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13 Pentecost: Your Giftedness

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You know, sometimes,
(and this is one of them),
I am compelled to leave the lectionary behind
and branch out on my own.

The New Revised Common Lectionary
has a scratch in it,
and we have been reading and re-reading
the same thread from John’s Gospel
for weeks and weeks. Ugh.

So I am going to jump off
that Mary Oliver poem that is ostensibly
about prayer — but, I think, much deeper.
And catch a lift
from that wonderful psalm 139,
and then land in the midst of…Kurt Vonnegut!

First of all,
if you do not know what a “Hoosier” is
then you probably haven’t read Kurt Vonnegut.
Hoosier is the name of native Indianians –
that is, someone from Indiana.
Vonnegut uses them
as a subtle thread running through his stories.

No one seems to have the definitive
derivative source of the name,
but legend has it
that “Hoosier”
comes from the accent.
As in, when someone knocked on the door,
back in the day, they answered, “Whosetheyer”.

Now that is apropos of nothing.

But I am a Hoosier,
and there is a piece from Vonnegut’s well-known work,
“Bluebeard,”
that I found more inspiring this week, than John.

Here it is:
“…simply moderate giftedness
has been made worthless
by the printing press and radio and television
and satellites and all that.
A moderately gifted person
who would have been a community treasure
a thousand years ago has to give up,
has to go into some other line of work,
since modern communications put him or her
into daily competition
with nothing but the world’s champions….

A moderately gifted person
has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until,
in a manner of speaking,
he or she gets drunk at a wedding
and tap-dances on the coffee table
like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers.

We have a name for him or her.
We call him or her an ‘exhibitionist.’
How do we reward such an exhibitionist?
We say to him or her the next morning,
’Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!’”

And isn’t that so true?

I am a writer of truly moderate giftedness
and it took me forty-five years
to get up the nerve
to try and get something published.

Now, there are so many writers
of truly moderate giftedness
and much less,
who get published with independent presses
or publish works themselves
with what used to be called vanity presses,
that it is extremely difficult
for rare and especially gifted talent
to break through the morass.

Digital publishing
and digital music
and digital everything,
has made so much accessible to the public
that it is now quite difficult
to sort through it all
to find some of the more spectacular talent.

The line between talent and exhibitionism
has been made difficult to discern
by Facebook, Instagram, and Tick Tock,
but Vonnegut’s point still resonates
because it hits close to home
for all of us.

I had a couple children
who eventually became  athletes
but the competition was fierce
and the winnowing process astounding.

One of my daughters was a swimmer
and she would blow out other girls
in the 200 yard butterfly at one swim meet,
only to place way back in the pack
at another, bigger swim meet.
She went on to be an eight time All-American
at the DIII level
but put her in the DI pool
and she might not have even placed.

Or my “little” 16 year old who was 6’5”
and a dominant center in Buffalo,
but then we would go
to a basketball tournament in NYC
and he suddenly got shorter and slower.

Or, when planet Earth seemed bigger,
and you were the smartest kid in your high school,
you had to travel a far piece
to realize you weren’t the smartest kid in the world

So Vonnegut is very perceptive
when he recognizes how we keep our
merely moderate giftedness
all bottled up
because there are so many other
more gifted,
true champions
out there.

The Olympics remind us of this every couple of years.

What that means for you and me
is that our creativity
which is the life-blood of giftedness –
lives deep down in us,
deep down
where mushrooms grow.
Down there, in the depth of our hiding places,
our creativity –
which is also the wellspring of joy –
can get depressed.

How many artists are in sales these days?
How many musicians are teaching math
or social studies?
How many dancers are in advertising?
How many poets write copy?
How many authors are working for Verizon?
How many painters are behind the counter at CVS?
How many sculptors went into the ministry?
How many story-tellers spend their days punching a keyboard?
How many athletes grow slow at their desks?
How many gardeners work in file cabinets
or how many spectacular cooks
spend their days drywalling?

What happens to our creativity
when the artist or athlete or performer in us
is buried underneath a 27 hour life in a 24 hour day?
Or for those who are retired,
it may be a reduced energy level
and lack of community or companionship
that holds us back.

