Homily: The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost [October 2, 2011] Christ Church Cranbrook

Our first reading this morning is the version of the Ten Commandments taken from the Book of Exodus. The Ten Commandments are, of course, the cornerstone of Jewish law. Over the course of the past several weeks, our Old Testament readings have told the story of the life of oppression the Jews lived under Pharaoh in Egypt. We have heard how Moses led the people out through the Red Sea, how God gave them manna in the wilderness as they wandered, and today about God’s covenant with them on Mt. Sinai. The Ten Commandments are, in Israel’s understanding, the terms on which God will have a relationship with human beings. I will be your God and you will keep these commandments. The terms of the relationship are an ethical, rather than a monetary or political obligation.

Today I want to talk about only ONE of these ten Commandments. I want to talk about the one that nearly every contemporary person in Western culture, especially America, disobeys. Now I hear you all thinking to yourselves, which one is he talking about? Covetousness? Bearing false witness? Honoring one’s parents? Maybe even adultery? No, I think many of us do a pretty good job of trying to abide by the Ten Commandments, but there is one commandment that every one of us routinely and flagrantly disregards.

I refer, of course, to the commandment on the Sabbath. Listen again:

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it. [Exodus 20: 8-11]

Now before you tell me that I’m being harsh, that we Americans actually do our best to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy, I ask you to think about the actual culture we live in—a culture where people boast of being on duty “24/7”, a culture in which people are praised for never taking days off or vacations, a culture in which even the days off we do take are filled with feverish, frantic activity. I was once asked in a public forum what I considered the greatest threat to Christianity in the 21^st century. “Soccer,” I replied.

The Sabbath, as God describes it to Moses here in Exodus 20 (and in greater depth in Deuteronomy 5) is not simply a day for a different kind of activity. It is a day of rest. In the first chapter of Genesis, we read about how God made the world in six days and on the seventh he rested. One way to understand the Sabbath is the idea of divine rest. If even GOD needed a day of rest after making the world, you and I need to step back from labor ourselves. To say that we require rest is to admit that we are finite. And if there is anything we do not like, it is the idea that even we might have limitations.

But there is more to Sabbath than that. The biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann makes the case that the Jewish Sabbath is directly tied to the world left behind in Egypt. As he says, “The conduct of Yahweh on the seventh day is in sharp contrast to the world of pharaoh, in which there is no rest but only feverish productivity. “ Pharaoh’s brickyards were like 21^st century sweatshops, where Jewish slaves were driven mercilessly to ever more oppressive labor. The world of the Exodus, the new community to which Israel is going, will be an anti-Egypt, and the God who rules it is an anti-Pharaoh. Again, Brueggemann:

[The command on the Sabbath looks forward] to a human community, an Israelite community peaceably engaged in neighbor-respecting life that is not madly engaged in production and consumption, but one that knows a limit to such activity and so has at the center of its life an enactment of peaceableness that bespeaks the settled rule of Yahweh. [Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, p. 185]

In other words: the community that God’s relationship with Israel creates in the Covenant on Mt. Sinai is a world radically different from the Egypt the Israelites escaped. That new Jewish world is a world of peace and wholeness and abundance and generosity. And the symbol that singly most perfectly embodies and represents God’s will for that new world is the institution of the Sabbath.

Those of us who are older than a certain age will remember a time when the world was not a 24/7 world, a time when stores were not open on Sundays, a time when they didn’t say, “If you don’t come in to work on Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday” even as a joke. I say this not to sound like an old crank but rather to raise the theological question: in our exaltation of work over rest, in our relentless pressure to be responsive to the unending barrage of information that comes toward us, in our turning even childhood into a time of ceaseless activity and obligation, are we not turning America into Pharaoh’s brickyard? And if we live in Pharaoh’s brickyard, are we not in some sense living and acting as slaves?

I think that our willful, prideful disregard of the Sabbath commandment is a sign of our deep spiritual disease. It is one thing to disobey a commandment; it is altogether something else to take pride in doing so. Which one of us would get up publicly and say, “I’m a murderer! I’m an adulterer! I’m a thief! I’m a liar!” Yet how many of us boast of our willingness to work without rest. There are, of course, times when urgent necessity gives way to religious rules. As Jesus himself said, the Sabbath was made for human beings and not the other way around. But to the extent that our lives are lived in chaotic bondage to the demands of the 24/7 world, and to the greater extent that we are prideful about that bondage, hearing the Fourth Commandment today calls us to think again about how and why we spend our time.

