Sermons – Page 39

Proper 22C: My Dad and Rachel Carson

October 2, 2016 by Cam Miller

Please forgive the indulgence
but I am going to tell you about my dad.
He would have been 100 years old
in a couple of weeks
but died from a fall about seven years ago.

My dad looked like the old Hollywood actor,
Gary Cooper;
tall, lanky, slow of movement.

It would be a gross understatement
to describe him as introverted.
My dad was a listener not a speaker,
and he was the kind of man that,
when he did speak up in a group,
everyone listened
because they knew
if my dad thought it was worth saying
it was worth hearing.
As I got older and ventured into our community
without my parents
and formed relationships as my own person,
I also began to recognize that my dad
had stature in our town.
Not because he ran for office
or held positions of influence or power
but because he was trusted.
People held him in esteem for his integrity –
his word was his bond, as the saying goes.

My dad was a Republican and quite conservative,
and started legal aid in our community
before there was such a thing as legal aid.
He was an attorney who had a solo practice
doing wills and estates.

But I discovered,
when I worked on the County Hi-way Crew
during my summers in college,
that many of the men I worked with also knew my dad.
He had a reputation among them too,
not just among his professional peers.
It seems that he was one of the few attorneys in town
that charged a very affordable flat fee for divorce
decades before that was even an idea.
When I asked him about it,
he told me he despised doing divorce cases
but that the men I worked with
couldn’t afford it otherwise
and he didn’t want them to suffer debt
when they were also suffering through divorce.

My dad was more libertarian than conservative, and he just did not want there to be much government.

So he did the kinds of things
people need to do for one another
if they don’t want the government
to provide the services.

Now my dad and I disagreed heartily on that principle
but he was a man who practiced what he preached,
even though he never preached.
Whatever someone knew about my dad,
it was because they dragged it out of him
or simply hung around in his presence over time
to watch what he did and how he lived.

One small memory is burned in my soul.
It was the second Earth Day.

Some of you may remember the first-ever Earth Day
that took place in the now crowded year
of cultural history, 1969.

Well this was 1970, the second one,
and it was bigger than the first.
“Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson’s small book
on the effects of indiscriminant use of pesticides
and the chemical industry’s misinformation about it,
had ignited the environmental movement.
My dad, I discovered,
was the President of the local Isaac Walton League,
and an officer in the local Audubon Society.
He was a bird watcher
and an environmentalist before it was a word,
even though he really was just a man
who believed in living simply.

I was in charge of organizing my high school’s
Earth Day symposium
and I begged him to be one of the speakers.
My dad was not a public speaker
but I didn’t know it at the time.
I was amazed then,
sitting on stage behind him as he spoke from the podium,
to see my dad’s knees shaking.
But I was proud
and the event went off with great success.

Then sometime not long after that event
my dad called me into my own bedroom
from wherever I had been.
He stood pointing at the light switch
and reminded me that I was to turn off the lights
when I was not in the room.
He told me in a quiet voice
about the coal required to generate electricity
and how that coal pollutes the air.
Now mind you, this was 1970.

But being the squirrely teenager I was,
I responded with some smart, defensive protest
and he stopped me short when he said,
“I guess you don’t really care about the environment.”

It was such a small incident, so small
it seems an unlikely thing to be seared into my memory.
And it would probably be the kind of thing
buried by the dust of forgetfulness
if not for the fact that my dad
was a man whose integrity was recognized as bedrock
by all who knew him.

The third promise of the Baptismal Covenant
is as singularly simple
as it is spectacularly powerful and difficult:
To live a narrow distance
between what we say we value
and what we do.
“Will you proclaim by word and example,
the Good News of God in Christ?”

Heck, that could be the whole covenant –
just that one promise:
“Will you proclaim by word and example,
the Good News of God in Christ?”

If you just walked in off the street
and haven’t been here for a couple of weeks, or ever,
then you should know you have stumbled into
a sermon series
and this is week number three.
We are focusing on the “Baptismal Covenant”
as articulated by The Episcopal Church,
which is our description of what it looks like
to practice Christian spirituality in 2016.

It is descriptive and not prescriptive.
It is about what we do
and how we do it
rather than what we believe
and how we say it.
All of these sermons are available online
from Trinity’s website or my personal website,
and there will be some hard copies here at the end
if you want to read them altogether.

Today I want to unpack
the dense knot of wisdom in Promise 3.

We are not a doctrinal church,
and that is very important to point out.
We do not have a Catechism
or a Confessional Statement,
or magical words of any kind
that bestow entrance into the love of God,
or heaven, or membership in the Church.

That is not us, that is not our tradition.

You do not have to take Jesus
as your “personal Lord and Savior”
to be a full and complete insider here.
You do not have to recite the Nicene Creed
or any Affirmation of Faith
as a litmus test of correct personal theology
in order to be a practicing “Episcopalian.”
In fact, you do not have to be an Episcopalian
to be a full member of this or any Episcopal congregation.

That is just who we are
and the kind of community we try to practice
in this brand of Christianity.

But on the other hand,
those who are baptized and wish to practice
Christian spirituality as we have come to understand it,
do need to take Jesus seriously
as representing or pointing to
the core of our spiritual wisdom.

We believe that God shown through Jesus
like sun through a prism,
and that what Jesus taught and lived
makes available to us profound wisdom
about God’s best dream for us.

Let’s just stop and think about that for a second.

If we could know what God thinks…
if we could see,
just for a nanosecond what God sees…
wouldn’t we want that?
No matter what you think God is
or what you think God does or doesn’t do,
wouldn’t we want,
if just for a fraction of a second,
a God’s-eye view
of living life in such a way as to promote more and greater life?

