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3 Pentecost 2022: Little prophets

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Don’t you just love euphemisms?
Check out that first line of Luke’s Gospel:
”When the days drew near
for him to be received up…”

By “received up” he must have meant
tortured,
stripped naked,
and nailed to a cross.
”Received up” does sound better.

So this little series of dark sayings
is positioned at the hinge of Luke’s gospel
in which Jesus turns away from the rural areas
where he is well known and popular,
toward Jerusalem
where messiahs like him
were a dime a dozen
and ended up as goo on the bottom of a Roman sandal.

Both Matthew and Luke have the sayings
we heard today,
while Mark and John do not.
The theory is
that Matthew and Luke
had a common source of Jesus sayings and stories
that Mark, being the earliest gospel, didn’t have.
Who knows,
but these sayings sure are hard to contend with.

9:59 To another (Jesus) said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”

9:60 But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

9:61 Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.”

9:62 Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

So this strikes me as warrior talk.
That is, the Jesus
who knew there was a target
on his back
and was dodging Roman patrols.
Jesus the warrior
who found himself up against it
and needed to know
that whoever was with him
had his back.
”Forget about those
who have already been killed
and forget about your mom and dad,
because you probably won’t see them again anyway.”

That said, I am not certain
there ever was a Jesus warrior,
but the kind of rhetoric
Luke has coming out of Jesus’ mouth
is not an every day kind of banter.

Let me just say, that I realize I talk about Jesus a lot
from week to week.
I don’t know Jesus any more than you do.
I know you know that
but I just need to say it once in awhile.

I probably read more about Jesus
and Gospel commentary than most of you do,
but talking about what Jesus said
and thought
and did
is an educated guessing game,
and anyone who pretends otherwise
is a delusional lout.
Not to put too fine a point on it.

That said, I’m going to talk about Jesus.

Okay, here is my take on today’s gospel.
The Jewish primal narrative
almost from day one,
was torn apart by dueling traditions:
the purists
and the prophets.
Jesus was a prophet.

Purists — represented by the priestly class —
saw the world
as a set of god-given rules.
Keep those rules and all is well.
Break the rules and all is lost.
When the rules were broken
then there were more rules
for repairing the fracture.
Every offense had a prescription
and every prescription
had a secondary solution.
It was a tightly constructed world,
built like interlocking Lego’s with a hierarchy of rules.

The prophetic tradition
saw the world differently.
The prophetic vision was of a human landscape
that operates within a standard of equality,
where goods and services should be
distributed evenly,
and the good guys lead
while the bad guys get punished
and then reformed.

The prophetic
can be infected with a purity virus also,
but often the very rigidity of the purity faction
acts as its own corrective.

Jesus the prophet, was a peasant.
He was impoverished by circumstance not by choice.
That makes a huge difference.

We are told by the Gospel of Mark that
Jesus lived in Capernaum.
He had a house there,
and he likely had some kind of business
in his house,
at least before he became a preacher.
Jesus also had some friends with more means
than he had, friends
who funded his public ministry.

Lazarus, Martha and Mary,
and perhaps others
must have provided capital
to supplement whatever collections
were taken at sermons.
We don’t often think about
how Jesus was funded
but it is worth thinking about.

As you may remember,
I spent a little over a decade
as a regular visitor to El Salvador.
On one of my visits
I went to a Church with over 150,000 members.

The pastor and his son, who was a co-pastor,
held ten services each weekend,
each service with about 10,000 people in attendance.
All along the streets
on every side of the compound
are vendors selling food,
beverages, and clothing
from carts and booths.
The market is not there during the week
as it is a shaded residential neighborhood.
But on the weekend
it becomes a crammed and jammed
mishmash of commercial enterprise.

The pastors showed us the church’s spreadsheet
for the month of June,
and each week
the collection was $70-100,000 dollars.
That is roughly five million dollars a year
collected from extremely poor people.
Attending one of their services,
I witnessed people putting quarters in the baskets.

Five million dollars…
a few quarters and dollars at a time!
When Jesus drew a crowd
his disciples also probably passed the hat.
I wish we could get a quarter every time
someone visits our website,
Facebook page, or YouTube channel!

Jesus is so often depicted
as a sweet, lamb-holding
shepherd
who wandered through this world
healing, and making nice
to everyone he met.
A kind of haphazard ministry
that ended up with him mistakenly crucified.
Not likely.