But touch the dilemma,
let your own mind search out
where this struggle lives in you,
and we will put our finger
on the core challenge
for anyone
who wishes to deepen their spirituality.

I do not care if you are ninety-six years old
or twelve,
this is a true struggle
worthy of our attention and effort.

What
is your giftedness?
Where
are you allowing it to bloom?
When
is it recognized,
whether simply by you or anyone else?

We all have giftedness.
It may be
mechanical aptitude,
innate Fung Shui,
intuitive fishing acumen,
or any number of less obvious
and more mysterious kinds of talent.

But the question,
the challenge,
is if and how often
we are able to exercise it.

I am thinking of creativity in a very broad sense,
as in our being co-creators with God
in the on-going act of Creation.
Those things we have been gifted with are the very talents that evoke our partnership with God
as we live life within our small place on the planet.

Suppress the gift,
push the creative process to the side
for want of time,
or fear we are not good enough,
or because no one will pay us for it…
and our spirituality will suffer.

Indeed, if we do neglect our giftedness,
if we do not keep fidelity with that gift,
no matter how moderate our talent it is,
then our efforts to grow
and deepen spiritually
will be diminished.

So, let loose “imagination’s tongue,”
as Denise Levertov wonderfully describes it.
Hear the orchestra of life’s fullness –
then taste and see
where the goodness of co-creating with God
can be unleashed with your gifts!

Unleash your gifts!

Even the small ones.
Even the moderate ones.
Even our very least gift,
if truly a gift,
will unleash a process within us
that has enormous power.
At first our legs will feel heavy
because it is scary to be
only moderately gifted
in a world awash with the images of champions.
But there is power even in just beginning.
There is even more power in unleashing it
once we allow it to grow.

So there is the challenge from me to you:
Unleash your gift.

You may never become a champion
or Best Selling author or cook,
but when you free your creativity
to exercise your gift,
you will experience the power of it.

12 Pentecost B: Have you seen the stars?

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I remember reading once,
probably a decade ago,
that in New York City, during a Black Out,
they saw stars.

Real stars!

It was a big deal
because some people there
had not seen “real” stars in the sky
since the previous big major Black Out a
decades earlier.

Now imagine a world
in which there are only “real” stars
because the only human light
is from fire –
as in the kinds that smolder
and go out at night.

Imagine a world
in which humans realize
how small they are
in the vast expanse of interstellar space,
because their ability to forge tools
had not yet morphed into
the creation of machines,
flight,
speed,
or digital communication.

Imagine a world
in which humans live
in intimate relationship
to their surroundings
and are affected daily
by the tidal forces of nature,
the rough terrain of the Earth,
and the whimsical dictates of the weather.

Imagine humans like that
and it is easy to imagine the experience
of a transcendent God.

Transcendence
refers to the complete otherness of God.
The unspeakably awesome Creator of the cosmos
so far beyond our imagination
as to seem almost terrible in proportion —
terrifying actually.

When the ancients, of whatever religion,
speak of the “fear” of God,
it is about awe
more than afraidness.

When the ancients
point to the vastness
of the Creation
and speculate as to what kind of force
could possibly create
such an incredible equation
of matter and life,
it is always with a stutter
or gasp.

But in our mind,
our human mind that is,
we have become quite a bit bigger
that we used to be.

We have tiptoed to the edge
of our own self-destruction
with the creation of truly amazing devices
that both enhance
and screw up life as we know it.
With the power of our own hands,
the Earthen forces of nature
have receded
as we learned to shield ourselves
in environments of our own making.

In this kind of world,
the kind in which we are big
and God is distant,
we tend to seek a more immanent
experience of God – not transcendent but immanent.

That means up close and personal.

We seek the Pentecostal moment
in which we are grasped
by the holy terror
who enters our body space
and makes known, in no uncertain terms,
that God is alive and well
and living in our neighborhood.
In a cosmos that God has to share with us,
immanence is the thirst
and transcendence can seem
kind of antiquated – a bit too Wizard of Oz-ish.

