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2 Advent C: God is Manna

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Well, preparing for today
was humbling and challenging.

Last week, inspired by the birth of my grandson,
I reached for the intangible.
I sought to capture an experience
rather than define or describe
a theological idea
or liturgical season.

Like any effort to capture an experience
for someone else, it failed;
but it failed pretty well.
It wasn’t a laser pointer
but it did hover poetically enough
in the vicinity of the experience I wanted to evoke,
at least according to those who stayed for the discussion.
And if Facebook is any indicator,
it reached about two-hundred more viewers
than an average sermon post.

So, it’s like that old preacher’s adage:
If you take your shirt off to make a point one Sunday,
what are you going to do the next?

Staring at the readings for today,
I just did not want to fall back into the usual –
which is taking an archeological pick and brush
to carefully remove some top layers
of historical soil and theological detritus
so we can see the context
around which the original text was written.

Don’t get me wrong,
I still think that is important.
In fact, I went back to see how I had
addressed these readings in the past.
Since they come up every three years,
I took a peek at 2 Advent, Year C,
all the way back to the year 2000.
I was not impressed.

So I want to lean on T. S. Eliot some more,
even though we do not have a reading from
the Four Quartets this week.
I want to stick our fingers
into the wet glob of goo
his poetry does, with its notion of the unity
of past, present and future.

The unity of past-present-and future is oh-so abstract
in comparison to talking about
John the Baptists’ historical relationship to Jesus.

It’s also not as concrete
as what we know about those two heroes
as we gaze back through the haze
of the Jewish-Roman war
that buried both of them
beneath a historical layer of sand.
The unity of past-present-and-future
is the stuff that cotton candy is made of
and can easily leave us with nothing
but a sugar high.

That’s the risk, but here goes.
In a culturally historic interview with Bill Moyers,
the academic, Joseph Campbell,
who specialized in comparative mythology,
offered us a brilliant metaphor
about the evolving lenses
through which human beings have viewed
life, meaning, and hope.

He pointed out that the tallest buildings
in the great centers of power,
were icons that reflected the central myth-making
power in each epoch of human history.

At first, temples to the gods and massive cathedrals
took the place of pride
as the focal-point of past civilizations.
But at some point,
at least in Europe if not elsewhere,
those religious buildings
become dwarfed by citadels of political power
and governance.
Great domes, palaces,
and massive governmental plazas
replaced cathedrals as the central focus of cities.

But then, beginning in the twentieth century,
even those most prominent government complexes
are made to look shabby
by huge modern towers of concrete, glass, and steel
built by corporate multi-national conglomerates.
Campbell didn’t live to see it,
but the grandest icons of that world now
are the huge sprawling campuses
of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and
other Tech companies.

It is a visual, even visceral example
of how past-present-and-future
live side by side in the same moment.
In cities both large and small,
these icons of human myth-making
live with one another.

In Geneva, we have 19thcentury
Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Methodist Church buildings
on the hill looking down on
at a 20thcentury prominent City Hall in the middle of town.
But we do not have a dominant commercial building
because the economy is diffused
between small business, retail, and campus.

The point is this:
John the Baptist and Jesus
live side-by-side in the 21stcentury
with Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson –
and between them are all the highfaluting theologians,
criminal priests,
saints, martyrs, and black preachers
that have filled the air
with their ideas and witness.

It is simply impossible
to lift up the Biblical text
as if it were a photographic negative
we could hang to dry in a darkroom
so that we can see what it all really looked like.
Emperors Nero and Constantine;
Doctrines Nicene and Trinity;
theologians Augustine, Aquinas, and Niebuhr;
scandals Galileo, Inquisition, Colonialism,
witch-burning, and sex-abuse;
movements Reformation, Evangelical, Pentecostal, Fundamentalist, and Monkey-Scopes;
not to mention Evolution, Industrial Revolution, Einstein, Hubble, and landing on Mars;
all live side-by-side
in the same moment
with John and Jesus.

We are a jumble.

You and I cannot know Jesus and John
without the presence of Karl Marx,
Madam Curie, and Frederick Douglas.

Just think about that…
All that past is folded into this present moment.
And the future?

We know the likelihood
that a comet of enormous proportions,
like the one that blotted out the dinosaurs,
is in our future.
We may not be alive to suffer it,
but we know it is out there – just a lottery pick away.

We also know that the chickens of our decadence
are coming home to roost too –
environmental degradation caused by
our willful neglect, waste, and denial
is piling up and may soon swoop over us
with accelerating speed.

We know that in the future artificial intelligence
and robotics will eliminate nearly all the jobs
and many of the professions
that were elements of the Industrial Revolution
and Age of Information.

If Da Vinci’s drawings of helicopters,
tanks, and flying machines
are an example of the human imagination
wandering centuries ahead of its ability to actualize it,
consider the implications of movie narratives
such as Star Wars, the Hunger Games, and the Matrix.

