Homily: Thanksgiving Day [November 22, 2012] Washington National Cathedral

            Today is not only Thanksgiving Day; it’s also November 22, and nobody my age can hear the words “November 22” without thinking of the day in 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated.  That event happened just before Thanksgiving that year, and I remember even as a 9^th grader the painful irony of reading the late president’s Thanksgiving Proclamation in the newspaper a mere six days after he had been killed.  As he gave voice to the many reasons Americans have to be thankful, President Kennedy also articulated the many challenges confronting the nation.  And then he said this: “As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words but to live by them. [“Proclamation 3560 - Thanksgiving Day, 1963”, November 5, 1963]

 “The highest appreciation is not to utter words but to live by them.”  In framing the Thanksgiving holiday as a dialogue between words and deeds, President Kennedy was expressing one of the great creative tensions faced by all people of faith.  As Christians, we are the custodians of inspiring words about hope, peace, love, and compassion.  As Americans, we are the inheritors of a national vision encompassing liberty, justice, and opportunity.  On both sacred and national holidays, we tend to talk in large beautiful abstractions.  But President Kennedy’s Thanksgiving remarks call us back to our central task as both followers of Jesus and citizens of the United States: not only to proclaim ideals but to enact them. “The highest appreciation is not to utter words but to live by them.”

As Christians, as Americans, we face these creative tensions anew in 2012. What does it mean not only to give thanks but to live thankfully in the 21^st century?

Last week, WAMU, the local NPR station, ran an extraordinary series on homelessness in the District of Columbia.  One episode described the surprising number of homeless college students who find themselves back on the street during school holidays.  Another noted how on any given night there are 67,000 homeless veterans in America.  The story that arrested my attention, though, told of a 22 year-old mother of four named Ebony who walks or (on cold nights rides the bus) endlessly with her two month-old son, Khyla.  According to the story [“Homeless Mother Waits In The Cold For Spot In Shelter”, WAMU, November 14, 2012] there has been a 73 percent increase in demand for emergency shelter since the onset of the recession. Ebony and Khyla are one of about 600 families on the waiting list for shelter in the District. 

Ebony is both hopeful about her prospects and realistic about her plight. "I'm hoping I'll find something within the night," she says. "A lot of times me and him will just walk around late, just pass time at night. I don't trust sleeping out there, 'cause there's a lot going on. You hear gunshots, you know, people running red lights."  As I listened to this story, I felt at once moved and ashamed.  How can I live in a country that lets its veterans and young mothers and children go without shelter?  How can I give thanks for the abundant and comfortable life I enjoy while Ebony and Khyla and 599 other local families spend their nights looking for someplace to stay?

My dilemma is probably your dilemma. I’m thankful, and I’m also chagrined. I continue to hear President Kennedy’s admonition: “The highest appreciation is not to utter words but to live by them.”  The most authentic way for a Christian person to give thanks goes beyond the eloquent prayers we will utter at our tables.  The most authentic way for a Christian person to give thanks involves standing for and with those who do not share in the abundance for which we are so understandably grateful.

This morning we have heard two passages of scripture that can help us face into this dilemma.  One is Psalm 126; the other is from the sixth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel.

Psalm 126 is my favorite of all the Psalms.  It comes from the time when Israel’s leaders were held in captivity in Babylon.  They were in exile, cut off from home and land and culture.  And yet they fashioned a remarkable song of thanksgiving and trust.

When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, *
then were we like those who dream.

The LORD has done great things for us, *
and we are glad indeed.

On first hearing Psalm 126, you might say, what’s the big deal here?  It’s a typical song of thanksgiving.  But when you read it carefully and mull it over for a while, you realize that the psalm gives thanks for something that hasn’t even happened yet.  It treats a hoped-for reality as an accomplished fact. Only after the initial proclamation that “the Lord has done great things for us and we are glad indeed” does Israel then go on to ask God to do the great things they’re already thankful for: “Restore our fortunes, O LORD, like the watercourses of the Negev. “ 