He was an organizer.
He was strategic.
He was a reformer with an agenda
and probably had some lofty goals.
He was also notorious
for breaking purity rules.

It is hard to imagine Jesus dining
with a Roman collaborator one day –
a tax collector who made his money
demanding imperial taxes,
and extorting extra for himself –
and the next day
rebuking a would-be follower
for wanting to say good bye to his parents.
I am betting that was Luke’s editorial bias —
but I could be wrong.

But herein lies the problem for us.
Jesus becomes a purity figure
even though he was a prophet.

Jesus is a huge canvass
upon which we project
our own desires
beliefs
and hopes.
Whether it is Luke’s projection
of a militant-healer
or my projection
of a reform-minded organizer,
or Paul’s projection
of an eternal Christ-figure
or someone else’s standard bearer
for moral purity,
we do not get to know
the original Jesus.

When it comes to Jesus
there is no purity.
Within Christianity
the purity parties have captured Jesus
and imprisoned him under glass,
so that he is now
the litmus test of purity
and divine acceptance.

Meanwhile, Jesus’ prophetic vision
languishes in domesticated Christian churches
that have become the pillars of class and culture,
or purveyors of American Nationalism.

Too often when America looks at Jesus
in the 21st Century, it sees itself
and its own aspirations.
It does not see the prophet,
and instead sees the silhouette
of it own standard for purity.

It does not hear a vision of equitable distribution,
it hears a justification for individuality
and a prosecutor for private property
and gun ownership.
If I were to tell you that Jesus
was in fact, an evangelist of basketball
and a passionate partisan of the Boston Celtics,
you would rightly dismiss it as bunk.
And yet, the Jesus we hear
in the public square these days
is as ridiculous
and a lot more dangerous.

Whatever Jesus we want to espouse,
needs to be reconciled
with the soil within in which Jesus is rooted.
Standing alongside Jesus
is an ancient vision
born on Mt. Sinai,
handed down from Moses and Joshua,
to Elijah and Elisha,
to Ruth and Naomi,
to Elizabeth and Mary,
to Peter and Paul…
and all the way down
to Dietrich Bonhoeffer
and from Bonhoeffer to Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is a vision
to be debated, interpreted,
argued and shaped over time,
in every time.
It is not a vision to be prescribed
or force-fitted
or purified.

So where does that leave us?

Obviously, if you asked someone else
you would get a different response
than the one I have.
My take is this:
While I wouldn’t go so far as to say
the concerns of the purity gang
are irrelevant and retrograde…
I will say
that we are not
a purity institution.
Not if we hold Jesus
as the central teacher
of our movement.

Rather, we are meant to be
a prophetic movement.
But that is a pretty big umbrella
and doesn’t narrow it down too much.

One of the questions
we face as a spiritual community
is what kind of spiritual community are we?
I am guessing,
based on my experience with you,
that we do not have a lot of difficulty
choosing between
the purity faction
and the prophetic tradition.
But it is the next step we need to take.

And we will be taking that step this summer
for those of you who are part of the Geneva community.
The vestry is gearing up
for a mission development retreat
and inviting the whole congregation
to take part.
Date to be announced.

What kind of prophetic community are we?

We have been using three separate tag lines
the past seven years, none of which
were voiced by the whole community.

One is, “open, inclusive, and challenging.”
Another has been to say,
”We are a spiritual community in the tradition
of the Episcopal Church.”
And finally, on our windows, we declare
that Trinity Place is “an open space for growth, healing, wellness, and the arts.”

Clearly we are a hybrid of some kind,
a new creature on the evolutionary tree
of the Jesus movement.
But what kind?
What are our core values?
What do we name
as the most important things we do
or aim to do?
What would diminish us
beyond recognition
if we could not do it?

These are questions
every community, and certainly
every spiritual community,
must ask itself
in every new generation.
We are that new generation
in the life of Trinity Church Geneva.

Unlike Luke, I believe we are allowed
to turn our faces back
and remember
even as we move forward with the plough —
digging up and planting the future.

I also believe we can bury our dead
and grieve them too,
while still being faithful
to our newness.

And I do believe we can go home
and say good bye to whoever
or whatever it is
we are leaving behind,
while still being fully engaged
as a new kind of community
in the Jesus movement.

But if we hover too long
or too much
on the past
or on our grief,
Jesus will challenge us to stop it
and keep moving forward.