You see?
Past, present, and future
are all folded into the dough
and we cannot separate it.
It all gets baked together
and is in us.
But do you know who or what
lives only in the present?
The one thing
that is neither past or future
is God.

While we can fiddle with past descriptions of God,
and read copious predictions about God,
the experienceof God
is once and only
in the present – now.

God is manna – that divine food
given to the escaped slaves
to sustain them in the wilderness.
Remember its properties?

It could be eaten
but not stored or hoarded.
It could be harvested at that moment
but never left to the next day.

God is our manna,
available in the moment
but never truly grasped in the past
or predicted in the future.

At Christmas,
we can tell the story of baby Jesus
but we cannot re-create the moment.
At Easter,
we can re-tell about the empty tomb,
but we cannot duplicate it.
At communion,
we can remember what Jesus did
but the experience of that love
is only available
in any given moment we are in.
You see, that is what I think we are,
as church in the 21st century.
We understand now,
that those lenses
which claimed our fidelity
are only blurred glass through which we see darkly.
Whether temple,
state house, or bank,
none of them hold the truth about God,
and only God holds the truth about whosewe are,
and whatwe are,
and, most importantly,
what it is we can genuinely hope for.

So, we come here, around this Wayfair altar,
seeking an experience with God,
and sharing our experiences
as we try to figure out with one another,
what they mean.
We have all this past –
these human geological layers of time and history
stacked one upon another –
and we have to sift through it.
And for some reason, it is better done together, with others.

We know sifting through history won’t give us
the experiencewe’re looking for,
but maybe it will open us up
to the experience of God we seek?

And we have all this fear, anxiety, and blindness
about the future –
it is in the air all around us like dust particles
filling our lungs, hearts, and minds with confusion.
By coming together
and sharing Eucharist and food
and the questions on our hearts,
maybe it will open us up to the experience of God we seek?

Maybe that is why we come here in the 21stcentury –
that’s my guess anyway.
We come here,
whether we can name it at the time or not,
to get open.
We come here
to use the past to soften us,
and to look into the future to rattle us,
all so that we might be open
in the moment –
which is the only place where God lives,
and moves, and has being.

If you were to ask me why I come here,
to church, to Eucharist,
to hanging out with fine people like you,
that is why.
A place like this…is one of the few places we can come
where other people gather,
with the potential
to open us up to God
who is present only here
and only now,
only in this moment.

21 B, 2018: An Ugly Protocol

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Iron prosthesis 1560-1600

I had a recent facetime call
with a friend who is in seminary.
She was exhilarated by the intellectual stimulation
of learning about the Hebrew Scripture
as well as New Testament literature,
discovering all kinds of things she never knew before.

Biblical scholarship and archeology
is alive and thriving these days,
offering us new and renewed perspectives.

She did not seem troubled
by the startling implications her new knowledge has
for doctrines and long-held beliefs.
But it did make her nervous to realize
she would eventually be a preacher
who would be called upon to share things
that might be troubling
to members of her future congregations.

I told her not to worry too much about that, I don’t.

It is possible I have become jaded
as a result of preaching too long.

You see, when I re-read Jesus
as he appears in today’s Gospel,
and think about all the biblical commentaries
and sermons over the years
that bend themselves into complicated yoga
positions in order to make Jesus
sound better,
I feel like a parent
peering into the kid’s room in total chaos
and thinking, “enough of this!”

“If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off;
if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off;
if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out.
Better to maim yourself than go to Hell.”
But kids, don’t try this at home.

Couple Jesus’ very bad therapy protocol
with the story from the Book of Numbers,
and it is a real horror show.
We have a scene in which thousands of people
are weeping with hunger
and in response to their pitiful vulnerability
and serious discomfort,
God gets “very angry.”
Not only is God without compassion here,
Moses is too!
He wants to know why he has been
saddled with these woeful people –
if I am supposed to change the diapers of these
whimpering, needy people,
just kill me right here, and right now, he says.
Nice.

Jesus’ diatribe from Mark,
and the grumpy Oz behind the curtain in Numbers,
are like an abstract painting we keep turning
to figure out which way is up and which way is down.
I want to use this moment to pick on “Hell.”
Hell is an idea used by bad religion
as a fear-mongering cudgel.
If Hell is anything, it is poetry
not a piece of supernatural real estate.

The word Hell comes from the word, Gehenna,
which actually was a piece of real estate.
Gehenna was the site of ancient Canaanite sacrifice –
ritual human sacrifice.
Children were sacrificed at Gehenna.
Not to be too gruesome about it,
they were cut open and bled like a lamb
in order to access the Canaanite gods.

Israelites were horrified by such a brutal custom
and as they became the dominant culture in Canaan,
human sacrifice was outlawed.