A God that offers “wisdom”
and promises understanding; and
a God that can be eaten
as if bread and wine,
is an immanent God to be sure.
That is a God
that can be prepared and swallowed,
not to mention
told, read, and understood.

Even in our hymns,
while the words may mention
the big, transcendent Creator God,
they still sing about the one
that does stuff for us —
the milkman God
that still delivers to our doorstep.

Wendell Berry’s poem could
potentially be either,
but I think he is pointing
toward the dark sky with stars
filling us with amazement
more than a cuddly, whispering God
that tells us what we hope to hear.

My favorite line in the poem,
because it is also the core of my theology,
is where he writes:
”There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.”

Whether transcendent
or immanent,
we desecrate the holy
when we imagine it is ours;
and we desecrate the holy
when we treat it as if it is ours
to do with what we want;
and we desecrate the holy
when we presume we understand it.

The grand sanctuary of 520 S. Main Street
was built upon the imagination
of God the transcendent —
spectacular,
beautiful,
well beyond our reach.

The intimate space at 78 Castle Street
was formed to imagine
God the immanent
that surfaces among us
with whispers,
and hears the cries
within the closeness of community.

We do both of course:
look upward and outward
toward the transcendent God
who is the force behind and within the cosmos,
as well as peer inwardly
both searching for
and listening to the still small voice
that knows us each by name.

The truth of it all
is that is God both – or in fact,
God is neither
but we experience God in both ways.

The tendency of our tradition,
because it has conserved
the ancient wisdom and practices,
is toward a focus on transcendence.

The tendency of post-modernism,
because we are so uncomfortable
with the overly rational,
formal, and systematic,
is to seek the immanent.

But these need not be, nor should they be,
two poles that pull us apart
or reject each other
when they in close proximity.

Rather, they are natural rhythms
in a well-practice spiritual life.
Religion, old or new,
ought not seek the demise of the other
but rather, incorporate
and be rooted in both.

It is a neat trick if we can do it,
but looking toward the future,
when we have both Trinity Place
and Trinity Church
to worship in,
we ought to be able to figure it out.

Think of the image of the Yin-Yang,
often associated with Buddhism and Taoism.
It is not only about the masculine
and feminine experiences of life,
it can also refer to the transcendent
and immanent experiences of the holy in life.

Moving away from the either/or,
all-or-nothing dualism
so predominant in our moment of history,
and into the embrace
and exploration
of a dance with the holy —
that is both intimate and distant —
is exciting.

Most of us are weighted
toward one or the other.
If you tend to look for and experience
God in the grandeur of nature
or the gush of light through stained glass,
try watching and listening and feeling God
in the face of a friend,
the shared song of our community,
or the presence one can sometimes feel
when people sit in silence together.

If you tend toward that up close
experience of God,
that rush that happens in a group
or even in the stillness
of your own quiet mind,
then lean into the big God.
Lean into the horizon
or the heavens,
or the deep, mysterious unknowns
from which come huge forces
that seem awesome
and even terrifying
in our smallness.

It is a dance, I am recommending.
It is a dance
in which we need to learn
to both lead and follow.

Whichever comes naturally,
we need to lean into
and learn, the other.
It is a spiritual dance
for a spiritual practice,
and young or old,
we can learn it.

Transcendence
and immanence —
the experience of awe
and intimacy
with the Creator
of all that is.

Keep dancing, even if your feet no longer move,
keep doing this dance.

It’s good for what ails you.

Pentecost 11B: Never Enough

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Near the top of Mt. Sinai
Text for preaching on 11 Pentecost: John 6:35, 41-51

In John’s story about Jesus
we hear a harking back to Moses.

Whatever we read in the Bible
is family history
and it is interconnected
across a thousand or more years –
whether those connections were
actual
or mythical
or theological.

Most importantly,
it is impossible to understand
what the authors of the gospels
were trying to tell us
if we don’t connect the dots
between the gospel stories
and those earlier stories.

Trying to understand the Gospels
without understanding the connections,
would be like trying to conduct foreign policy
in the Middle East
without understanding the history
and relationship
between Sunni and Shia
and British Colonialism.

