Jesus

Worship & Sermon for 11 Pentecost,Year A, 2020

August 16, 2020 by Cam Miller

WORSHIP VIDEO

TEXT OF SERMON

I don’t want to preach today,
instead I just want to share some thoughts.
Jesus gave us a true gem this morning,
or I should say, Matthew’s memory of Jesus
gave us something special.
So by way of my grandfather
I want to talk about this story of Jesus.

By all accounts my granddad was a peach.
I never knew him,
he died before I was born.
As a dentist in his small,
average American town for those days,
he cared for some people that pushed him
beyond his comfort zone.
I know that
because of stories handed down in the family.
But I also know,
because my dad told me in a quiet moment,
that my grandfather belonged
to the Klu Klux Klan,
known as the Indiana Klan in those parts.

Now the way my dad explained this to me,
was that back in the day – my grandfather’s day –
the Klan was like a political party
and it had a social dimension
because “almost everyone” belonged it.
I checked that out, and indeed,
Indiana has the dubious distinction
of being the state with the highest ever
Klan registration.
From 1920 to 1925,
30% of “native born white men in Indiana,”
as it was recorded,
belonged to the Indiana chapter of the Klan,
and the Governor and over half the legislature claimed membership.
”Everyone was in it,”
I think was the phrase my dad used to explain it.

My dad had a childhood memory
of being with his father
in a downtown building
when a Klan meeting let out
and being scared by the procession
of men in robes
coming down the dark stairway.

The mind has lots of tricks.
Because my granddad was a good guy
I embraced my dad’s explanation
for quite some time.
Then, one day, the dissonance
embedded in that explanation
agitated me enough, so that
I started thinking about it more.
The heart of the Klu Klux Klan
is racism and bigotry –
against African Americans,
Jewish Americans, Roman Catholics,
and nearly any immigrant
from anywhere other than northern Europe.

It did not matter if “everyone was doing it”
there is no way around the darkness
at the heart of that beast.
You do not become part of evil
without first having that evil within,
or getting poisoned by more of it
while being part of it.

My grandfather may have been a wonderful guy
to his family
and some members of his community,
but there is no easy explanation or excuse
that will dissolve the ugliness of his association
with the Indiana Klan.
”Everyone was doing it” is a rationalization
meant to put its dissonance
with everything else we know
to sleep.

My point here,
is not so much about my granddad
but the importance of listening to dissonance –
of allowing ourselves to feel the rub
and agitation
between what we think
and have been taught
and what we experience
and what we practice.

Let me repeat that
because it is counter-intuitive:
It is GOOD
when we allow ourselves to feel
the dissonance
between what we have been taught
and our actual experience,
or between what we believe and espouse
and what we actually practice.

When there is a crinkle and a rub
that makes us uncomfortable,
it is better to pick at it
than to leave it alone.

So again, my granddad
may have been a peach of a guy
to his family and some people in the community,
but his participation in the Indiana Klan
tells us something else as well.
Allowing myself to be uncomfortable
about my own father’s rationalization
about his father – because it didn’t really jive
with my knowledge and experience of people –
caused me to acknowledge
my granddad’s participation in evil.

We all have filters, right?
I mean we all have lenses
we’ve crafted or been given,
that explain the world and the people around us.
There are macro filters
like science, religion, politics, and economics,
and there are micro filters
like family culture, neighborhood consensus,
professional culture,
and personal prejudices and superstitions.

When we feel a dissonance
or agitation about something
we can’t quite put our finger on,
it is probably because
we are calling into question
the trustworthiness of a lens or filter
we’ve been seeing the world through.

In such moments, our instinct
is to turn away from the dissonance.
Our knee-jerk reaction is to deny
or rationalize
the discomfort and move on
without thinking too much about it.
But having the courage and curiosity
to wonder about that dissonance
and explore the agitation
is the gem this story about Jesus holds up to us.

But we have to pay the price of entry
in order to see this gem up close.

In order to even see the gem embedded
in this story from Matthew,
we may have to question
one or more of our filters
about Jesus.

There is an orthodox Christian lens
that looks at Jesus
only through God-and-Perfection
colored glasses.
Anytime there is a story
in which Jesus says or does
what seems distinctly ungod-like
or less than perfect,
a corrective lens is asserted
that finds an explanation or rationalization
that likely strains credulity
but leaves in tact the orthodox lens.
If we will get curious
and muster some courage,
the insight in this story
is actually low hanging fruit.
This story of Jesus
gives us a glimpse
of a human being struggling
with his own bigotry
along with the lens of his cultural and theological assumptions.
If Jesus is perfect
we do not get to see this moment of enlightenment
brought on by Jesus listening to the dissonance
within himself.

The dissonance
is between what he says he believes
about the universality of God’s love
and the bigotry held within
the spiritual practice of his own religion.
I would go so far as to say,
this moment of dissonance
and Jesus’ willingness to listen to it,
may be the turning point
in the life and ministry of the messiah.
Here is the story behind the story
that tells the story.
It begins with Jesus ignoring the woman.

But that is not all.
His bigotry toward her is pretty obvious.
He as much as calls her a dog –
in fact, he does call her a dog.

A mother, desperate to save her child,
accosts Jesus.
Now consider what we know
about the plight of peasants in those days.

There was no social safety net.
No medicine, and without any money,
there was not even access to spiritual healers.

It was a social caste system
that left poor women utterly powerless.
It was a society that placed children
on the absolute bottom rung of the ladder
where their value was measured
by their potential for labor.

If you were a female child,
your value was in eventual marriageability.