Remember the story in Genesis,
of God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac
and then in the nick of time,
replacing Isaac with a sheep?
That was an anti-child sacrifice story.
It was told to explain why Israelites
did not sacrifice their children
the way some of their neighbors did.

Take a leap forward 700-1000 years,
and we have essentially the same story
told about Jesus being sacrificed for our sins –
this time God did not intervene
and Jesus replaced the sheep
only to became the lamb that saved us from Hell.

The idea of a ritual sacrifice to God or the gods
is not very compelling in the 21st century,
but it was an idea powerful enough to
change the world in the 1st century.
Mixed up in the midst of that idea about
human sacrifice, is also the idea about Hell.

Let’s go back to those ancient Israelites for a moment,
the ones who scorned the idea of child sacrifice
and rejected human sacrifice altogether.
They created a garbage dump at Gehenna.
They created a garbage dump
on the very spot where Canaanites
practiced child sacrifice.
That is a pretty dramatic denunciation
of the Canaanite practice.

In Jesus’ time,
Gehenna was still a garbage dump,
but at that point it was the municipal dump
for the city of Jericho.

So imagine if you can,
the image of an arid climate
in which dirt is baked by the sun
to a clay-fired hardness.
With no modern earth-movers,
imagine what that municipal dump looked like,
and maybe more disgusting,
what it smelled like.

In the ancient world,
that was the place where dead bodies
were abandoned by families too poor
or indigent to claim a space in a burial cave.
Human and animal carcasses
rotted and were burned with other refuse there.
Gehenna was an endlessly smoking pile of trash
baking in the sun
where charred and worm-eaten human remains
fueled a fire that was never quenched.

While Dante is still the primary source of images
used for the threat of Hell,
they are images rooted in actual real estate,
in a smoking pit of nastiness
outside of Jericho.
It is a bitter irony in today’s international politics
to realize the very idea of Hell,
of a place of eternal judgment,
actually comes from Persia, modern day Iran.
It was an idea that exiled Hebrews
brought back with them from Persia,
and to which images of Gehenna came to be applied.

Hell as a piece of real estate
somewhere in the supernatural,
where a vindictive and parsimonious God
condemns the misbehaving for all eternity,
really ought to be updated
if we are going to continue to wield it.
Images of Hell based on an ancient trash heap
should become those of Buchenwald, Auschwitz,
Cambodia, Rwanda, and Sudan.
We have too many graphic and terrifying images
from within our own generations
to remain content with Gehenna.

Personally though, I reject the idea of Hell.
It seems absurd to me
and I simply cannot make sense of it.
Pew Research indicates a majority of Americans
still believe in Hell, even as a majority also,
conveniently, believes they will not end up there.

Mostly I cannot get my head around a god
who balances the scales of justice
in ways we would insist on them being balanced.
A god sadistic and vindictive enough
to torture us for our moral failures,
including the mentally deranged
who were victims of their own physiology.
That is a god who stands in painful contrast
to the ancient prophetic notion
of the God of Israel who loves mercy more than justice.

But on top of that, we live in the 21stcentury
when the idea that human beings occupy
the center of God’s attention
seems as odd and quaint as a flat Earth.
Knowing what we know about the Cosmos,
and knowing how much we do not know
about the Cosmos,
the image of God as a moralistic accountant
keeping score on our lives with a golden abacus,
seems, well, it seems utterly implausible.

But who knows? I could be wrong
and that is exactly how God manages things.
Still, I doubt it.

I could, and have in the past,
found ways to make these stories
from Numbers and Mark
rest easier with our 21stcentury domesticated religion,
but these days I find myself disinterested
in trying to perform such reconciliations.
The common theme between these two stories
is not a bad one,
even if surrounded by troubling imagery and ideas.
Clearly, the punchline that comes from
Eldad and Medad,
as well as the stranger casting out demons
in the name of Jesus,
is that we need not be from
the same tribe
or the same party
or the same group
in order to all be about the same mission.
Our socio-economic status,
our ethnicity, gender, and race,
all are neither here nor there
when it comes to serving as agents of God’s love.

Rather, we are who we are
and we need not attempt to be someone else
so long as we do not harden the membrane
of our community
to only welcome and include people like us.

I dare say there are agents of God’s love
in every army of every nation on the planet;
agents of God’s love
in every religion,
in every political party,
in every tribe;
there are agents of God’s love
living among the billionaire class
and among those poor as dirt;
agents of God’s love
living every life-style imaginable,
and those life-styles we can’t imagine.
They may not look like us,
or talk like we do,
or have the same ideology or theology,
but if they are doing the work of God’s love,
we are with them
and they are with us.

It would be a very simple truth to agree on
if only we were better at recognizing one another.

 

Proper 22A: Poetry, Chimpanzees, and a God Not Hidden

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As you know, I like poetry.

I write poetry,
and I have some published poems.
But I am a hack –
a poet-wannabe that will never achieve
the exquisiteness of language
rendered by some of the poets I love most:
Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Anne Sexton, or Li-Young Lee.