If you ask me,
and I realize you didn’t,
I would say that every single one of us
was commissioned as a little prophet
when we were baptized.
Our task now, as a community,
is to nurture and challenge each other
in that ministry.
As individuals, our task
is to engage with a community
and nurture and challenge
the community forward,
because being prophetic is a movement.

While we were baptized
to become little prophets,
Christian spiritual practice
is not something individuals do
it is what a community does.
The individuals within the community
are its gifts
and its charisms
that shape what and how
the community practices.
That is why we are a movement
rather than something that was.

 

3 Advent: Do you have two shirts?

by

Washington National Cathedral

Video version follows the text
Sermon Texts: Isaiah 12:2-6; Theologies for Korah, a poem by Dante Michael; Luke 3:7-18

Alright, how many of you still have two shirts?
That’s what John the Baptist wants to know.
But as for me, as the poet wrote,
“I have learned to keep my head
while speaking the truth.”
That is a pun.

I dare say, there are not many other poems
about John the Baptist,
nor that many sermons.
It is kind of like preaching about John Brown —
another prophet who came to prepare us
but isn’t talked about in polite society.

We like our prophets
in the rear view mirror
after we have enough distance
to pluck the insect wing from their beards
and can no longer smell the musk.

We clean them up and sanitize them
so we can make national heroes of them.
Another word for it is domestication.
If they were alive
we could never get away
with domesticating them
because they just wouldn’t sit still for it.

On the other hand, nobody in their right mind
wants to be a prophet.
Nobody who has other options
ever sits around and thinks to him or herself,
”I think I’ll grow up to be a prophet.”

Whereas once upon a time
there were schools of prophets
and even professional prophets,
it long ago fell out of favor as a profession.

One generation of amazing prophets included
Amos, Micah, Hosea, and Isaiah
and somehow, miraculously really,
we still have their poetry —
lo, these twenty-seven hundred years later.

Decades and decades ago,
at the beginning of my ministry,
I attended a once vaunted institution
now closed, called The College of Preachers.
It was in the nation’s capital
on the grounds of the National Cathedral.
20th century greats like Reinhold Niebuhr
taught seminars there,
and after initially being an invitation-only program,
it came to be more open —
even to punks like me.

I anxiously drove to Washington, DC
from Indianapolis, Indiana
my “real” sermon text in hand
which we were instructed to bring.
Like everyone else, of course,
I brought one I thought was really, really good.
The first full day we delivered our sermons
to a group of colleagues all there for the same thing.

As I recall, I was one of the youngest of the bunch,
with longish hair and a bushy beard,
without a doubt, the least refined.
The feedback was nearly unanimous:
too harsh,
too radical,
too angry.
You can’t get away with talking like that
from the pulpit.

I was downhearted, of course,
but tried to stay open and learn
because that is what I was there for.

Somewhere toward the end of the week,
the faculty gathered us
to watch a video of the retired Presiding Bishop,

John Hines.
I had heard of him but that’s about all,
never read or heard him speak.
We watched as he ascended the tall pulpit
of the National Cathedral,
two canes helping him up the steps.
In the red and white of bishop’s robes,
he also sported a long beard —
at least in my mind’s eye.
I can’t find any photos of him with a beard.

Anyway, he was older in this video,
and clearly had to hold the edges of the pulpit
to remain standing.
But his voice boomed,
and filled every nook and cranny
of that vaulted cave.
As the camera panned the congregation
it was filled with fur coats
and Georgetown black suits
sitting there under the hot breath

of that lion who preach a wildly prophetic sermon.
We were all blown away
at the power of that man’s words
and his very demeanor – resonating as it did
out of a shrunken body that was crumbling.
All around the room,
all of us commented on the sermon
in glowing tones.

Then one of the faculty members
very quietly remarked,
”Isn’t it funny how Cam said nearly the same things,
but he was perceived as an angry young man.”

It is a hard reality to learn
that youth, gender,
race, and class
are robed in countless presumptions
that we cannot get rid of
nor deny.

Neither John the Baptist nor Jesus,
both brown men of color
adorned in the aura of poverty,
would be able to speak to us
in our world and churches,
still segregated as they are by class and race.

We have about as much chance
of changing that reality
as we do making a silk purse
from a pig’s ear.
But you know what?
With God, all things are possible.
(Jesus said that, I didn’t make it up).

There are more ways than poetry
and violent rebellion
to be prophetic.
Whenever we can offer a witness
that could cause other people to stop and wonder —
to stop and ask themselves how or why we did that —
and have their pondering lead
like ant tracks back to God,
we are being prophetic.