What I take from Pslam 126 is a clue about how to live in the tension between what I know to be true and what I hope will be true.  The life of faith is ultimately about what we all, together and individually, hope for.  As Christians, as Americans, we organize our lives around a vision of life that we hope will be true, a vision symbolized by the abundance of the table to which Jesus gathers us, a vision symbolized by the cornucopia of our harvest celebrations.  God offers us an abundant future, even in moments of personal and social deprivation.  They key to abundant living, to living on Jesus’s terms, is to choose to live as if what you hope for is already true now.  If you’re a Jew in Babylonian exile, live as though you’re already free.  If you’re a person of faith in 21^st century America, live as if the abundant, mutual, generous society you hope for were already here. Even though the blessings of material prosperity are not available to all, we can work to make them so, we can start by extending the circumference of our own family tables and strive to widen the circle of abundance. “The highest appreciation is not to utter words but to live by them.”  We give thanks by working to make our tables and our society hospitable to the Ebonys and Khylas of this world and all those whom God wants to draw inside that circle of abundance and plenty with us now.

So one way to give thanks this year is to live as though the world we hope for was already here.  Another way is to remember what Jesus says to us in the sixth chapter of Matthew:

"I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? . . .Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you . . .?” [Matthew 6:25, 28b-29]

“Do not worry about your life,” says Jesus.  God feeds the birds and clothes the lilies.  God will feed and clothe you.  The key to abundant living is not only to live thankfully in advance.  The key is also to remember that the source of our ultimate security is not ourselves.  The source of that security is God, who even now is looking out for you in ways you can’t even begin to know about.  God cares about Ebony and Khyla and the homeless veterans and all those who are hungry or homeless or cold this night.  God cares about you and your household and the fears and challenges you face.  Don’t let those fears and challenges control your life.  Let Jesus’s hopeful vision of shared mutual abundance, of a world where not only lilies and birds but human beings are lovingly provided for—let that be the truth that gives shape to your life. Let us all live as if everything we hope for and believe about God and America were true.  And once we’re  living in that truth ourselves, we can act together to make it real for everyone.

When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, *
then were we like those who dream.

The LORD has done great things for us, *
and we are glad indeed.

“The highest appreciation is not to utter words but to live by them.” Happy Thanksgiving. Amen.

Homily: The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost [November 11, 2012; Veterans Day] Washington National Cathedral

“First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey.”  So begins the title story in Tim O’Brien’s book about American soldiers in Vietnam, The Things They Carried. Published 22 years ago, The Things They Carried lists the objects soldiers bring with them into and away from war, and then uses them to represent both the soldiers’ own internal burdens and the larger ones we Americans place on them.  The title story begins with a matter-of-fact list of what might be found on a soldier’s person during the Vietnam War:

The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wrist watches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between 15 and 20 pounds, depending on a man’s habits or rate of metabolism.  [Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, p.2]

Over the course of The Things They Carried the list expands.  As the tale evolves we learn that the soldiers carry with them more than their personal items, weapons, or supplies.  The list of “the things they carried” grows to include all sorts of meanings:  their own hopes and fears, the history and ideals of the nation they represent, the unresolved conflicts of the people back home.  As we move more deeply into the narrative, the soldiers are seen to carry not only their own burdens.  They carry along with them the burdens of an entire people as well.

            Today, November 11, is Veterans Day. Though it’s not a church holiday, Veterans Day is an important occasion in our national life.  Even though veterans and the wars they fought were not part of the recent electoral discussion, I’ve been thinking a lot about veterans this fall. Late last month, the great George McGovern, presidential candidate and decorated World War II bomber pilot, died, and many obituaries reprinted his most memorable quote, said at the height of the Vietnam War:  “I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.”

            In today’s Gospel, Jesus also appears fed up with those who place burdens on others they’re not willing to take up themselves.  Listen to him again:

"Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows' houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation." [Mark 12: 38-40]

Jesus is “fed up to the ears” with religious functionaries dreaming up obligations for others.  The scribes—religious bureaucrats of Jesus’s day—live off the sacrifices of others.  In that sense they are like the old folks who send young soldiers into battles they’re not willing to fight themselves.

The longer I live, the fewer soldiers I know.  This distance is not only a function of my age.  It is a result of my social location.  We have just concluded a presidential campaign in which the ongoing war in Afghanistan was rarely if ever mentioned. Our 21^st century wars have been largely hidden from people like me.  The wars we fight today are wars that we and those with our privileges have dreamed up for others to die in.