As a matter of fact,
a poor female child possessed by a demon –
or with mental illness if you prefer –
was truly a life without value or worth.
She would have been completely vulnerable

to all forms of human cruelty.

The mother, as most mothers do,
loved her child beyond value.
She would have been beside herself;
woeful in her fear
about what would happen
to the daughter she loved.

I am guessing that most mothers,
and fathers too,
would chase down any and all options.

So, despite the social and ethnic wedge
that stood between them,
the mother goes after Jesus.
She is poor, so she had already learned
not to be too polite –
that would get her nowhere in the first century.
Instead she charges into the crowd of men
and shouts.

That’s important: she shouts.
She yells at Jesus to stop and “have mercy.”

My image of this moment
is of of Jesus as a deer in the headlights.
He is accosted by a strange woman
demanding mercy.
We should remember too,
that “mercy” was a special feature of
Jesus’ stump speech.
So, just to fix the scene in our imagination,
this an aggressive outcast woman
publicly begging Jesus for mercy.
The first thing Jesus does is ignore her.
How human: Ignore it and hope it goes away.
I’m good at that, how about you?

But his disciples did not allow
an avoidance strategy.
They begged Jesus, and I quote, ‘get rid of her.’

”That’s harsh” Jesus might have said to himself.
But still, he concurred.
“Look lady, I’m not here to help Canaanites.”
He probably motioned her to leave, as in “shoo.”
“If you want to know the truth lady,
I was sent to help the lost sheep
among my fellow Galileans and Judeans.
I got nothing for you.”

Now to put a really fine point on this moment,
we need to recall what Jesus said
just prior to this event.
In Matthew’s version of the story,
Jesus has just said:
“…What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart,
and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions…”

Granddad, is that you?
Something dark slipped out
from the heart of Jesus.
In fact, Jesus’ treatment of this women
contradicts everything he just preached.

Remember what I said about dissonance?
One source of it is the rub between
what we say we believe or value
and how we actually behave.
When there is dissonance, pick at it.

Hypocrisy is pretty human.
I hope I am not speaking out of school
when I suggest that you may have had some experience
with hypocrisy yourself.
I know I have.

All of us violate our own values
and veer off the walk of our talk.
But the question for Jesus – and for us –
is what to do about it?

“Go away lady, you are not my concern”
sounds so awful to us but we can rationalize it
like my dad did for my granddad.
Jesus feels completely justified
in ignoring this woman
and for asserting an immediate distance
between them.

You see, Judeans and Galileans
saw Canaanites as morally unclean,
socially despicable,
and ritually filthy.
Keeping a distance
from such low-life
was integral to the practice of good faith.

For Jesus, social distance
from a Canaanite
was practicing good hygiene and “good faith.”
Plus, she is an unattended woman
and so Jesus had plenty of reasons
not too get close.
Social and religious policy
dictated that men
not enter into conversation
or deal with in any way, an unrelated woman –
especially one that was not with a man.
Again, that was a matter of good hygiene
and good faith too,
because a woman might be
on her menstrual cycle.
If a man touched a woman when she was menstruating,
he would make himself unclean.
Making himself unclean
would separate him
from the company of other men,
and any religious activity.

So you could not associate with women
you did not know.
And then, on top of all that,
there was the reputational issue.

Jesus just wanted her to go away.
Clearly Jesus does not want to help her.
He may even be disgusted by her.
His compassion was not aroused,
nor his mercy.
He was likely repulsed
and closed off
by the cultural and religious
lens he wore.

On top of all that,
everything in the culture
justified and reinforced his rejection of her.
”Everyone does it.”

But Jesus seems to have listened
to the dissonance
and recognized what we so clearly see
from our historical distance:
his first response,
while very much part of the normalcy
of his moment in time,
is the wrong response
when seen through the lens of God’s love.

Friends, we need to pick at the dissonance
when it arises within us
amidst the current political moment
and in the rising up of people of color
insisting that the impact of 400 years of slavery
now be addressed and reconciled and healed.

We need to pick at the dissonance within us
whenever we feel defensive about our privilege,
victimized in our whiteness,
hostile or afraid or mistrustful of any class
or category of human being –
as if Canaanites are somehow different
from Galileans.

We need to listen to the dissonance
between the universal love of God
and the normal and routine prejudices
bigotries, and fears
held within the lenses we’ve been given
or crafted for ourselves.

So if what I am saying is disconcerting
or agitating in any way, good.
Pick at it,
explore it,
follow what you know
about the universal love of God
and our call to be agents of that love.

3 Advent, Year A, 2019: Is this sermon about hope?

December 15, 2019 by Cam Miller

If I can be personal for a moment,
I want to echo Wendell Berry’s poem about trees:
“They are the advent they await.”

Advent, an arrival or emergence, or
as we say in church-speak, a coming.
Trees are and do Advent –
they arrive without notice,
a seed in the soil
as anonymous as an infant
born into poverty at night
hidden from sight.
Trees are the thing they await,
both the recipient
and pure embodiment
of light.

Trees are that “light come down to earth”
consumed and processed
and transformed into more and greater tree.

Truly, we do not think of them as such,
but they are channels of sunlight
absorbed and changed into
bark and stem and leaf.

You likely think I am nuts now,
but truly, trees are perhaps
the most heavenly creatures on earth –
their very life a benediction (or blessing)
to the rest of us.
As Berry says, we “walk on (their) radiance
(and are) amazed.”
But they are also “a benediction said
over the living and the dead” –
literally granting comfort and shade
above our graves.

They bless us in life and death.

We pray for light and life
every dang time we open a prayer book,
and there they are –
trees all around us,
life and light blessing us while
we all but ignore them.