Someone remarked to me this week,
about how remarkable it is,
the robust quantity of goods and money
this small congregation
is able to collect and give away.

Indeed, during the pandemic shut down,
we were recognized in the diocese
as one of the few congregations
that were able to keep our outreach going.
In fact, it was then that we really began to accelerate.

This is not meant as a boast of any kind,
just a moment to stop and recognize
that one way we can be prophetic
in this community, is to have an outsized heart.
Like John Hines,
many of us are no longer
in our best physical condition,
and that narrows some of our options.
But because of that very fact,
how and what we can do
is able to boom and resonate
our conviction
that with God, all things are possible.

I also believe
that by choosing to leave our building
when we did
and how we did,
and our dogged persistence
in the face of struggle,
that we can offer hundreds
if not thousands
of congregations around the nation
a prophetic message of hope.

(The congregation voted in 2016 to allow the historic building to become a boutique inn
while it moved into a former wine bar in downtown Geneva).

Being prophetic doesn’t require us
to eat insects
or break into armories
in pursuit of abolition.
We can also be prophetic
by living out a cherished value
in ways that other people begin to wonder
why we did that?

In the darkest moments of his generation,
Isaiah offered the poetry of hope and restoration.
Then, when prosperity made his contemporaries
forget who they were,
his poetry turned radical and challenging.

What he didn’t do
was sit around and fret
that no one would notice
and so be rendered speechless.

It is Advent
and after today
we turn the corner toward Christmas.
Next week the stories and images
we associate with Christmas
begin to leak through the purple curtain.
What we need to know
is that Christmas itself —
the stories we associate with
hot cocoa and silent night, are
at their core, prophetic stories.

More about that next week.

8 Pentecost B, 2021: No Place for a Story

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Texts for Preaching
Jeremiah 23:1-6; Mark 6:30-34, 53-56; “The Place for No Story” by Robinson Jeffers

I do not usually talk about poets
in a sermon,
and to be honest,
though I am a student of poems
I am not a student of poets.
Mostly I could care less about poets.

But today I want to start
with a brief nod to Robinson Jeffers
because he was a Jeremiah.
I have talked about Jeremiah a lot,
and as Jeff Hodde might tease me,
I like to talk about Jeremiah and Isaiah
more than Jesus.

The readings for the past couple of weeks
and in the next few as well,
put an emphasis on prophets
and prophetic mission.

Jeffers is an example of a modern prophet
and worth noting.
He was the son of a Presbyterian minister
and biblical scholar, poor boy,
and he became a student of medicine,
anthropology, literature, classic languages,
and forestry.
Oh, and he graduated
with an undergraduate degree at 18.
That is not to say you have to be brilliant
to be a prophet.
That is just one of his gifts — if indeed it is a gift.

Anyway, to make a long story short,
Jeffers turned to writing poetry and plays full time
and developed what he called
the philosophy of “inhumanism.”

He thought that human beings
had been jilted by God
because of our obsession with ourselves
that had led to so many crimes against nature.
Think Jeremiah:
“‘How terrible it will be for the leaders of Judah,
who are scattering and destroying my people,’
says the Lord.”

“They are responsible for the people, so the Lord, the God of Israel, says to them:
‘You have scattered my people and forced them away and not taken care of them.
So I will punish you for the evil things you have done.’”

Well, Jeffers’ fame and poetry
reached a zenith before WWII
but in the extreme patriotism of wartime
and the Red Scare following it,
he was criticized as unpatriotic
and his strong denunciation of war
and its extreme destruction of nature
made him a target.

Like Jeremiah who was thrown down a well
and left to die,
Jeffers was shunned for his prophetic rage
against American imperialism
and his philosophical shift
from human
to not-human.

He is an example of a modern prophet.
The title of that poem,
“The Place for No Story”
is to say,
look at this spectacular natural scene —
it is a place that human presence
will only dilute
if not destroy.
Stay out, get away, leave it alone.
This place
is for its own sake
not for human consumption.

Well, whether or not you can go along
with his non-anthropomorphic philosophy,
and his God that has not one iota of humanity,
or his bitter critique of American imperialism,
he is an example of the voice
crying in the wilderness.

And by wilderness,
the bible does not mean nature’s emptiness
so much as the landscape of human power
and the carnage human power
leaves everywhere it goes.
Any voice that speaks in its midst,
against the interests of human power,
will be an endangered voice.
We see that playing out on the streets today
and just about anywhere
the clash of powers
exercises their implements of coercion.