            We are gathered on Veterans Day not only to acknowledge our veterans but to express our gratitude for what they have given us. But how best do we do that? One way to express our thanks for those who have served in our recent and ongoing wars is to try to understand the reality of what they face on a daily basis.  I have recently finished reading a powerful new novel about the war in Iraq.  It’s called The Yellow Birds, and it’s by Kevin Powers, an Iraq war veteran. The Yellow Birds is a great novel on its own terms, and it’s also an important way for people like me to understand a combat experience that carries challenges most of us never think of. All war is hard, but contemporary soldiers are being asked to do things we haven’t asked them to do before.  As New Yorker writer George Packer explains,

The nature of [the Iraq] war is particularly hard on the psyche because of the complete opposites that have to be held together in one person’s head.  A soldier said to me, “You cannot turn on and off the switch in these guys.  It’s just tearing them apart to have to be nation builders and good guys and walk through villages and sit and drink tea and fighters who have to go out and shoot people and protect themselves.  What we need is two armies, one army of tea drinkers and one army of shooters.”  [George Packer, “The New Yorker Out Loud” Podcast, October 29, 2012]

In recent wars, our soldiers have had to serve as both nation-builders and fighters.  They have to drink tea with people they may also need to shoot. The resulting internal conflict can be soul-destroying.  As Bartle, the machine-gunner narrator of The Yellow Birds says,

I feel like I’m being eaten from the inside out and I can’t tell anyone what’s going on because everyone is so grateful to me all the time and I’ll feel like I’m ungrateful or something.  Or like I’ll give away that I don’t deserve anyone’s gratitude and really they should all hate me for what I’ve done but everyone loves me for it and it’s driving me crazy. [The Yellow Birds, p. 144]

As Christians, as people of faith, how do we make sense of the burdens borne by the modern soldier? When we think about the things they carry, about the burdens we place on the men and women who go to war on our behalf, we should think as well about someone else who carried a burden for us, about another young man who walked up a hill carrying not a rifle but a cross. I am not trying to turn soldiers and veterans into Christ figures.  I realize that they’re real, complicated people like you and me. But I am suggesting that they are important to us because, as they symbolize both our aspirations and our pains, they remind us of someone else.  As Christians, we know something about sacramental sacrifice. As Christians we know what it is to project our dreams and our enmities onto another. As Christians, we know on Good Friday what going to the cross cost Jesus, and as his followers we know after Easter what it means to live life in gratitude for the sacrifice made by another. “Surely he has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.” [Isaiah 53.4] “All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way. And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” [Isaiah 53.6]  As Christians we find life’s purpose as thanksgiving for the gift for us of Jesus’s life on the cross.  As Americans we can never be too far away from the knowledge that we can live our lives in peace because soldiers from Valley Forge to Gettysburg, to the Somme and D-Day, to Pork Chop Hill and the Tet Offensive to Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan have been willing to take up a burden on our behalf.

Today’s Gospel takes place as Jesus teaches in the Temple, and in it Jesus follows his attack on the scribes by pointing to a widow—the poorest of the poor in his day—as she quietly makes an offering of two copper coins, “all she had to live on”.  The widow’s quiet, sacrificial offering shames the pretensions of those who make a show of their flamboyant benevolence.  At the center of Jesus’s teaching there is always a dual call to outward compassion and inward humility.  He calls us, by example, to be both generous and humble, to be less like the scribes and more like the widow, because that’s the way God is. In loving us in Christ, God offers us “all she had to live on”. 

As we gather around Jesus’s table on this Sunday, we’re invited by God to know ourselves as people loved not because of our outward appearance but because of who we authentically are. In knowing ourselves that way, we are asked to be less like the scribes and more like the widow.  As we gather around Jesus’s table on Veterans Day, let us do so giving thanks for the men and women who have served our country not only by carrying our burdens and living into new and challenging ways of fighting our wars.  Let us give thanks that in their lives and service we glimpse an image of what it means to offer everything you have to live on so that someone else might thrive.  We cannot all replicate that offering.  But we can all acknowledge it and respond by helping our soldiers and veterans shoulder the things they carry.  Amen.        

Homily: The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost [October 21, 2012] Washington National Cathedral

 Our Gospel reading this morning tells us the story of James and John, the sons of Zebedee, approaching Jesus with a request.  They begin, as middle school students might, with a vague preamble.  "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you." No fool in these matters, Jesus responds in a general way himself. "What is it you want me to do for you?" Then they come out with it: "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.”  I’ve heard and preached on this story innumerable times, and as I hear it again this morning I think that most preachers, even me, have largely missed the point.  When we encounter James and John asking for special treatment, our natural tendency is to think of this story as kind of cute.  “Isn’t that adorable,” we say to ourselves. “The two Zebedee boys just don’t get it.” We smile inwardly at how quaint their request appears. 