Oh, excuse me, we did that,
and we see
how well it has turned out.

So I begin with an annotation
of that reading from John’s gospel”
“I am the bread of life.

Whoever comes to me will never be hungry,
and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”

Do you hear it?
Can you hear the Biblical whisper
to another time and place?
It is the wilderness.
Remember bread in the wilderness?
Manna?
It didn’t last forever.

Remember water in the wilderness?
They kept getting thirsty anyway.
So this speech from Jesus says,
”I satiate a different hunger
and I slake a different thirst.”

Now we know this isn’t Jesus talking to us
but rather, a speech John gave to Jesus.
John didn’t know Jesus
and John wasn’t writing a verbatim report.
What we have here
is a rendering of John and his community’s “vision”
of what Jesus would say and do.

It is also a description of John and his community’s
experience with religious leaders.

The religious leaders
who hear Jesus make these big claims,
do exactly what the original ancestors did
after God had escorted them
to safety
into the wilderness
with brilliant, never before seen miracles:
they whine.

It is another nod to that Exodus story
in which the people whine
about their new freedom
and demand bread, meat, and water.

John draws a parallel to Moses and Exodus
with HIS story about Jesus and the religious leaders.

“We know Jesus is Mary’s son,”
the religious leaders say.

“He has no father
in heaven or anywhere else,” they say.
“We know where he lives;
we know his address,” they say.

“If we know where he came from and
we know where he lives,” they mutter,
“then how can he be bread from heaven?”

It doesn’t matter if Jesus
has just walked on water
and fed five thousand,
just like manna in the wilderness wasn’t enough;
and birds being blown into their camp to eat
wasn’t enough;
and water gushing from rocks wasn’t enough.
In response to their whining,

Jesus says, “Stop it! Enough already.”

But the religious leaders haven’t had enough.
The people trotting along behind Jesus
hoping for more bread and fish
or a healing
haven’t had enough either.
I suppose there are all kinds of punchlines
we can read in these stories
but here is the punch line
that resonates the most for me.

When it comes to the things that really matter to us:
No one can satiate our appetite for more.
Answer my prayer today
and tomorrow I will have another one;
and if you don’t answer that one
then I will be just as agitated.

When blood is gushing from one wound
it doesn’t really make a difference to us
that another wound has been bandaged:
“What about THIS wound!”

This has real-life implications for us.
For people who see Jesus
as just another myth
or an interesting wisdom teacher
or a literary illustration,
then no amount of preaching
or personal witnessing
or impassioned proof-texting
will convince them
that Jesus can satiate their hunger
and slake their thirst.

Preaching and witnessing
are as powerless as miracles
to give someone an experience
they do not already have.

In spite of the idea of evangelism,
deeply embedded in Christianity
is the belief that revelation
cannot be given by humans.
And by revelation, I mean the unveiling of God
or information about God.
As I have illustrated before,
world religions can be lumped into two categories:
“Revealed” and “Unrevealed” religion.

“Unrevealed” religions,
like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism,
are practiced
and with that practice comes wisdom.
Any secrets or mysteries — if they can be discovered —
are discoverable through practice and learning.
That may also be why it takes many lifetimes.

In “Revealed” religions,
like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,
that which is important to know
is revealed only by one source,
and one source only: God.
No matter how hard we practice the spiritual steps
God will not be revealed to us
unless God reveals godself.
It is all God’s action
and none of ours.

So, according to our wisdom tradition,
we are powerless.
No matter what we do
no matter how good, bad, or ugly we are,
if God wants to be known
or unknown,
it is God’s choice.

But this is also true:
whatever is here in the field around us
to be seen or heard or known
will go unseen, unheard, and unknown
if what we are doing is whining
and cheeping for more and more
like baby birds.

While it is true
that no amount of preaching
and teaching
will reveal the mysteries and love of God,
it is also true
that we can always be more open
to the presence of God
that is right here
and right now
in every moment.

But God’s presence in our midst
goes unseen while we whine
about what we do not have
and when we are focused
on what we have decided is not enough.