That is what we think Jesus offers:
a peek at God’s best dream for us.

Oh, and by the way,
we do not insist that it is the only peek
ever to be revealed,
before or after.
To embrace Jesus
does not require us to reject Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, Lao Tzu
or the pantheon of revelations Hinduism offers.
The wisdom revealed by God in Jesus
is neither enhanced nor discredited
by the claims or wisdom inherent
in other spiritual practices.

To hold and embrace the wisdom of Jesus
can and should be done
from a place of pluralism
not exclusivism or relativism.
This is who we are;
this is what we embrace;
this is the wisdom
that has been confirmed by our experience
and by the history of humankind.

We believe that through Jesus
God’s best dream for us
is made clearer
and more accessible.
That is the bedrock of our belief.

Now some of us, in the Episcopal tradition I mean,
want to add some stuff on top of that bedrock –
like Jesus is God
or was divine in a particular way –
but the bedrock is not about who Jesus was
it is about God.
The bedrock is about God
and God’s best dream for us,
and then getting our heads around that
so we can get on with living the dream.
We can argue about Jesus all day long,
and we probably will,
but it is living God’s best dream for us
that matters.
Our spiritual practice
is living God’s best dream for us.

I know that I am not going to be able
to convince anyone here
that God does indeed have “a best dream for us”
if you do not already know it or intuit it.
It is not even my job to convince you –
because contrary to popular belief
we are not in sales.
We are in construction.
We are builders, not sales representatives.

That has been the problem in Christianity.
We thought we were in sales
and our job was to convince people
to see the world
the way we wanted them to see it.
Wrong.

Our job is to be like my dad,
and live the life we imagine God dreams for us,
and hope that others around us
will find it compelling enough
that they then begin to see what we see
and do what we are trying to do.

So this third promise pinches us
between listening for God’s best dream for us
through the wisdom of Jesus,
and living that dream with our own lives.

Integrity can feel like a harsh requirement
when described as a narrow distance
between what we say we value
and how we live.
It’s just plain scary
because most of us know how wide that chasm
is for us in our lives – Yikes!

It ain’t just light switches we forget to turn off.

And please,
we’re not talking about punishment for failure
as if there is a special Hell
for people who don’t get it right.
The whole heaven and hell thing
is maybe the worst of Christian history
because in earlier times it promoted
so much violence and self-abuse.

The case for integrity
is not made with reward and punishment
but by understanding cause and effect.
If we do this,
then we can expect this outcome;
and if we do that
we can expect that outcome.
It is reasonable and based upon
the evidence of experience
not magical thinking about heaven and hell.

So finding our integrity
is like discovering our balance.

Remember learning to ride a bicycle?
I realize that was a pretty long time ago for some of us
but I suspect it is a memory that doesn’t fade too much.
Remember it?

There was the wobbling and teetering,
even the falling over and getting scraped knees?
But then you got back on your bike
and wobbled down the street
until, voila, you moved into that sweet spot
that was your balance upon those two wheels.
And what joy the freedom riding a bike brought you.

Integrity is the same.
We suddenly discover we are living what we cherish
and it feels awesome
and solid
and just plain good.
Then we do something that makes us fall down.
Or maybe it happens
but not because of something we do,
but because we didn’t recognize
things around us had changed.

But either way, we lose our balance
and we wobble
and teeter
and we violate our own principles.

But then we learn from it
and try again.
And that is how it goes if we are willing to learn.

So what do we need in our lives
to practice living a narrow distance
between what we say we value
and how we live?

Well, we need some wisdom…
wisdom that stands the test of time.
Jesus offers that, which is part of why we gather here.
But we also need other people around us
to challenge and support us
as we wobble and fall, and get back up.

What we need is to see ourselves
in a process of learning to live with integrity,
rather than perfectionism
that requires us to get it right all the time.

What we need is a community
that nurtures and challenges us
to get back on the bike and wobble forward
rather than condemns us for failure
and threatens us with punishment.

What we need is grit
so that when we finally realize that balance
is always only temporary,
we will keep trying to discover it again.

Wisdom,
community,
a temperament to enter into learning as trial and error,
and gritty perseverance
is what we need
in order to practice promise number three:
to see and hear God’s best dream for us
and to live it as best we can
one day at a time.

Proper 21C: Evil is not the opposite of good

September 25, 2016 by Cam Miller

THE BAPTISMAL COVENANT

“We will continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.”
Being: Lens
Doing: Staying in Relationship

“We will persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever we fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord.”
Being: Openness
Doing: Making Amends

“We will proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.”
Being:
Doing:

“We will seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves.”
Being:
Doing:

“We will strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.”
Being:
Doing:

“I will, with God’s help.”
Being:
Doing:

I made a discovery on the way to writing this sermon.
I’m in deep doo-doo, which means all of us are.

If you weren’t here last week,
or if the sermon was utterly forgettable,
here is a reminder that today
is the second of a multi-part sermon series
on the Baptismal Covenant,
which is our core description
of what it looks like to practice
Christian spirituality in 2016.

When I started last week,
I really thought it would just be two weeks.
But honestly, I felt compelled to dig into the covenant
in a way I have not done before in preaching.
I realize now
we are going to look at one promise at a time.

We are going to give each promise its due,
and there are five of them.
They are that important to us,
especially for us here at Trinity Geneva,
because we are at such a radical turning
point in the history of the congregation.

So I apologize for the fact
that the readings for each week
will likely not get any specific attention
while we are focusing on the promises of the covenant.

That is a pity too,
because that story from Jeremiah is as juicy
as the one from Luke is disturbing.
But they’ve been in front of us before
and they will come around again.

