Homily: The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost [August 23, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

 

            This morning’s Gospel [John 6:56-69] gives us one of the strangest and saddest incidents in the New Testament. At the close of Jesus’s “bread of life” discourse—a talk that takes up the whole of the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel and which we’ve been hearing together in church for several weeks now—we hear that “when many of his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?’” [John 6: 60] A little bit later, John tells us, “Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” [John 6: 66] What on earth did Jesus say that his followers couldn’t accept? Why did so many of them turn away and stop following him?

            As a preacher, I know something about saying things that people cannot accept. One Monday morning several years ago--the day after giving what I thought a rather mild sermon on a social issue in a suburban parish where I was rector--I heard a voicemail message from a drunken parishioner who asked, “Who do you think you are to come in here and tell us what you think?” And just this summer, after I had called for our Lee-Jackson windows to be removed, I read an online story about my statement entitled, “Another Fatwa from the Imam”. (Wrong on both counts.) The National Rifle Association is not likely to name me their person of the year, and I carry the distinction of having been called out by both Franklin Graham and Antonin Scalia. So I know about teachings that people won’t accept. Whenever a preacher ascends the steps of a pulpit and tries to do public theology, someone who disagrees is bound to be offended.

            But something else is going on here. Jesus has not been talking about public, social issues. He has been talking about himself as the “bread of life”: 

Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. [John 6: 56-57]

 

Because you and I are accustomed to talking about Jesus as the Word made flesh, these “bread of life” words do not sound like “another fatwa from the imam”.  But something in them sounded dangerous enough to offend his followers to the point that they would stop going around with him. What on earth could that be?

            I think there are a couple of things going on here.  For one, Jesus seems to be talking about himself in rather exalted language. Imagine yourself to be one of those disaffected followers.  You came to Jesus because something about his life and ministry attracted you.  He was a prophetic teacher, a healer. But then he started talking about himself as the “Son of Man” and the “Holy One of God”. John’s Gospel begins with the claim that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.  The Jesus movement is not just a personal healing movement.  It’s not just about my personal wellness. The Jesus movement is one with social and cosmic implications.  What Jesus is up to tells us something about the beating heart of the universe.  The kind of love and justice and compassion we see both in and around Jesus show us the final truths about God and us.  Signing on to follow Jesus means committing oneself to heal and bless and change not only myself but the world.

            So if you were someone who started following Jesus simply because you were attracted to what he could do for you, the idea that his movement might be about more than making you feel better might shock and offend you.  And that leads to the second thing going on here:  all this talk of flesh and blood must mean something to Jesus’s original hearers that it doesn’t quite mean to us.  For us to eat Jesus’s flesh and drink Jesus’s blood is not only about taking communion.  For us to partake in the bread of life is not just about sharing the benefits of his company.  For us to drink his blood must have something to do with what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “the cost of discipleship”.

            There have been two times this year when I have been brought close to tears by something I saw on the news.  The first, last June, was when the families of the nine women and men killed at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston went to court and told the shooter they forgave him.  The second, last week, was when former President Jimmy Carter rather matter-of-factly discussed his cancer and its treatment.  “I’m perfectly at ease with whatever comes,” Mr. Carter said. “I do have a deep religious faith, which I’m very grateful for.”

            I suppose the common thread in these two stories lies in how powerful it is to see people who not only actually believe what they profess to believe, but who actually act out in their lives the words they profess in their faith.  The families in Charleston and President Carter have many things in common, I’m sure, but for me the chief among them is this:  they understand that following Jesus has implications.  Following Jesus means that you extend to others the forgiveness you ask for yourself.  Following Jesus means that you stake your life on the bet that the promises of God and Jesus are real.  There’s no magic to living a transformative life dedicated to the healing and liberation of the world. All you have to do is act on what you say you believe. Easier, of course, to say than to do, but revolutionary when somebody actually tries it.

            I have been ordained now for almost 40 years, and over the course of my working life I’ve been saddened to observe that some people will only go so far before they fall off and go away. It’s one of the mysteries of church life, really. Those of us who work in the church today have become obsessed with the statistics and demographics of declining church membership and attendance.  We are doing a lot of soul-searching about why people have stopped coming.  We are thinking and brainstorming about how we might better attract younger people to our services. I am sure that there are many things we could do better to make ourselves more relevant to modern life.  But there are times when I wonder if the countercultural claims of the Gospel are simply too much for most people.  Putting gyms and coffee bars in the parish hall will no doubt attract some customers, but let’s be honest about it: following Jesus will always be a minority enterprise. Jesus promises eternal life. He also asks that we deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him. “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” “Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.”