Not enough and whining
takes away our sight.
Not enough and whining
takes away our sensitivity.
Not enough and whining
takes away our understanding.

Not enough
creates all kinds of static
in the field all around us
and makes it nearly impossible
for us to pick up on the signals
of God’s ordinary presence in our face.

A scarcity mentality
that always sees the glass half empty
leads to whining as a default,
whether in our own head
or out loud.
Ceaseless sorrow and insistence
that we do not have enough,
simply sucks the sacred
right out of any moment.

Sometimes there really and truly
is not enough,
and sometimes
that “not-enough”
is a justice issue that we must demand
be changed.
But much of the time…there is enough.

If I learned anything
from the decade I spent learning
from communities in El Salvador,
it is that affluence
utterly distorts our perception
of what is and what is not
enough.

What I suspect now,
is that whenever things are not enough,
or not good enough,
or simply not to our liking,
it is still probably enough.

The problem is not
what is missing
or that we do have what we need,
it is that we do not have what we want,
or as much as we want,
or exactly the way we want it.

The point of John’s story,
is that Jesus could be standing on water
right in front of us,
right here and now,
and handing out wine flavored ice cream,
but we could still be saying or feeling,
“That’s not enough.”

The solution
is not for someone to preach at us about Jesus
or try to convince us that Jesus is miraculous
or supernatural —
or try to convince us of anything.
The solution comes from within:
to address the anxiety
and the fear
and the resentment
and the grief
that whimpers or screams, “Not enough.”

But addressing all of that
is a topic for another sermon,
and may be above my paygrade.

10 Pentecost: Our shared congenital disease

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Here is a self-composed American Psalm for the 21st century
taken from Psalm 78 that we read this morning:

“He sent the east wind from heaven
and led the south wind by his power.

He rained vaccines on them like dust.
The masks were as many
as the sand of the sea.

He made the vaccines fall inside the camp,
all around the houses.
So the people received shots
as God gave them what they wanted.”

And then this commentary
adapted from John’s gospel story we heard:

“Jesus said, ‘The vaccines are the way to life. The person who is vaccinated and practices CDC advice, need fear no more, ever. I have told you this explicity because even though you have seen your unvaccinated and unmasked neighbors get sick, you don’t really believe it…I came down from heaven not to follow my own agenda but to spread the word: mask up when necessary, get vaccinated.’”

Okay, my editorial effort is goofy
but I was struck by the Psalm and Gospel.
Those two stories about people
doing or resisting
the very things
that might protect and save them,
parallels how unvaccinated people
resist the clear and obvious benefits
of being vaccinated
even when it does not compromise their health.

This present catastrophe of ours is all so biblically familiar.

God called the people of Israel, “stiff necked”
which is a great description
of human beings
when we put our foot down with resistance,
no matter what the evidence
and no matter what the consequence.

I made that creative parallel
just to say it has been going on
for a very long time.

We shake our heads today
in complete and utter disbelief
at what people are denying and saying “no” to,
and yet it has been going on
since the beginning.
Noah didn’t get a 75% postive response either.

Whether it is climate change
or the political situation or vaccines
stubborn resistance is par for the course
when comes to humans.
And what’s more, every single one of us here
has been a stiffed necked human
more than once in our lives.
Can I get an “Amen?”

I think most of you know
I have been contending with back issues
for quite a few months now.
I do not know what the solution will be
but I do know what the cause was:
years and years of stiff-necked Cam
doing things I should not have been doing
just because I refused to accept
I wasn’t big enough
and strong enough
to do them by myself.
When anyone warned me not to,
my neck stiffened
and I went on doing whatever I was doing
just to show I could: Evidence and science be damned.

That is what we do.
Jesus may be the Bread of Life
but we will bake our own,
thank you very much.

We will do what we want
when we want
and how we want
because —
well, because we are a stiff-necked species.
It is part of our disease.

If you didn’t know
we all have a congential disease
then I’m afraid
that is just one more denial
to add to your bar tab.

Traditional religious folks like to call it sin.
People like Paul and Augustine
developed awkward mythologies
to describe why we do
what we know we should not do —
even when it is against
our best interest.