Hearing the story today in the light of world events, I can’t help but think that something deeply troubling is going on here.  James’s and John’s request to be numbers two and three in the Kingdom of God isn’t cute at all.  Their request is actually a grab for power, an attempt to guarantee their own position in the emerging Jesus movement.  Their mistake—a common one in all religions—is that they have come to think that holiness has something to do with power.

All religions—Western and otherwise—struggle with this problem.  Great buildings like this cathedral stand as monuments to the zenith of Christendom, the period when Christianity was the official religion of Western culture. But Gothic architecture sends us mixed messages.  Overtly, it suggests the transcendent nature of the divine.  Inside a building like this one, or Salisbury or Chartres or St. John the Divine in New York, I feel small but not insignificant.  I have a sense of the scale of myself in relation to the divine.  But Gothic buildings are also about the institutional power of the church.  They project that power outward and suggest that the church, like the state, is a world historical institution.

Some of you may remember Franco Zeffirelli’s film, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, a movie about St. Francis of Assisi.  At one point in the story, Pope Innocent III summons Francis to Rome, and the two men encounter each other inside the cavernous spaces of the Vatican.  Imagine the Pope seated up at our high altar accompanied by a large entourage, all decked out in regal splendor.  And then imagine a simple man in robes and sandals walking humbly up the aisle to meet him. The contrast between the two—one the representative of a powerful institution, the other the founder of a movement based on voluntary poverty—could not be more striking.  It’s hard to imagine, as the scene unfolds, that these two men might even practice the same religion.

Something like that is going on in the dialogue between Jesus and the sons of Zebedee this morning, though in this incident the roles are reversed.  Jesus is more like Francis, James and John are flexing their imperial muscles.  They seem to think that the institutional shape of the church will be something like the Roman Empire, and that getting in early on the distribution of power will be the path to heavenly success.  Jesus—the one who gathered the movement in the first place and who exemplifies the Christian life as one of humility, compassion, and mutuality, sets them straight.  "You know,” he says, “that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.” [Mark 10:35-45]

On Jesus’s terms, Christianity will not be about imperial rule.  For Jesus, holiness and power are not the same thing.  James and John have misread the situation.  The may have been the first, but they weren’t the last Christians to do so.  For most of our history, we Christians have struggled to get the balance right.  And we are not alone.  The same can be said about other religious traditions.  When we encounter the holy, something in us wants to make our experience mandatory for everybody else.  We think that being faithful to our knowledge of God means imposing it—sometimes through force--on others. It’s a short step from James and John to the Crusades.

Power and holiness are on my mind this morning because, for the past couple of weeks I have followed the events surrounding Malala Yousafzai, the courageous 14-year old Pakistani girl shot by the Taliban because of her opposition to their ban on education for women in the Swat Valley region of Pakistan,.  Since she was 11, Malala has written an anonymous blog for the BBC, “Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl”, in which she described the effects of the ongoing war in the Swat Valley and her sadness at the closing of girls’ schools. She has been interviewed several times on television in Pakistan and has expressed her desire eventually to go to medical school and become a doctor. In reprisal for her vocal advocacy of women’s education in Pakistan, Malala was shot on her way home from school in Mingora. In taking credit for the shooting, a Taliban spokesman called her crusade for women’s education “an obscenity.”  The same spokesman said, “Let this be a lesson.” [“Taliban Gun Down Girl Who Spoke Up for Rights”, The New York Times, October 9, 2012]

As we think about Malala’s shooting as an expression of religiously-motivated violence, notice the way the Taliban spokesman makes an almost unthinking connection between religion and coercive power.  Let this be a lesson?  A lesson in what? The Taliban spokesman talks as if the shooting of a teenager were a “teachable moment” in religious education. From his point of view, deviation from orthodoxy merits a violent response.  In this respect, the spokesman is the direct descendant of James and John when they ask to be seated one at Jesus’s right hand and one at his left in glory.  Their request for status has an ugly underside.  They have equated God with power, and they have volunteered to be God’s agents in wielding that power.  When faithful people try to exert coercive force—be they Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu—they are making a fundamental mistake not only about themselves but about God.

