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1 Lent B 2021: Don’t wait for the angels

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I’m starting all over again.
This is a second stab at a sermon,
the first one just didn’t seem right.
It may have been okay
if we weren’t in our eleventh month
of a pandemic
but context is everything. Right?

We don’t need the Holy Spirit to drive us
out into the wilderness
because we have been wandering it for awhile.
We just want “the other side.”

We’re like those ancient escaped slaves
brought by Moses through the wilderness
to the far banks of the Jordan River.
They could look across that small
meandering boundary but weren’t allowed to cross.
They had to sit down
and listen to another sermon
when right across the muddy way
was a land of milk and honey.

Slowly but surely,
chaotically and maddeningly,
we are getting vaccines.
Hope for “the other side” is named
as “July” or “the end of the summer”
or ”by next fall.”
But we are here, on this side,
with the threat and memories
of sickness, variants, and death.
For many of us loved ones are far away,
even if we can see them through plasma screens.
Good friends must keep a distance
and smiles go unseen.
Favorite cafes, bars, and restaurants
have closed.
We are close and yet so very far.

For some of us
the wilderness is knowing that our pain
is so much less than most people’s suffering.

Millions and millions and millions
have lost work,
live tenuously in the shadow of back rent
and food lines, or worse.
Around the world the pandemic
has only deepened the isolation
of those suffering extreme deprivation.

We see it,
know about it,
do not live it and
are far from doing anything about it.
In that scenario,
we are in the land of milk and honey
looking back across the Jordan
at those still in the wilderness.

Yet, somehow,
we feel as though we are wandering
in the wilderness still.
And we are.
Such is the strangeness of this time.

Obviously the boilerplate for Lent
comes from the gospel story
about Jesus in the wilderness for forty days.
But he got angels waiting on him. No fair!

There is yet another thing to notice about that story,
at least in Mark,
and it is a parfait of love and suffering.

First he has a private religious experience.
A voice in his head (remember, in Mark
only Jesus hears the voice),
tells him he is beloved.

That peak spiritual and emotional embrace
is followed by some kind of harsh wind
that transports him to a wild and desolate place.
It wasn’t a polite invitation to Lent,
it was coercion.

In the midst of a wildness,
home to beasts and the darkness of his shadows,
he gets some TLC from angelic counter-forces.

Then, after surviving that,
his spiritual mentor and a prophet like him,
is arrested.
So from the spiritual high
of an intense experience of both light and dark,
he now has to decide whether the risks are worth it.
Apparently he does, and goes off preaching.

Just as an aside, Mark is an economic story-teller.
He describes all of that action in seven sentences.
Our tradition lumps Mark in with Matthew and Luke
and so we lose Mark’s point of view.
Jesus was totally human,
had a spiritual awakening as an adult,
knew he was beloved by God,
and it empowered him to do what needed to be done.

And just an FYI,
Mark never proclaims Jesus as the only son of God.
The earliest Gospel doesn’t make that case,
nor offer any notion of a supernatural birth
or extraordinary beginning.
To Mark, Jesus was a human being like us,
who has an intense awakening
and allows it to change him.
Much like Noah, Abraham, and Moses.

When I am in the wilderness
and need a guide and a hand to hold,
I prefer that prophet and messiah
to the one Paul and John proclaim.
But that is just me.

Now, back to our wilderness wandering.

In normal times
the wisdom I would think to follow
is community.
Community is a spiritual practice, you know?
It is the practice of inter-dependence.

In order to practice community
we have to run interference with
the demons of individualism
and self-sufficiency
that whisper we don’t need others —
especially those others not like us.

You know those beasts.
They insist that we resist vulnerability,
that no one is to be trusted,
that we have to look out for Number One.
Those beasts.
They make community difficult, and impossible
if they have taken over.

The practice of community
involves throwing our lot in with others
as if – AS IF –
our well-being and survival
is dependent upon them.
AS IF we are all in this together.
You know, as if we are dependent
upon those who harvest the crops
and slaughter the meat
and drive the produce
and stock the shelves
and sell it to us.
You know, AS IF
we were dependent upon those folks.

