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9 Pentecost: Forget about worship…worry about where your treasure is

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We should feel alarmed and threatened.

Isaiah is telling us,
with the voice of God
on his lips no less,
that formal, public worship
should be eliminated.

Luke is telling us,
on the voice of Jesus no less,
that we should sell everything we have
and give even the proceeds of that sale
to the poor.

Now, I could perform a little dance
around these two voices
and explain away the radicalism
in favor of a more mainstream view,
but it would just be a dance.

So let’s go a little deeper
and see if there is something for us
in these two prophets
that lived more than five hundred years apart

Isaiah is a poet extraordinaire,
a second generation prophet-poets,
with Amos, Hosea and Micah
being among the first.

Isaiah leans on Amos and Hosea,
and Jeremiah leans on Isaiah,
and on and on until we get to Jesus.

Then Jesus leans on Isaiah and Micha
and on and on
until we get to the prophets and martyrs
of our generations.

We must always remember
that Jesus did not just appear out of nowhere,
and teach what he taught
as if it began with him.

Rather, Jesus swims in the river of wisdom
that flows from the earliest
human encounters with the holy,
all the way to you and me
where that wisdom meets up
with the still small voices we hear
within the silences of our own lives.

Basically, Isaiah had the unenviable task
of speaking truth to power
at a time when everything looked pretty good.

The Northern and Southern Kingdoms
we associate with Israel
were getting along for once,
and they were prosperous
with strong armies
and even some newly invented
military technology
that none of their neighbors possessed.

Uzziah had his own stable of in-house prophets –
seers, dream weavers,
and oracles
that mostly told him
what he wanted to hear.
The Temple had a caste of clergy
who regulated a pretty tight ship,
and served the power of the king.

Their attention was on doing ‘good church’
as seminarians would say
about worship.

But the prophets like Isaiah,
did what poets are supposed to do:
they saw.

Not only did they see,
they described what they saw
in powerful language
that was often threatening
to the king and clergy.

It wasn’t all dark and terrible either.
Some of the prophesies
were magnificently hopeful
and encouraging.

But in today’s reading from Isaiah,
what we have
are words that pierced the armor
of prosperity and power.

Basically what Isaiah is saying,
or what God is saying on the lips of Iaiah
if you wish to believe that claim,
is that what really matters
is not religion
but integrity.

What God wants from us,
Isaiah seems to be saying,
is not worship but integrity.

Now, integrity is measured
by the distance between
what we say we believe and value
and how we actually live day to day.

It is a really scary word
when if we think about it that way.

What God really wants from us,
Isaiah says, is our integrity.

Scholars and theologians of good will
argue about whether
Isaiah is suggesting
that all worship
be thrown out with the bathwater, or not.
The Temple,
whether in Isaiah’s day or ours,
has a vested interest
in keeping the Temple
at the center of the religion
and the prophets
often seemed at tension
with the temple, which
they accused of lacking integrity.

But I think it would be a reach for us
and most church-folks today,
to think about eliminating worship
since worship is often
the only element of spiritual practice
that many people engage in.
But we could make a case,
based upon the prophets,
that instead of calling for a new prayer book
or better music,
we should be calling
for the elimination of worship.

That’s right: eliminate worship
in favor of lives of justice and compassion.

When worship gets in the way,
cut it out Jesus might say,
as with the offending eye.

Or as Isaiah wrote:
“…learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.

Come now,
let us argue it out,
says the Lord…”

But calling for the elimination
of worship
is the same as Jesus’ tough talk
about selling all our possessions
and giving the proceeds to the poor.

Like that is going to happen.

But let’s back up
on this Jesus talk
because there is something
hiding here in plain.

There is no way Jesus
would tell his audience
of highly deprived and impoverished listeners
to sell all they have
and give it to the poor.

They were the poor!

I’ve described the situation before
but it is worth reminding ourselves
when we hear Luke tell a story like this one.
Wealthy Roman citizens
who lived in Italy
and likely didn’t travel far,
engaged in real estate speculation and development
out on the outer margins of their empire.

They would wait until
drought or floods caused real hardship
to peasants farming their little plots,
and then their agents would arrive
offering loans
to help the peasants buy seeds for the next cycle.

Because they were desperate
and had no recourse,
the peasants took the loan
and almost without fail,
would eventually default on it.

Then, all of a sudden,
their land,
which was the one thing
that peasants had to keep them from slavery,
belonged to an absentee landlord.

The peasant then became a tenant farmer
or worse,
was kicked off the land with nothing.