            In today’s Gospel, after the others have departed, Jesus poses this question to the twelve who remain: “Do you also wish to go away?”—not, under the circumstances, a surprising question. And then Peter answers him: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” [John 6: 67-69]

             

            Following Jesus entails some risk. It means signing on to some values that push deeply against the culture. It involves a willingness to stand with people who can do nothing for you.  It asks that you find your fulfillment not on your own but in mutuality and communion with others. There is, in fact, a cost of discipleship.  In a self-serving culture, many around you will be confused and offended by what you stand for. They won’t get a life centered around love and justice and not around self-aggrandizement.

            But that life has so much more to it than risk. As Peter says, “You have the words of eternal life.”  Life lived in solidarity with the poor, the sick, the oppressed is neither unrelievedly grim nor entirely self-denying. There is suffering and pain, to be sure, but there is also joy and freedom in standing with those whom in the Beatitudes Jesus calls “blessed”.  The folks who gave up following Jesus did so because they thought they didn’t need him.  The ones who stayed knew themselves to have more in common with the strugglers and sufferers than they did with those who appeared to have made it.  They knew their need of God.  They could say, with President Carter, “I’m perfectly at ease with whatever comes.”

            Jesus is the bread of life.  Some people think they don’t need him. Others know they can’t live without him. Our need for God and Jesus is for some a hard teaching and difficult to accept. But for others it’s the words of eternal life. I will go to my grave mystified that some people don’t seem to need Jesus while others can’t seem to live without him. But I know which group I belong to, and invite you now to join me in the grateful banquet of life and hope and justice that gathers at his table. Amen.

Homily: The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost [August 16, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

            Fifty years ago this week—August 20, 1965—Jonathan Daniels was shot and killed in Hayneville, Alabama.  Jon Daniels was a seminarian at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had spent the summer demonstrating for civil rights in Alabama and doing voter registration work in Lowndes County.  On the day he died, Jon Daniels had been released from jail. Along with a Roman Catholic priest and two African American civil rights workers, he approached Varner’s Cash Store in order to buy some cold drinks. A deputy sheriff with a shotgun aimed at Ruby Sales, one of the women in the party. Daniels stepped in front to protect her and was killed. The man who shot Jonathan Daniels pled self-defense and was later acquitted by an all-white jury.

            Several years later, I entered the seminary Jonathan Daniels attended, and I studied with faculty members who had known and taught him.  That seminary—now called the Episcopal Divinity School—has long had a tradition of remembering Jonathan Daniels in its liturgical calendar, and in the last decades the larger Episcopal Church has come to recognize him as well. This past week, my wife Kathy, our Director of Programs Ruth Frey, and I joined Bishop Budde and many church people from the diocese and around the nation on a Jonathan Daniels pilgrimage sponsored by Episcopal Divinity School to Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery, and finally to Hayneville, Alabama. We spent several days reflecting not only on Jonathan Daniels’ life and witness but also on the ongoing issues of racial justice in America. We concluded with a Eucharist in the courtroom where Jonathan Daniels’ killer was acquitted.

As part of the larger church’s observance of Jonathan Daniels, the cathedral is installing his bust in our human rights porch, and just this week the carving was completed. Following this service we will have a special forum to say more about that installation, and the bust will be formally dedicated at an Evensong in October.

There are so many things to say about Jonathan Daniels, about race, about martyrdom, about reconciliation, and there is so much going on about racial justice in America today that could be informed by his witness.  How do we begin to think about these things?  This morning we get some help from the sixth chapter of John.  This passage nominally concerns the bread and wine of the Eucharist, but there is more to it than that. In today’s Gospel, Jesus says:

Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. [John 6: 54-56]

 

You and I are so used to hearing Jesus talk this way that we don’t really hear how radical these words are. The Torah prohibits Jews from drinking blood. That prohibition lies behind the kosher food laws and the requirement that all the blood be drained from an animal when it is slaughtered.  A Jew would not risk consuming blood and violating the commandment. As the book of Leviticus tells us,

For the life of every creature—its blood is its life; therefore I have said to the people of Israel: You shall not eat the blood of any creature, for the life of every creature is its blood; whoever eats it shall be cut off. [Leviticus 17:14]

 

For Jesus to talk to his followers about eating his flesh and drinking his blood seems eminently normal to you and me who use that language when we take communion.  But to a Jewish audience, Jesus’s words must have sounded radical if not openly sacrilegious. Speaking as a Jew, Jesus cannot mean that we are literally to drink his blood. He must be telling us something else.