The ceiling on my abilities
is limited by how little I understand about language,
even the language I speak.
I know enough to be amazed by such poets
but not enough to write like that myself.

Therefore, I marvel all the more at Isaiah.

Two thousand, six hundred years ago, in Hebrew,
Isaiah wrote exquisite poetry
with an elegance I can only stutter over.

Check it out.
In Hebrew, a language I do not speak or read by the way,
one of the words for justice, is “mishpat.”

A very similar word to mishpat can mean bloodshed.
It is almost the same, but it is mishpach:
m-i-sh-p-a-ch (“k” sound instead of a “t” at the end).
Mish-pat and mish-pach.

Likewise, a word for righteousness
and a word that means, to cry
are almost the same.
Righteousness is “tsedeqah.”

But a word meaning, a cry,”
is tse’ahqah.
t-s-e-‘-a-h-q-a-h.
(“ah” in the middle instead of “de” in the middle).

The point is, Isaiah
is playing with similar sounding words
that have poignantly different meanings.
His poem says:
God expected mishpat but saw mishpak,
and God expected tse-de-quah but heard tse-ah-quah.

In English: God expected justice but saw bloodshed,
and anticipated righteousness but heard cries.

I once read an article about Jane Goodall –
I have long since forgotten where I read it,
but it described her thirty-year study of chimpanzees.
Her research, of course, is legendary
and had a broad focus.
But this particular article was about the history of events
taking place in a community of chimps
that she observed for three generations.

To bring her study closer to home,
her observation of a particular chimp colony of over time,
would be like someone observing the city of Geneva
for sixty years, and noting what took place
within and among a given neighborhood.

In Goodall’s study, she gives names to each chimp
and identifies each one’s role in the community,
and evocatively describes each one’s death.

Beginning in 1960, Goodall describes
an idyllic community of interdependence
where communal affection and parenting is commonplace,
and care for the aged intentional and well-developed.

Then something changed.

I do not remember if she even knew the cause or not,
but suddenly a war broke out among the chimpanzees.
It was a protracted and bloody war,
with weapons and deadly ambushes and attacks.
The war ended in genocide.

In the end, the conquering group
systematically destroyed every member
of the opposing clan, including infants.
The dead were left for scavengers.

Peace then ensued, for a time.
But then an even more wretched development took place.
The dominant female and her daughter,
began the practice of cannibalism.
Goodall described how the mother/daughter team
would forcibly snatch a newborn from other females,
and eat them.

This new, awful practice of course,
ensured the continuation of only their genetic strain.

The final, sad chapter
of Goodall’s history of twenty-six chimp generations,
was a polio epidemic.
The original community was largely destroyed
and in the end only a few remained.

When I first read this account of war,
genocide,
and cannibalism
among a species not our own,
I was shocked and dismayed.
I had assumed such carnage was a human dysfunction.
I had always felt that God
was in the frenzied buzzing of bees
and in the undulating chamber of the human heart,
but looking at that chimp story,
I could see atrocities were in there too.
What’s going on?

God expected justice but saw bloodshed,
anticipated righteousness but heard cries.

All of that leads us to the gospel of Annie Dillard:
“The surface of mystery is not smooth,
any more than the planet is smooth,
let alone a pine.
Nor does it fit together;
not even the chlorophyll and hemoglobin molecules
is a perfect match…
Certainly nature seems to exult in abounding radicality,
extremism, anarchy.
If we were to judge nature
by its common sense or likelihood,
we wouldn’t believe the world existed.
In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade.
The whole creation is one lunatic fringe…”

Oh my goodness, is that so true!
The whole creation is one lunatic fringe!

And yet, we dither around trying to put the pieces together
in some kind of perfect order,
tied into a nice package without a seam,
wrapped with a splendid bow –
as if we can be what no other thing is:
a perfectly smooth life without ruffle or rage.

I remember when my youngest son was in fourth grade,
he had a science project to complete.
I think the assignment was to pick a problem to solve
and provide an original solution.

First of all, please understand
that when I took an aptitude test once,
I scored in the bottom three percent
for mechanical aptitude.
My son, in fourth grade, had already surpassed me.

Anyway, his idea was to make a hanging rod for a closet
that a short person, or someone in a wheelchair,
could lower and use to hang his or her coat up.
I was dutifully impressed with his idea,
and purchased the supplies he thought he needed:
dowel rod, pulleys, and twine.

He finished it and it worked.
I watched him demonstrate it and immediately,
I wanted to show him how to make it look better.
Never mind that it worked just fine.
I began telling him my ideas and as I did,
I noticed that his whole face seemed to glaze over.
It was as if he had said, “You’re making me tired, Dad.”

That is how I imagine God looks at us
when we fret about our obvious imperfections,
or even our gaping failures, for that matter.
God looks bored,
as if to say,
“You’re making me tired,
go look at the lunatic fringe I created.”

