Homily: The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost [September 26, 2021] St. James, Newport Beach

 

            I want to begin by thanking Cindy for her gracious invitation to be with you this morning. I don’t want to reveal my age, but the last time I was here at St. James, John Ashey was the rector. You have certainly been through a great deal since that time, and I want to thank you for your faithfulness, perseverance and the obvious creative vitality and pastoral leadership evident in the leadership and ministry of Canon Voorhees. Who else would think of using swim noodles for the socially distanced passing of the peace? I’m glad to be here.

            As the bulletin tells you, my last job before I retired in 2016 was to serve as dean of Washington National Cathedral. I had a great time there—what’s not to love about a beautiful gothic building in a dynamic place like Washington, D.C? We put on a lot of programs in my years as dean—working against gun violence, advocating for same sex marriage, voting rights, and environmental activism--but my favorite event was a one-week endeavor each January called “Seeing Deeper”. During that week we would take all the chairs out of the nave and do music, dance, prayer, and other offerings that made use of the entire transcendent empty space and invited people to respond not just mentally but physically. Seeing a big church like that without chairs is a revelation. We think of churches much as we do classrooms—as places where everyone watches and listens passively to a reasoned presentation. Emptying the space out and using it as a place for using not just our heads but our bodies was, as we said in the 1960s, a mind-blowing experience.

            The first year we did it The Washington Post ran a  front page story [https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/national-cathedral-opens-worship-space-to-free-classes-and-more-to-boost-profile-coffers/2014/01/14/216f87b4-7d3f-11e3-95c6-0a7aa80874bc_story.html] in which I was directly quoted in perhaps not my most PR savvy remark. Michelle Boorstein, the religion editor, came to our opening night, and as we sat there in the empty space watching a large group doing tai chi, she asked me how this all made me feel. Without thinking two seconds, I enthusiastically pointed to the length of the space and said, “I want to skateboard down it—or have a paper airplane contest.” [“National Cathedral opens worship space to free classes and more to boost profile, coffers” The Washington Post, January 14, 2014] 

            Now it wasn’t the most controversial thing I said there, but it wasn’t the best quote to soothe the worries of the staid, traditional lovers of a cathedral who already saw this smart-alecky Southern California import as a dangerous innovator and change agent. Isn’t this the place where they bury the presidents? The idea of rollerblading past Woodrow Wilson’s tomb was too much for some, and you can be sure I (and the bishop, and the cathedral chapter) heard about it.

            “I want to skateboard down it—or have a paper airplane contest.” Was saying this a mistake? Yes, in that it scared some people who thought I would actually do something like that. No, in that it was an authentic expression of the real exuberance I felt when I opened myself up to the transcendence of a big, holy space.

            This experience of saying something at once unwise yet authentic gets to a kind of doubleness we all experience and which Jesus explores in the Gospel for today [Mark 9:38-50]. He says two things that, on their surface, seem to be in direct contradiction with each other. The first one:

“If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell.”

And here’s the second one:

“For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”

            How do these statements conflict? In the first, Jesus tells us not to be a stumbling block to others or to tolerate aspects of ourselves that make us get in our own way. Not to take us into a big word study here, but the Greek word σκάνδαλον literally means “the movable stick or trigger of a trap”, hence anything that would cause one to stumble or fall. It’s where our English word scandal comes from. Jesus uses σκάνδαλον to denote how we can be two kinds of stumbling blocks. We can be a stumbling block to someone else. We can be a stumbling block to ourselves. We can so offend someone with our words or behavior that they will look askance at the causes we stand for. We can so get in our own way that we make problems for ourselves that wouldn’t exist without our helping them along.

            To use our example of the day: a smart-aleck dean saying “I want to skateboard down it—or have a paper airplane contest” about a sacred space might very well offend someone and turn them off not only the cathedral but the state of modern Christianity in America. The idea of a priest skateboarding anywhere is probably too much for some.

            But then we have Jesus’s second statement:

“For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”

Again, not to be a dictionary hound, but the Greek word for salt (ἅλας) denotes a mineral that in Jesus’s day was at once a seasoning, a preservative, and a purifier. If salt has lost its “saltness” (KJV) what use is it? The “saltness” of salt is the thing that makes it worthwhile. If salt isn’t salty, then who needs it?

Seen in this light, a cathedral dean saying “I want to skateboard down it—or have a paper airplane contest,” is doing something, well, salty. For every person who wants to preserve each tradition exactly as it is, there is probably another person who finds our whole church enterprise hide-bound, stuffy, and stodgy. Taken under the rubric of “saltness”, a smart-aleck remark can be taken as a breath of fresh air, a refusal to take oneself or one’s cathedral too seriously.