That practice of community
also involves an intentional,
and continuous choice
to live connected to people we may not even like.
People we don’t agree with.
People we don’t want to be connected to.
All of that is required because it is real.
Interdependence is the actual nature of the universe
and it does not consider whether the elements in play
like each other or agree with one another.

So you see, the practice of community
is a big, complicated, and even
comprehensive practice
that includes our economic choices
and our political choices
and our social choices,
along with all our more personal choices.

That is why there are so many beasts and demons
at work to keep us from practicing it.
There is a lot of room in there
for those shadows to fly around and create havoc.

But you know, a community
making it forty years in the wilderness together,
like those escaped slaves did,
seems like a more realistic strategy
than waiting forty days in the wilderness
for the angels to arrive.

We are all in this together
whether we want to be or not.
We will do better practicing community
than waiting for the angels.

Plus, it is usually in the practice of community
that we encounter our own belovedness.
Often just after
we have run into our own beasts and demons.

So community is practiced a bit differently
during a pandemic
but the alternative is an awful isolation
that makes social distancing
seem like child’s play.

Welcome to Lent,
and a communal practice
of wilderness wandering.

1 Epiphany 2020: Noticing Our Practice

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Jordan River where it empties into the Dead Sea

I have been preaching for forty years, I can’t believe it.
I realize that to some of you,
that’s nothing –
heck, Sabin’s got married
the year I was born!

But I was ordained a deacon in June, 1980
and then priested nine months later.
That is irrelevant to everything this morning
except that the First Sunday of Epiphany
may be one of those Sundays
I have never missed preaching.
One year I was in El Salvador
but even there I preached through a translator.

While the cast of characters
never changes in this story of Jesus’ baptism,
it remains endlessly interpretive
just like the whole of the bible
and our theological tradition.

There are stories that come up
in the lectionary cycle
that I just grit my teeth and get through,
but this one is so layered and interesting
that it feels like a good friend
I haven’t seen for a year.

But our understanding of stories changed,
as does our theology.
We do not believe today
what Christians in other times and other places believed.

Christianity is obviously an old religion –
not as old as Judaism, Buddhism or Hinduism
but older than Islam, Shinto or Mormonism.
Each century, and indeed, each culture
makes numerous contributions to a religion,
so that Christianity
is like a mountain
sculpted by time and events
that changes its shape  and texture and size.

We imagine, standing as we do
at a fixed moment in time,
that Christianity
has always been like it is today,
but that is as impossible
as Christianity 100 years from now
looking like it does today.

Just think about how much Christianity
must have changed
from what it was before Constantine
and when it became the religion of the Roman empire.
It went from being a decentralized,
competitive
and subversive movement,
that was a loosely associated
string of house churches and regional centers,
to becoming an institution –
with a bureaucracy and an emperor
who had the power to enforce conformity.
The 4thcentury was big
in the evolution of Christianity,
but so was the 20thcentury.

For one thing,
the 20thcentury began to apply
historical and literary analysis
to our interpretation of the Bible.

Think about this.
Prior to the 20thcentury
the Bible was read exclusively through the filter of doctrine.
All the things that the Church
already believed about Jesus
were assumed to be true
beforereading it.
For example, never mind that the Gospels are clear
that Jesus had brothers and sisters,
the doctrine said his mother, Mary, was a perpetual virgin,
and so that took precedence
over whatever the text actually said.

But in the 20thcentury,
archeology, anthropology,
and history
suddenly blossomed as sciences,
and it was inevitable
that the Bible came to be read
through their filters as well as –
sometimes even replacing the filter of doctrine.

To its credit,
Protestant theology often led the way:
great 20thcentury Christian scholars and theologians
began to ask the Bible
historical and archeological questions
instead of isolating single passages
that helped prove a point of doctrine
while ignoring or rationalizing all the rest.
So, in the first half of the 20thcentury
Christianity began to open its doors
and hear brand new things
from the very old Bible.
And the things they noticed in the Bible
did not always match up with previous doctrine.
For example,
it soon became clear
that John the Baptist
and Baptism
were treated very differently
in the earliest Gospel, Mark,
and the last Gospel, John.