One of my favorite contemporary theologians is a Roman Catholic, John Caputo.  In his book The Weakness of God, he challenges us to think of God not as ultimate power but as ultimate weakness.  He invites us to consider, in his words

. . . the possibility of a kingdom of the kingdom-less, a kingdom where there is no sovereign and no one reigns--or if they do, they have no power--an un-kingly, anarchic kingdom, a kingdom where the only power that is permitted is the power of powerlessness, where the very condition of power is that it be without power. [John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God, p. 26]

If we learn anything from the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, it is that the One Jesus calls his Father does not dwell in imperial splendor.  Instead, that One became one of us in Jesus, and went to the cross as a victim of the kind of coercive violence that we deplore in the fundamentalist terrorism directed against Malala Yousafzai and all those who simply believe differently than those with power think they are supposed to.

            James and John didn’t get it.  They thought that following Jesus would bring them power in his kingdom.  But the kingdom they imagined is not the one that Jesus offers. The kingdom Jesus invites us all into is organized not like the Roman Empire but like a meal.  It’s a community gathered around a table, a place where 14 year-old aspiring women doctors and all those without imperial status—the sick, the lonely, the bereaved, the oppressed—feed each other and are fed by God.  When we finally see things as God sees them, we’ll know that it is people like Malala and St. Francis who will sit at Jesus’s right hand in glory.  As Malala recovers, let us stand with her in that weakness, even as it grows increasingly into strength.  In standing with Malala, we will stand with Jesus, too.  Amen.

Homily: The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost [October 14, 2012] Washington National Cathedral

            Ever since I was in graduate school I have carried a copy of Henry Thoreau’s Walden in my car. This practice came in handy a couple of weeks ago when I found myself in the line at the District of Columbia Vehicle Inspection Station.  In other places I’ve lived, having your car inspected takes about 15 minutes.  Here in DC the process can last several hours.  Since I’ve already read my car’s owner’s manual and tire warranties more times than I can count, I was glad I had my copy of Walden at my side.

            As I began reading, I remembered the circumstances that led Henry Thoreau to move to Walden Pond in the first place. The year was 1845.  He had recently suffered the loss of his brother John who cut himself and died of lockjaw.  Henry had also had a difficult time holding down a job.  The economy was still recovering from what we would call a Recession, our parents would call a Depression, and Thoreau’s contemporaries called a “Panic”.  Times were hard for everybody, and though he was grief-stricken and broke, Thoreau wanted to show that it was still possible to live abundantly, even through personal and economic crises.

Thoreau’s answer to the question of how to live in the face of adversity, as all readers of Walden know, was to suggest that we give up pursuing luxuries and simplify our wants, so that our energy can go less toward paying for stuff we really don’t need and more toward enjoying life in all its fullness.

            Sitting in the DMV’s vehicle inspection line, it was easy to affirm with Thoreau that life is hard and that there ought to be a better way to live it.  But soon after that realization came another one:  life can be more than merely annoying and frustrating.  It can be really, really hard in more serious ways. When I looked around, I saw all sorts and conditions of cars and people, and I was reminded once again that life can often be painful and unjust. People suffer from both natural and human causes. We can easily feel that we are living in a universe with the deck stacked against us.

Henry Thoreau saw that most people were ground down by life—as he famously said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” [Walden] All of us experience hardship. If we’re honest, we’ll admit that our human spiritual experience often begins with the experience of suffering.  We cry out as an expression of our grief or pain or bewilderment, and what we want in return is not so much an explanation as to be heard.

            The poet (and former Poet Laureate) Robert Hass tells the story of taking his grandchildren to a museum where they saw a statue of the Buddha. Because they didn’t know who the Buddha was, Hass told them a bit about how the Prince Siddhartha became the Buddha.  As he puts it,

I told them the story of Prince Siddhartha, how his father had brought him up in a kingdom of the Himalayan foothills in such a way that he would never see any form of human suffering, how when he was a young man and curious, he snuck out of the palace compound and visited the local village, how he saw there a sick man and a poor man and a beggar and a corpse, and how, overcome with infinite sorrow at human suffering, he vowed to set out on a path that would lead him to overcome the violence in the human heart. [Robert Hass, “Study War No More:  Violence, Literature, and Immanuel Kant”]

Living in contemporary America is much like being raised by Prince Siddhartha’s father.  We have constructed a world in which we increasingly try to insulate ourselves from engagement with all forms of human suffering—including --with alcohol, drugs, overwork, or medication--our own.  But those of us drawn to the life and witness of the spirit, those of us drawn into the mystery of a transcendent space like this Cathedral, we know somewhere inside ourselves that the attempt to deny the reality of human pain is not only impossible; we know that such an attempt runs counter to the whole religious enterprise. 

