fooled by the guise of patriotism;
trust what you see and hear;
get out now because the Babylonians will win
and everything and everyone left behind
will be destroyed.”

An unknown, low class prophet
from out of town,
someone like Amos for example,
could be managed by removal or execution.
But an annoying prophet
from one of the old-line families
who won’t shut up?
That is a headache Advil won’t fix.

Eventually,
and it is not clear whether by order of the king
or an exasperated captain of the guard
who couldn’t stand to listen anymore,
Jeremiah was thrown into an empty well.
He was left in a deep hole in the ground
from which no one could hear him,
and where he would eventually be forgotten
and starve to death.
They couldn’t execute Jeremiah
but they could allow him to die.

But alas, I have gotten well ahead of myself.

In Chapter 32 of Jeremiah,
the point in the story that we heard this morning,
Jeremiah is still shackled in the courtyard
ranting and raving about the doom of Jerusalem.
That is where his cousin finds him,
and the piece of the story we heard today.

Under ancient Israelite law,
spelled out in the Book of Leviticus,
there is a statute called, “the right of go-el.”
My Hebrew is even worse than my English,
so I don’t know if I am pronouncing it correctly.

Go-el, as a legal statute,
stipulates that if someone is forced to sell
a piece of property
that has been in the family,
then the first right of refusal must go
to the next of kin.
As it turned out, Jeremiah’s cousin
wanted to sell some property.
Of course he did.

Think about the housing bubble in Jerusalem:
With the Babylonian Empire camped at your door
waiting for you to weaken from a lack
of food and water,
there would be a glut in the real estate market.

So Jeremiah’s cousin can’t sell his property
until he offers it first to Jeremiah –
who, remember, is shackled in the courtyard.
To the cousin’s utter amazement,
Jeremiah agrees to buy it.
“Sure,” Jeremiah says,
“not only do I want to purchase the land
but I knew before you even asked,
that you would offer it to me.

So as the story unfolds,
Jeremiah’s cousin gathers a host of witnesses,
Jeremiah signs the deed,
and gives it to his chief disciple, Baruch.
In front of everyone,
Jeremiah charges Baruch
with protecting the deed
by hiding it in an earthen jar
to be uncovered in the future.
Talk about a bullish act of hope –
it was pugnacious, even aggressive hope.
Surrounded by certain doom,
the very prophet of doom
declares the future is worth investing in.

Jeremiah was investing in the future
with a dramatic, physical,
concrete and highly personal
act of trust.
It was trust in God,
trust in the future,
and trust in the inevitability
of justice and mercy.

Everything around them spoke of destruction.
Everything seemed futile.
It not only looked bad, it was bad.
In the face of sure and certain doom
Jeremiah embodied hope
by investing in the future.

And now, the rest of the story.
For about eighteen months
the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem,
weakening the will of the walled city
before a devastating onslaught.
Eventually the Babylonians
broke down the walls and invaded.
They sacked the city,
stole everything they could carry away –
including the giant bronze pillars of temple.
The temple itself they reduced to rubble.
They killed every officer and leader of the guard.
They mercilessly killed
all three of King Zedekiah’s sons
right in front of the king’s eyes.
And then, they cut out the king’s eyes out
so that the deaths of his sons
would be the last thing he saw.

Jeremiah survived the devastation
because the Babylonians mistakenly thought
his prophecies meant he was on their side.
But Jeremiah was not in favor
of the Babylonians;
he was in favor of trusting God
to have the last word.

Legend has it, that Jeremiah died in Egypt.
But we do not know for certain.

We do know, and this is an important part
of the story,
that an Ethiopian slave,
likely one of the eunuchs that guarded
the royal harem,
saved Jeremiah’s life.
He got Jeremiah released from the well
before the city fell to the invaders.
The slave somehow convinced King Zedekiah
to allow Jeremiah’s freedom.

So there is the great irony
we should be used to by now,
and always looking for, in a Biblical story:
The foreigner in their midst,
and their slave,
could recognize God spoke through Jeremiah
even when those who knew him best could not.

This strange and ancient story
is pregnant with great insights about us,
and about our moment in history,
and about what you and I could be doing
in the midst of our families and friends
who do not yet recognize what time it is.

Jeremiah, the prophet of doom,
committed a devastatingly bold act of hope
by investing in land
at the very moment he knew
it would be ravaged and occupied
in the short run.
He trusted God for the long run
and embodied hope in the short run.

That is the punch line.
Our days, yours and mine, are numbered.
We know that.
But what happens to us,
is the not the final word
or the last act of the story.

So if we are capable of seeing
beyond the little universe in our own head,
then we can see that our own heartbeat
is only the short-term.
If we can see that,
it opens us to seeing that the long-term
may be influenced by us
even if it is not about us.
“The long-term can be influenced by us
even if it is not about us.”

So if the future is not about us,
we can start looking past our own particular
fears and anxieties to see the unexpected.
In this present moment, the one you and I live in,
hope is hard to come by – even for those of us who are optimistic.

I have had so many conversations with folks
about our fears and anger, and the
the seemingly overwhelming nature
of our problems.
I hear from people,
and from within my own heart,
about how difficult it is
to muster hope for the future
because we are surrounded by
deep and pervasive crisis
in the environment,
among nations,
and within our own nation.
There seems to be a pervasive crisis
in every institution of society
whether education, medicine,
law, the economy, or religion.

We are like Judah and Jerusalem
under the reign of Zedekiah,
when tomorrow seems to end in shadows.
We cannot see beyond the darkness
and what we imagine beyond
what we can see
is too disconcerting to entertain.

As in Jeremiah’s day, false prophets surround us.
They smile and promise a gospel of prosperity
for anyone who believes
their theological propaganda.
They promise that faith
and the love of God
will solve all the problems of the world
and act as a talisman
against danger.

Our royalty –
the political, corporate, and religious elite –
would have us be quiet,
and stop naming the grotesque imbalances
within our economy.
They want to hush us
and claim that we only know counterfeit truths –
they castigate the eloquent voices of our youth
who are now irrepressible
and out of their control.

Our royalty and their prophets,
who are broadcast loudly
by their media corporations,
eat away at the foundations of our future
like termites beneath the floor.

To the efforts of our royalty to shut us up
we can be silenced
or we can engage in acts of hope.
We may not have loud voices,
but our lives speak loudly.

For us, the question we must ask
is what are the acts of hope
available to us in our particular moment?
As individuals,
as households,
as a spiritual community –
what acts of hope
can we engage in now,
today, tomorrow
and the next day?
What would it mean
for us to act like Jeremiah
who bought property
even at the darkest moment in his city?

Not surprisingly,
I don’t have an immediate answer for us
and I can’t answer for you anyway.
But given the choice,
why wouldn’t we engage in acts of hope
and refuse to be silenced?

22 Pentecost 2019: A Data-Driven Theology

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

Proper 25C 2019: Wisdom v. Reaction

19 Pentecost: Get Ready to Rumble…with God!

16 Pentecost: Hope

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