I think the word sin has too much
religious baggage on it to be very useful.
But that does not mean
I am in denial about our universally shared
congenital disease.
I don’t know what to call it.
“Stupidity” might work,
but that has baggage too.

All I know, is that the Bible
is masterful at telling stories
about how stiff-necked we have always been —
whether kings and queens,
priests and prophets, or ordinary folk like us.

Over and over and over again
we have just refused
to see things as they are
because we didn’t like the evidence.

Over and over and over again
we have just refused
to accept or believe warnings
about the consequences of our choices.

Over and over and over again
we have just refused
to do what we could do
in order to change or modify
or even save ourselves
from the bad things likely to happen
from our bad choices.

We have done this repeatedly throughout history,
and we have each done this repeatedly
in our own lives.

Today we witness entire segments of our society
doing it right now.
We are a stiff necked species.
Instead of compensating for our disease,
by ensuring that feedback
from the prophets in each generation
can and will be heard,
we marginalize them
or worse.

Whether in science,
politics,
religion,
banking,
industry,
military,
the media,
schools, or the economy
we marginalize the people
who speak up
and who offer feedback
and let us know the rudder needs a hard turn.

Most of us do not have the power
to make sure our political leaders
or cultural influencers
have people around them
to offer feedback from different perspectives,
but WE can do that.

You and I can make sure we have people in our lives
who will offer feedback
from a perspective that is not
naturally our own.
Whether it is about race,
gender or trans-gender,
sexuality,
ethnicity, immigration,
religion, poltics or economics…
we can work to build relationships
with people who will share
a different perspective
than the ones we keep
in the comfort of our own nest.

Then, of course,
there is the challenge of listening to them.
Taking in what they see
and trying to see it from their perspective.

When we do that,
chances are we will be changed.
Chances are something we have assumed
or wanted to believe,
will be challenged.

We may not change our minds
about the particular issue
but maybe we will grow in compassion
or understanding,
and that will change our behavior.

Here is a small, ordinary example.

I have been taking part in a clergy dialogue
with clergy from all over the country
gathered in small groups via zoom,
discussing a variety of topics —
particularly about how the pandemic
has changed our perspectives
and ministries
and personal spirituality.

One of the questions
we were asked to ponder, was:
”How has your experience and understanding
of God been sustained or reinforced?”
I objected and called it an “unfortunate question.”
I was proud of myself for using such a refined phrase.

But why would I want my understanding of God
to be sustained and not challenged,
or to be reinforced and not changed?

It was framed as if spirituality
and religion are about preservation, which is crazy.
So I offered the organizers feedback.
The challenge for me will be if they respond,
and whether I will listen,
then hear the perspective from which they see it,
and learn something from them.

That is a feedback loop,
and it can go on and on and on
for as long as the participants
want to listen to one another.

But when we are stiff-necked
we simply do not want to listen
and we push away
whatever else anyone has to say.
That is a black hole
and a dead end for relationships.

So this is another element of prophecy
and being prophetic.
It is a small, humble, ordinary
kind of thing we may do every day
but that we do not label as religious or spiritual.

Offering feedback,
receiving feedback,
putting ourselves in a place
to make certain we are exposed to feedback…
this is all a part of being prophetic.
It is an element of spiritual practice.
And conversely, isolating ourselves
and walling ourselves in
so we only hear what we want to hear,
is the opposite of spiritual —
whatever we call it,
it is stiff-necked
and a disaster for us
and those we live with.

Often spirituality
and good spiritual practice
is very ordinary and relatively simple.
In this case, as ordinary as giving
and receiving feedback.

9 Pentecost: A parasite that worms its way into our hearts and minds

by

Texts for 9 Pentecost (2 Kings and John)
Youtube video follows text

Okay, it is the 21st century
and we have discovered planet 452b
that may be an earth-double.
How can we not
see stories about Elisha and Jesus
differently than earlier people did —
and how can we not
ask different questions of such stories,
even from when “we” first heard them?

But here is an open secret:
These stories were not even intended for us.
We are strangers to those ancient story-tellers,
living on another continent
2000 and more years away.

