Homily: The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost [June 24, 2018]

 

            I grew up in Southern California and went to seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a valley boy, I often felt at a bit cowed in the presence of patrician New Englanders, but I also had a bit of an attitude about it—they didn’t take it kindly when I called Cambridge “the Berkeley of the east”. I did, though, have one real advantage when it came to studying the Bible. New Englanders, like northern Europeans, live in a four-season climate.  This explains the counterfactual lines we sing in our Christmas hymns, like “The snow lay on the ground/The stars shone bright.” There was no snow on the ground in Bethlehem in December. At Christmas, they were probably all out skateboarding. When it comes to understanding biblical weather, Easterners are hopelessly confused. Californians, however, know better. The Holy Land, like the Golden State, is a two-season climate. True, we do not have a round of spring, summer, fall, winter seasons. Instead, like Palestine, we have two: dry season and wet season. It’s not that we have no seasons. It’s that we have two that we can recognize and interlopers can’t.

            Being from a two-season climate is a great help in reading the Bible, especially when it comes to understanding scripture’s profound ambivalence about water. In climates like ours, water is either scarce or superabundant; there is either too little or too much. Every once in a while we get the just the right amount of it, but on many occasions we find ourselves facing either into drought or flood. Hence the Bible’s seemingly two-faced attitude toward water. It is, at the same time, precious and dangerous. It is at once the source of and threat to life.

            The Bible’s hydraulic doublethink helps us understand the symbolic undertone to today’s gospel (Mark 4:35-41). If you think back to the book of Genesis and its creation and flood stories, you’ll see that biblical water often stands for chaos. In the earlier creation account, God makes the world by bringing order out of chaos, especially by separating “the [upper] waters from the [lower] waters” (Genesis 1:6). In the later Noah story (Genesis 6-9) God punishes human wickedness by “bringing a flood of waters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life” (Genesis 6:17). Over the long haul of its history, when Israel thinks about chaos, the element they use to represent it is water, especially by the way we experience water in a storm.

            Jesus and his companions were Jews, and so they lived and thought within the Bible’s cultural and symbolic framework. It is no accident, then, that in today’s gospel story, Mark uses a windstorm on the water to represent the internal and social chaos which we all experience and innately fear. A windstorm arises, the waves threaten to swamp the boat. While his disciples panic, Jesus is asleep in the stern. They wake him up, he calms the storm, and the story ends with general astonishment that “even the wind and the sea” obey him.

            It’s not only ancient Israelites and first century Palestinian Jews who find meaning in windstorms and floods. You and I also seem to be hardwired to see weather standing for something more than itself. Robert Frost talked about “outer” and “inner” weather. We humans seem reflexively to see climatic conditions as emblematic of states of the soul. Just think of the songs: “Blue Skies”, “Stormy Weather”, and so on. We cannot seem to help talking about our inner lives without using meteorological comparisons. Wallace Stevens often referred to his own internal struggles as “major weather”.

            It is easy to imagine the inner and outer major weather Jesus and his followers knew, not only in the boat but in their daily lives. Remember that first century Palestinian Jews lived under Roman rule and, because of Rome’s need both to tax them and take all their food to feed their army, the Jews were at once oppressed, impoverished, and starving. But the Bible’s stories are not only about them. They are also about us. The windstorm on the lake stands for more than the inner and outer weather of the disciples’ lives. That windstorm represents our own chaos, too.

            On Tuesday night, when she began to read a breaking Associated Press story about the immigrant family detention crisis, Rachel Maddow broke down in tears. Here is how that story she couldn’t get through reading begins:

The Trump administration has set up at least three “tender age” shelters to detain babies and other young children who have been forcibly separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, The Associated Press has learned. Doctors and lawyers who have visited the shelters in South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley said the facilities were fine, clean and safe, but the children — who have no idea where their parents are — were hysterical, crying and acting out. Many of them are under age 5, and some are so young they have not yet learned to talk. [https://apnews.com/dc0c9a5134d14862ba7c7ad9a811160e]

            It is a sign of Rachel Maddow’s fundamental humanity that she had an impossible time reading this story live on the air. If there is any emblem of the social, political, and moral chaos in which we live and move right now, it has to be this ongoing story of the Administration’s separation of asylum-seeking parents from their children at the border. That we have gotten to a point in this nation where our leaders not only take children away from their parents but callously quote the Bible as they do so, means we have lost any moral and ethical moorings we may have once possessed.

As I have lived with this story during this awful week of cruel and inhumane news, I have felt exactly like one of Jesus’s disciples in a storm-tossed boat. We seem, now, to live in a world that makes absolutely no sense. All of the values we used to expect from our leaders (justice, compassion, and at the very least telling the truth) have departed. We are being swamped by waves of chaotic indifference and cruelty. Nothing in our shared experience has prepared us for living in such a constant state of moral and social turmoil. When the disciples angrily confront Jesus and say, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” I know what they are talking about. Wake up, God! How can this be happening?