Now if you are unfamiliar
with the Baptismal Covenant
it is the hub
around which the wheel of our spirituality
is connected.
It is impossible for a wheel to work
without a hub
and it is impossible
for our notion of spiritual practice to work
without the five promises of this covenant.

The twentieth century turned out to be
a war of beliefs within Christianity
even as the world was going to war
for ideological, nationalistic, and economic reasons.
Christianity obsessed on what it believed
and who believed rightly
and who believed wrongly
and the rewards and consequences for each.
The Episcopal Church corrected its course
with the Baptismal Covenant,
focusing on Christian spiritual practice
rather than prescriptive doctrines and dogma.

So please remember as we go through the covenant
that it is not prescriptive but descriptive,
which is the norm in our faith tradition.

The Covenant is on the front of your Worship Guide
and last week I began with the first promise:
“Will you continue in the Apostle’s teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and the prayers?”

Now some people, like me,
are big picture,
focus-on-the-process kind of people;
we are touchy-feely, and a bit gooey.

Other people are into details
and task-oriented;
and they are tell-me-what-to-DO kind of people.

So in order to address both needs,
I am assigning a word or phrase to each promise:
one for Being
and one for Doing.
Think of it as something gushy and sticky
as well as something about task and procedure.

Last week the being word was “lens” –
referencing the fact
that all of us have one or more
interpretive lenses
through which we filter our experiences
and see the world around us.

The Baptismal Covenant is a lens
through which we can understand
Christian spirituality as a practice.

The doing word was “staying in relationship.”
Our spiritual practice requires us
to be in relationship with other people.

We stay in relationship to the community of the past,
whether that first generation following Jesus
or the latest generation.

Staying in relationship with the generations
means dealing with the discomfort
of relationship with people we do not agree with
and may not even like,
but who share our history and tradition
and seek to know God’s presence in this moment.

But that does not mean we must conform
to what earlier generations did and believed,
rather, that even as we diverge from the past
we make an effort to stay connected
in meaningful ways
because the core nature of our spirituality
is communal.
So whether the past generations
or the ones coming up,
our spiritual practice is to stay in relationship to them
as best we can
and in ways that are life-giving and meaningful.

Okay, that was last week.

This week we will look at
the second promise of the Baptismal Covenant.
As you can read on the bulletin cover it is:
“We will persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever we fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord.”

The being-word for this promise is, feedback.
The doing-word for this promise is, making amends.

Resisting evil requires us not only to be open to feedback
but to actually court it,
and then of course, to hear it when it is offered.

FYI: evil is not the opposite of good, and
it is not some nasty supernatural power like the Satan.
Evil is a very human phenomenon
that each and every one of us is capable of doing
and we have already fallen into and practiced it.

Evil is the result of fragmentation –
when people become dis-integrated
and lose sight of the connections that actually exist.
To place it in a non-human context,
think of an eco-system that is in balance
verses one that has fallen out of balance.

Human beings have a history of encountering
Natural environments and other human communities
with certain blinders
to the balance of relationships that existed before.
As we enter them they can become distorted and imbalanced
because of our presence and behavior.

An easy example is natural wetlands.
As we know, wetlands
form at the edge of waterways and deltas
but we discovered the hard way,
they both regulate the flow of water
and ease the destruction of flooding,
not to mention they also filter toxins
and help to maintain water quality.

But until recently we saw wetlands as swamps
and an enemy to our interest in land development.
So we drained them.
Low and behold
we witnessed more and worse flooding,
greater and more devastating pollution,
and the disappearance of animal species.
That is a perfect example of human evil in action.

When we are self-orbiting
we see everything and everyone
as objects of our desire and use.
We treat them like objects for us
rather than perceive the intricate relationships
that existed before we entered the scene.
We see only the relationship
between the object and our desire,
and ignore or deny the consequences
of disturbing and thwarting the other relationships.

So our self-orbit
usually leads to the fragmentation of relationships
and that inevitably causes what we associate with evil:
destruction, violence, and alienation.

This is true on a personal level,
in our one-on-one relationships,
as well as in communities
and in the natural environment.
When we pursue our self-interests
WITHOUT a deeper and more pervasive perspective
on how we are effecting and influencing our relationships
in the wider sphere, bad things happen.

Conversely, when we are fully awake
to the exquisite complexity of our relationships,
and keep present both our compassion and empathy,
it is much more difficult for us to knowingly
betray and abuse our commitments, values, and beliefs.

So this second promise
relates to our propensity to slavishly pursue
our own self-interests.

Resisting evil requires us to court feedback.

We actually need to set up feedback loops
so that we receive a steady flow
of other people’s perspectives.
Then we need to find ways to become open
to actually hear the feedback we are receiving.

Again, think of the natural environment.

Satellite images of changes in the polar ice caps,
and historical studies
gathered from core samples of rock and soil,
are feedback to us about climate change.

But the self-interests of some very wealthy and powerful
people and corporations
led to many people, for many years,
closing themselves to that feedback.
Denial of climate change
is the denial of obvious relationships that exist
and has led to further fragmentation.
That is evil.

Listening to feedback,
actually going out and asking for feedback,
and then listening to what it tell us
helps remediate against that kind of evil.

It is amazing how powerful feedback can be
because it is a kind of mirror.

When we can see and hear
how our behavior is affecting other people
and our empathy and compassion are plugged in,
it becomes harder and harder
to willingly abuse our relationships.
That is what it means to resist evil.

We must court feedback and then be open to it,
even when it makes us uncomfortable
and defensive and angry.