What I think he is telling us gets not only at who he is but at who we are called to be, too. It amounts to a reversal of all our ideas about power, especially considering the way ancient warfare was practiced. In many places in the ancient world, victorious warriors routinely drank the blood of those they conquered. In telling us to eat his flesh and drink his blood, Jesus turns that equation upside down.  Here we have a Messiah, a king, telling us to drink his blood.  He’s not asking us to risk our lives for him.  He’s risking his life for us.

In the second century, Tertullian famously said, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”  The Christian word “martyr” literally means “witness”. The people we call martyrs are witnesses to a deep truth about Jesus, God, and us. God became one of us in Jesus. Jesus put his life at risk for us. Christianity is not only about loving your neighbor and trying to be good.  Christianity is about this deep, mysterious truth at the heart of the universe.  The one at the center of creation actually risks everything for us. Power—in its pretentious, inflated, pomposity—power is not the operating principle of the universe. Love—in its vulnerable, self-giving, compassionate mystery—is.

Jonathan Daniels was the 28^th civil rights worker killed in the earlier days of the movement.  He was neither the first nor the last martyr in the cause of racial justice.  In recent years, months, and days we have seen other martyrs who have put their lives at risk on our behalf:  the nine women and men killed in Charleston most obviously come to mind.  But so do Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland and others.  The one we have come to know in Jesus keeps coming back among us in the person of these witnesses. And yet we seem not ever to recognize him.

We are also observing a second fiftieth anniversary this week: the Watts riots in my home city of Los Angeles.  From August 11 to 17, 1965 the city erupted in violence that began when a young black man, Marquette Frye, was pulled over for reckless driving. The incident grew into six days of violence covering 46 square miles of the city.  When it was all over, 34 people were dead.

In 1965 we were saddened when people like Jonathan Daniels (or James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner a year earlier, or Medgar Evers a year before that) were murdered, but we were not particularly surprised. That was the south. But when Los Angeles erupted in rage and violence many (especially whites) were shocked. Los Angeles was considered at the time as the most hospitable U.S. city for African Americans to live in. Reports at the time always referred to the suburban-looking “wide tree-lined streets” of Watts. The racial injustice in Alabama was obvious. The racial injustice in California (and later Michigan, Massachusetts, and even the District of Columbia) was harder to see.

Fifty years later, we have yet to learn all the lessons of 1965. We live in a country that has gutted the Voting Rights Act which was bought at the price of the violence and death we are remembering this week. But some things have changed, many for the better. I have been to Alabama twice now, and each time I go there I am impressed (and frankly a bit surprised) at how intentionally the deep south has come to terms with its own history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and racial injustice. But when I come back home to the north, I am struck with how we continue to live in a kind of racial fantasy land. Jonathan Daniels was murdered doing civil rights work in the south in 1965. But he could just as easily have been killed working for school busing in Boston in 1975. The killings of unarmed black people happen in southern cities to be sure, but they also happen in Michigan, New York, Maryland, Ohio, and California. Alabama and South Carolina have removed their Confederate battle flags. Some northern institutions have yet to do so.

Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. [John 6: 54-56]

 

Those Christians who have died in the service of racial justice—from Jonathan Daniels to Clementa Pinckney—have been strengthened and sustained by the example of Jesus—the one who puts himself at risk for us. We don’t follow one who consumes us. We follow one who offers himself on our behalf. As followers of Jesus, as brothers and sisters of Jonathan Daniels, you and I need today to ask ourselves some hard questions. What are we doing—not out there or down there but up here and in here—to come to terms with our own history of racial injustice, with our own personal, interpersonal, institutional, and cultural racism? Civil rights looked a lot easier when all you had to do was get on a bus and go desegregate a lunch counter in another state. The ongoing work right here is harder and more risky. It asks that we open ourselves up to the questions we would pose to others.

In telling us to eat his flesh and drink his blood, Jesus turns the tables on our usual expectations of what holy figures are supposed to do. He refuses to point the finger at others. He opens himself to the world. In this time and place in America, you and I are being asked to live out that logic in our own lives and work. Jonathan Daniels understood it in his day and offered himself so that our history of slavery, racism, segregation, and oppression might be healed. His life and death ask no less than that you and I do the same--that we put ourselves—our lives, our comfort, our privilege—at risk on behalf of others so that all may live and thrive in an America worthy of its name.

We can’t all be martyrs, but we can all be witnesses. We can offer ourselves in the spirit of Jesus and after the example of Jonathan Daniels. We probably won’t get a saint’s day in the calendar or a bust in the narthex, but the nation we inhabit just might finally begin to live into its promise of justice and equality for all.  Amen.