The traditional way to read this gospel story depends on its tag line: “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” We preachers normally take this story as some kind of miraculous endorsement of Jesus and his divinity. To me this week, though, it’s what Jesus says after he calms the storm that really matters.  “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” This is not only a story about Jesus as a first century wonder worker. This is a story about Jesus empowering his companions, especially us.

“Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” I was sorry that Rachel Maddow felt it necessary the next day to apologize for losing it live on the air. But I was enormously pleased that, the next night, she was back at it, ready to jump into the fray. The point of today’s gospel is not only that Jesus can calm the chaotic storms of life. The point of today’s gospel is that God has empowered us to do that, too. What makes us think we can opt out of these struggles and rely solely on divine guidance to save us? Jesus knew what you and I need to learn: the disciples had it within them to calm the storm themselves. They did not trust their own power, and so the storm threatened to defeat them. Faced with the chaos and cruelty of the current moment, you and I have license neither to opt out nor to despair. We have only one choice, and that is to work together to organize and resist the depredations brought on by those who would engulf us in constant, traumatic, unfeeling chaos and despair.

I was cheered this week when I read on Facebook that a Bay Area friend of mine is devoting his free time between now and November to working in Tulare to help defeat a particularly onerous member of Congress. I was saddened to read on the Secretary of State’s website that only 35.6% of California voters turned out for the June 5 primary. Elections, now, are the things that matter. The rallies and the pussy hats and the Twitter posts are great, but if we are going to calm the chaotic storm we face together, you and I are really going to have to get to serious work. As the late William Sloane Coffin, Jr. once said to me, “Anyone can preach. Blessed are those who can organize.”

If you remember the last page of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (back to New England again), you’ll recall that as the whaling ship Pequod sinks beneath the wave, the last image we see is of the American flag being nailed to the submerging spar. At least one of Melville’s meanings suggests that solipsistic tyrants like Captain Ahab endanger not only themselves but our whole collective enterprise. Our ship of state is sinking fast, and we cannot let our current Fifth Avenue Ahab bring us all down. The Pequod was not a democracy, but (at least for the moment) America still is. We can change our course if we organize and act together for the common good. “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” The best cure for chaotic inner weather is working together to calm our outer weather. Jesus knew that authentic power is shared and we hold it together. The situation is serious but not hopeless. To quote our current despot against himself, “We alone can fix it.” Amen.

Homily: The Third Sunday after Pentecost [June 10, 2018] Trinity, Santa Barbara

            On primary election day, last Tuesday, June 5, Kathy and I served as poll workers in Canoga Park. This is the fourth election we have worked since we moved back to L.A. two years ago. We don’t have exalted positions. Kathy’s title is “Clerk No. 1”. Mine is “Clerk No. 2”. My friend and former teaching colleague, Larry Dilg (“Supervisor”) has been working elections a couple of years longer than we have, and he recruited us to be part of an ongoing precinct team. Larry is a smart and hospitable guy, and he has built a small staff of people who can both do the work effectively and treat the voters with respect.

This past Tuesday, Los Angeles County inadvertently dropped 118,000 voters from the rolls. As you can imagine, we had to serve a number of frustrated people and convince them to cast provisional ballots, which we were able to do. Nobody in our precinct lost their temper, and everybody voted. Although the days of a precinct worker are long (they run from about 6 a.m. to around 10 p.m.), the work is rewarding because the voters take it so seriously. I think I’ll keep doing it until I’m too feeble to lift all the equipment.

            In Los Angeles County several precincts usually share one location. At Canoga Park Presbyterian Church, our precinct (the “orange” table) shared the parish hall with another precinct, (the “green” table). The green table precinct was led by an elderly man in a US Navy cap who seemed very unhappy to be there or, in fact, anywhere. His affect was such that he could not address the many voters with problems without seeming to scold them. About once an hour a voter would come over to our table and ask how they could file a complaint against the other supervisor.

            The women who worked at this other precinct tried their best to control their leader and put out some of the interpersonal fires he started, but everybody over there ran out of patience when the polls closed at 8 p.m. Several people were still in the process of voting, but as both precincts began the process of closing up, the leader across the hall really began to lose it. There are very specific instructions about how to set up and tear down—largely having to do with ballot security-- but this guy had his own way of doing things. When his colleagues began to question some of his orders, he erupted.

            “I don’t care what the official procedures are!  I am the leader, and your job is not to question me but to do what I say!” Very like Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.