Now, having said that,
there are of course occasions
when the competing interests
of different communities and values,
leads to conflict that also fragments;
and sometimes fragmentation has to happen
before a beneficial reconciliation
or progress can be made.
Jeremiah,
Susan B. Anthony,
Frederick Douglas,
Dietrich Bonheoffer,
Rosa Parks,
Aung San Suu Kyi
are all examples of people who engaged in conflict
and sewed the seeds of fragmentation
on the way to a greater binding
of more and complete relationships.
Such people are obviously the source of feedback
that self-orbiting people in power
do not want to hear.
Still they create fragmentation
on the way to restoring balance.

But courting feedback
and finding ways to be open to it when it comes,
is a primary way to resist evil. It is a spiritual practice.
We need to do this as individuals
and as communities,
and as governments and corporations.

Resisting evil
is a core element of our Christian spiritual practice.
And it has a corollary:
Making amends when we fail.

We will fail,
we have failed,
we have and do engage in evil.
And we have gotten really bad at making amends.

Our legal system makes it excruciatingly difficult
and even hazardous to say, “I am sorry.”

But the process of acknowledging responsibility
for evil that ensues from our actions,
whether by intent or by accident,
whether we did it consciously or unconsciously,
is fundamental to healing
and reconciliation.
It is also just a very basic step
in how we learn to become better people.

When an alcoholic or drug user
decides to enter into the recovery process,
a fundamental moment in that process
is facing all of the harm he or she has done
and all the violations of relationship
he or she has engaged in.
THEN, he or she makes a list
of all the people
to which they need to make amends.

Amends are then made one by one
where to do so does not cause even greater harm.
How to make amends or reconciliation
is not prescriptive and will happen differently
with different people and different relationships.
But, and this is huge,
recovery is stunted right there
if personal acknowledgement of offense
and an intentional process of making amends
does not take place.

Recovery is in fact endangered
and will inevitably end
without the difficult and often brutal companions
of confession and reconciliation.

That element of recovery from addiction
is a metaphor for all of us
when it comes to dealing with the evil
we have participated in.

So when we engage in evil,
or when it is revealed to us that our actions
have caused and abetted in the fragmentation
of goodness and love and health –
our task,
our DO,
our practice…our Christian spirituality –
requires that we figure out the best way
to make amends and pursue reconciliation
in addition to ceasing the action that is causing harm.

So the second promise is resisting evil,
done most effectively by courting feedback;
and making amends,
which means changing our behavior and reconciling.

Next week we will focus on the practice of keeping a shorter distance between what we say we value
and how we live our lives. Stay tuned.

Proper 20C 2016: Whose Glasses Are You Wearing?

September 18, 2016 by Cam Miller

Who gave you the glasses
through which you see and interpret the world,
your life,
your relationships,
your own value as a human being,
and the value of other people to your life?

Hopefully you do not think
that you chose your own lens or lenses
because in fact, you and I were fitted.
The question of faith,
the question of adult life,
the question of spiritual maturity,
is whose lenses are we wearing
and are those the lenses
through which we want to see the world?

Allow me to back up, almost thirty-five years in fact.

The well known Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann,
more or less asked me the same question I just asked you:
Whose lens are you looking through?

He is one of my heroes by the way,
and I do not have very many heroes.
He said out loud something I had been stuttering over
for a very long time
but was unable to put my finger on
and organize into clear thoughts.
Then, viola, he said it.

It was that low-energy point in the afternoon on a hot day.
We were in the refectory at The College of Preachers
in Washington, DC,
and Brueggemann was holding forth on the topic of “eschatology” – a subject that I had always looked down my nose at. Still do.

Eschatology is the part of any theology
that has to do with the end of history
and perhaps even the final disposition of souls.
Most self-respecting theological liberals and progressives
don’t have too much use for such speculation,
and honestly, we are a little embarrassed to discuss it
in any serious way.

So as Brueggemann talked about the prophet Isaiah’s
vision of history,
and where God was guiding the Creation,
I interrupted with an objection.

I raised my hand of course, and then blurted out:
“Excuse me,
but we know from Carl Sagan and others
that the Earth will one day end up
a dark cold cinder in the vast expanse of space.
In light of that knowledge, and all we know from science,
how in the world can we be talking about God’s plan for history?”

“Well,” Brueggemann responded without missing a beat,
“you can see the Creation through Carl Sagan’s lens…or
…you can look at it through Isaiah’s lens.”

And then he just went on with his lecture
as if I had not asked a difficult or important question!
He said it as if his answer adequately swept away
all doubts and problems with eschatology.

Now here is how my mind works: very slowly.
It wasn’t until days later,
after having gnawed on that response with some degree
of confusion and bitterness,
when I was driving home through the mountains of West Virginia,
that I suddenly understood the depth of what he meant.
Boing!
Dah!
I got it!

He was telling me that which lens we view the world through
is entirely our choice;
but even more profoundly,
which lens we view the world through is A choice.

The lens we use
will also lead us to see
very different things about the world.
It is a hellish, circular logic perhaps,
but a supremely practical wisdom that is profoundly true.

If we assume for example,
that God is not actively present in our very own lives,
we are not likely to experience God.
Indeed, we very rarely see
what we are not looking for.
Well-funded and generally accepted
scientific perception studies tell us as much.

The lens we choose
will influence what we see
and also, what blind spots we are likely to have.

What a fundamentalist Muslim
and a fundamentalist Christian
and a fundamentalist Jew
and a fundamentalist Hindu
have in common
is the belief that there is only one lens,
and if we do not see through their lens
then we are both blind and lost.

And the truth is,
we all have a primary lens through which we see the world
and several sets of secondary lenses as well.
Yet what is fundamentally important for us to realize
is that we have a lens;
that we have chosen it;
that what lens or lenses we chose colors what we see
and how we interpret what we see;
AND that our lens is a continuous choice
rather than a single and fixed decision
to which we are condemned.