Homily: The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost [August 2, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

            Maybe it’s the oppressive southern heat and humidity we felt over the past weeks, but in summer my thoughts always turn to Flannery O’Connor, the great Southern American fiction writer who died a little over 50 years ago.  Flannery O’Connor was a devout “pre-Vatican II” Roman Catholic, and her stories and novels employ highly symbolic characters and incidents to advance deeply theological arguments. In an essay she once described the problem many readers have with symbols and symbolism:

Now the word symbol scares a good many people off, just as the word art does. They seem to feel that a symbol is some mysterious thing put in arbitrarily by the writer to frighten the common reader--sort of a literary Masonic grip that is only for the initiated. They seem to think that it is a way of saying something that you aren't actually saying, and so if they can be got to read a reputedly symbolic work at all, they approach it as if it were a problem in algebra. Find x. And when they do find or think they find this abstraction, x, then they go off with an elaborate sense of satisfaction and the notion that they have "understood" the story. Many students confuse the process of understanding a thing with understanding it. [“The Nature and Aim of Fiction”, from Mystery and Manners]

 

If you’ve ever taught or studied literature, you know that symbols tend to take on a life of their own.  Even those of us who think we understand how symbols work often want to nail them down and permaplaque them into one fixed meaning.  This is not going to be a sermon about the Confederate battle flag, but I will observe that the disagreements about what that flag means to different people prove Flannery O’Connor’s point.  Some people say that the flag symbolizes racism. Other say it represents tradition.  The point is it represents both and probably a lot of other things besides.  That’s how symbols work.  We don’t understand them by solving for x.  We understand them by opening ourselves to the range of all their possible meanings.

The same could be said for the Eucharist. Today is the first of several Sundays over the course of the summer in Year B which we preachers dread--when we immerse ourselves in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, and Jesus’s famous “bread of life” discourse.  Last week we heard tell of how Jesus fed the five thousand with five loaves and two fish, a story with Eucharistic overtones occurring in all four gospels.  In today’s passage, the crowd follows Jesus after that feeding and essentially asks him for more food.  Jesus replies that he—not the loaves and fishes--is the bread of life.  God may have given the Exodus Jews manna in the wilderness, and Jesus may have fed five thousand with bread and fish, but these miracles were not really about literal, physical food. As he says to the somewhat peckish crowd,

Then Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world." They said to him, "Sir, give us this bread always."

Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty." [John 6: 24-35]

I have been a priest for almost forty years now, and over the course of my working life I’ve had several repeating pastoral conversations.  One of them always rises near the top. When taking communion, people want to know if they’re understanding it correctly.  They want to know what it means, and they’re worried that when they’re taking communion they’re not making the right mental sense of it.  In Flannery O’Connor’s words, they wonder if they’re properly solving for x.

There are, of course, almost as many ways to understand the Eucharist as there are Christian traditions.  Roman Catholics emphasize transubstantiation, the notion that the bread and wine of communion become the literal body and blood of Christ. (A Roman Catholic priest friend of mine says that the real miracle is believing that those gummy wafers are actually bread.) Anglicans and Lutherans emphasize what we call the “Real Presence” of Christ in the sacrament. The more Protestant Christians  emphasize that the bread and wine are simply a way to remember the death and resurrection of Jesus.

In some ways these sacramental disagreements mirror the scriptural arguments over the meaning and identity of Jesus.  Is he a preacher, teacher, and healer? Is he the Messiah? Is he God incarnate? In John’s gospel, those who pursued Jesus to ask for more bread and fish wanted to get into an argument with him over what it all meant.  But notice that Jesus does not fall into that trap.  He does not lecture them about the nature and meaning of symbols and sacraments.  He merely tells them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty." To which they reply, "Sir, give us this bread always."

In one of her letters, Flannery O’Connor tells of attending a dinner party with another great writer, Mary McCarthy, whom O’Connor rather derisively called “a Big Intellectual”. Mary McCarthy went on and on about how she had left the church when young and how she now had come to see the Eucharist “as a symbol, and implied it was a pretty good one.” In Flannery O’Connor’s words, here is what came next:

I then said, in a very shaky voice, "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it." That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest is expendable. [The Habit of Being]

 

"Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it." Perhaps not the most elegant expression of sacramental theology, but you get the point. Just as those who followed Jesus contested with each other about his real identity, so we Christians have argued for centuries about what we are doing when we gather around this table and share bread and wine together in Jesus’s name.  Like readers solving for x, we have focused too narrowly on what the bread and the wine of communion “mean”. We think of these elements as symbols--that they stand for something else—some version of Jesus’s physical and spiritual presence. 