With forty or fifty years between them,
and with totally different audiences,
it began to be noticed that Mark treated John the Baptist
and Baptism
much differently than the Gospel of John did –
and that Luke and Matthew
were also different
but created a kind of mid-way evolution
between Mark and John.

The power of doctrine dissipated
and suddenly we could see what was obvious all along,
if only we would place each Gospel
next to one another and read them.

In Mark, the story of Jesus’ baptism
clearly states that people came to John the Baptist
confessing their sins
and being baptized
as some kind of ritual cleansing in the Jordan River.
In Mark, John the Baptist
does not recognized Jesus,
nor does Mark make a clear connection
between “the one” who John the Baptist predicts,
and Jesus as being “that one.”

Rather, Mark describes a private religious experience.
Jesus comes up out of the water,
and HE sees the heavens torn apart.
He sees a dove descending.
He, Jesus, hears the voice of confirmation,
“You are my beloved.”

But we see in Matthew today,
as in Luke,
that this story evolved
over the fifteen or twenty years between them,
and Jesus’ private spiritual moment,
becomes a huge public miracle.
In Matthew, John the Baptist declares
that Jesus is “the one,”
and the CROWD sees the dove,
and the CROWD hears the voice.
There is no room left for doubt
that this was a miraculous event
that proved Jesus was “the one.”

Historians have discovered, however,
that the followers of John the Baptist
had their own religious movement
and it was focused on John, not Jesus.
The Baptist movement outlasted John
and in fact, still exists.
They are called, Mandaeans.
Until we invaded Iraq, they lived mostly
in that part of the world.

The John the Baptist movement
was probably bigger and stronger
than Jesus’ movement
when they both existed side-by-side
in real time, as we say today.

Biblical historians began to recognize
that this whole idea
that John the Baptist foresaw and proclaimed
Jesus as the Messiah,
was likely a bit of early Christian propaganda.

You see, in this baptism story
we have preserved a very gnarly issue
for those early Christians:
Jesus was baptized by John
and that could be seen as Jesus
being subordinate to John.
Surely John’s followers
used that inconvenient truth
to say that John was superior to Jesus.

Then, from the standpoint of doctrine,
there was another problem rising up from this story
like an arm sticking up from a grave.

As time went by,
those that followed the Jesus movement
began to claim that Jesus was perfect.
It was not enough for them that he was merely human.
In fact, to them, in order for him to be the Christ,
he had to be without sin.

Now that is a very big claim,
and it contradicts the very human Jesus
that appears in Mark –
the one that goes down to the Jordan River
confessing his sins.
That is what the crowds were doing remember,
coming down to the river
to confess their sins and be cleansed.

But the idea that Jesus submitted himself
to a baptism
“for the forgiveness of sins”
became such a scandal in early Christianity,
that the last gospel written
does not even record Jesus’ baptism.
We will hear next week from the Gospel of John,
and it simply does not say Jesus was baptized.
The Gospel of John also directly quotes John the Baptist
declaring Jesus is superior to him, and
leaving no doubt that Jesus is the Messiah.

So the Gospel of John makes clear
that Jesus was not baptized
for the forgiveness of sins or anything else,
and that John the Baptist
was merely the opening act for the main superstar, Jesus.

To summarize then,
historical, literary, and archeological analysis
of the Bible led us to realize
that Mark is not the same story
as Matthew,
which is not the same story as Luke,
which is not the same story as John.

The differences cannot be dismissed
as just a few stray details, because
these are four different manifestos
with four different views of Jesus.
The four gospels range from a grown man
who has a religious experience at his baptism,
to an eternal God, begotten not made.

Whether we choose to believe
all the doctrines about Jesus or not,
the 20thcentury opened the Gospels
and let the cat out of the bag.