Heck, that is a scenario
that happens in the United States.
In my home state of Indiana
and elsewhere in the breadbasket,
most of the farmland now belongs
to large corporations
who have repeated that same ancient pattern.

The reason I mention this
is because Jesus was talking to the bottom 99.99% —
which in that society
and in that time,
were desperately poor
and without the slightest social safety net.

“Give away your possessions?”
What possessions?

“Give alms?”
With what?

It just doesn’t make sense for Jesus
to say such things to the audience
with whom he was speaking.

BUT…Luke’s audience
would have contained people
who actually had slaves,
and people who worked for people
who had slaves.

Luke did not know Jesus,
but he was speaking to Gentile Romans
in a society removed by time
and geography
from Jesus.

And that is true for all the Gospel editors –
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Luke and the other Gospel editors,
along with Paul,
are speaking to people like us.
That was their mission.
They sought to take
the stories and teachings attributed to Jesus,
and interpret them for the distant,
non-Jewish,
more affluent
people of the empire…us.

But be that as it may,
there is a gem of a sentence
in today’s reading from Luke,
that has Jesus written all over it.
It is the very prophetic sounding phrase
about the contrast between our heart
and our treasure.

That, by the way,
is a hallmark of an authentic
first century Jewish parable:
a spare, single point of contrast
unfettered by all the fluff
of an allegory.

Luke’s words on the lips of Jesus
boil down to a question of integrity:
“…where our treasure is,
there our heart will be also.”

Where our treasure is,
there our heart will be also.

So simple.
So eloquent.
So exquisitely truthful
in such a poetic way.

Our treasure, our heart.

Where we place our treasure
is where we plant our heart.

We know that is true.
We know it is true
even without having to verify it in a laboratory.
We know it is true
before the words are even spoken.
We know it is true
in the marrow of our bones.

We know where
we want our heart to be,
and we know
what and where
our treasure actually is;
and we wince to acknowledge
the distance between them.

So here is how Isaiah and Jesus come together.

Maybe we won’t have to eliminate worship
if we can manage to create
and sustain
worship traditions and practices
that challenge
and nurture
our integrity.

Maybe worship could be a good thing
instead of a vestige of empty religion
if it led us to examine
and see
the distance between
our values
and our practice.

Maybe worship could be a good thing
if, when we gathered
and did it,
the experience nurtured
and strengthened our integrity.

Let’s work on that, okay?

Proper 27A: Mysticism, and a Little Something Else

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TEXTS FOR PREACHING

Wisdom of Solomon
6:12-13

Wisdom is radiant and unfading,
and she is easily discerned by those who love her,
and is found by those who seek her.
She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.
One who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty,
for she will be found sitting at the gate.
To fix one’s thought on her is perfect understanding,
and one who is vigilant on her account will soon be free from care,
because she goes about seeking those worthy of her,
and she graciously appears to them in their paths,
and meets them in every thought.

From Julian of Norwich
14th century mystic and anchorite

Our highest Father, God Almighty, who is ‘Being,’
has always known us and loved us:
because of this knowledge, through his marvelous
and deep charity and with the unanimous consent
of the Blessed Trinity, He wanted the Second Person
to become our Mother, our Brother, our Saviour.

It is thus logical that God, being our Father,
be also our Mother. Our Father desires,
our Mother operates, and our good Lord
the Holy Ghost confirms;
we are thus well advised to love our God
through whom we have our very being.

I then saw with complete certainty that God,
before creating us, loved us, and His love never
lessened and never will. In this love
he accomplished all his works, and
in this love he oriented all things
to our good and in this love our life is eternal

Matthew
25:1-13

“God’s kingdom is like ten young virgins who took oil lamps and went out to greet the bridegroom. Five were silly and five were smart. The silly virgins took lamps, but no extra oil. The smart virgins took jars of oil to feed their lamps. The bridegroom didn’t show up when they expected him, and they all fell asleep.

“In the middle of the night someone yelled out, ‘He’s here! The bride-groom’s here! Go out and greet him!’

“The ten virgins got up and got their lamps ready. The silly virgins said to the smart ones, ‘Our lamps are going out; lend us some of your oil.’

“They answered, ‘There might not be enough to go around; go buy your own.’

“They did, but while they were out buying oil, the bridegroom arrived. When everyone who was there to greet him had gone into the wedding feast, the door was locked.

“Much later, the other virgins, the silly ones, showed up and knocked on the door, saying, ‘Master, we’re here. Let us in.’

“He answered, ‘Do I know you? I don’t think I know you.’

“So stay alert. You have no idea when he might arrive.

SERMON

The readings are about mysticism
but it makes no sense whatsoever to preach about mysticism.