The great Jewish scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel said this about the Sabbath:

The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation, from the world of creation to the creation of the world. [Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath]

In other words: take a day off! That’s not just lifestyle advice. It’s a commandment! May each of us hear in this teaching God’s call to the freedom of rest. God has sanctified a day of the week as the place where we can shut out other noise, so that we will hear God’s voice and be open to it in the deepest places of our authentic selves. May we have grace to listen to that voice, to respond in obedience, and so be truly free in the Exodus from Pharaoh’s brickyard to the promised land of milk and honey symbolized so perfectly in the idea of Sabbath. Amen.

Homily: The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost [September 11, 2011] Christ Church Cranbrook

On this tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, I’m not exactly sure how to talk about the events of September 11, 2001. Even at this remove, I do not presume to be able to explain or make sense of them. Kathy and I were living in the Philadelphia area in 2001, and I clearly remember the day and the effect the attacks had on our parish community. But I’m not sure, ten years later, that I understand September 11 any better than I did then. Oh, I think I understand the political and social forces that led to the attacks, and I think I have a sense of the various ways Americans and others have processed them. But I don’t think I see September 11, 2001 with any more clarity than I did at the time. Was it the day that everything changed? Not really. Was it the day we lost our innocence? I don’t think so. The easy bromides don’t help any more now than they did then. But I do know that it felt like a wound and still does. And I do know that our tradition has a lot to say about how to deal with wounds. And that is where, as a Christian, it makes sense for me to try to talk about it.

In the Gospel for today, we begin with this interchange:

Peter came up and said to Jesus, “Lord, how often shall my brother or sister sin against me, and I forgive them? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times. [Matthew 18.21]

What we’re offered in the scriptures this morning—and this is the Gospel actually scheduled for today, not something I chose for the occasion—is a parable of forgiveness. The Bible uses numbers—40 days and 40 nights, 40 years, 77 times—without modern scientific precision. When Jesus says “seventy seven times” or in another reading, “seventy times seven”, he does not mean either number literally. He uses 77 as a figure for infinity. We must always forgive.

And then he tells a parable—one of his most outrageous—about forgiveness. A master forgives a debt of 10,000 talents to a slave who then forces repayment of a debt of 100 denarii. In contemporary terms, the disparity between those debts is enormous. The first slave owes the master something like three or four lifetimes’ worth of wages. The second slave owes the first something like the price of a latte at Starbucks. The point of the story is clear: we who have been forgiven a gigantic amount by God need to extend a proportional amount of forgiveness to our fellow beings.

Now I’m not going to say that we should clap Al Qaeda members on the back and say “let bygones be bygones”. But I am going to say that there is something in the process of forgiveness that we need to attend to if we want to make sense of any hard world historical event. Even though we preachers talk a lot about forgiveness, none of us fully understands it. I know in my own life I have experienced the ability to forgive as a gift more than as an act of my own will. When I’ve been able to do it, I’ve experienced the granting of forgiveness as a surprise. The grace to forgive comes to me from outside myself. But I know it starts with an acknowledgment of the injury I’ve suffered.

We live in what one writer [Michael Hrebeniak ] calls the “Amnesiac Market State”. When we experience pain or tragedy, we tend to say, “Let’s put this behind us and move on.” One thing I do know about forgiveness is that you can’t forgive someone for a wound you haven’t fully acknowledged. To the extent that our 10^th anniversary remembrance of September 11, 2001 helps us recall and acknowledge the pain, confusion, and grief we felt on that day and afterwards, then it’s all to the good. To the extent that this anniversary becomes an occasion for boastful posturing or an anniversary we forget tomorrow, then we really haven’t moved very far down the road to healing.

But once we recall and acknowledge that wound, what then? One of the deep life lessons I’ve learned in almost 62 years on the planet is that I can really, finally, only change myself, not someone else. So the question for all of us on this 10^th anniversary of September 11, 2001 is: how do we become the people God is calling us to be? I can’t really do anything to change the heart of an extremist, whether abroad or here. But I can do something about my own heart and my own world. And that, I believe, is what Jesus is getting at when he talks about forgiving 77 (or 70 times 7) times.

A year ago I asked Beth Taylor to join our staff and take on primary responsibility for youth ministry and outreach. The vestry and I felt at the time that the parish needed both to increase its commitment to our own young people and to develop ways to call all of us into deeper relationship with our wider metropolitan community. Beth has done extraordinary work in both areas, but as we think today about moving forward from September 11, it is her work in the outreach area that engages my imagination.