But most importantly,
we need to acknowledge that most of us walk around,
most of the time,
assuming that what we see
is the way our world and the universe actually is –
and that everyone sees what we see.
Or to put it yet more basically:
we assume that what we think is real
IS the real and only reality.

But everything we see is filtered through our lens, and lenses.
We do not all see or experience the same things in the same ways.
Everything is changed
by the filter through which we receive it – our lens.

So our work,
a basic element of our spiritual work,
is to recognize which lens or lenses we use,
who gave us those lenses,
and if they are the ones we wish to retain.

Here is the thing –
if something isn’t right about our lives,
if we are chronically confused or in doubt,
if we are depressed about how the world is,
if we are cynical,
if we think nothing will ever be right,
if we can’t imagine God’s presence in this world,
or we can’t imagine a future in which justice reigns,
then maybe it is time to get a new lens!
I know that may sound Pollyannaish and naïve.
But all the filters we imagine are fixed and true
are only…well…just filters.

Adam Smith and capitalism is a lens.
John Locke is a lens.
The US Constitution
and our inherited Roman legal system is a lens.
Patriotism is a lens.
American Exceptionalism is a lens.
Whatever version of Education or Psychology
or Human Development we have glommed onto is a lens.

All of them are human constructions
and they will disappear altogether some day
just as Communism has begun to recede into the past.

Those who are both brilliant and wise,
like Albert Einstein,
have long understood this idea about lenses,
and that is what enables them to see
both new possibilities
and the limits of their own vision.
Which, by the way,
is a deeply spiritual quality whether in a scientist,
engineer or theologian.

Okay, that is point number one.
We wear lenses
and there is not one lens that is the only lens.

Point number two
is that we get to choose our lens or lenses.

Point number three
is that the primary Christian lens
is some version of the Gospels,
usually seen through and interpreted by
a post-biblical, theological lens.

Since the middle of the last century
we in the West have come to see the world
primarily through an Economic lens.
Economics is the essential criteria
with which we seem to evaluate everything,
and the basis from which we make our most important choices:
where we live,
who we vote for,
what career we choose,
how many children we have and where we send them to school,
and the car we buy.
All of these are factored by the economic choices we make.

What we believe
about how the world should be organized,
what is fair in love and war,
how we think about our country and its foreign policy,
all are rubbed and tossed and coated
with economic criteria.
The primary lens of our society at this moment in history
is Economics.

In the Modern Era known as the Enlightenment,
the lens was Pure Reason and subsequently Science.
Before then it was religion.

Now don’t get me wrong.
It is possible to live a long and happy life
viewing the world through Economic assumptions.
Millions of people do it
and live their entire lives believing that Economics
makes the world go round.
The only point I want to make is that IF,
if God seems distant to us,
then maybe we might consider a different lens.
You see, an Economic lens only sees
that which can be measured and quantified
and God is not on that list.

So now I want to share with you an explicit lens,
the one recommended by The Episcopal Church.
It is the primary lens of our church at this time
and it is supremely concrete.

But before I share it with you
I want to emphasize that it is de-scriptive
NOT pre-scriptive.
And that
is at the heart of our tradition:
we do not prescribe reality
or God or lenses.
Just that fact alone
is crucial to understanding who and what we are.

So in fact,
as focused and concrete as the lens I am going to share is,
it will take at least two sermons,
and maybe three,
to finish.
So this is just the beginning.

Okay.
Please look at the cover of your worship guide
(or bulletin if that’s what you call it).
There are five promises of the Baptismal Covenant there,
or found in the Book of Common Prayer – beginning on page 304
if you want to use an original source document.

The Baptismal Covenant
is our description of what it looks like
to practice Christianity.
It is a description of our spiritual practice.
As such, it is also our primary lens.
It doesn’t mean we cannot also wear other lenses
as we walk through life
but this is the one we urge
as a primary lens when it comes to seeing the world
through the eyes of the gospels.

I am going to say a couple things
about the first promise
and offer a meditation for our week ahead,
and then take it up again next week
with the second and third promises.

“Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching
and fellowship,
in the breaking of the bread,
and in the prayers.”

Notice please,
it does not ask us to conform to the doctrines of the church.
It does not insist that we believe
what the pope says
or the Archbishop of Canterbury says
or the creeds and documents of the Prayer Book say.
Nor does it invite us into radical individualism
that imagines the only lens worth wearing
is the one we made and fitted for ourselves,
as if it were even possible to invent our own
without resting upon and borrowing from the past.

Instead, what this Baptismal Promise asks of us
is to stay in relationship
with the gospels;
and stay in relationship
with the traditions like sharing Eucharist;
and stay in relationship
with the community by sharing the prayers of our hearts together.

So the first promise of the baptismal covenant
invites us to SEE spirituality
as a communal enterprise.

It invites us to PRACTICE spirituality
in relationship with a community.

It invites us to understand that the community
is not Trinity Church Geneva only,
but a vast expanse of history
connecting us with people and communities and events
stretching all the way back to the people
in the generation that followed Jesus.

It invites us to practice our spirituality
with other people;
and to see ourselves as inter-dependent with other people –
some of whom we do not even like or agree with.

It asks us to promise
that we will connect ourselves,
invest ourselves,
and root ourselves
in spiritual community.

And it asks that, with those people,
we will try to figure out how to be guided
by the wisdom handed down to us,
and re-enact some of the traditions handed down to us,
and share the prayers of our hearts
with the community we have given ourselves into.

In short,
it invites us to see spirituality as communal not private;
and the practice of Christian spiritual wisdom
as both historic and contemporary
but not fixed and prescriptive.