Trees are so god-like,
and our ignorance and negligence,
and at times downright belligerence toward them,
is just so darn human.

Jesus was hung on a tree,
one that itself had been tortured into wood.
We make that ragged wood of the cross
our symbol of holiness
instead of the tree from which it came –
also very human of us.

I don’t want to over-do this metaphor
but trees are potent symbols of life,
and the veritable incarnation of light
and its presence among us even on a cloud-filled day.

Why am I talking about trees?
Glad you asked.

I once read a quote in an interview
with the aging folk singer, Joni Mitchell.
The interviewer asked Joni if she ever got disillusioned.
“No,” she immediately replied,
“because I never have any illusions.”

You see, it is illusions that, in the end
cause us to become cynical and disillusioned.
What we need is VISION, not illusion
and many people – especially many idealistic people –
confuse those two.
Isaiah is all about vision
rather than illusion.

It is an easy and common mistake
to imagine that Isaiah
is creating a specific set of criteria
by which to discern
God’s presence in the world.
“When the desert gets to be like this,
then we will know God is with us.”
But that is what his poem says
only if we read it as a formula
or the directions for a how-to manual
instead of as poetry.

First of all, we are not wilderness people.
We do not live in a desert –
in fact, just the opposite.

We live along or near a lake,
a giant blue lake
fed by roaring tributaries
pouring off dramatic waterfalls
and adorned with vineyards,
forests, and orchards.
We are Hobbits
who live in the lush green Shire,
not denizens of Isaiah’s desert –
or John the Baptist’s wilderness,
or any of the Biblical dryness metaphors.
Using desert metaphors for us
is like referring to Jesus as the bread of lifein Japan,
where rice is the staple.

The VISION in Isaiah’s poetry
is not embedded in topography
or geological features of the land.

They are metaphors, like Wendell Berry’s trees.
They are metaphors
mouthing to us in whispers
about when we can be sure that God is
present and at work
in the world about us.

Here is how I translate his metaphors.

God is present and at work
where the hawks of war
fall in love with the doves of peace
and their progeny is hope.

God is present and at work
when power is used to raise up the powerless
and make vulnerable
those who are steadfastly arrogant.

God is present and at work
when our economy is driven by the invisible hand
of fairness and equity
instead of moved by the clutch of scarcity
pr the suction of gluttony.

That to me, is the substance of Isaiah’s vision.
But our vision generally does not come from Isaiah,
instead, we get our vision
from CNN…FOX…MSNBC…Brietbart…NPR
or any other electronic sieve
that filters the universe
into small enough particles
that they can be transmitted by electrons
into 15 second sound-bytes,
or 30 second streaming images,
or a “generous” two-minute expose.

Our news…our vision…our very perspective on the world,
is filtered into manageable sound bites
and polished into a lens
by businesses, organizations, and platforms
driven by profit,
rather than a prophet of God.

It is as if we are presented
with a daily paint-by-numbers world
with a few stray dots
we are directed to color in
and told which colors to use, and then,
we are told what the image is
we are supposed to see.

You and I do not actually know
what is going on in the world.
We only get briefings
from people who want us to see the world
in a particular way – theirway;
the way that is best for them
to have us see it.

But here is the laughable part.
They do not know
what is happening in the world either.

The idea that anyone has the right perch
and a good view
of what is actually taking place in world is an illusion.

The idea that there is a constellation of facts out there
that can be gathered,
and that once pulled together for us
can be added up like an equation…
to give us “Reality”
with a capital R – is an illusion.

We do not get to see “reality”
we only get to see very small snippets
of life as we experience it;
and then we get to salt it
with a conglomeration of information,
some of which is helpful
but a preponderance of which, is not.

So, let’s back up,
and back away from CNN and FOX
and that barrage of information,
whatever its source.
Let’s instead, go sit by the lake.

I imagine that all of us
have had the experience
of sitting by a lake or pond –
one small enough
to have an apron of trees around it.

Seated there at the water’s edge,
we see the surface of the of lake or pond
and the tangle of trees
stretching up and out toward the sun,
and in the midst of it all,
we see the chaos of textures and colors
and we can probably hear a cacophony of sounds.
If we sit there long enough,
and wait patiently enough,
our eyes will actually adjust to the abundance.

Think about that – our eyes
will adjust to the abundance
and we will see more of what is there.
In the same way as we wait for our vision
to adjust to the dark,
if we are patient at the water’s edge
we will see a stunning array of detail emerge.

We will see the dance of light upon the carpet of shadows.
We will see the complexity of grasses
and an almost wasteful variety flowers and plants –
especially if we are there in the growing season.
But even in winter,
we can see a reckless variety of once green bodies
poking out of the snow
or leaning in all different directions
like a bad haircut.

We will hear a symphony of natural music
played by the freakish vocal instruments
of chitterling birds,
fractious insects,
undulating amphibians,
chortling mammals,
and even the strings of the wind.

If we sat there long enough,
this intricate canvass of life will change by season
over and over and over and over again.
Autumn with its subdued colors and receding hairline;
Winter with its purity and milk of God;
Spring with its scent of life and squeal of green;
Summer in all of its full-bodied shapeliness.

Were we patient enough,
were we very good listeners,
were we to have the studied vision of a cat,
we would see this year-long scene
as one whole turn of the page.

If we had the vision,
instead of looking upon its minion of component parts
and seeing them as separate and discrete activities,
we would see it as a rolling and rippling whole.

But even if we had the patience and vision of a tree
to see the wonderful wholeness of lake and seasons,
we still would not actually see it.
That is because there is so much else going on within it.

We still would not have seen the microbiology;
not have witnessed the microbes at work
in the moist wet soil along its banks.