Over the last year, Beth and the Outreach Committee, chaired by vestry member Felix Rogers, have studied Detroit and its challenges, and they have explored the possibility of finding a non-profit organization with whom we could partner and through whom we could channel all our volunteer and philanthropic energy. My vision for this was that we would build a relationship with a real urban neighborhood, get to know the people in that neighborhood, and build a volunteer program through which parishioners here could offer their energies in the areas of education, healthcare, employment, and housing. This would be a concentrated, focused outreach ministry where our parishioners could offer themselves to tutor kids, build houses, offer professional skills, and help stabilize an endangered neighborhood. It would also allow us to get to know women, children, and men who live in a very different context than the one we all inhabit. Such a program would be transformational for them and for us.

After a year of work, Beth, Felix, and the Outreach Committee have proposed a partnership with Focus Hope, a well-known Detroit non-profit with a forty year history offering hunger relief, career training and development, and racial reconciliation. We have been invited to join their Hope Village Initiative in a section of the Oakman Boulevard neighborhood in Detroit which has the newly reopened charter elementary school, Glazer, as a community anchor. Kathy and I have been down to Focus Hope and to Glazer Elementary, we’ve met with the leaders and the school principal there, and I feel that this partnership will offer us a way to make an enormous difference in the health of Detroit both as a city and as the metropolitan area in which we all live. This partnership will allow Christ Church parishioners to offer the wide range of their skills and energies to help improve the lives of real people in a real place. And this partnership will help us all live out what it means to be a Christian in the 21^st century, pledged in the Prayer Book’s words “to seek and serve Christ in all persons, respecting the dignity of every human being.”

I don’t know what else to say about September 11 except this: when the remembrances and the speeches are over, all of us are left with the question, what have we done to make our community more just, more loving, more prosperous, more safe? What have we done to take on and engage the sufferings and struggles of people whose culture and context may differ from us but whose fundamental humanity we share? There is nothing we can do, finally, to stop others from hating us. But we can, together, work to help our city, our community, our society reflect our deepest values and highest aspirations. And that is why I believe God is calling us to this new work with Focus Hope in Detroit.

The same year as the terrorist attacks, 2001, I became rector of the parish in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania—the Church of the Redeemer, a parish similar in size and demographics to this one. When I arrived in Philadelphia in May of that year, I made a pilgrimage to talk to the retired Bishop of Pennsylvania, Robert DeWitt, not coincidentally the third rector of Christ Church Cranbrook, serving here at the parish in the 1950s and in the 1960s as Suffragan Bishop of Michigan. Bob was a hero of mine, and he had been famous for all kinds of great things in the church, especially for getting so many ministries going here that responded to the urban and social crises of those days.

Because Redeemer, Bryn Mawr and Christ Church Cranbrook are so similar, I asked Bob how he managed to get so many outreach projects going in a large suburban parish. He responded, “There are a lot of people in the congregation who care deeply about the things you and I care about. So I would just get up on Sunday and tell people what I’d been thinking about, and then I’d ask them, if they were thinking about it too, to come over to the rectory some night and we’d think through it together.” So this morning, following in Bob DeWitt’s footsteps, I’m telling you what’s on my mind. I hear God calling us to respond to the fear and pain of September 11, 2001 by opening our hearts and hands to real, nearby people in our own metropolitan area. And I’m asking that, if you hear some version of that voice in your own head, that you come and think and talk about it with Felix and Beth and me at the rectory this Wednesday night. Details are in the bulletin. We’ll be open for coffee and talk from 7:30 to 9:00. Let’s think about this together. Let’s go forward from this tenth anniversary of September 11 not in vengeance or in anger but embarked on a process to know and serve and love people whose lives are linked with ours in an infinite myriad of ways.

Christianity is a realistic religion. It understands that both human sin and aggression and human heroism and compassion will always coexist within and among us. Our call as Christians is not to try to change human nature—only God can do that. Our call is to be faithful, generous, and compassionate as we are where we are, with the people God has made us neighbors.

In this morning’s epistle [Romans 14], Paul says this: “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.” Paul and Jesus knew what it is to be afraid. And they knew something else: they knew that those they feared would not say the last word about them; they knew the final word would be God’s. Whether we live, whether we die, we are the Lord’s. That great truth puts every other claim in its place. Threatened and vulnerable though we may feel, we are ultimately, finally, safe. As we take in the knowledge of that safety, let us reach out to love and serve those who will only come to know of God’s blessings through the work of our hands and minds and hearts. Amen.