So that is the first promise.
I invite you to take your bulletin home
and every day this week just read through those promises,
maybe even one a day, and think about them.
Just think about them
open-endedly, open-mindedly,
and see what comes. More next week.

At The Fish Tank: Proper 19C

September 11, 2016 by Cam Miller

Her face is round
and before she was aware of my presence
I saw her staring at the fish tank
as she sat in the entryway outside my former office.

She was sitting very primly
as she stared at the fish,
evoking the image of a small girl
though she was not young.
Her girlish face held tired eyes
and she was riding that wide meridian
we call mid-life.

I knew her.
She was poor
and the aura of poverty was a gray cloud
through which her otherwise light presence shown.
Wide gaps between her teeth
whispered neglect like broken windows
on an abandoned house.

Her valiant attempt to make out-sized,
second and third hand clothing
appear neat and muss-free
could not conceal a limited capacity
for personal hygiene.

I knew her by name
and for a split second before she realized
I was there, I studied her face.

I knew her story, at least part of it.
She had labored at the most menial of jobs
but in her thirties became determined
she would go to school and earn an Associate’s degree.

Working full time
and going to school full time
seemed obvious to her.
What else would you do?

“Some people have parents,” she once confided to me
with reverential awe, and a slight
but barely perceptible hint of judgement,
“that don’t want their children working
at all during school.”

The concept seemed mystifying to her
and I hid my embarrassment
at my own parental and class prejudice on the subject.

The tiny bit of public assistance she received
was suspended when she lost her job.

“If you don’t work twenty hours a week,”
she explained to me,
her words drenched with earnestness,
“the county can’t help you with school.”

Then she looked down at the floor.
After a silence she mumbled that no one would hire her.
She had applied to more jobs than she could count.
Now, sitting outside my office,
she was out of school,
out of work,
out of a place to live,
out of money,
out of food.

She looked at the floor again
as she asked if I had any food cards left.
She probably remembered that the last time she was in
I turned her down.
But before I could answer her question,
she asked me another.

It wasn’t a casual question either,
not something that just popped out of her head.
Clearly she had been thinking about this question
for a while.
She had been stewing on this question –
its moist heat sweating through her thoughts.

She straightened up her already prim posture,
hands still folded neatly in her lap
and ankles crossed as if some long ago lesson
from Catholic school.
Then she looked me straight in the eyes,
her eyes big and wide open with expectancy.

“What parent,” she wanted to know,
“would sit and watch her baby fall?”
She pointed to an imaginary toddler in the room with us
as if she were the mother
watching an imaginary baby fall down.
I could tell she knew that I knew what she was asking,
but I allowed silence to hang there between us.
“What parent would do that, just sit there, I mean,
and watch his baby fall?”

I asked her point blank, “What do you think?
“I don’t want to think bad thoughts,” she whimpered.
“I don’t want to think bad thoughts about, you know;
I don’t want to think bad thoughts about…God.”

Just then the fish tank bubbled and burped.
It’s funny how we remember little details
and so often forget the big ones.

Maybe you want to know what I told her, but maybe
you would rather think about your own answer.
Your own answer is a lot more important than mine.
Maybe there is no answer?

You see, one of the hallmarks of 21st century
Christian spirituality
is that we are faced with asking really big questions
but we do not get really big answers.
And another hallmark of Christian spirituality
in the 21st century is that we are able
to live within the tension of those two things:
really big questions and little or no answers.

In this century, in post-modern, secular society
we have to ask a question like,
“Why would God
watch us fall on our face
and not do anything about it?”

Then, when we acknowledge we do not really have
an adequate answer to that question,
we are still able to live in the faith that God loves us,
and even wants every good thing for us.
It is a crazy faith that is stubborn and flexible enough
to live between a rock and a hard place.

Does a loving parent watch as his or her child
fall hard and not do anything about it?
Not just fall,
but does God sit idly by
while that child is pushed and shoved
and trodden upon
by ordinary human greed?

Does a loving God do anything
to help an earnest single woman
simply struggling to work for a living?
Here is what I said to her.

I told her that I don’t know the answer to her question.
I told her it confuses me too.
I told her that it is easier for me to imagine
her troubles are the result of human failure and neglect more than God’s indifference –
and by human failure,
I told her I meant prejudice and greed
and hardness of heart.

I told her it was a good question to ask,
and that everything I ever read about God in the Bible
indicates that God can handle our anger
and even our suspicion.

I told her that I get angry with God fairly often;
and that I question God’s judgment on a regular basis,
even as I laugh at myself for doing it.
I told her that all of my confusion
and anger
and frustration with God
usually leads me right back to thinking about people;
about how we act
and when we are negligent
and what differences we could make
if we had a mind to make a difference.

Here is the thing that mucks up our thinking
about God
and human evil
and why bad things happen to good people.
We think it is supposed to be a well-ordered universe
in which the good guys get rewarded
and the bad guys get punished.
We can see that is not true
but we keep trying to think that way
because that is the way most of us were raised:
rewarded for good things
and punished for bad.
We earned praise and approval
and we received discipline and punishment.
That is the world we want
because it is predictable
and seems fair.

On the other hand,
we know from experience
that is not the world we have
and we presume something went wrong
because we do not think God wants it this way either.
But then we have a Gospel story like the one from Luke.
It really messes with our penchant for order.

“Now the tax collectors and sinners,” it says,
“were coming near to listen to Jesus.
And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling:
‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them!’”

That little word in Luke
that Elizabethan English preferred to translate
as “sinners”
is rooted in a more ancient Hebrew word: Resha’im.
Resha’im refers to people who have
“sinned willfully and heinously and who did not repent.”
(J.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism).