So the prophetic tradition
gives us the image of walking upstrea
against the traditional exercise of human power —
whether that is in the halls of government,
banking, commerce, military,
or the church.
Jesus stands
and teaches
in that tradition.

The reading we have today from the lectionary
cuts out a big piece of a larger story
that demonstrates Jesus’ prophetic nature.
You can see that it skips from verse 34 to 53.

What we see in these missing verses
is that a prophet does not bath
in shallow companionship
nor seek fame and fortune.

In Mark, Jesus is always trying to get away
from the crowds
and escape to “lonely” places.
In other words,
where people are not.
Think Robinson Jeffers
and “The Place for No Story.”
Jesus wants to get to a place
and do something that will have no story
associated with it.
BUT, when the needs of people arrive
he always responds — no matter how tired
or how fierce his own longings.
The verses we read today
are followed by a feeding of 5000 story.
But the end of that story
is what always hits me.

“Immediately” it says,
as soon as the people were done eating,
Jesus sends his disciples
to the other side of the lake.”
What does he do then?
He stays there to say good bye
to each one of the 5000.
He stays there
to send them home one by one
before dark,
and makes sure
the very last person is addressed.

Only then,
after everyone has gone,
does he go get his needs met.
What it says literally, is:
“After sending them away, (his disciples
already gone), he went into the hills to pray.”

That scene is followed
by Jesus walking on water in the dark,
to catch up with the disciples
still rowing to the other side.

But then the cycle starts all over again:
A lonely place gets crowded
with people flocking to have their needs met
by Jesus,
Jesus addressing them the best he can,
Jesus teaching them, which
is what he had come to do,
and then finding another
lonely place.

Now…
do not get me wrong.
I am not saying we all have to be Jesus.
That is an awful notion
that traditional Christianity
has foisted upon us.
It is not our task to be Jesus.
We are not supposed to be little Jesuses.
Our task is to learn from him
and be ourselves.

Our task is to learn from him,
and the other prophets,
and become better version of ourselves.

We will not all be
Robinson Jeffers
or Mary Oliver
or Wendell Berry —
prophets able to voice the sacred
as it calls to us from out of the natural world.

We previously
or currently
have stood inside banks,
city councils,
military corridors,
engineering companies,
behind the bar or the register,
inside classrooms,
at desks
inside or outside the offices of power,
on assembly lines
of looking down at the machinery
from the air conditioned window of management.

Wherever we have stood
or currently stand,
the sacred calls out to us
and pleads
to be voiced.

It isn’t a plea so much as a word —
a word with our name on it.
It is left up to us to voice it or not.
But left unvoiced,
the sacred warns us
we will have contributed to
the banishment
or the exile…
or the destruction
or the end
or whatever it is
the sacred has tried to warn us about.

The voice that calls us by name,
from out of the past
or in this moment,
wants our voice to speak for it
and our lives to live for it
and to help make us a better version of ourselves.

That is what prophetic means,
and that is what,
these days,
the prophet does.

1 Lent: Prophets help us tell the true story of our lives

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Link to Lectionary Readings: http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=24

WHO is telling the story, and
WHY they are telling the story,
and WHAT the story is,
matters.

You have a story,
I have a story,
and together, at Trinity,
we have a story.

Do we tell our own stories?
Who is telling our stories?
Why are they telling our story?

I am going to make an assumption
that everyone here, who grew up going to church,
was told the story of Jesus
in fairly similar ways.

Orthodox Christianity –
whether Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, or Evangelical –
has a Jesus story prototype
that we have been given.
Most of the time,
it is NOT the same story
the Gospel editors were telling.

The reasons that Orthodoxy
and the Gospels tell different stories about Jesus
is too big for one sermon,
but I am going to show you two examples –
the so-called temptation of Jesus
and Adam and Eve story –
in which the church
has told a different story than the Bible.

If you were here last week,
you heard a preview: Jesus is Moses.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is Moses.

Matthew was a Jew
writing for a community of Jews
and Jewish Christians.
His Jewishness oozes out of his gospel.

Matthew wants us to see Jesus
as the sum total of everything heroic about Israel:
A prophet-leader like Moses,
genetically connected to King David and
the throne of Israel,
descended from Abraham,
and more powerfully miraculous than Elijah.
Get that: Abraham,
Elijah,
Moses,
David.
That is the Hebrew Testament Hall of Fame.
Matthew voted Jesus into that Hall of Fame.