Homily: The Tenth Sunday after Penteocst [August 21, 2011] Christ Church Cranbrook

Despite all that’s happening nationally and internationally, the biggest story on the Episcopal News Service this week concerned an art theft in Los Angeles. Last Sunday night, a Rembrandt drawing was stolen from an art sale at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in the Marina del Rey section of Los Angeles. The 1655 pen and ink drawing, called “The Judgment”, is valued at around $250,000. Late Monday night, a priest at St. Nicholas’ Episcopal Church in Encino walked into the church office after a meeting and discovered that the stolen drawing had been placed just inside the office door. [“After Rembrandt heist, mystery thief finds religion”, Los Angeles Times, 8/17/11] I just mention this in case anybody here has any Cezannes or Monets they want to dispose of. Just think of your local Episcopal church as your one-stop shopping place to drop off master artworks. We’ll happily take them off your hands.

I thought about this story all this week as I pondered today’s Gospel, Matthew’s account of the confession of Peter. Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answers, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” [Matthew 16. 15] Like the unexpected return of a stolen artwork, Peter’s answer is surprising. And like the choice of a church as the place to drop off that drawing, Jesus’s rejoinder to Peter is even more unexpected. “ "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.” [Matthew 16.16] How do you and I make sense of this interchange?

We might start with the question: who is Jesus for you? Is he a teacher? A healer? A miracle worker? A lawgiver? Is he the friend of the suffering and the poor? Is he the one who is put to death on the cross and rises on the third day? When each of us looks at Jesus, we see the aspect of his life and ministry that speaks to us most deeply. In Jesus’s own day, people followed him for various reasons. Most saw him as a healer, many as a teacher. Some saw him as a prophet—Elijah or Jeremiah, as the Gospel says. Some saw him as a religious reformer or political figure, one who preached and practiced subversion of both the Temple system and the Roman Empire. When the church got more established, it portrayed him as a lawgiver. In today’s Gospel, however, Peter says only that Jesus is the Messiah.

The Hebrew word “Messiah” is translated in Greek as “Christ”, and they both mean the same thing—a word we would render in English as “anointed”. The anointed one is, simply, the king. Jews in Jesus’s day looked back to the reigns of kings David and Solomon as the high point of Israel’s life as an independent nation. They longed for a Messiah—an anointed one, a king—who would come, re-establish David’s throne, and throw the Roman occupiers out. When Peter claims that Jesus is the Messiah, he’s saying that Jesus is the king, the one who exercises real political and religious authority.

As you know from the rest of the Jesus story, the drama finally turns on this question of Jesus’s Messiahship. Is he the Messiah? And if he is, what kind of Messiah is he? He certainly doesn’t look and act like a worldly political king. No wonder the majority of Jews never accepted him as God’s promised king and continue, to this day, to look for the coming of the real anointed one, the Messiah who will set things right.

Both religious and secular Jews have thought deeply about the hope for the Messiah and what it means. One of them was Alfred Kazin, a prominent 20^th century Jewish intellectual whose journals have recently been published. In a review this month of Alfred Kazin’s Journals [Edward Mendelson, “The Hidden Life of Alfred Kazin”, NYRB 8/18/2011] the scholar Edward Mendelson observes that “to live authentically as a Jew, in Kazin’s eyes, is to serve universal justice.” When Jews look to the coming of the Messiah, what they are really talking about is the future—not only their future but the world’s. For Jews, the moral life, the religious life, is oriented toward what God is doing next. This means that Jewish thought always asks about the future implications of present actions. What kind of world are we making or leaving for our children? For thinkers like Alfred Kazin, “the moral individual looks toward the future.” [Mendelson] As Kazin puts it, “The Christian idea of the future—based on the individual. The Jewish idea: the past, the group.” Both Jews and Christians need to learn from each other. For Kazin, the task for Jews always involves taking the lessons of a painful past and transmuting them into a hopeful expectation of God’s future. For Christians, the task is to think less about our own individual destinies and more about the future of the world.

Thinking about Messiahship in Jewish terms helps us Christians understand what Peter’s confession actually means. In this moment, Peter makes the connection between Jesus’s ministry and the idea of an anointed one. It is an “Aha! moment”, an occasion when Peter glimpses what Jesus and God are up to. Something is going on in the life and ministry of Jesus that points us towards God’s future—the future to which we (both as individuals and as a group) are invited, a future which God wants us to participate in bringing about with Jesus and each other. The goal is to build a future world that looks like the community Jesus has established with his companions here and now—a world of mutuality, compassion, dignity, and respect, a world characterized by the Hebrew word Shalom—peace, reconciliation, justice, love--a world of health and wholeness, creation restored to what God intends it to be.