Wisdom, as she is referred to in the Bible,
is not a learned or accumulated knowledge gathered
in school or by practice or the work of our daily lives.
Wisdom is raw knowing;
a slow burning ember that appears
as if from nowhere and ignited by no one,
to open our eyes
or heart
or mind
or imagination,
or whichever of our myriad
eyes we are perceiving through at the moment.

She appears
and we see –
see what we didn’t see before.

Sometimes we do not even see
the very thing that has been staring us in the face
or walking just behind us
or appearing at our feet,
and then suddenly we can see it…
because of Wisdom.

I know you know what I am talking about,
but truthfully, is it ridiculous to talk about it

because Wisdom lives on the other side of the veil
of rationality, and like a poem or joke,
as soon as we start taking about it
Wisdom no longer seems real.

Such is Wisdom, or God, if
you would rather use its big name.
The parable of the wise and foolish women
we just read, is not about
preparing oneself for judgement,
it is about being ready and open
when Wisdom appears.
It is not about hellfire or damnation
for those who are not ready, rather,
we simply miss out – we lose a little vision,
or we get a bit more nearsighted
than we needed to be.

But as I said,
it is ridiculous to talk about such mystical things
because they come and go
and we apprehend them or not,
and that is all there is.

This is one of the definitive breaks
between Western and Eastern religion.

While there is no God per say, in Buddhism,
there is Wisdom that can be learned
or apprehended through practice.

Such Wisdom, in Buddhism,
has a capriciousness about it to be sure,
and learning her ways is never a straight line
from A to B. Yet, there is still a path
well-worn by a long tradition of teachers
and it can be learned.

But in the three Western religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam –
Wisdom cannot be learned or taught.
She is revealed, by God and only God.

If God chooses not to reveal her,
she remains veiled. Period.
In our tradition, it is all God’s action
and we either recognize her when she arrives
or we do not.
Now there is a whole lot of other stuff to be learned
that is not Wisdom –

the ethical and moral traditions
and the worship and ritual practices
and the prayer and meditation methods.
But that is all human stuff,
the brick and mortar of religious institutions
created for human beings
because we need that stuff.

But Wisdom, she is not learned,
she arrives or not,
and we perceive her or not.
It is terribly unfair from our way of thinking.
But that is, as they say,
what it is.

That is also probably why
we don’t preach about it much:
Wisdom is beyond our words
and methods and control.
So let’s talk about something else.

Last week I mentioned “the Manna Principle,”
based upon the Exodus story, and
with the pointed punch line
that in the economy of God
there is always enough to go around:
and everyone gets enough,
and anything that really matters
can’t be collected, amassed, or hoarded.

We know that in our economy,
the economy of money,
that the way we practice distribution
means there is never enough
because we operate from scarcity.
Let’s admit it, we like it that way, and generally,
we do not like the economy of God.

We pay lip service to abundance
and we say all the right things,
but we don’t really like the economy of God
because it means we cannot collect, amass, or hoard.
The economy of God,
were we to actually choose it,
would be most threatening to people like us.

So if we are going to reflect on stewardship,
which is what this is by the way,
then honesty has to be front and center.
Like most things, unless we’re going to honest,
we might as well not talk about it.

So last week I offered
a pithy little definition of stewardship:
caring for and nurturing
that which has been given us to share.
Let me repeat it for effect,
caring for and nurturing
that which has been given us to share.

“Stewardship” is such a sad word any more,
at least as we use it in Church.

Sad, because for all intents and purposes,
it has become synonymous with soliciting money.

But the environmentalists
have given its fuller meaning back to us,
as in the stewardship of the Earth.
In that context, stewardship takes on
urgency
and meaning
and is chocked-full of sobering
and exciting implications.
Stewardship is a really Big Word,
so much more than pledging and dollars in the plate.

Stewardship, as a Big Word,
as the really big word that it is,
actually refers to the incarnation of our spirituality.
Hold that for a moment:
our personal behavior as stewards
is the incarnation
of our personal spirituality.

In other words,
the way that you and I act, as stewards of our lives
and stewards of our resources,
is the best reflection of our actual,
personal spirituality.

Thought of this way,
our spirituality is not reflected so much in
the particulars of our beliefs,
nor in which way we worship or pray.

Instead, the health and wellness
of our personal spirituality –
its depth and breadth –
resides in how we act as stewards.

Our spiritual health, from this point of view,
is located in how well we care for and nurture
that which we have been given to share.

Conversely,
if we are feeling spiritually anemic or ill,
we should look first
at how we are doing as stewards
of that which we have been given
to nurture and share.