Now the point of this little exercise is not retroactively to justify my remarks. (Yes, I probably shouldn’t have said it, and yes, I’d probably do it again.) It’s to make a point about this doubleness which all of experience in life. How many times in your life have you said something that you thought was funny but turned out to be hurtful? And how many times have you held back from expressing yourself and so failed to bring your needed perspective to the conversation?

When it comes to self-expression, we are caught in a double bind. A lifelong priest friend of mine used to say, “One person’s painful dichotomy is another person’s creative tension.” We need always to consider the feelings of others and to weigh carefully how our words or actions might injure, offend, or actually abuse someone else. And we also need to be true to ourselves by saying and doing the things that arise from our own individuality. We are no good to the world if we are always stepping on each other’s toes. And we are no good to the world if we squelch the particularity of our own gifts and talents out of fear of being misunderstood.         

            One of the most helpful distinctions I have learned over the years is the one between intent and impact. My words or actions may have an impact on you that I do not intend. When I offend you—which I have probably done several times by now—you need to realize that my words or deeds may have an impact on you that I did not intend. And I need to realize that, even if I did not intend to hurt or offend you, I am responsible for the impact of my behavior on your heart or mind.

            Two seemingly contradictory things are true this morning. Jesus calls us to be aware of our own words and actions and the unintended impact they may have on another. He cautions us not to be a stumbling block to ourselves or others when we speak or act. He asks that we take responsibility for our words and actions.

            And at the same time, he admonishes us to stay faithful to the unique “saltness” that is our own particular gift to the world. If you do not bring your own insights and experiences to the conversation at home, at work, or in the public sphere, who will? Your “you-ness” is precious, and it is a sin to hide it like a candle under a bushel out of mere fear of being misunderstood.

            We come now to gather at God’s table, the one place in our life where we are both members one of another and uniquely precious just as we are. As we are fed with what Jesus calls the “bread of life”, let us take that bread both as a sign of our togetherness and as an emblem of our uniqueness. Your sisters and brothers are too precious to hurt or offend. And you are too precious to squelch the things that make you “you”. We need both to honor each other and to cut ourselves some slack. Walking this doubleness tightrope is never easy, but we’re strengthened to do it, because before us there is Jesus, who in his life and ministry, shows us how both to respect others and value ourselves at the same time. Honor each other, and honor yourself. It’s a risky business, more of an art than a science. This creative tension is the thing that makes us human. And this compassionate care for us as humans, in all our wonderful, mixed-up frailty and magnificence, is what God’s love for us is finally all about. Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homily: The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost [September 19, 2021] Trinity, Santa Barbara

            Because they both started out as child actors, my father and the late great jazz drummer Buddy Rich were lifelong friends, so I know this story firsthand. When Buddy was dying, he checked in for his final time at UCLA Medical Center in Westwood. As part of the normal intake interview, the nurse asked Buddy Rich if he had any allergies.

            “Yeah,” he said. “Country and Western.”

            I’m very much like Buddy Rich in my musical tastes—I grew up on a steady diet of straight-ahead bebop jazz and then the 1960s LA rock sound. Over the course of my long life I have come to have some appreciation for country music, but it’s been a long, slow process, and much of it I still can’t stand.

            About 20 years ago my son Oliver and I drove part way across the country together, and we did so by way of Tennessee so we could see Graceland and Sun Studios in Memphis and the Ryman Auditorium (original home of the Grand Ol’ Opry) in Nashville. It was a wonderful trip.

            The night we were in Nashville, another late, great musician, the singer George Jones, was giving a concert at the Ryman, and we decided to go, more to see the auditorium than to hear the music.

            Now I can’t say that George Jones is precisely my cup of tea—he specialized in the kinds of tearjerker ballads (“He stopped loving her today”) that don’t really appeal to me. And he had the annoying habit, in concert, of advertising one of his many products between songs. But he did sing a song that night that has stayed with me all these years, an up-tempo number called “Sinners and Saints”. In deference to your aesthetic sensibilities I will not sing it to you, but I will at least read you the final verse:

            Nobody’s perfect, we’re just flesh and blood

            One foot on the high road, one in the mud

There’s a mighty fine line between right and wrong

Don’t point your finger, don’t matter which side you’re on

            The only thing different in sinners and saints

            One is forgiven and the other one ain’t.        

 

            In case you dozed off for a minute, here it the refrain again:

            The only thing different in sinners and saints

            One is forgiven and the other one ain’t.