            A composed and dignified young woman quietly responded that to her mind everybody’s job was to follow the county’s procedures and that no one person was above them. At this, rather than respond with a rationale for his authoritarianism, the older man unleashed a string of misogynist epithets, managing to call this young woman a couple of offensive names. My friend Larry went over and tried to calm things down, but everyone (especially the people still voting) was rattled by the experience. As Kathy said on our way out, “I think that guy’s sell-by date has passed.”

            My experience of the man I now call the “misogynist martinet” comes to mind as I reflect on the gospel [Mark 3: 20-35] for this morning. Today’s passage is from the early chapters of Mark’s gospel, the part in which Jesus’s public ministry seems to alarm everyone in town, especially his own family, who try to restrain him from healing and teaching. But the main attack comes from the scribes, religious professionals whose official authority system is threatened by a popular free-lancer like Jesus. Rather than give a reasoned argument explaining their critique of Jesus, the scribes immediately resort (as did our misogynist martinet precinct supervisor) to name-calling. “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts our demons,” they say. Jesus is clearly more popular and effective than the religious professionals. The only way they can think of to attack his credibility is to call him names.

            It is hard, when hearing a story like today’s gospel, not to think immediately of certain leaders in our national public life who use social media to make ad hominem and ad feminam attacks against their adversaries. (No names, please!) Whatever your associations with name-calling, we are all familiar the practice of labeling people rather than engaging them in their full humanity. Attaching a label (often, but not always, a gender, race, ethnic, or sexual identity epithet) is a way of reducing a person to a thin abstraction. It’s easier for me to hate or dismiss you if I can think of you as something rather than someone. And it’s easier still for me to deflect your criticism of me if I can call you the devil in the bargain.

            As in many Jesus stories, the great thing about this gospel interchange lies in the way Jesus turns the tables on his attackers. As Jesus asks,

“How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come.”

            Jesus knew that part of the problem with name callers is that they don’t think very clearly. If demons are of the devil, and Jesus is of the devil, then why would the devil cast himself out? Once you rob the invective of its power, the scribes’ argument makes no sense. And that is why Jesus then goes on to make his remark about what we in the church have come to call the “unforgivable sin”.

“Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal sin”— for they had said, “He has an unclean spirit.”

By making their charge that Jesus’s works were of the devil, the scribes had attributed Jesus’s power to Satan rather than God. Apparently for Jesus, you can say anything you want about God so long as you don’t make the mistake of calling something that actually comes from God “evil”. When I was younger I was confused by this passage, but now it strikes me as eminently simple. It gives me great comfort whenever I hear a hateful preacher talking against same-sex marriage, gender equality, or racial justice. Like the scribes in the story, some folks make the mistake of equating status quo oppression with the will of God. In so doing they are treading on dangerous ground. It is one of the highlights of my professional life that right wing evangelist Franklin Graham on two occasions called me an apostate for performing same sex weddings and allowing a Muslim prayer service in the National Cathedral. While I would not presume to accuse Mr. Graham of having committed the unforgivable sin, I will suggest that it is not smart to misconstrue works of the Holy Spirit. When in doubt, it’s always good policy to side with the champions of love, justice, and compassion.

            Our culture seems to be caught up right now in a maelstrom bad thinking, bad theology, and personal attacks. Given this miserable national mood, it shouldn’t surprise us that two new documentaries have appeared in local theaters: a movie about Mr. Rogers (Won’t You Be My Neighbor) and another about Pope Francis (Pope Francis—A Man of His Word). After endless hours of cable news featuring hateful rallies, screaming pundits, and pugnacious tweets who wouldn’t want to spend some time in Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood or schmoozing with Francis? It is no accident that, in this dispiriting national moment, we find ourselves drawn to people who enact those values of love, justice, and compassion that got Jesus into so much trouble even in his home town.

            The renewed popularity of Mr. Rogers reminds us of one of the first truths we all learned in nursery school, that name calling is never a good idea. Jesus knew that the people who called him evil did so primarily out of fear. And frightened people, like frightened animals, can be dangerous. The precinct leader who called his colleague names resulted to name calling because he feared, correctly, that his time in authority was nearing an end. The scribes who called Jesus evil clearly believed the same thing. And who knows what goes on in the mind of our Tweeter-in-Chief?

When we are confronted by frightened, dangerous people our natural response is to jump reflexively into the fray. But before we start throwing elbows too, let’s pause and remember the women and men who show us another way to be in the world. God’s grace comes to us in many forms, but high among them is the possibility of showing kindness in the face of hate, compassion in response to aggression, generosity in the wake of fear. Love, as Mr. Rogers knew and practiced, is both formative and transformative. Love, as Pope Francis demonstrates by his life and witness, both makes us and renews us. Love, as Jesus always reminded his followers, is all that we finally have to offer.  I know this may sound simplistic, but I believe it to be the gospel truth. Amen.