We would not have perceived
the interaction of worms and acid and decay
within the blankets of leaf-strewn mud on its icy bottom.

We would have
witnessed the trees changing color,
but hidden from our sight would be
the thickening liquid sucked up from their roots
and pumped like blood to the vessels in their leaves.

We would have enjoyed the sparkling surface of the water,
but never have guessed
the presence of a water table
resting beneath the green stubbled earth,
and that even that invisible body of water
ebbs and flows up and down by a connecting aquifer
that roars like a river
still deeper in the soul of the earth.

Standing by the exquisite elegance of the lake,
and having even an inkling
of how much life
and how many relationships
form the matrix of that exquisite web,
we understand CNN and FOX give us a 100-mph view
and call it the world.

But that view is not the world.
It is a view. It is a profit-driven and power-hungry view.

We know instead,
and Isaiah is telling us so,
that the world is composed of billions,
perhaps trillions of lakes and ponds– and please,
that’s a metaphor –
each with their own ecosystem
and yet inter-connected
with every other ecosystem
and forming a magnificent, single wholeness.

We could sit and study for an entire year
just one pond,
just one amazing day
just one moment in our lives,
and still we would not have the vision to see it.
The idea that we see it or know it,
is an illusion.
The way to keep from being DISillusioned
is to abandon the arrogance of illusion.

Is God present and at work in the world about us?
It does not seem so
if CNN, Facebook, or FOX is our lens.
But those who take the time,
who have the patience,
whose curiosity will allow,
and who have the eyes to see,
will know that God is present
and at work even here…even now.

If we are looking in the newspaper
or on television
or in our favorite online sources
for where God is carpeting whole nations
with peace and cures and prosperity,
then our ability to see God is diminished.

If we are waiting for the power-mongers in Washington
or Albany or the county or city
to suddenly speak with honesty
and act with integrity,
then we will become cynical.

If we are following our own vision
and insisting that WE KNOW
what the world is supposed to be like,
as if it had a script that follows a plot
and arrives at a happy ending
penned to our own liking, then we will be crushed.
If we are holding God
to the exact words that appear in Isaiah
or Matthew,
or to some mystic poet we read somewhere,
then we will become rigid
and encrusted
like anything else that has been dead that long.

To see the movement of God
here and now,
present and at work in our own lives,
we must be prepared
to look without expectation,
to listen without talking,
to observe without planning,
to feel without protecting,
To study without proving.

As we approach the Big Day of Christmas
and tell the story of Jesus born in a barn,
consider how many years
Nelson Mandela was in prison
before the world ever heard of him!
Think about how many seasons that tree lived
before you ever noticed it.

As we approach Christmas
and assume it is about a baby being born
late at night under a star
instead of a poem about God’s presence
here and now in our midst,
consider how many acts of kindness,
how many small acts of love,
how many life-changing encounters,
how many transforming moments
will never get one bit of ink or airtime,
and how few of them you or I will ever know about.

Consider how knowing about them
might change our vision
or at the very least, subvert our illusions.

Coming up through the roots of the tree
and feeding its leaves;
deep in the soil where death is refashioned into life;
and under the surface of the water
where a universe thrives,
God is present and at work.

There are 16 days left in this worn-out old year
and instead of rushing to the end,
I invite us to slow down,
take a deep breath,
and observe the small, the ordinary
the neglected elements, moments
and people
in our busy lives.

If we do, I suspect we will be able to see that
God is present and at work.

But you don’t have to take my word for it,
go out and touch the bark of a tree
and feel the naked little stems on its branches,
and poke around to notice a hint of its roots.
Realize what you feel
and what you see
is light. Sunlight.
Present, right there with you.

23 Pentecost: Eschatology or the Theology of Framing

November 17, 2019 by Cam Miller

Okay, this is about eschatology.
Yep, I knew that would move you
to the edge of your chair!

So, we are sitting between
Isaiah and Jesus this morning,
and it is like pulling at both ends of a cherry popper
or snap dragon – the fireworks are in the middle
and you have to pull at both ends.

Isaiah is all dreamy-eyed
and gushy
while Jesus is dark and morose.

Both are eschatological,
which traditionally is a form of theology
focused upon death, judgement,
and the final destiny of humankind.

Eschatology is a lens
through which we look at life on this planet
and proclaim what it all means.
We are tiny neck hairs
on a small planet lost in space
and with a growing sense
of just how infinitesimal and vulnerable we are.
Eschatology reels that in a little bit.

It can be grand and inspiring to sit on a mountain top
and savor the blue-green vista
and feel awed by the beauty
and intricate balance of nature
and our small part in it.
But it is another thing altogether
to sit naked beneath the stars
and recognize that beauty
is actually massive hot gaseous explosions
into which everything we know
will be incinerated
in a Nano-second.

It is a deep well of ponderance
we can easily fall into
and never come out of,
which is why taking one step at a time
is such sage advice
for little creatures like us.

So eschatology is a lens we inherited
to help us see the enormity of life
a little closer.
Like those funny glasses
used to look at a solar eclipse,
our eschatological lens
allows us to stare into something
that might otherwise harm our soul
if not our mental health.

A lot of Christian tradition
has treated biblical eschatology
as if it were the Farmer’s Almanac of Earth time,
a kind of folk art
that can predict with precision
what science can’t quite get right.

But eschatology
is not a sundial of the universe
that will tell us
how and when or why
all things come to an end.
Rather, it is an act of imagination
that seeks to understand
how and why the events of the moment
are connected to the movements of God.

Just like physics wants to understand the Big Bang
and everything that has taken place
between then and now,
biblical eschatology
wants to understand God
and the relationship of God’s best dream for us
with all that has happened
and is happening now.