In rabbinical literature,
Resh’im is always translated as, “the wicked.”
What Luke is saying with the accusation in this story
is that Jesus welcomed and ate with the wicked.

Now in Jesus’ world the wicked
were mostly people who had professionalized their sins:
not only did they do bad stuff
but they made money doing it!

The wicked refers to
prostitutes,
crack and meth dealers,
pornographers,
Executives of credit card companies,
people who sold those ridiculously bad mortgages
to customers they knew could not afford them.
You name it,
any professionalized sin we can think of
and it qualifies for the category of the wicked.

Jesus, Luke says without debating it,
welcomed the wicked to his table,
to our table actually.
You see, in Christianity,
we adopted that silly formula that
IF we repent
and change our sinful ways,
THEN God will forgive us.
It is a very nice, very tidy,
almost economic formula that works pretty well for us:
Do the right thing
and get the reward.

It is a great formula
if what we are aiming for
is a well-ordered society or
a Church that insists upon orthodoxy:
God will like us
IF we have the right belief.
And conversely,
if we do not believe the right things,
THEN no matter what we do
we will not be able to gain God’s forgiveness.

IF…THEN: a conditional phrase
that makes clear what the bargain is.
But Jesus mucks it all up.
He says: “God forgives you, NOW go and repent.”
Hear the difference?

You are forgiven IF,
which is our formula,
and Jesus’ formula: You are forgiven, now go…

This is a critical difference.

Jesus declares that the wicked,
not just the every day, ordinary old sinners like us,
but the wicked,
those who haven’t repented yet,
are included in the kingdom of God
whether or not they repent.

The wicked are welcome at the table.
The wicked are brought into the kingdom of God
even while they are still wicked.
The wicked are welcome even before they make restitution,
even before they have confessed,
even before they pay for their crime.

How wrong is that?
It is a total violation of the way we like things.

According to Luke,
Jesus ate with the wicked while they were still wicked,
and Jesus announced that God loves them.
THEN – if you can believe it –
Jesus forgave them even before they had earned it!

What is the punch line for us? Go and do likewise.
So here is our predicament.

At the fish tank,
which is a metaphor for events and encounters
in every day life we do not anticipate or plan for,
we have to make decisions and act
with insufficient information
about what God does or does not do.

We have to choose answers
that do not come from above
and only belatedly, if we are lucky,
come from within.

In the absence of certainty
and without big answers to life’s big questions
we still have to decide
and we still have to choose
how to act
and whether to act.

Instead of making those decisions
based upon of what we will get for our reward
or if and how we will be punished for our crimes,
the more faithful
and just plain better human response,
will be based upon what we value
and what we care about.

We know the universe does not operate
on reward and punishment
so the question is whether we will be as radical
in our embrace as God is,
and whether or not we will make our decisions
based upon the values we claim to hold
rather than the hope of reward
or the threat of punishment.

Those are two big questions we can answer
because we hold the answer to them:
Will we be as radical
in our embrace of the wicked
as God is?
And will we base our decisions
on what we value
or the hope of reward and fear of punishment?

Honestly I do not know why
God would order a world
in which the wicked get loved and accepted
just as they are –
even before they have changed
and even if they never get punished for their sins.
But according to Jesus, that is our world.
If we are followers of Jesus,
that is also our value.

The question we face is if we will go with it or not?
Some days I do better than others
with God’s crazy and bizarre way of doing things,
and on other days, not so much.
It is on the other days,
the days I just can’t go along with God
that I am grateful even the wicked are loved.

Proper 17, Year C, 2016

August 28, 2016 by Cam Miller

The Liturgical Reading: From “Listening to your Life,” by Frederick Buechner

If the world is sane, then Jesus is mad as a hatter and the Last Supper is the Mad Tea Party. The world says, Mind your own business, and Jesus says, There is no such thing as your own business. The world say, Follow the wisest course and be a success, and Jesus says, Follow me and be crucified. The world says, Drive carefully—the life you save may be your own—and Jesus says, Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. The world says, Law and order, and Jesus says, Love. The world says, Get and Jesus says, Give. In terms of the world’s sanity, Jesus is crazy as a coot, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without being a little crazy too is laboring less under a cross than under a delusion.

The Gospel: Luke 14:1, 7-14

On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely. When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Anticipating that it would reach 91 degrees again today,
I aimed for a sermon under ten minutes (but don’t time me).

Let’s be honest,
there are some people we like better than others.
In fact, there are some ‘kinds’ of people
we like better than other ‘kinds.’
And as a matter of fact,
churches are mostly congregations of the like-minded –
they are self-selected havens of
class
ethnicity
and race.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. observed so long ago,
Sunday morning is one of the most
segregated hours in America.
The segregation does stop with race
it forms around socio-economic status as well.

But churches aren’t alone.

There are social clubs
and bowling clubs
and poker groups
and quilting circles
and golf clubs
and same-sex interest groups
and Gay bars and biker bars and college bars.

We congregate with other people
who are similar to us because, well,
because that is what makes us comfortable.
But even more particularly,
and apropos of today’s Gospel,
we especially self-select as we congregate around food.

A meal
is the most pervasive element of our social structure,
thoroughly commonplace
but taken for granted.
Eating together is the way we express
the kind of relationship we have with one another
as well as the way we build and nurture
relationships with one another.
We hardly give a thought to who we eat with
and who we don’t –
but seldom consider who we would never
share a meal with.

A breakfast meeting,
mid-morning coffee,
power lunch,
romantic dinner,
late night pizza date…
these are all ways of being in relationship
and they are even metaphors for the kind of relationship
we have with a business associate,
friend,
or lover.
We normally do not analyze these occasions and instead,
we just do them.
But they are deeply significant and meaningful.