So let’s recognize these stories
were not even meant for us.

2 Kings reports four miracles
performed by Elisha
in order to demonstrate
that he is an appropriate successor
to the prophet Elijah.

Then, a thousand or more years later,
John attributes the same miracles to Jesus
in order to demonstrate
that JESUS is an appropriate successor
to the prophets Moses, Elijah, and Elisha.
In all of John’s miracles stories,
Jesus one-ups
his predecessors.
That is the point of the stories.
We just hear the miracle,
and in our 21st century seat,
ask if such things could really happen?
Or even reject the verasity of such stories.

But for the author of John’s gospel
the point of the stories is not for us,
rather, it is that Jesus’ wow-factor
is bigger and better than
Elijah’s and Elisha’s wow-factors.

Elsewhere in 2 Kings
Elijah and Elisha
are walking along
followed by a bevy of lesser prophets –
disciples so to speak –
when they come to the river.

Without skipping a beat,
Elijah smacks the water with his robe
and the two of them walk through the water
on dry land – echoing back
to Moses at the Red Sea.
Jesus doesn’t need no stinking magic robe
for him to actually walk ON water.

Likewise, Elisha does three food tricks
during a time of terrible famine,
the final one we heard this morning:
he feeds a hundred men
with only a single tithe of food
someone gave him.
In other words,
he had just enough to feed one prophet
and yet, after feeding 100,
there was stil food left.

Well, Jesus has just enough
to feed one family
but after he feeds 5000
there is plenty left over.

In a more innocent time
such a competition of miracle stories
was used by preachers
and evangelists
and ordinary folks sharing their faith,
to prove
that Jesus was God.

I can remember thinking that
as a kid.
In my Sunday School mind I thought,
”Wow, walking on water, that proves it!”

But I don’t remember any sermons
in which it was pointed out
that the other great prophets of Israel
did such miraculous things too.

And when I was a kid
no one ever told me about Milarepa,
the great Tibetan spiritual master,
who could fly.

We had Jesus who did such big stuff
but any other stories we heard
were dismissed as mytholog —
or cartoons.
At least that was my childhood,
I don’t know about yours.

But that was then
and this is now.

There are still churches
that speak of the Bible as proof of itself –
churches that try to hermetically seal
its members within a cocoon of thinking
so they are not troubled by obvious questions
raised by using the bible for proof of itself.

But in our tradition,
the authority of the Bible
is not that it is an unassailable,
or an eyewitness account,
nor the belief that the Bible
is a meticulously detailed
factual version of events
recorded verbatim
with the miraculous assistance of God.
It is none of those things,
at least from our tradition.

The authority of the Bible
is that we are the same community
in another time
and in another place
seeking, struggling with, and encountering
the presence of God in our midst.

We are the same community of the Bible
doing the same things
and seeking the same things
and struggling with the same things
as those people did thousands of years ago.

The problem with the Bible
is not the Bible itself;
the problem is what we have laid on top it.

As the early religious movement survived Jesus
it aged and developed and spread,
and then it became the religion of an empire.
When that happened,
Christianity sought to harmonize the Bible.
It felt the need to harmonize
all the conflicting stories
because they wanted it to also reinforce
the countless beliefs it brought to the Bible —
from far outside the Bible.

In other words, and for example,
five hundred years after Jesus,
Christians living in what is now Turkey
and who were citizens of Rome,
wanted to make Scripture
conform to their worldview
and religious assumptions.
They didn’t want the gospels, for example,
to contradict each other
or to be in tension with what they believed,
so they imposed upon them
an interpretive matrix
that mushed things together,
ignored internal contradictions,
and made things fit.

But they were not alone.
Christians in Ethiopia did that
and Christians in Egypt did that
and Christians in Spain did that
and Christians in Britain did that
and Christians on the Minnesota prairie did that.
We have rung the Bible
through paintings,
stained glass images,
maudlin, triumphant, and sentimental hymns
and spirituals,
and every other kind of art
and cultural prism at our disposal
until the people,
events,
and ideas of the Bible
look and sound like we want them to.