It has to be an act of imagination
because we are too small
to truly comprehend the massive whole
in which we are but a teeny tiny part.

So Isaiah is imagining how it all works out
given the horrendous history he is navigating.
Jesus is imagining how it all ends,
so that God’s best dream for us
can finally come to pass.

Where they are standing
in the context of their own lives and nation,
and their own moments in history,
effects what they see
and what they say.

When Jesus pushes before the faces of his friends
his shocking and traumatic vision
he is standing at the end of his life.
His context is grim.
He is about to go toe to toe
with the Roman Empire
and get rubbed out.

His compatriots may not have understood
the trajectory of Jesus’ prophetic ministry,
but he surely did.
Jesus also likely understood
that many of his friends
were living close to their end too.

In the midst of such a grievous moment,
someone makes a stray comment
about the beauty of the stained-glass windows
– oops, I mean the glory of the Temple.

Their ogling at the glory of the architecture
sends Jesus into a wild-eyed explosion of emotion
with him muttering all kinds of images
related to his and our mortality.
It was as if to say,
“Stop!
Focus on what is important!
This thing you think is so great
is nothing.
This building
you think is so awesome
is meaningless and irrelevant.”

And then…that’s it.
That is literally the end of Jesus public statements.
He’s done preaching.

His dark prediction
about the demise of the temple
is end of the story for Jesus.

Now, every story has an ending.
We tend to think of the Gospel
as ending with the resurrection –
a kind of tortured happy ending.
But that is not how Jesus chose to end
the story of his public ministry
in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
His last public story
in each of these Gospels,
is the one we heard in part today.

It is a story about the end of time
and it is pretty dog-gone dark.

And in all three Gospels
Jesus’ last story is provoked
by a knuckle-headed pilgrim to the city of Jerusalem ogling at the Temple
and exclaiming over how beautiful it is.

Something about marveling at the Temple
sends Jesus into his darkened depths
to forecast what is going to happen
at the end of time
when God runs out of patience
or humans run out of options.

But honestly, we actually do not know if
Jesus ended his public teaching
with this little apocalypse,
or if the editors of the gospels
were the ones to use it as a period
at the end of his public ministry.

Here is what I mean.
If it was Jesus predicting the Temple would be destroyed,
then he was doing it
in the year 30 or so of the first century.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke
are editing their Gospels 45 to 60 years
AFTER Jesus is already dead and gone.
In-between Jesus’ death
and the writing of the Gospels,
there is a terrible Jewish/Roman war.

The war lasts for three years
and ends with nearly every Jew in Palestine
killed or fleeing for their lives.
When the Romans march into Jerusalem
they destroy the Temple.
So, in the year 70 of the first century,
Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the Temple
comes to pass – forty years after he made it.

Now, the descendants of those first followers of Jesus
remember his prediction.
“Wow, it happened just like he said it would”
they marvel forty years later.
So all those early Christians
begin to attach other signs and meanings
to Jesus’ original prediction,
things like warnings about being arrested
and persecuted.

They attach those warnings
to the memory of Jesus’ prediction
because they are being arrested and persecuted.

The fact that Jesus’ prediction is born out
in their present moment,
even though it is through repression
and violence,
is a kind of twisted hope for them.
“Nation will rise up against nation,
and kingdom against kingdom…
and there will be dreadful
portents and great signs from heaven.”

So IF this dreadful apocalyptic vision
was something the editors
put on the lips of Jesus,
instead of some kind of verbatim memory
of his last teachings,
then they were saying it to their tormented
and targeted generation:
“There is hope.
After death comes resurrection.”

They can say that
because they know how it turned out
after Jesus was tortured and executed.
So it helps them FRAME their moment
and face their struggles.

What is happening here
is that the original prophecy
is contextualized
by the succeeding generation
to FRAME the crisis of their own day –
and as always,
each generation thinks its crisis is the last crisis
of human history.

Framing or contextualizing
is exactly what should happen with the bible.
Each generation
should take the ancient words of our wisdom
and contextualize them
for own day
and own crises.
The words of Jesus or Isaiah
are not to be pheasant under glass.
This wisdom is not frozen in time
with a meaning limited to a single historic occasion,
rather, it is to be made present
in each new generation.

The “So What?” in this sermon,
as with the implications
of the poem from Wendell Berry
and the visions of Isaiah and Jesus,
is to ask ourselves
how we are framing OUR moment?

How are we framing our lives
in this moment,
and is the way we frame it
empowering us to act
or disempowering us?

In every single moment
we face a life
and a world
that is at one and the same time
Isaiah and Jesus –
both hope and dread,
both life and death.
They are always the possible next moment,
and every breath we take
holds both possibilities.
How do we frame that?
In fear
or commitment?
In anxiety
or resolve?
In resignation
or passion?

How we frame the moment,
how we frame our lives in any given moment,
and how we frame the opportunities and challenges
of the moment we are in,
makes all the difference in the world.
It makes all the difference to the world.

I want to end with one of the primary
ways I frame my life –
especially when things get dark and wiggly.
It is really just a metaphor,
probably one you have heard me use before
in one form or another,
because it is my eschatology.

The light from the star closest to our sun
(Proxima Centauri)
takes four years to get here.
Light from the most distant stars we see at night
has taken up to ten millennia – ten millennia –
to reach us.

So while we see those sparkling orbs up there
the light we are seeing from them
was actually created
between four and ten thousand years ago!

In other words,
we are not actually seeing those stars
when we look up;
instead we are seeing the past.
Think about that…just hover on it for a moment.