If we are feeling down in the dumps
of a spiritual malaise,
that we can’t quite put our finger on,
then improving the stewardship
of that which we have been given to care for and share,
may be the diagnosis.

This understanding of stewardship,
of spirituality even,
offers a totally level playing field.
Suddenly it has nothing to do with how much
we have collected, amassed and hoarded
but how well we care for and share
that which we have been given.

So stewardship is about
what kind of spiritual practice you and I live,
not just about dollars and cents.

But allow me to put some meat on these bones,
to add a note of supreme practicality.

What kind of steward we are,
is NOT completely a matter of choice –
any more than we get to completely choose
what kind of spirituality we practice.

Here is what I mean.
I have three older sisters
and even when we were quite young
I figured out whom to ask for what kind of thing.

  • One of them wouldn’t even share a pencil with me if there was no promise of getting something in return.
  • One of them was exceedingly generous with things she didn’t really want any more anyway.
  • The third was a cautious giver who would usually give me whatever I asked if she thought I truly needed it.

In honor of full disclosure, I was the youngest
and no one wanted my stuff anyway,
and even if they had wanted it,
they could always fool me out of it.
And I am sure they would have something to say about me as a kid too.

But the point is, thinking about me
and my three sisters,
and looking at the amazing differences
in my own children,
it seems to me that some of our proclivities
are hard-wired into us.

In other words, we just come out the shoot
with some personality traits
and they greatly influence what kind of a steward
we are and will be.

We imagine that our values are environmental,
rooted in how we were nurtured,
but it seems to me we begin with some hard-wired
personality traits and whatever those are,
they are a part of the fruit within the garden
we have been called upon to steward.

Some big piece of what we have been given
to care for and share
comes standard issue on our particular model.
Some models have more
and some have less,
and more doesn’t necessarily mean better.

The point is, religion,
ours or someone else’s,
is barking up the wrong tree
when it demands that people be generous,
give happily,
or give away some magic formula like 10%.

How we give,
what we give,
how much we give,
to whom we give,
and when we give
does not line up into a one-size-fits-all formula.

Being called by God to be a good steward
of the gifts and resources
we have been given to care for and share,
is not an accounting formula –
it is a spiritual practice
and we need to treat it as such.

Practice means doing:
trial and error,
experimentation, work and effort,
reflecting and learning,
over and over and over again,
and without the possibility of perfection.

But here is one thing I have observed
and perhaps you have seen it too.
It seems to me that if something belongs to us,
and we value it,
then we take care of it.

We all have different kinds of capabilities
and capacities for taking care of our belongings –
some people keep their things in pristine shape
for years and years and years,
while others exert hard ownership along the way.
Yet most of us seem to find ways to hold onto
and protect that which we treasure.

So, while we have different attitudes
and different strategies
about whether and how
we share our resources with others,
all of us are generally pretty clear about
what belongs to us
and how we will care for it.
If it belongs to us,
and we treasure it,
then we take care of it for the long haul.

That means our first task of becoming
good stewards,
and practicing our spirituality,
is to get clear
and get honest
about what we have been given
and what we treasure.

Stewardship then,
involves an honest and fearless inventory of the actual gifts and resources
you and I have been given,
so that we can name that which we truly treasure.

We say we treasure and value many things
but which of them do we really?
Which of them do we personally, and with sacrifice,
care for and sustain.

Then, the next step in this fearless inventory
of our practice of stewardship, is a little scary.

Once we get honest and clear,
we need to ask how we can share
these precious things we treasure.

How do we share our treasure?
How do we share the very thing we are inclined
to hold onto most tightly?
Now there is a very big,
and maybe scary question.

So, the spiritual nature of stewardship
is to get really honest and clear
about what we truly treasure,
and then risk asking the question:
how can we share it?

Once we have done that,
we can go from theology to faith –
which is to narrow the gap
between what we treasure and what we share.

By the way, that is also how we will figure out
how much money to give to Trinity Church.

It will depend upon whether or not
we see spiritual community,
and this spiritual community,
as one of our treasures.

If it is our treasure, then
it is ours to care for and share –
and that will guide us in our financial giving.

So to sum up,
our spiritual practice is to determine
how to go from theology to faith,
which means narrowing the gap
between the treasures we have been given to share
and what we actually share.
My guess is,
though I couldn’t prove it,
that Wisdom, when she is experienced,
becomes the leaven
that helps us narrow that gap.