You and I live in rapidly changing times. The economic turmoil that has been the principal focus of most of the news this summer (and even last week) is one symptom of the many ways we can no longer live by the assumptions that many of us grew up with. In his review of Nicholson Baker’s new novel in last week’s New York Times Book Review [Sam Lipsyte, “Inside Nicholson Baker’s Sexual Utopia”, NY Times Book Review, 8/11/2011], the novelist Sam Lipsyte discusses what he calls “a vanishing consumerist America, where enough cash can protect you from consequences.” Most of us have lived most of our lives in the grip of this vanishing consumerist America, and more often than not we have put our faith in the fond hope that cash can protect us from life’s consequences. As Lipsyte says about Baker’s novel, “The real humor, and sadness, emerges from the impossibility of this fantasyland.”

We are not the first people on earth who thought they could build a society where our affluence could shelter us from all the vicissitudes of life. The Romans of Jesus’s day tried to live in their own version of a consumerist fantasyland, and one central aspect of Jesus’s life and teaching was that there was another, better way to live. Even in a time of diminished resources, Jesus said, people can live abundantly. The Gospel stories of the feeding of the 5,000 are not just Eucharistic miracles—they are parables of the hidden abundance of life lived on God’s terms. There is, really, enough to go around. Citizenship in Jesus’s kingdom means orienting your life away from faith in cash (or power, or success, or beauty, or whatever bad value appeals to your most fearful self) and toward the values around which Jesus’s life and community are organized. If we live our lives for others and not for ourselves, if we point ourselves openly toward God’s future rather than fearfully protecting what we have salvaged from our past, if we think and pray and work for universal justice rather than building walls around what we think of as ours—if we live this way we will find life joyful, abundant, meaningful, and whole. Peter’s confession of Jesus as Messiah expresses his willingness to commit himself and his life to the joyous, hopeful future Jesus offers and that dawns even when things look most bleak.

In our Old Testament reading this morning, the unnamed Levite woman who gives birth to Moses makes this same kind of faithful commitment to God’s future. If Moses’s mother had simply clutched the baby to herself, she would have lost him to Pharaoh’s guards. Instead, she performs an action of breathtaking trust. She puts the baby in a papyrus basket and places it in the bulrushes, the reeds on the bank of the river. She does so without a guarantee that someone will come and find and raise the infant Moses on her behalf. In taking a creative risk for the future, this unnamed Levite woman ensured the liberation of Israel from bondage in Egypt. She risks, rather than play it safe. She commits herself and her son to God’s future, and the result is the birth of Israel as a people.

In painful, scary times, it is natural for us to look back to a fantasy of a safe past and imagine that all will be well if we can only get back to a time when things were simpler or easier or more coherent. Nostalgia is always dangerous, because as we look back through memory’s selective filter we fail to see the real pains and dangers that lurked in the time we are idealizing. Nostalgia may look harmless, but it’s dangerous personally, it’s foolish politically, and it’s pernicious as a religious posture. Christianity, like Judaism, always points forward. God is doing a new thing, and you are invited to step into and cooperate with God in bringing that new thing to fruition. The past is a beautiful place to remember, but as the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby learned, it’s a terrible place to live. You can never find fulfillment there.

I don’t know why the California art thieves brought the Rembrandt drawing to a church. But here’s what I hope is true. I hope they realized, once they had spirited away the picture, that by stealing it they had committed a fearful, selfish act, literally seeking future fulfillment in an artifact of the past. By bringing that stolen drawing to a church, I hope they had decided instead to commit themselves to the kind of future Jesus offers, to give up holding on to an icon of worth for themselves alone and instead to entrust it to a community seeking to live out God’s love and justice in the here and now.

As each of us navigates the personal, social, and economic traumas of this turbulent summer, I pray we will have grace to do the right thing, to face always with God into the direction of God’s new, abundant future. The past is gone. We cannot go back there, even if we wanted to. God’s promise to you and me is that we will find blessing and peace both today and tomorrow as we walk together hopefully into the future, uncertain though it may look to us today. Even now, God is working that promise out. Commit yourself to what God is doing in your life and the life of the world. As you respond to God’s promise and live into that commitment, God will lead all of us together toward a future that exceeds everything we can ask for or imagine, we and the world will be blessed, and all will finally be well. Amen.