What we see is not what is, rather,
what we see is what was –
what was years and years and years ago.
In some cases thousands of years ago.

We think we are seeing those stars
and that light as if in real time,
but we are only seeing what they once were.
In fact, some of that light
is emanating from sources
that no longer exists.
Some of that light is but the ghostly image
of what was
but is no longer.
And yet that light,
even the light we see from the sources
that no longer exists,
has lasted longer than all of human history
and will outlast any of us here.

If you will forgive a movie reference here,
it is Rick’s line to Ilsa at the end of Casablanca,
when he explains why he is suddenly
going to act against his own self-interest
and risk everything
to join the Resistance:

“Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble,
but it doesn’t take much to see
that the problems of three little people
don’t amount to a hill of beans
in this crazy world.”

Our lives are small
and our smallness is in fact,
part of the beauty of God’s creation.
What WE imagine is hopeful
or dreadful,
is not the last word.
And the point is,
we do not get to know the last word.
So how we frame our lives
on this planet, and in this vast cosmos,
will make an enormous difference
in how we live our lives.

As weird as it is to say, eschatology matters.

How we frame this crazy life
and our place in it,
really does make a difference.
And here is the money part –
since this is stewardship season
and I am really supposed to preaching on money.

What we do with our money,
at least that which is somewhat discretionary,
reveals better than just about anything else,
how we frame our lives.
Time and money are the currencies
in the economy of God.
How we spend them
and what we spend them on,
declares our values far better
than any words we use.

So it is worth thinking about
and actually doing a little research on
how we use our money
and what it may say about our values
and even our eschatology.

12 Pentecost C, 2019: Peace be with you

September 1, 2019 by Cam Miller

I went to a laboratory school.
It was kindergarten-through-high school
in the same building, and,
while a public school,
it was also operated by the teacher’s college
of the local university.
I mention it, because we did not have letter grades
until high school.
All through the first nine years of classes,
we had written evaluation that emphasized “the positive”
while allowing for comments
that identified “problematic areas.”
So, the end of the first semester of ninth grade
was a time of reckoning
when, for the first time,
there was a single letter staring up from the page.

That individual letter was very loud,
and somehow it seemed to say more
than the longest evaluation ever written
by one of our previous elementary
or middle school teachers.

I can’t swear to how many A’s I had,
but I think I had all A’s, one B, and a C.
That C was in Algebra and an absolute success story.
The B was in Spanish,
and considering my goof-off and Smart Alec behavior,
it was probably a gift.

My mom looked at my report card,
said nothing about the A’s I had received,
and told me in no uncertain terms
that the B and the C were unacceptable.
At the end of the second semester,
I had all A’s a D and an F.

That says as much about my psychology at the time
as it does hers, and was just a hint
of the problems to come.

Any of us who had a hyper-critical parent
know and recognize the problems and behaviors
planted within the garden of such relationships.
One of them is the voice of that critical parent
traveling with us over time and space,
no matter how we grow and change and flourish.
Struggling to keep that critical parent inside our head
as a small voice instead of a dominant one,
can sometimes be exhausting.
Which is also why, I sometimes read the gospel story
appointed for a given Sunday,
and say, “Ugh.”

I love Jesus,
and with all honesty,
the wisdom of Jesus is my life’s blood.
Some would be surprised to hear me say that
because I do not talk about Jesus or quote Jesus
like some Christian bobble-head.
But Jesus, along with his prophetic pals –
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, and Amos –
is my chosen primary lens
through which I decipher the world.

That said, sometimes I just sigh
because the negativity gets to be too much.
Or more accurately, when I am struggling
with that critical parent inside,
the hard medicine of Jesus
feels like too much.
That is the case today
with this reading from Luke.
I could easily go on and on about the prophetic witness
Jesus lets loose with this story from Luke –
or that Luke lets loose with this story of Jesus.
But not today.
You see, when I read the gospels
I understand that you and I
are the bad guys in the story.
I think there is a lot of Christianity around
that inserts Christians as the good guys,
which makes for a very different story.

But that is so strange to me, when we know
the good guys in these gospel stories,
especially in Luke,
are “the poor, the crippled, the lame,
and the Blind.”

That is Luke’s motto for “the good guys.”
The good guys are the marginalized
not the fat cats like us.

The poorest among us here
would be judged hugely wealthy in that society.
So, in these stories,
we should know that at best,
we are the Pharisee with the lavish banquet
that invited the wrong guests.
But at worst, and more likely,
we are the imperial citizens or senators back in Rome
whose agents are forcing peasants into bankruptcy
in order to amass wealth at the edges of the empire,
or worse, crucifying them.
It is a view of ourselves that is difficult to gaze at
for extended periods of time
if we take it seriously and want to know more.

Yet, like I said,
there is a majority of Christianity in this country,
that reads these scriptures very differently.

They see themselves,
even if middle class and quite wealthy,
as the marginalized and pure at heart
amongst a threatening horde of “secular atheists”
or the fearsome and alien “Muslims,”
or the strange and perplexing godless Buddhists
and polytheistic Hindus.
They domestic Jesus
in order to bring him into their polite company.

While it often doesn’t feel good,
I prefer to keep Jesus as the zealous
social and theological prophet that he was.
Even so, sometimes, like today, it is just too much.

Without going into it in detail today,
I would also say that part of our challenge
as Christians in the 21^stcentury,
is that the context of Jesus and his society
is radically different than us and our society.

That change in context
creates change in the wisdom,
and when we do not seek to understand those changes
and hear his wisdom in OUR context –
or when we over-simplify that wisdom for our context –
then we are not doing any better
than the Christians who think that they are the good guys.