I would guess that your experience
of preachers preaching on the 1st Sunday of Lent
is one that depicts Jesus
being tempted in the wilderness
as an age-old struggle between good and evil.
Frankly, that is not Matthew’s point at all.
Let me show you what I mean
and then you can judge for yourself.

A simple comparison
between the Exodus story and Matthew’s story
about Jesus in the wilderness,
reveals that it was intended to be the same story.

Moses, 1000 years before Jesus,
was taken up to the high mountain
in his story
and shown land as far as the eye could see –
and so was Jesus in his story.
Moses was with God for 40 days and 40 nights
in his story –
and so was Jesus in his story.

During the 40 days in his story,
Moses did not eat or drink –
and either did Jesus in his story.

In his story, Moses said,
“We do not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from
the mouth of God.”
In his story, Jesus said the same thing.

Moses said, “Do not put the Lord God to the test”
in his story – and by golly,
Jesus says the same thing in his story.
In his story, Moses said, “You shall serve the Lord God alone” –
and Jesus says the same thing.

Obviously these parallels are not accidental.

The point here,
the one Matthew is making,
is that God has raised up someone like Moses.
That is what this story of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness
is all about for Matthew.

It has a different punch line in Mark and Luke,
and we’ll get to those next year,
and the year after,
when those versions of the story come around.

But the Christian preaching tradition
has generally wanted to turn this story
into something supernatural about Jesus verses the Devil,
as if it was an ESPEN Fight Night narrative.
Yet the way Matthew tells it,
this story is about how God has raised up
a great prophet like Moses.

The problem is,
when we move down the highway of history and culture away from ancient Israel,
we just don’t get the importance of a prophet.

We get the importance of engineers.
We can fathom how amazing astronauts are.
We appreciate Presidential power.
There is awe that goes along
with the Nobel Peace Prize.
We are simply stunned by surgeons,
and especially the incredible array of technology
they have working for them these days.

But prophets live somewhere with camels and sand
for those of us who live in concrete and asphalt.
They are not even real.
So we don’t get Matthew’s point at all.
Even if we did, we wouldn’t care too much
about God raising up a new Moses
because we don’t really care about the old Moses.

We also have this competitive cultural thing going on.
We want our heroes and sports teams
to be the winners,
and the best.

We want other, lesser figures
compared to our heroes
and not the other way around.
In religion,
at least before the 21st century,
there is an either/or game going on.

Our heroes and mystics
are the only ones to be followed,
because otherwise,
how would we know who owns the truth?

So we inherited this story about
Jesus-as-the-new-Moses
and turned into an allegory about good verses evil
and how Jesus was more powerful than the devil.

Then, centuries after that,
it became the allegory that created the season of Lent.
Lent was intended to provide a period of
sustained self-reflection and self-regulation
in anticipation of celebrating Easter.
It began as a one or two-day preparatory period
but soon blossomed into a 40 day and 40 night
tunnel of darkness
with a blow out party on either end.
Lent took on very dark and demeaning tones
and for centuries was a way of browbeating
ourselves for being human –
as if we could be something else.

In other words,
Jesus-in-the-wilderness was used as the gateway to Lent,
and so it became a story about temptation
and overcoming sin,
rather than the story that Matthew was telling:
that God has raised up a new Moses.

The same thing happened to Adam and Eve.

We took that wonderful Jewish Creation myth
and turned it into a morality play
that somehow got twisted into the idea
that sex is something bad for us,
and proof that we were born sinful.
But Jewish Midrash,
which is the body of historic Jewish commentary,
treated the Adam & Eve stories much differently
than Christians did.
What Jewish storytellers tended to see and hear
in that Genesis narrative,
was a story about the hierarchy of human need.

Their take on it went something like this:
Once our essential physical needs are met,
and we feel safe and secure,
and we have love and affirmation,
then what we want is power.
There is nothing that makes us feel
more powerless than, “NO”.

Adam and Eve leave the garden in search of an answer
to a question God won’t even entertain.
They go in search of a knowledge that God won’t give.
God’s one little “No” in an entire ocean of “Yes”
was enough to drive them out of paradise.

It is just a story, the rabbis might say,
but it is probably a story each one of us
has lived out in our lives too.