Conservative Christianity
simply refused to accept the analysis –
putting hands over ears and eyes
and very loudly shouting down
anything that did not agree with its doctrine.
It is no coincidence that Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism
are products of the 20thcentury too.
They are a reaction against
historical, literary, archeological, and anthropological
analysis of the Bible.
So much of what we see and hear today
in terms of the conflicts within Christianity
are as a result of the 20thcentury’s
theological contributions to Biblical scholarship.

This division is splitting Christianity
across cultural and continental boundaries,
with the religion dividing-while-shrinking in the Global North,
and growing massively in the Global South.

Well, all of that is interesting,
but has little to do with our baptismal practice,
here in our little wine bar church
in this small slice of New York.

It is a new year, so let’s notice
what we practice together,
even if we always practice it imperfectly.

There is the Jesus we proclaim,
though I recognize there may be significant differences
and a many splendored variety of lenses
through which we see Jesus.
But our pal Jesus, the one we proclaim
and whose spiritual practice we raise up,
is not a Marvel comic book character.
Rather, he is one who failed and floundered
and likely engaged in what we call sin,
and who was vulnerable to what hurts us –
because he was human, just as we are human.
I think some version of that 20thcentury-bleeding-into-the-21stcentury Jesus,
is the Jesus we practice.

Then, we proclaim a Jesus who welcomed
all people to the table,
a Jesus who practiced a radical hospitality
that we are supposed to emulate.
That is a claim that Christianity
has not always been known for.

Another part of our practice
has to do with seeking God,
and the God we seek.
Rather than the cosmic critical parent
that judges our brokenness,
I think we practice the search for the God
who coos to us in the quietness of our hearts:
“You are my beloved,
with you I am well pleased.

Then there is the sharing of subversive wisdom,
which definitely is my practice.
Yet I have noticed more than a few of you
seem to also value that which undermines imperial orthodoxy
wherever it claims to be the keeper of exclusive truth.

The practice of using contemporary poetry and prose
is also interesting, because it suggests
that God whispers to us through moderns texts
just as easily as ancient ones.

We practice changing worship every season,
learning new prayers,
and new songs
or new words to old tunes.
Without a doubt we have different feelings
about this practice,
but it has become a Trinity Place practice.

We practice a spirit of authenticity in worship,
in which it is okay to cry,
say amen,
or laugh out loud.
It is a spirit that allows sitting or standing,
verbal participation
or simple presence –
a come as you are
and be as you need to be
kind of spirit.
It is all-at-once casual and ritualistic,
tradition-bound and innovative,
constant and changing.

We practice the sharing of our lives
and the unfolding our stories with one another
around the table.
It is a circle we try to make safe
with the honest acknowledgment of our common brokenness
and a willingness to give one another glimpses of ourselves.

We practice a hospitality
that understands eating together
is an act of spiritual intimacy.

We practice the awkward and painful art
of balancing precariously –
like the fiddler on the roof –
between today and tomorrow.
By which I mean, we practice surrender
because we have so much of our future
dictated by the courts.
It is a surrender required because we also
live as a spectacle in the court of public opinion.
The act of surrender
in times when control is far beyond
the edge of our reach,
is a core spiritual practice
in every tradition.
We practice it, not out of desire,
but out of necessity.

We practice all of that and more,
which is to say, these are ways
we practice our baptism with one another.
We practice it in many other ways
where we live our lives beyond this spiritual community,
but I dare say, how we practice it here,
helps, enables, and nurtures us
out there.

So, it is important to stop and notice what we do
now and again, and celebrate it
as well as noting any distance
between what we say we cherish
and what we actually practice.

The occasion of Jesus’ baptism
is a great moment in which to do that –
which is why we just did.

 

Proper 21C: Evil is not the opposite of good

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THE BAPTISMAL COVENANT

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, that was last week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resisting evil requires us to court feedback.

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

Again, think of the natural environment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Proper 20C 2016: Whose Glasses Are You Wearing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trinity Place

Our vision…to be 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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