I love Annie Dillard’s brilliant understanding:
“If creation had been left up to me,
I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the imagination or courage
to do more than shape a single,
reasonable sized atom, smooth as a snowball,
and let it go at that.”

Oh, so true.
Smooth, clean, and orderly
is an imprint of perfection with which we are obsessed.
Even if we have the creativity and imagination
to mix and match,
and play with color,
chances are we will still be driven
to get it just right.

All of us
have an idea of the way the world is supposed to work;
that our lives are supposed to be lived;
and the way we will know when we have done enough.

We have a tyranny of ideas
imposed upon us from above, and within,
built up over time like dead skin forms a callous.

A tyranny of ideas
about the way we are supposed to look,
about the way we are supposed to act,
about the way we are supposed to think,
about the way we are supposed to succeed.
None of it, I suspect, even comes close
to the rough and peculiar surface of mystery.

Instead we have a mania for management, machinery,
and refinement
rather than the abounding radicality
that is the lunatic fringe we call creation;
that we call God.
In fact, rather than see God through the lens
of creation’s lunacy,
we imagine God as a singular, smoothed out atom.

Blaise Paschal wrote that any religion that does not
affirm God is hidden, is not true.
But God is not hidden by creation:
creation is rather, a sacrament
that reveals God –
that opens up to show us
the hand of the Creator in all its marvelous,
terrifying, incredible, and lunatic elements.

God is hidden, instead,
by our penchant for perfection
and our ideal for smooth, orderly, progression –
or worse, our presumption of God
as wedged into the past,
preserved in our precious temples
and place under the glass of time.

But nothing could be farther from the truth.

God is hidden behind our blinders,
the ones that would have us cast the world
in our own image –
and not even our actual image,
but an idyllic projection of ourselves
we have built up and expanded
into something monstrously dangerous.

It seems to me, that we need to intentionally dismantle
the OZ-God projected in human image
on the big screen of our imagination,
and instead, peer into
the exquisite details, even
beginning with just the surface of the Creation.

If we look upon the atom and molecule
we will see traced the great mystery.

Everything about life –
from drunken chlorophyll soaking up light
to the sucked-dry blemished wrinkles on our own faces –
reveals God,
holds God,
is tinged and tangled with God.

We need to turn our gazes away from perfection,
maniacal penchants for orderliness,
and lust for smooth outlines to life,
and get wild with God.
We need to turn away from our unreal ideals
and fantasy images
about our lives
our bodies
our minds
and ourselves.

Instead, we need to turn toward the faint tracing
on the surface of our lives
that point to God,
a god who is present in every moment.

Instead, we need to turn toward the roughness,
the blemishes,
the goofiness and crazed thinking,
and all the strange and peculiar things
about ourselves that tell the real story,
and reveal the real God.

If the question of agnosticism is,
“Who turned on the lights?”;
and the question of faith is,
“Whatever for?”;
then the question of spiritual practice is, “How?”

How can we learn to see the presence of God
here and now,
in life and in ourselves,
as we really are –
instead of how we wish the world
and our own lives were?

Proper 17A 2017: God

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800 BCE, first known mention of the God of Israel

Text for Preaching

Exodus 3:1-15

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.  There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.  Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.”  When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”  He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.  Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.  The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them.  So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”  But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”  He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”   But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ”  God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’:  This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.

Matthew 16:21-28

From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.  And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”  But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”  Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.  For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?  “For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done.  Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

Sermon

You may or may not have noticed,
but I do not preach much about “God.”

Instead, I start with the Bible
or the Liturgical Reading,
and dig into whatever it says.
Wrestling with the readings
to imagine what the author or editor
wanted us to hear –
given his or her context –
is usually where I like to start.

Starting there usually offers plenty of wisdom
to then explore and share
over the twelve or fifteen minutes
I have to preach –
which may feel like an eternity to you,
but feels short to me.
I am reticent to preach at length
on something I know so little about – God.
But today is different.
Today, because of that Exodus story,
I feel emboldened.
So let’s just notice
what we have spread out here before us.

There is a fire that burns without consuming.

Turns out, that is a metaphor for God.
As we read on,
in Exodus and elsewhere,
we learn about a god that loves without controlling,
gives freedom without conditioning,
desires justice without punishing,
and offers mercy without questioning.

We have here
a fire that burns without consuming,
which stands for love so perfect
even we can almost feel it –
though we cannot get close enough to touch it.

We can almost imagine the kind of love that kindles fire
even though we actually never know it like it knows us.

What we have here
is a god who sees misery.
Think on that, pause on it,
get curious about it.

This god that burns without consuming
has lost its innocence,
and been defiled,
by the sight of infants impaled upon swords.

This god that sees,
has seen women violently battered and abused.
This god that sees,
has watched men enrich themselves
while trading other men for gold.