That is just a little tease for the weeks ahead this fall,
when the sermons will seek to examine
the wisdom of Jesus
and how it changes from his context to ours.
But today, I have a few words
about that critical parent inside.

It is important to note
that I am talking about the critical parent “inside”
and not the actual parent in our life,
whether living or dead.
You and I know that at some point
we cross a line
after which our parents are no longer the issue.
Rather, it is how we internalized our parents
and we have some control and responsibility with that.
I know it is no longer my mom talking to me
when I beat myself up inside
for failing at something,
or when I am getting a C
and unwilling to recognize that in this case, a C is success.
Whether it is a critical parent
or critical boss
or teacher, friend, or grandparent,
their voice fades over time
and it becomes our own.

It is then the voice of OUR perfectionism
or OUR negativity
or OUR overly-critical judgments.
And we know all too well,
that if that voice becomes the dominant, lecturing voice
inside of us, it will ooze and bleed outside
and get all over those we care about and love.

So what would Jesus have to say
to a slave-driving,
perfectionistic,
haranguing voice of criticism
whose hot breath is on our neck
and leaning over our lives?
I think what Jesus would say is, “Peace.”
“Peace be with you,” he might coo into our ear.

While I doubt that Jesus
would have cared about us Romans and Pharisees
as much as he cared about “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,”

I do believe he cared about us.
If he is the personification of the love of God,
then no matter how many C’s and D’s and F’s we have
on the scorecard of life,
then we are cared for and loved.
I think the theory goes,
that if we ever finally come to realize we ARE loved,
then we will start doing better on the scorecard
when we are able.

But I do not think that Jesus
can take away the presence of that niggling voice of negativity
once it has gotten inside us.
I do not even think WE can exorcise it.
We can, however, moderate it.
We can quiet it
and make it just one of the many voices
we hear every day inside our busy heads.
“Peace” is how we do it.

That is why Jesus kept saying that
to his disciples, especially
when they were anxious and afraid.
“Peace be with you,” he would say.

Truly, when the dominating and the ugly
are loud in our hearts
and taking up too much room in our minds,
we need to stop and breathe in peace,
and to stop and exhale peace,
because it is the only thing I know that truly does the job.

When my own voice saying “peace” is not powerful enough
to quiet the big voices or sometimes the army of voices,
I can recruit Jesus in my imagination
to come along and add some strength.
I can recruit the memory of affirming elders
and I can recruit the wisdom of teachers.

There are a whole bunch of people you and I have known
that want nothing more
than to be the source of peace in our lives.
We need to let them.
We need to activate them.
We need to give them voice in our hearts and minds.

Peace be with you.

Three Pentecost/Proper 8C: The Movement

July 7, 2019 by Cam Miller

Spring break of the last year of seminary,
the bishop of the Diocese of Indianapolis
brought the four senior seminarians home
for each of us interview in the same four parishes.
One was in Evansville down on the Ohio River,
another in Lafayette up on the Wabash River.
The other two were in Indianapolis.

I remember the interview in Evansville.
The rector was evangelical,
rigid in body and mind,

and for whatever reason,
I found him a little bit scary.
I spent the day there learning about the parish
and Evansville, as well as getting to know the rector.

He took me to lunch at a downtown club
on the top story of an office building
overlooking the Ohio River and city.
I took the moment to confess
I wasn’t sure that the two of us
were quite compatible
theologically or liturgically.
He put his arm around my shoulder
and looking down on the city, he said,
“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborer are few; therefore, ask the Lord of the harvest
to send out laborers into his harvest.”

I don’t know what I said to him, if anything.
But I do know that I was thinking,
that we were not seeing the same Jesus
nor looking at the same harvest.

Let’s keep getting clean with Jesus.

The last two weeks
I spent a little time brushing away
dirt and detritus
built up on the floor of a two-thousand-year-old
history between Jesus and us.
I want to continue with that just a bit.

I going to do something I don’t do often,
which is read a few excerpts from someone
who writes on the subject.
In part, so you will know it is not just Cam-nonsense
but also because he writes clearly.

I am going to read from John Dominic Crossan’s book,
Jesus, A Revolutionary Biography.

In it, he is commenting upon
the well-known verse in Luke
in which Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Crossan argues against the English word “poor”
as the translation for the Greek word
that appears in the text.
He prefers the word, “destitute.”
He isn’t alone in this interpretation either.
It may seem like splitting hairs until
we hear Crossan explain it.

It is a little lengthy, but here it is:
“The poor man has to work hard but has always enough to survive, while the beggar has nothing at all. Jesus, in other words, did not declare blessed are the poor, a class that included, for all practical purposes, the entire peasantry; rather, he declared blessed are the destitute – for example, the beggars.

Now, what on earth does that mean, especially if one does not spiritualize it away, as Matthew immediately did, into “poor in spirit” – that is, the spiritually humble or religiously obedient?

Did Jesus really think that bums and beggars were actually blessed by God, as if all the destitute were nice people and all the aristocrats correspondingly evil? Is this some sort of naive or romantic delusion about the charms of destitution?

If, however, we think not just of personal or individual evil but of social, structural, or systemic injustice – that is, of precisely the imperial situation in which Jesus and his fellow peasants found themselves – then the saying becomes literally, terribly, and permanently true.

In any situation of oppression, especially in those oblique, indirect, and systemic ones where injustice wears a mask of normalcy or even of necessity, the only ones who are innocent or blessed are those squeezed out deliberately as human junk from the system’s own evil operations.

A contemporary equivalent: only the homeless are innocent. That is a terrifying aphorism against society because…it focuses not just on personal or individual abuse of power but on such abuse in its systemic or structural possibilities…none of our hands are innocent or our consciences particularly clear.” End of quote.