We did all of that
to harmonize the wildly divergent,
utterly disorganized,
and truly eclectic stories of the Bible,
as if they formed a clear image
and delivered proof for our way of thinking.

Here is an interesting way to think about this.

Let’s say that everyone
who is a part of this congregation
has been keeping a spiritual journal
that describes our understanding
of what God is doing in our lives –
or in some cases,
complaining about what God
is not doing in our lives.

And let’s say that the people of Trinity Place
have been keeping their journals since 1806
when it was first formed.
And now let’s pretend that somehow,
all those scraps of paper
were brought together and typed into a computer.

What we would have
would be a wild mishmash of perspectives
flowing across a period of time
that witnessed the second Industrial Revolution;
two world wars;
a cold war;
the discovery of electricity,
flight, and
the splitting of atoms;
not to mention the rise and fall
of antibiotics,
terrorism and many more wars.

The quality of writing,
the breadth and narrowness of perspectives,
the quality of wisdom and insight,
the peculiarity and ordinariness of content
would be wildly different
from person to person
and generation to generation.

Just imagine the differences
we might find between
Bunny Bell,
Kathy Flick,
Beth Henderson,
Howard Sabin,
Cam Miller,
Sherry Gibbon, and
Kim Donselaar?
What kind of violence
would we have to do to all of that writing,
that all those people
over all those generations produced,
in order to make it offer a harmonious
point of view?

So one of the truly wonderful
and amazing things
that is happening these days,
is the effort to return to the Bible
without all of our harmonizing efforts.

But we will never be able to strip away
everything we have laid over the Bible
and there is no pure and pristine original
to get back to and uncover anyway.

For one thing,
the Bible was originally told not written.
When it did get written down
it was done in disconnected scraps
by a variety of editors
over a great many years
and cultures
and languages.
So there is no original Bible
for us to uncover
and say, “Ah ha! Here it is!”
as if it were a buried pirate treasure.

It came to us in pieces
over time
and from different voices
and cultures
and languages.

But what is exciting,
is that we can begin to see
what we have laid on top of the Bible
and recognize it as our effort to harmonize
what was not originally in harmony.
We can learn a lot about ourselves
by seeing what we have shellacked the Bible with,
and we can learn more and more
as we keep digging.

So one thing that means,
is you will not hear me say,
“Jesus walked on water
therefore Jesus is Lord of Nature.”

What I might say instead,
is that this story originates
in the Gospel of Mark
who uses it to proclaim Jesus as Lord
even over Nature,
and that John retells it,
a generation and a half later,
to proclaim Jesus is greater
than Elijah and Elisha.

You see, it even changed purpose and meaning
from Mark to John.

So I do not proclaim that something in the bible really, really happened.
Instead, I try to point out what the particular
editor or author hoped we would see.
And like Paul or Augustine or Dorothy Day,
I will converse and argue with the story
rather than simply believe
what Mark
or John
or the 2nd Council of Nicea
may have wanted us to believe.

But that still leaves the question
of whether or not
Elijah could part the waters of the Jordan;
and Elisha could feed a hundred men with a portion allotted to one man;
and whether or not
Jesus could walk on water
or feed five thousand
with an amount normally shared
by a single family;
or for that matter, whether or not
Milerapa could fly?

We all come to such a question
from a different place,
and I come to it from a place.

I am more inclined to focus on small details
like this one in John’s story.
“Jesus knew that the people planned to come
and take him by force
and make him their king,
so he left and went into the hills alone.”

I mean, listen to that!
There is so much more for us
in that one measily sentence
than wondering about miracles.

Jesus, “taken by force.”
The crowd, “wanting to make him their king.”
Jesus, stomping off to be alone in the hills…

I like to think of the bible as a holy parasite
that worms its way
through our thoughts
and into our hearts
causing us to see the world differently
and do things that risk our own self-interest.

A sentence like that one
is a parasite
and it will worm its way inside
if we drop our guard.

All miracles require is a “yes” or “no.”
It is all the other stuff that is more dangerous.

Trinity in Time of Pandemic

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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.

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

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