This god that sees,
does not look away
and does not squint.
This god that sees,
stares at misery through tears.

But we notice so much more in this story
if we pay attention.

We discover a god
who hears.

We should be shocked by that –
really, if we are at all honest,
we should be amazed by a god who hears.

This god that hears,
hears slaves scream.

This god that hears,
listens even to dispossessed, marginal, enslaved people
scream while bleeding at the hands of taskmasters.

This god that hears,
listens to the cry of a single human voice
even amidst all the music and noise of the cosmos.

This god that hears,
can even hear the quiet, internalized agony
hidden in a human heart,
beating within the envelope of these pews –
right here, right now.

This is a god who can focus on the music of Niagara Falls,
a songbird at dusk,
an oboe playing in the stillness of some empty cathedral,
AND, while hearing all of that,
still hear
your silent pain and mine.

A god that sees
and a god that hears
is more than we can imagine,
at least in our right minds.
But what we have here,
is a god who also knows – us.

This is a god
who actually experiences us.
Seriously, a god that is embodied in us.

This is a god
that could just as easily
have created the cosmos
and let it go like a spinning orb,
just to watch what happened.

This is a god
that could have dispassionately experimented with us,
or simply smirked at our foolish state,
from an invulnerable perch of otherworldliness.

But instead, this is a god
who chose to experience us – that is, know us –
from the inside out.

Think about what that means.
Seriously, bore into the notion
of what it means that god knows us,
and experiences life as we live it.

In order to do that,
to know us,
this god must be vulnerable like us.

You see, to know us is to suffer, like us.
To know us is to explode with joy, like us.
To know us is to be amazed by hope, like us.
To know us is to have tasted love so sweet it hurts, like we have.
To know us is to have reached beyond our grasp for something we desperately wanted
and come up short, just like we have.

What we have here before us
in this story from Exodus,
the story at the beginning of the story,
is a god who hears us
and knows us
and sees us;
a god who is with us like a second skin –
or maybe under the first one.

So now,
because we have a god who knows us like that,
it is only natural for us to want to know God
with the same intimacy.
That is what Moses asks:
he wants to know God as God has known us.
Tell us about yourself, God.
Tell us who you are.
Let us hear.
Let us see.
Let us know you, as you have known us,
Moses chirps with utmost eagerness.

“No,” God says.

The god who knows us so well
is also a god who refuses to be known.

“I will be who I will be,” is God’s answer.

In other words,
You are unable to know me the way I know you.
You are unable to see and hear and experience me,
as I see and hear and experience you.

What we have here is a god
who burns but does not consume,
sees but is not seen,
hears but is not heard,
knows but is not known;
a god that loves without controlling,
gives freedom without conditioning,
desires justice without punishing,
offers mercy without questioning,
and knows us from the inside out but is not known by us.

All of that is why I avoid talking about God
if I can help it.

5000 years later,
we do not know anymore about God
than Moses did standing on that mountain.
The best we can do
in the presence of this kind of god,
is to take off our shoes and be amazed –
and be grateful.

But let’s be honest.
Amazement and gratitude is never enough
for creatures like you and me.
We want it all.

We want definition.
We want proof.
We want a god who fits within the laws of nature –
even though we do not fully understand those laws,
or that nature.

We want a god
that acts like we expect a god to act,
and do what we need a god to do.
We want a god
we can prop upright in the corner
that will listen while we yammer.

Amazement and gratitude are all well and good
in the moment that we feel them,
but what’s after that?

We want a god
that does stuff, and does the stuff
we ask that god to do.

That’s who we are.
But let’s stop right there and pause.
Is what we want, what we need?

Did you ever feel truly heard by a friend?

Remember what that feels like?
Remember pausing from the long, woeful description
of your pain and fear
as you realized that your friend
had actually been listening intently.
Remember how it felt to know
he or she not only heard your words,
but also heard the feelings within tears
rolling down your cheeks,
and the ache gripping your heart,
and the knot tying up your stomach?
Remember what that felt like,
to be held within the rapt attention
of someone else’s caring?

Amazing, right?

So then, can you remember a time so horrible
that the only thing anyone could do for you,
was just…to be there?

Remember what that was like?

They were just there with you:
not asking or doing,
not trying to fix or cover up the awfulness
of what you were going through,
but just there for you?

Maybe at the time it didn’t seem like that big a deal,
but as you looked back, you realized how crucial
and how powerful
their willingness to just be there with you
was, and the impact it has had.
It was a grace, wasn’t it,
if ever there was grace in your life?
They were just there with you,
and in retrospect, you are so very grateful.
Remember that?

The bravery of simple presence,
and the courage to experience
what someone else is experiencing,
is powerful beyond words.

Even if that was all we ever got from God,
wouldn’t be enough?
Would we demand more?
Do we really need more?

I think what we see
when we take a syringe
to the heart of this Exodus story,
and extract a single drop of its healing blood,
is a god who hears,
who sees,
who experiences,
who becomes present,
and who points to a way out.