In other words,
what Crossan is emphasizing
is what we already know to be true,
at least in our gut:
Jesus was a radical agent of change
operating at the street level.
His was a prophetic witness against the evil
frozen within what was considered normal.

But as Crossan notes,
Jesus was not really street-level,
he actually operated at the rural route level.
His mission and ministry was largely rural,
and it wasn’t until he hit the Big City
that he was gobbled up.

That too should give us pause.
We can imagine that Jesus
could easily have gone unnoticed
by many well educated and successful people
in a world that was so much smaller
and less populated than ours.
What then, are we to imagine about now
and the challenge you and I face seeing Jesus?

Here is a little more Crossan about Jesus’ mission:

“What sort of a mission are we dealing with,
who goes on it, and to where?

…The mission we are talking about is not, like Paul’s, a dramatic thrust along major trade routes to urban centers hundreds of miles apart. Yet it concerns the longest journey in the Greco-Roman world, maybe in any world – the step across the threshold of a peasant stranger’s home…

The missionaries were not some specific and closed group sent out on one particular mission at one particular time. They were predominantly healed healers, part of whose continuing healing was precisely their empowerment to heal others.”

What Crossan is describing is a
“network of shared healing”
initiated by Jesus but shared by his colleagues.

It was a covert movement
that pierced multiple layers
of a complicated social caste system,
and called into question
a mountainous hierarchy of relationships
and authority.

The movement that Jesus initiated
finally turned from the countryside and entered the city –
the beloved Jerusalem,
as Isaiah refers to her – and it was abruptly repressed.
But the movement refused to die
when Jesus was murdered.
Think of all the movements in our lifetimes,
ones that have included millions and millions
but that disappeared within decades
if not a few years or even months.

Here is a little portal into history,
written by a Roman philosopher named, Celsus,
who wrote something called “True Doctrine”
which was an intellectual attack
on the growing Jesus movement called Christianity.
This was written around 177 CE
when the emperor Marcus Aurelius
was persecuting Christians,
and it is included in the same Crossan book.

Celsus wrote:
“…I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show, deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind.

Taking its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar: nay, one can even say it spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate, reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its purer form among the ignorant.”

So, for generation after generation
the fledging Christian movement
continued to be a covert operation
from the bottom of society up.
And it is still a movement,
only it comes to us today saddled with an institution
that has grown up around it.

That institution unknowingly
sits upon the movement of healed-healers
like an underground aquifer
feeds lakes, rivers, and wells
that rest upon the surface.

It is that movement of healed-healers,
gathered around an open table,
sharing food across class lines
and straddling color lines
and holding hands across political lines
and subverting all the other social and economic
divisions that feed on bad faith.

It is too easy for us to see the institution
and forget the spiritual movement that feeds it.
In fact, those who have no use for the institution
don’t even know about the spiritual movement flowing underneath us –
and that is why they look at the Church
and think it is empty or without vitality.
But they are wrong.

As Crossan has observed,
we often forget
that we are healed-healers
whose continued healing
depends upon our helping to heal others.
We often slip into a mode of thinking
about the institution and imagine
that it is here for us
whenever we need it –
that it is here to meet our needs.
But the movement
running underneath the institution,
authorizing its very existence,
is a movement
and we need to remember that.
It moves – always.
It moves in and out, and it moves in and it moves out.

The movement underneath us
is an ocean lapping the beach
and pulling us out to sea again,
and anyone who brings a need or a wound
to the church for healing
should also expect to be caught up
in an outward flowing movement of healing.

The same wisdom is found
in 12 Step recovery groups
where the final and 12^thstep
is the one that transforms the healed
into the healer
by taking the new life one has discovered
and bringing it to others who seek i

Healing – spiritual healing –
takes place as the healed become the healers…
as the healed become the healers.

That kind of healing takes place
in a community of healing –
a whole movement of people
bonded together by woundedness
that is in the process of being transformed
into the power to heal.
While Crossan is a student of history and archeology,
his theological eyes of faith
could see and write about this spiritual truth.

There is so much more to say about this Jesus
who has bubbled up from below
and risen to within earshot of even our loftiness.

But that is where we leave it for now.

This Jesus, at least as refracted
through Luke, Crossan, and your silly preacher,
initiated a movement among and comprised
mostly of peasants.
It was a movement of healed-healers –
actually, healers in the process of healing
because we are never fully healed in this life.
Healers who understood that the destitute,
those people even lower down the pecking order than peasants themselves,
were the blessed.
It was their very victimization and marginalization by the ordinariness of oppression that defined their blessedness.
This was a movement of people
who were incredibly fragile economically
and who balanced precariously
over an open hole
with absolutely no social safety net.
This was a movement of people
who nonetheless kept looking downward
and outward
to extend the network of healing to others.
This was a movement – like the motion of waves,
that was ceaseless.

That is our challenge, yours and mine:
To understand that we are first and foremost
a spiritual movement and not an institution;
one that moves from personal need
to becoming healers ourselves.

We are a movement…
always moving outward from a place of healing
that is both inward and at home
but never isolated or stationary.

It moves.
It is a movement.
We are a movement.
We move, always, constantly, moving.
In and out,
change and motion,
moving, moving, moving.

Worship & Sermon for 11 Pentecost,Year A, 2020

WORSHIP VIDEO

TEXT OF SERMON

3 Advent, Year A, 2019: Is this sermon about hope?

23 Pentecost: Eschatology or the Theology of Framing

12 Pentecost C, 2019: Peace be with you

Three Pentecost/Proper 8C: The Movement

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