 

 

Proper 9, 2017: Reversal Wisdom

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“Come to me,
all you that are weary and
are carrying heavy burdens,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me;
for I am gentle and humble in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

 

Burdens and yokes – each of us have them;
and some of us, like old lumbering oxen,
are no longer even aware of the weight we carry
soldiering on as we do through life.

You know, Jesus was downright smart.
I mean really,
Jesus must have had a sky high emotional IQ –
able to read and understand people in depth.

Not only were his stories and parables penetrating,
rascally,
and insightful,
he also had reversal sayings and parables
that came in the back door
and smacked the listener upside the head.

The Good Samaritan – an oxymoron.
A camel threading the eye of a needle – an absolute impossibility.
Those who love their life will lose it and those who lose their life will gain it – a paradox.
Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth – an absurdity.

He seemed to talk like that all the time,
or at least within the residue of what we have left to us.
I am sure he said plenty of ordinary things too,
like: “Please pass the spuds.”
Surely he put his foot in his mouth more than once, too.

But on the preaching circuit he was pretty phenomenal.
And so it is, with today’s gospel from Matthew.

Imagine what that proverbial image meant to a peasant?

Seriously, a yoke that is easy,
a burden that is light?
A first century Galilean peasant,
burdened by debt and taxes to absentee Roman landlords,
would never have experienced a light burden
or an easy yoke – an oxymoron.
Oxymoron,
reverse logic,
Zen Koan…
a wisdom-teacher is waiting in the bushes of such ancient reversal-sayings,
ready to jump out and rattle the cage of our logic and open us up to new insights –
or slam our mind shut.
That’s what happens.

We can hear such proverbs and exclaim, “No way!”
But that is the beauty of Jesus’ way of teaching: open up the mind
and something new will drop in;
or if we choose to close the gate,
he will leave us alone.
An easy yoke?
A light burden?

I want to share a difficult storyabout burdens and yokes
and reverse-wisdom.

Before I became a priest, as you may know by now,
I worked in an inpatient Mental Health Unit.
It was a marvelously therapeutic environment –
a Camelot with a miraculous healing milieu
balanced precariously upon the politics of healthcare and psychiatry.
It has long since fallen into the realm of institutional psychotropic drug therapy, I am sure.

But for a time a healer was at the helm, a Gestalt Therapist
with a mere Master’s degree in the land of the MD’s and Ph.D.’s.
She was a wizard of wellness.

Her name was Claire
and she would gather her staff each week,
those with large and small academic degrees
along with aids who may have only had a high school degree.

She gathered us to do our own inner work through dream interpretation
and the exploration of our own angels and demons.

One thing she would frequently do is invite us to name the patient on the unit that week
who was most difficult for us to feel empathy toward.

As it turned out, the patient we had the most personal difficulty with
was also often the one who evoked something in us
that was personally threatening.
In other words, and ironically,
the patient that was the most difficult to empathize with
was usually the one that evoked the deepest sense of personal vulnerable within us.

It was never that obvious of course,
and we had to work hard to figure out the source of our vulnerability because,
let’s be honest, who wants to feel vulnerable?

There was one thirty-something woman
that I just could not warm up to and often could hardly even care about.

The second time she was admitted she was on suicide watch
because she had tried to kill herself several times,
and judging by her efforts
she was growing quite serious about it.
We took away her belt,
her shoelaces,
her sheets,
her razor,
we even made sure she didn’t have
a plastic dinner knife.
Anything she might use to harm herself was kept from her,
or was keenly observed while she had it.

The woman was very quiet and introverted
and she bothered me a lot.
She bothered me because
I could never connect with her,
and I never had any sense
that I knew what she was thinking or feeling.

One day on my shift,
as I walked past her room,
I saw her hanging from the ceiling.

She had tied one sleeve of her nylon parka
to the sprinkler pipe on the ceiling
and the other sleeve around her neck.
She was still alive and adrenaline shot through me.
I yelled for help and ran into her room.

My first instinct was to grab the parka
and desperately try to tear it apart,
as if a string of yarn.
I don’t know how long it took me to come to my senses,
it may have been immediately or a minute
before I grabbed her by the legs and held her up as I called for scissors.

People came running,
the coat was cut, I lifted her down
and off she was taken to the emergency room.
She lived.

Instead of being elated or even thinking about having saved a life, I was angry.
My anger lingered and it confused me.

She made me so angry.
Everything about her aroused my anger and in that anger, I felt guilty,
ashamed and…well, angry.

In our group that week with Claire it became obvious why:
She made me feel powerless.
An otherwise large, strong and competent person,
she reduced me to impotence.
My immediate impulse to try to tear a nylon parka
revealed how much I depended upon my physical strength.
The fact I could never connect with her
diminished faith in my intuitive capacity.
My inability to get her to respond to me
and my growing anger about it, revealed how important it was to me
to have other people respond positively to my efforts.