I know we like to get all miraculous
and supernatural about such stories,
and make inflated claims and promises
for things we have never seen or heard,
before or since,
but I do not think we need to do that with this story.

What this Exodus story actually offers,
tucked up under the gold leaf and statues,
is much more basic
and much more powerful.

Being known from the inside out,
and knowing the presence
that extinguishes the darkness,
is plenty powerful enough.

A god who sees,
a god who hears,
a god who knows,
a god who experiences,
a god who is present,
and a god who points to the way out,
is plenty powerful enough for creatures like us.
Don’t you think?

Last Epiphany: Reading the Bible as Poetry not History

by

Link to Exodus 24:12-18 and Matthew 17:1-9:http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=22

The liturgical Reading
“Transfiguration” by Frederick Buechner

“His face shone like the sun,” Matthew says, “and his garments became white as light.” Moses and Elijah were talking to him. There was a bright cloud overshadowing him and out of it a voice saying, “This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” The three disciples who witnessed the scene “fell on their faces, and were filled with awe” (Matthew 17:1-6).

It is as strange a scene as there is in the Gospels. Even without the voice from the cloud to explain it, they had no doubt what they were witnessing. It was Jesus of Nazareth all right, the man they’d tramped many a dusty mile with, whose mother and brothers they knew, the one they’d seen as hungry, tired, footsore as the rest of them. But it was also the Messiah, the Christ, in his glory. It was the holiness of the man shining through his humanness, his face so afire with it they were almost blinded.

Even with us something like that happens once in a while. The face of a man walking his child in the park, or a woman picking peas in the garden, or sometimes even the unlikeliest person listening to a concert, say, or standing barefoot in the sand watching the waves roll in, or just having a beer at a Saturday baseball game in July. Every once and so often, something so touching, so incandescent, so alive transfigures the human face that it’s almost beyond bearing.”

 

The Bible is not history.

There is some history IN the bible,
but the Bible itself is not history.

It is true that we know many of the incidents
and people mentioned in the bible
are identifiable, historical, moments in human history
but the Bible itself was never written
to preserve a historical record.

In fact, the Bible wasn’t written at all
in the way we think of writing today.

When we talk about writing today,
we think of people sitting at the computer –
or not that long ago,
with a typewriter or yellow legal pad –
and writing a long book of connected chapters.

Writing in our world
has a beginning and an end,
and often has a duration lasting
only a few minutes, hours, days, months,
or in the case of books, a few years.

But the Bible was TOLD
long before it was written.
The stories were shared over campfires,
ritualistic meals at the family table,
and among small knots of organized believers.
Competing groups told the same stories
a little differently,
giving the characters they liked best
the best parts and punch lines.
Which of those versions was included in the Bible
as it began to be written down,
involved politics as well as story telling.

The Bible as we know it,
was edited together as a big, fat book
over a thousand or more years
while those stories circulated.
And while the stories about Jesus
were compressed into a much shorter period of time
than the stories about Moses,

the nature of the Gospel’s evolution –
from TOLD to WRITTEN to EDITED –
is the same kind of process.

I mention all of that because
more often than not,
we treat the Bible as if it is an historical narrative.

We read it out loud in church,
or study it in small groups,
as if the words
and the characters
and the events
were a textbook
unwrapping exactly what happened.

But that is a very hazardous way to receive the Bible.
It will lead to outlandish,
bizarre, downright dangerous,
superstitious,
and bigoted ideas.

Instead, more often than not,
we ought to hear biblical stories
like the two we heard today…as poetry.

If we treat Moses on Sinai,
and Jesus on his mountain, as a poem –
or even as a marvelously madcap abstract painting
with strange, vibrant, swaths and slingers of color –
then we begin to feel our way
to some pretty good stuff in these stories.

All we need to do is be a little lithe and elastic,
and follow that sweet slight-of-hand
exemplified by writer-theologian, Frederick Buechner,

For example,
I have never been enclosed in a cloud
on top of a mountain,
or had a vision of Jesus
hanging out with Moses and Elijah,
but I have had mountaintop experiences
from which I could suddenly see clearly,
and breathe deeply again.

I have never been handed tablets of stone
that set out the perimeter of my life and actions,
but I have had astoundingly clear guidance
from time to time – even if I didn’t really understand
that advice until I was looking back on it.

I have never heard God speak in an audible voice
from out of a cloud,
but God has spoken to me clearly
in the audible voice of a friend,
and in the speech of prophets,
and even in the whisper of dreams
and inner voices.

We know what Matthew is up to here,
with this vision-quest story of his,
and it is a kind of poetry.

Matthew, remember, is a Jew,
and a follower of the dead Messiah, Jesus.
He understands that if he is ever going to grab
the attention of his fellow Galileans and Judeans about Jesus,
he is going to have to do it through Moses.
So Matthew poetically arranges Jesus
in the image of Moses.
Just compare those two readings today!