So with our own behavior in mind
it is interesting to note who Jesus was
most comfortable with.
It wasn’t religious leaders –
definitely not clergy.
It wasn’t the power brokers.
It wasn’t even the gaggle of students and groupies
who followed him everywhere
and who we call his disciples.

Luke gives the people Jesus seemed to be most comfortable with a special moniker:
“The poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.”

He actually uses that descriptor
over and over and over again
as a metaphor for a whole class of people
we might call “the marginalized.”

In fact, there seems to have been something about
people who lived out on the margins of society
that Jesus felt particularly comfortable with;
more comfortable with, in fact,
than he would have been with you and me.

That doesn’t mean Jesus wouldn’t have liked us –
what’s not to like?
It just means that we are not necessarily
his kind of people.

If that were true
it would be kind of ironic, wouldn’t it?

So much of Christianity
as it is described and defined
by all flavors and pedigrees of churches,
would have us think that Jesus was our homeboy –
that he would like us in particular precisely because we are Christian –
and therefore his kind of people.
But if we think about it,
that notion is pretty ridiculous
given that Jesus was not a Christian,
never knew a Christian,
and lived three hundred and fifty years
before there was anything that would even remotely
resemble something we call a church.

So when we hear a story like this one from Luke,
we have to think about all of the ironic,
swept under the carpet,
and hidden between the lines
kind of stuff going on.

At a first century dinner party,
as I have mentioned before,
guests reclined on pillows in groups of three.
No chairs.
We need to disabuse ourselves
of Last Supper scenes we have seared into our brains
by Renaissance images of a long narrow table
with Jesus and the twelve
all sitting on one side of the table
while posing for the camera.

In reality, they would have been reclining in groups
on pillows
and scattered around the room.
Furniture, like tables and chairs,
was hard to come by in the first century
even for the few relatively privileged folks,
or the business and religious classes.

The guest of honor
sat with the host at a central location in the room.
Eminent guests often came late,
so if you took a seat closer to the center
than your position in the pecking order allowed,
when someone more important came along –
like a Hollywood star, NFL quarterback,
or the biggest pledger in the congregation –
you would have to pick up and move.

That’s all in the background of this story, and
when we hear Jesus giving advice
to the guests at a nice dinner party,
we need to ask ourselves:
would Jesus really care
if someone lost face
because of a social faux pas related to a caste system
he was trying to subvert anyway?

In fact, I think we should be suspicious
when we hear this story from Luke.
It seems unlikely that Jesus would have told this story
to the Pharisee
in order to save him from embarrassment
from some future faux pas –
as if Jesus were a rabbinical Cotillion coach.

Rather, what this parable does
is to call into question
the very values that under-gird that social system.

Jesus’ point was this:
wealth, fame, power,
degree and pedigree,
are not supposed to matter
in the community of faith.

This thing we do here,
around this table,
and around this symbolic meal,
is supposed to be absolutely egalitarian.
What that means is that at this meal
and for this little bit of time,
there are not supposed to be any margins
among us.
None.

We are supposed to host, at this table,
and at this meal,
a community
where we do not congregate
by class
ethnicity
race
sexuality
or around any kind of status
that otherwise creates margins.

Instead, we are supposed to host a table
and a meal
in a community with people
that may make us terribly uncomfortable
as well as with those we actually like a lot.

That is probably not big news to anyone here.
We know we are not Jesus’ kind of people,
and we know we are supposed to host
a community without margins.
The hard part
is acknowledging how we really feel about that.

Anyone who has been going to Trinity Church Geneva
all of their life
is going to expect to be treated differently
than someone who just walked in the door.
That is perfectly natural.
But it is not what Jesus was talking about.
Anyone who gives sacrificially
to support Trinity Church Geneva,
or even just gives a big number
even it if is not a big stretch,
is going to expect to be treated differently
than someone who throws a buck in the plate
now and again.
That is perfectly natural.
But it is not what Jesus was talking about.

Rank has its privileges after all,
and pride of place ought to be given
to those who have given most
and given best
and given most often.
That is how it should be –
it is only natural.
But it is not what Jesus was talking about.

I do not expect any special deference
because I am the priest
and I would ask you not to expect any special deference
because you have been coming to Trinity Church Geneva
since Bossy was a calf –
by which I mean, a really long time.
Instead, I would ask
that we work really hard
to have a community without margins.

I would ask that when you see me or someone else
doing something
or saying something
that creates a margin for others
that you tell us.
And by margin,
I do not mean that our feelings are hurt
or we got angry because someone said something
we did not like or disagreed with –
in fact, I expect that to happen
if we are being open and authentic with one another.

By creating margins,
I mean taking power or decisions away from one another,
or only giving influence and authority
to certain people but not others,
or granting special status to some people
so that their opinions matter more than everyone else’s.

By creating margins,
I mean practicing worship and programs
that only embrace and utilize
what WE happen to like
and throwing everything else out.

By creating margins,
I mean closing our minds
and folding our arms against
efforts to welcome in
and attract
those who are not here yet.

By creating margins,
I mean refusing to think about
who we do not want to eat with
and who we would rather not have to worship with
and who we are uncomfortable around.

As Frederick Buechner wrote,
“In terms of the world’s sanity,
Jesus is crazy as a coot,
and anybody who thinks he or she can follow Jesus without being a little crazy too
is laboring less under a cross than under a delusion.”

Let’s try really hard to be crazy like Jesus
and build a community with fewer and fewer margins.

Proper 22C: My Dad and Rachel Carson

Proper 21C: Evil is not the opposite of good

Proper 20C 2016: Whose Glasses Are You Wearing?

At The Fish Tank: Proper 19C

Proper 17, Year C, 2016

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