All my normal abilities and the sense of power they provided me
were thwarted in her presence, and were intensified by the experience
around her attempted suicide.
The way Claire invited me into that exploration was like Jesus inviting peasants
to imagine an easy yoke and a light burden.

She asked me to intensify my anger.

Rather than trying to ignore it or moderate it
or numb it
or intellectualize it,
she encouraged me to intensify it: make it bigger, she encouraged.
When I made that anger bigger
I could suddenly see it.
It was powerlessness I feared
and that which drew me into my fear made me angry.

The invitation to intensify the anger
instead of keeping it at a distance
was an unexpected strategy that led to insight.
Likewise, that was Jesus’ strategy.

What is your burden?
What is your yoke?

Put it on and feel it’s heaviness.
Put it on and feel how it captures and constricts you.
Feel it in your shoulders,
let your knees and hips feel its weight.
What are you carrying – intensify its weight if it helps.
In the encounter and relationship with that which burdens us
our spiritual journey ripens.

Let me repeat that.

In the encounter and relationship
with that which burdens us
our spiritual journey ripens.

But please, do not hear more than is being said.

This is not about courting pain and suffering,
as in some crazy, masochistic medieval spirituality.
It is not about those who are going through
intense sorrow and grief,
or the depths of despair and depression
making themselves feel worse.

This is about those of us who are cozy;
those of us who are within the normal walk we walk;
those of us doing just fine
with a few bumps here and there.
To those with a truly heavy burden
and a cruel yoke,
Jesus stretched out his arms
and invited them to use him
as a comfort station.

To those who lived in the mainstream,
supported by the current of economic comfort
and buoyed by social status
while leaving the multitude in their wake,
Jesus had in mind
an invitation to try on a yoke and burden.

But do not fear,
the invitation is not even for the biggest or heaviest of burdens,
nor the most restrictive or crushing of yokes.
You see, even the little ones
have something to show us.

Even the ordinary and everyday kind of burdens we feel,
or yokes we carry,
can deliver an insight to us:
that job that seems routine,
our home that feels like a money-pit;
relationships that are grinding or pinching,
those simmering conflicts or disagreements,
and the demands or neediness of others;
debt, grief, chronic physical pain, or emotional angst;
decisions we do not want to make;
losses we do not want to incur;
obligations we dread fulfilling;
inordinate needs or desires or fears that plague us…

What is your burden?
What is your yoke?

Whatever it is,
it is likely something you do not want to do,
and likely it evokes a range of emotions
you do not really want to feel.

But you see, when we do not want to feel it
we tend to do whatever we can to manage it
with the least amount of contact.
We distance it,
deny it,
detach from it,
suppress it.
That is our usual go-to response
when it comes to discomfort and pain.

But Claire’s wisdom,
and that of spiritual director’s
and other guides throughout generations,
is to enter into it
and intensify it
in the hopes of getting clear with it.

We are invited to venture into our burdens
and shoulder our yokes
and feel their weight,
so we can name what it is that weighs us down
and makes us leaden.
That is how we lighten our load,
and liberate ourselves from our yokes.

It is a Jesus paradox –
the kind of reversal wisdom
Jesus was famous for.

 

5 Easter: No Spiritual Secrets

by

TEXTS for Preaching

Acts 7:55-60

Filled with the Holy Spirit, Stephen gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” But they covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him. Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he died.

Excerpt from a speech by The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

If a man happens to be 36 years old, as I happen to be, and some great truth stands before the door of his life, some great opportunity to stand up for that which is right and that which is just, and he refuses to stand up because he wants to live a little longer…or he is afraid he will lose his job…he may go on and live until he’s 80, and the cessation of breathing in his life is merely the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

We die when we refuse to stand up for that which is right. A person dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true. So we are going to stand up right here…letting the world know we are determined to be free.

Gospel of John 14:1-14

Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”

Sermon

Honestly, I forgot we used this excerpt
from Martin Luther King back in January,

but I thought of it for today as a companion piece
to that reading from Acts about the stoning of Stephen.

This story from Acts has always bothered me.
I once served a “St. Stephen’s” congregation,
and so had to contend with it on a regular basis.

The problem, you see, is that Stephen
was called to be a deacon not a preacher.
The church made a big deal out of him
being the first martyr – after Jesus of course –
but he wasn’t called to preach to people,
which is what got him killed.
Stephen’s mission was to make sure
the many widows and orphans
who were supported by his community
received equal benefits.
His was a service role,
but instead he took it upon himself to preach,
and it was his preaching that got him stoned to death.