In Exodus, Moses goes up the mountain.
Jesus goes up the mountain too.

Moses takes Joshua – the heir apparent –
and some other leaders with him.
So Jesus takes Peter – the heir apparent – and
some other leaders with him too.

Moses was in the clouds for six days,
just like the Creation of the world took six days.
In Creation, God rested on the seventh day,
and God finished with Moses on the seventh day too.
Well, wouldn’t you know it,
after six days Jesus goes up the mountain,
and he gets transformed up there
on the seventh day also.

Moses’ authority is confirmed
by being given the commandments –
proof positive that he is the one to be followed.
And of course, Jesus’ authority is confirmed too,
by hanging out on a cloud with Moses AND Elijah –
proof positive, if ever there was any,
that Jesus is the one to be listened to.

We will see the same parallels between Moses
and Jesus next Sunday in the wilderness.
What we need to remember
when we come to these stories,
is they are literary not historical;
and poetry not prose.

If we read these stories
as if they are an historical account;
or worse, if we read them like the side of a box of cereal
that tells us what kind of daily vitamins we need;
then we will miss what we are supposed to get
and get what we really ought to miss.

Today’s Gospel story, for example,
gets used by the Church to assert its imperial theology
that Jesus is the one and only,
biggest and bestest god
that ever was
and ever will be.

But that would be an historical reading of it,
or worse, a mind-numbing
literal point of view.

If we read Matthew more poetically,
with a little verve and spirit,
then we might see and hear something different.

Here is how I read it as poetry.

In the presence of a terrifyingly awesome
and overwhelmingly spectacular experience
up there on the mountain,
Peter just doesn’t know what to do.
Like a lot of people who are anxious and afraid,
Peter dithers – he runs around and chatters.

He is like a mouse in the corner of its cage
nibbling on its own tail.
He is frightened.

Here is God, in so much more spectacular power
and magnificence than he had ever imagined.
He is just plain scared,
like all of us would be.

In his frightened dithering
all he can do is offer up a lame idea:
“Do you want us to…”
“Shut up,” the voice of God thunders!
“Listen, don’t talk,” God says to the little mortals.
All three of them then fall to the ground
with their faces in the dirt,
and probably wet their robes.
I’m thinking Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion.

Now if we are reading this as poetry,
the key event blossoms quietly right here
in the middle of the story:

Jesus reaches down…and touches them.
He touches them.

Just like he did with the lepers, he touches them.
Just like he did to Peter’s sick mother-in-law,
he touches them.
Just like he does with the blind,
lame, lost, and marginalized
in all the stories,
he touches them.
And, as should be familiar to us
from the various Christmas and Easter stories,
he says, “don’t be afraid.”

The fact is,
we are afraid.
At least we should be
if ever we find ourselves
in the presence of God.
And that is part of the poetry of this story.

We should be afraid of God;

not because we will be judged or condemned
or any silly, human idea like that!
But we should fear God, as in be awed by God,
because God is so much more
than we have ever allowed ourselves to imagine.
God is so much more incredible
than the little boxes that our religions
have packaged the Creator of the Cosmos in.

Peter represents our propensity
to button down God;
to define God with little receptacles
so we can pretend to have control
of this thing that is so much greater than we are.

But God is so much more massive,
so much more powerful,
so much more dangerous,
so much more unpredictable,
so much more ravenous for us
than anything we have ever imagined.
We should be afraid.

And yet, immediately in the moment of fright;
at the most dangerous point of the story;
a small verse of the poem
pierces everything blooming around it;
and we are alerted to listen.
That is when we are touched by God
and assured we need not be afraid.

We are touched.

I imagine if I asked you to close your eyes right now,
you could sit back and remember
moments when you have been touched.

Through small mysteries like bread and wine,
we are touched.

Through a friend, or even a stranger,
appearing at just the right moment
to utter just the right words,
we are touched.

At the moment we are least able to
rise above the pain and grief of our lives,
something happens to give us strength
and resilience,
and we feel touched.

This odd story in Matthew,
if we read it as history,
is about coercive power and majesty
and used to assert orthodoxy.

But when we receive this story as a poem,
and we feel the tenderness within it,
the message comes through
that the Creator of the Cosmos
reaches out and,
even in our smallness and insignificance,
touches us.

Well, because it is not history
or a table of vitamins,
so we get to interpret stories like these.
So that is our work.
You may interpret it differently than I do,
and therein rests the beauty of art –
poem, painting, or sculpture.
Its beauty
and its meaning
is rendered by the one who receives it
more than by the intention of the one who created it.

Whatever you do with these stories,
this is the last Sunday of Epiphany,
and on Wednesday we meet our mortality
with ashes.
Then next Sunday,
we enter into Lent.
All of that is poetry too.

Our Vision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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