Well, there you have it, two stories –
Adam & Eve
and Jesus in the wilderness –
that we were pretty doggone sure
we knew what they were about.

All our lives we have been told that
Jesus in the Wilderness is about
the war between good and evil.
And all our lives we have been told that
the story of Adam and Eve
is about forbidden fruit, the fall, or sex.
But low and behold, it turns out that neither story,
as told by the earliest storytellers,
was about those things at all.
So what does any of this have to do with you and me?

Just this: I bet that your story is like those two stories –
not at all about what other people told you it was about.

Our stories, yours and mine – our personal stories –
are not what people told us they were about.

We have all grown up being told
what our own story is about,
and some of us then come to discover
that what we were told
is not our true story at all.

Many of us, for example,
were raised believing that life is all about
meeting the right girl or boy,
falling in love,
getting married,
having children,
and living happily ever after.
But some people discover
that they are in love with someone of the same sex
and for most of history,
and in most places still today,
they can’t get married
or have children;
nor many of the things we are told
that go along with living happily ever after.

What I want to know is,
are they supposed to then be stuck
living out a story given to them by other people?
No, and no for any of the other prescribed stories
about gender, sexuality, race, class, or personality type.

Moses led slaves through the Exodus
into freedom;
and Jesus endured the cross
for Resurrection.
We are not stuck.
We are never stuck.
God is the author of a liberation story
not a prison story.

I would bet that every one of us here
has had the experience of getting placed
in the wrong story,
and then the struggle to recover
as we wiggle our way out of it.

The same thing happens to societies
and whole nations,
which can get placed into the wrong stories too.

In the United States of America
we are stuck in the wrong story.

We have been given the idea
that our story is all about
the personal pursuit of happiness.
That is a story of death and of self-destruction
for everybody but the winners.

We have been sold the story
that Consumerism is the answer to poverty
and even world peace.
That story ends with the rape of the Earth
and pervasive misery for all.

We have heard the story all our lives
that America is the greatest country in the world;
that we are the freest people in the world;
that we are the richest, smartest, greatest,
bestest, most wonderful nation in the world.

In short, we have been told
the story of American Exceptionalism.
The logic of that story is that if it is not true
then we are nothing at all
because it is an all or nothing story.
But American Exceptionalism is children’s story.

It is a ruse, a subterfuge, a trick
to keep our eye off the injustice and cruelty
that not only surrounds us
but that we have helped to inflict upon the world.

How bad could we be if we are the best?

To wiggle out of that story
does not then deny all that is good and wonderful
about us either –
we do not have to live in an either/or story.
We are not stuck with that story as it was given to us.

Moses refused to let the Golden Calf stand!

Jesus refused to speak before the jack-boot of Pilate!
We are not stuck.
We are never stuck.
God is the author of a liberation story.

It is difficult to discern the meaning of our stories
with the lies and manipulations
and psychological violence
heaped upon us
by those who tell us they know better.

But that is exactly why we need prophets.
Prophets help us discern the meaning
of our own stories.

So when Matthew
wants us to know that Jesus was a prophet
in the mold of Moses,
we are hovering around the central star
of our universe.
It is a very big deal that Jesus was a prophet.

Those who tell stories about us,
and place us into stories that are not our story,
often have a spectacular array
of weapons of mass deception
given by spellbinding storytellers.

When we think about the power of false stories –
whether our personal story,
our community story,
our national story,
or in the case of Adam and Eve, even our human story –
what prophets do
is lead us out of false meanings
and into true stories.

Prophets are the people God gives to us,
often at just the right time and place,
to lead us into the truth of our own stories.

Prophets are a big deal,
and that is why we need to perk up
and be amazed
when Matthew tells us that Jesus is a new Moses.

The title “Messiah” that we have translated as Christ
is just another way to say, Prophet.
Messiah or Christ
is the dream of a once and forever Prophet.

I think that is crucial information
if we are going to be practicing, 21st century Christians,
instead of 19th century Christians.
Here then is my invitation to us for Lent:
Open the book on your life and begin to read it again.

Take another look at the meaning of your life,
however old or young you are.
What is the meaning of your personal story,
and our corporate stories?
Who told us the meaning of these stories?
Who had a vested interest
in our reading our story that way?
Is what we were told indeed the meaning of our story?

Prophets abound in history
and in the present,
and they can help us discern our stories.
Find them, use them,
allow them to help with the discernment
of the true story of your life,
and of our life-together.

Trinity Place

 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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