Now it seems laughable today,
in the church in the United States of America,
that someone could get killed simply for preaching –

because, honestly,
few people take preachers very seriously anymore.
But then we remember
that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a preacher,
and millions of people took him very seriously –
but then he was an organizer as well as preacher.

If a man or woman happens to be 36 years old,
or 23 or 89
or 16 or 48,
and some great truth stands before the door
of his or her life,
some great opportunity to stand up
for that which is right and that which is just,
and he or she refuses to stand up
in order to live a little longer –
or hold onto a reputation,
or maintain a quiet life no one will notice,
or keep the friendship of people who might be offended,
or make a dollar that might be lost,
or suffer humiliating scorn or harassment from peers,
or any number of small but powerful reasons
that could cause our hands to cramp
and our feet to stand still…

Then that person may go on living until eighty
and be wonderfully well known
and greatly respected
and be comfortable and affluent,
but the cessation of breathing
at the end of his or her life,
will be merely the belated announcement
of an earlier death of the spirit.

Oh, Rev. King, you knew us so well
and described us so eloquently.

Here it a naked truth:
There is no secret spiritual wisdom.

Truly, there is no secret spiritual wisdom
hidden for us to find
or waiting to be delivered to us by Yoda,
or suddenly to arrive in a blinding vision.

What there is to know, we know.
The profound and enduring spiritual wisdom
some people spend a lifetime searching for
is already known to us.

BUT, and there is always a catch, isn’t there?

But for whatever reason,
we have a hard time hearing and learning
and remembering the wisdom
that is available to us as a guide to shape our lives.

We have amazing wisdom at our fingertips.

It is ancient wisdom
that millions and millions of others before us
have learned
and forgotten
and re-learned
and passed on to us.

It is written in our own lives,
and with poetry
and in Scripture.
It is sung among the music of the ages
and written or told
over and over and over again
in chapels, caves,
ashrams, sweat lodges,
cathedrals,
and temples all over the world.

In every dusty waterless place
and every frozen treeless tundra
where human beings eek out a living,
the not-so-secret wisdom is shared.

In today’s excerpt from Rev. King,
and whispering between the lines
of Jesus’ farewell prayer,
is a powerful thread of the filament
weaving a web of wisdom
we work so hard to forget or deny.

It is simply this:
What we are desperate to hold onto
we will lose with all the more cruelty;
and that which we cherish but refuse to clutch,
will flourish even without us.

As frequently warned throughout the gospels,
Jesus said,
“Those who want to save their life will lose it,
and those who lose their life for the kingdom,
will save it.”
Or, “what does it profit us
if we gain the whole world
yet forfeit our lives?”

It is the same thing we hear in Rev. King’s refrain:
“the cessation of breathing at the end of his or her life,
will be merely the belated announcement
of an earlier death of the spirit.”

You see, this is something we know
deep in our heart of hearts
where the hard truths we have lived
are stored, even when forgotten.

And we do forget it,
and bury it,
and deny it;
we who are so fretful about loss;
we, who are so prone to grabbing whatever we can get;
we, who are so well trained to clutch.

The understandable fear of loss,
if it guides our lives, will kill us
and as is so often true,
Jesus stands in contrast to our fear.

This excerpt from John’s gospel today
is from the so-called “Farewell Discourse.”
Oddly, as weepy and sorrowful as Jesus gets
at many points on his journey to the cross,
this long, fond farewell
is neither maudlin nor anxious.

He is on the dock
and without hesitation
he chooses to step off the life he has known
onto the boat of his future
without knowing where it will land.
He does not try to straddle
with a foot on both
until he has to jump one way or another.
He steps forward and leaves the other behind.

He is not naive.
He is not Pollyanna.
He is not a pie-in-the-sky preacher
spouting wishful thinking.
Rather, he is rock hard;
a life-toughened muscular prophet of God’s love.

He knows what he is asking of his friends
and he makes no excuses for it.
No more than Rev. King does.
No more than Harriet Tubman did.
No more than any fierce lover of God facing that choice.
They all know what we also know in our heart of hearts:
Clutch and we lose,
release what we have known
in favor of the risk to affirm
where the love of God beckons us,
and we live.

It is not rocket science;
it is not science at all, it is wisdom –
spiritual wisdom.

Here is one small example
of how and where you and I face this a choice.

It is an obvious if humble example
of how Christians
in a post-modern or secular culture,
clutch what was
or release it and move forward to what will be –
even if we do not yet know what it will be.