Like Thoreau, Jesus lived in a time of economic scarcity. And like Thoreau, Jesus upended all conventional thinking by telling people that they can actually live a joyful, free, and abundant life even in the midst of oppressive misery.  For Jesus, the trick to living abundantly in hard times is a simple one.  Acknowledge your frailty. Gather together with others.  Make common cause with them.  Share what you have. When we isolate ourselves behind our possessions, our power, our privilege; when we try to hoard what we have and protect it from the world, the forces we would flee gain power over us.  When we admit that we’re finite and vulnerable, when we band together with others and share what we have, we discover not only the inner resources of God among and within us; we discover also that there is miraculously enough to go around.  And more than that:  we discover that there is joy and hope in a life of compassion and generosity.  In the presence of Jesus, people are healed and hopeful, and there is, simply, enough:  enough food, enough money, enough companionship to get through life.

As we think together about our scriptures for today, we find two implications for us in how Jesus empowers us to live abundantly.  The first has to do with the Gospel reading we just heard, the one in which a rich man comes to Jesus and asks him the key to eternal life.  As Mark tells us,

Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, "You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me."  [Mark 10:21]

The rich man comes to Jesus looking for fulfillment. He has a lot, but he doesn’t have enough. What Jesus says to this man is that he will find fulfillment not by trying to shield himself with his possessions.  He will find that fulfillment by opening himself up to life in all its beauty and ugliness, joy and pain, in fellowship with others.  When Jesus uses the famous comparison of a camel passing through the eye of a needle, he is naming the difficulty we all have in moving from fear into trust.  If I want to get through the eye of a needle, it will be an easier journey if I don’t try to take my Volvo with me. (My wife says her Mini Cooper could make it, but I’m not so sure.) The stuff we trust in turns out to be not an asset but a burden. It doesn’t protect me.  It walls me off from others and the world. Yes, life can be hard, but it can be abundant and joyful, too.  We usually let our fear of life’s pains insulate us from the joy of life’s pleasures.  The rich man in this Gospel story cannot make the transition from fear to hope.  But others can and do and will, and they are the ones who in Jesus’s words “receive a hundredfold now . . . and in the age to come eternal life.” [Mark 10:30]

 I said there were two implications for us in Jesus’s call to abundant living this morning, and here’s the second.   It’s found in a gem of a verse from our passage from Hebrews this morning:

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.  [Hebrews 4:15-16]

Jesus shows us how to live abundantly in a world filled with joy and sorrow, happiness and pain. But more than that: Jesus’s experience of human joy and sorrow, happiness and pain, has changed the way God knows and loves us.  God took on human life and experience by coming into human life in Jesus of Nazareth. By becoming one of us in Jesus, God now knows what it is to be you.  God has experienced everything—the good and the bad—that human life has to offer.  God is not some abstract remote being out in space someplace.  God is some One who has gone through human life in all its fullness. When we pray to God—when we complain about our problems, when we give thanks for our blessings—we are praying to some One who gets what it us to be us.  That is the mystery of the Christian life and faith.  God loves accepts and blesses you with full knowledge of what it is to be you.  That’s the miracle of how we “find grace to help in time of need”. 

Reading along in Thoreau’s Walden in the inspection line, I came across another sentence, one not as well-known as the first. Thoreau says, “I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do.” [Walden, “Economy”] God knows and loves you.  God made this world and placed you in it so that you might live and thrive in it.  Here’s what God and Jesus want you to do.  Trust the world. Love the world. Engage the world.  Embrace the world.  Weep with the world.  Rejoice with the world.  In so doing you will not only live abundantly.  You will come to know and trust and love God.  And in coming to know and trust and love God, you will come to know and trust and love yourself. And when you know and trust and love yourself, you can serve and heal and bless the world. Amen.