            This deathless bit of cornpone theology came into my head as I reflected on the Gospel for today [Mark 9: 30-37]. The “saints” Jones mentions are the sanctimonious types who seem to think their life in the faith community makes them somehow better than those outside it. The song’s “sinners” are the ones who may not be so outwardly pious but who know their need of love, acceptance, and forgiveness. I’ve worked in the church a long time now, and I have to say that, for all his inelegance, George Jones got it right. One of the dangers of spending your life serving Jesus can be the illusion that doing so gives you special status in the universe.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells his companions something they cannot possibly process:

“The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” 

As Mark tells us, “they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.” A doomed Messiah does not fit with their idea of the program. Imagine you have joined the Jesus movement. You go from success to success—from healings to miracles to feeding the 5,000. One day your leader tells you that instead of the triumph you envision he will instead endure humiliation, torture, and death. As the robot on Lost in Space used to say, “That does not compute.”

So instead of engaging Jesus about the prophecy of his coming crucifixion and death, they start fighting about their relative status:

Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest. 

 

Why can’t Jesus’s companions hear him? I guess if you think you have signed on to a victory story, your biggest concern will be your own place in the hierarchy. If you’re imagining your new corner office in the Jesus tower, the idea of a crucifixion sounds crazy. It turns out Jesus wasn’t running a dress for success program. The healings and feedings were not about playing to big crowds. They were about something else. They were putting into action the wild, indiscriminate love of a God who, in spite of everything perverse we do, is coming to meet us where and as we are. And they were about living a life that puts compassion and justice way ahead of one’s own personal status.

            In order to make this point to his self-aggrandizing friends, Jesus does one more shocking thing:

He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

            As one who worked private schools, and I can tell you that we think of children very differently today than they did in Jesus’s day. Children in Roman occupied Jewish Palestine had no status and no rights. They were at the very bottom of the social ladder. So in holding up a child, Jesus is not being sentimental. He is radically inverting the hierarchy of sinners and saints. “If you really want to follow me,” he is saying, “you will throw your arms open to welcome those who have no earthly status.” Today it’s a child. Tomorrow it will be a prostitute, a tax collector, a widow, an orphan. The community Jesus builds is not one based on status. Or, to put that differently, the only status that matters in the Jesus movement is the knowledge that one is accepted, forgiven, loved exactly as one is right here and right now. 

            Back to George Jones, our guest theologian for the morning:

                The only thing different in sinners and saints

                One is forgiven and the other one ain’t.

 

            The church is not an awards show. The church is a motely gathering of wounded, healed, loved, forgiven people who have somehow experienced the transformative, accepting love of God as exemplified in Jesus. To say that we shouldn’t argue over who is greatest is not to say that we don’t have special status. We do: we have the status of a child who is loved, of a sinner who is forgiven, of a sheep who is lost and then found. And we follow one who, in going to the cross, understood that standing with the likes of us sinners was more important than saving his own skin. 

            We tend to think of the death and resurrection of Jesus as a kind of cosmic magic trick. But in the light of today’s story about true greatness and the welcoming of one without any status, the Passion story shows its true colors. You and I follow one who lived out the deep logic of his life, knowing that so doing would bring him into direct conflict with the values of a world that perpetuates itself by honoring power, status, and privilege over the innate worth of every human being. And our job as followers of that one is to strive continually to keep ourselves open to seeing God’s image both in those to whom the world denies status but also in ourselves and those close to us. 

            In Jesus’s day the ones without status were represented by the child he takes in his arms. Today they are the homeless, the oppressed, the immigrant and refugee, and yes, still and always the poor. When we think we are somehow more important than those folks we have another think coming. It’s not that some people are precious and others not. It’s that everyone is precious. Human worth is not derived from one’s status or associations. Human worth is a given. Jesus was able to love and accept everyone openly and expansively because he knew their real value. He saw beyond the markers to something eternally true.

            And it’s that way also for you. The inverse side of thinking you’re more special than others is to think you’re not special at all. But to deny your own value is just as false as exalting it above that of others. As we come now to gather around God’s table, each of us will be fed with what Jesus calls elsewhere the “bread of life”. This bread comes to us as a sign of the extent to which we are loved, accepted, forgiven, and valued for who and what we are, on our own terms right here, right now.

                        The only thing different in sinners and saints

                        One is forgiven and the other one ain’t.

            Like the late Buddy Rich, I’m still allergic to country music. But sometimes we take in what we need to hear from a source that surprises us: a child in Jesus’s arms, a country singer in Nashville. God loves everyone—the people you love, the people you can’t stand. God loves even, and especially, you. It turns out we all get a corner office in the Jesus tower. Not because we’ve earned it, but because we are loved. And being loved is the only status that finally means anything at all. Amen