I grew up in a city
and at a time
when the Klu Klux Klan held a night parade
replete with torches and a burning cross.
They had a way and a truth and a life,
and they even had Jesus
(according to them).

Like many if not most of you,
I grew up in a culture in which homosexuals
and transsexuals
were openly harassed, humiliated, and beat up.
No one seemed to have a problem with it either.
In fact, some forms of their sexual intimacy
were actually illegal.
In those days, in the culture at large,
we had a way and truth and a life,
and we had Jesus,
(or so we claimed).

I grew up in a church, an Episcopal one,
in which women could cook and wash dishes
but they could not be deacons, priests, or bishops.
You better believe that we had
a way and a truth and a life
and we had Jesus as our own.

All those truths,
so fiercely held onto by so many Christians.
Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life
as long as he is our way, and our truth, and our life.

Truth can be highly over-rated like that –
something with bloody barbs
when we expected sustenance.

Who would ever have thought,
back in those days,
that Jesus would have,
or could have,
changed so doggone much?
When we had the way and the truth and the life,
we had no idea
it was a changing way,
and a slippery truth,
and a temporary life.

I mean, think about it.

We had Thomas Aquinas,
and St. Anselm,
and Richard Hooker, Karl Barth, and Paul Tillich.
We had a whole bunch of ecclesiastical councils too,
that declared creeds and doctrines
and the shape and limits of truth.
Almost all of those pronouncements
were once and for all,
and for all time!
God does not change
and truth does not change
and the facts don’t lie,
and we had them all.

But then some quarrelsome people
started asking niggling questions
and those questions began to unravel the whole thing.

That dogma and doctrine, for example,
and even that foundational creed,
was written and voted on well before it was decided,
once and for all,
that actually the sun does NOT orbit the earth
but instead, the earth orbits the sun.

That is like discovering as a grown man or woman
that you have lived all your previous years
standing upside down, and now,
suddenly, everything is right side up!
Even so, you refuse to allow it to change what you see.

That kind of reversal and re-arranging of truth
kept happening over the centuries.
Somewhere toward the second half of the 20th century
we began to get the uneasy feeling
that perhaps we had been looking at the Bible
upside down too.
We began to wonder,
and to actually recognize and see,
that all of our previous interpretations of Scripture
were through a rather narrow and scripted lens.
From the perspective of the late 20th century
we began to understand that our view
of Judaism and Jesus
had been distorted by our
white, male, European Colonialist assumptions.

What happens, we began to wonder,
if we read Isaiah and Luke
and John and Paul
from the perspective of a Salvadoran peasant,
or a South African Zulu living under Apartheid?
Will we hear the same things in what we read?
Actually, no.

What happens, we began to ask,
if we listened to the teachings of Jesus
from a Womanist, or 21st century American Feminist perspective?
Will we hear the same things in what we read?
Actually, no.

What does it do to our traditional assumptions
regarding what Jesus did and taught,
if we view them from the perspective
of an Egyptian Christian
resisting an authoritarian regime,
instead of an affluent middle class American
living undisturbed by the police
and isolated from poverty?
Well, actually, it changes everything.

What happens to our uniform understanding
of Christian theology
and Biblical scholarship
rooted in the 19th and 20th centuries,
when it is undercut by an almost monthly
archeological discovery
calling into question
earlier methods of scholarship and ideas?

What happens when we are told
that the beloved King James Version of the Bible
is actually a pretty bad translation?

It is in those moments
we learn to parse wisdom from mere perspective,
or we retreat into resistance.

It is in climbing out of our own special perspective
and standing in someone else’s perspective for a bit,
that the wisdom woven through Scripture and tradition
begins to make itself known.

Do we hold onto our truth for dear life,
as if it is the only thing that will keep us from drowning
in the brutality of an on-coming tsunami?
Or do we let it go;
hoping against hope
that surrender to the torrent
will reveal a new, deeper, truer wisdom?

That is where we stand in 2017
as we listen again to Jesus’ farewell,
and Martin Luther King’s poignant challenge,
and read what happened to Stephen
when he lost track of his mission.

I have no doubt that you and I face
the challenge of clutch or release
in many arenas of our own lives,
and whenever we face it,
our true life, if not our breath, hangs in the balance.

But as Christians,
and as Trinity Episcopal Church in Geneva, NY,
we face this challenge to our faith as individuals
and as a congregation.

Clutch or release:
hold onto what we have known
or step forward in faith not yet knowing
where the boat is going.

We have the ancient wisdom we need
in order to unclench our fists,
and open our arms
and step into the boat.

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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