But remember what happens in today’s Gospel. Jesus does not tell us that the loaves and fishes are the bread of life. He tells us that he is the bread of life--“that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world."  When we gather together around God’s table and share the bread of life, we are not—symbolically or otherwise—eating Jesus.  We are eating with Jesus. This meal is neither an algebra problem nor a ritual sacrifice.  When we gather at this table we come into the presence of the bread of life, and that means we engage Jesus himself. We almost always mistake the symbol for the thing it represents. The point of this meal is not what happens to the bread.  The point of this meal is our shared fellowship with Jesus. We make him present not only in breaking bread but in our ongoing work of prayer and faithful action in the world. Eucharist is not just a ritual meal.  It is a way of living. 

"Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it." You and I think too much. The Eucharist is not a problem to be solved. It is not a set of propositions about God and us.  The Eucharist is a meal, a time together in which we are fed by and with Jesus.  We are not eating Jesus.  We are eating with Jesus. When we gather together around God’s table, Jesus is with us in the room.  Like those who followed Jesus to get more loaves and fishes, and like the Exodus community in the wilderness, we become confused and our attention wanders to the vehicles of Jesus’s presence rather than to the presence itself.  As Flannery O’Connor declared, “this is all I will ever be able to say about it . . . except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest is expendable.”

Don’t get distracted, and don’t overthink it.  God invites you to this table, so that you, along with others gathered here and around the world, may bask in the presence of Jesus.  It isn’t about the bread. It’s about the bread of life. Jesus is within and among us. His meal nourishes and sustains us. In his presence we will never hunger or thirst.  If we let them, symbols and sacraments will always confuse us. But if we open ourselves up to their power they can transform us. We will never entirely get it, but that doesn’t matter. It’s not about what we think.  It’s about who we’re with and who we are in his presence. Come to the table with Jesus. His presence among us will do the rest.  Amen.

 

 

 

Homily: The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost [July 26, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

            If you grew up in the 1950s and 60s as I did, and if you watched The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights, then you probably saw a lot of tap dancing.  Performers have their own lingo, and one of my favorite phrases that tap dancers use is “the B.S. Chorus”, their name for that easy, repetitive dance step that never fails to get sustained response from an audience. It is the easiest step that dancers ever do, but for some reason the audience always seems to fall for it.  Hence the term “B.S.” which, we’re told, does not stand for “Boy Scout”.

            In some sense, miracles are the “B.S. Chorus” of Jesus’s ministry.  In today’s Gospel, we hear tell of two of them:  in the first, Jesus feeds five thousand people with only five loaves and two fish. In the second, he walks on the water, crossing a rough lake to calm the fears of his companions in a boat. 

            It must have really rankled Jesus that, for all the time he spent talking about love, faith, compassion, and justice, the crowds always loved those big miracles.  In fact we know it rankled him, because a little later in this sixth chapter of John we hear him say, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.”[John 6:26] “Do it again, Jesus!” However much we preachers want to be appreciated for the nuanced subtleties of our ministries, the crowd always seems to hanker for another rendition of the B.S. Chorus.

                        The two miracle stories we heard today are separated in John’s gospel by this intriguing verse:

When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself. [John 6:15]

 

            I will bet that walking on water and feeding five thousand people with mere scraps were real crowd-pleasers.  Some biblical scholars assert that many in the crowds followed Jesus not so much because of his teaching and healing but because he appeared to be something of a first-century magician.

            John 6:15 suggests that Jesus himself was aware of this problem. "When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself." He knew that, as much as his vision of life offered a new way to live as compassionate comrades in a community of liberation and justice, the crowds would be happier if he dropped the philosophy and just kept on doing the old B.S. Chorus. In this intriguing moment we see Jesus going apart to recover himself and remember what he came out to do in the first place. Lots of folks will love you when you hand out free food and entertain them with magic in the bargain.  But playing to the adulation of the crowd only takes one so far; and when your fans pull you away from your core reason for being, then it is time to take stock and move on.

I know a great priest in Boston named Ed Rodman--a man who has lived his life as both activist and seminary professor.  After a lifetime of social justice work and teaching, Ed formulated some sayings he codified as "Rodman's Rules".  My favorite is the first one: “Never believe your own propaganda.”

 

Never believe your own propaganda.  You could say that this morning's Gospel--with its brief glimpse into the interior life of Jesus--exemplifies the wisdom of Ed Rodman's first rule.  Never believe your own propaganda. Just because you project an image outward to the world, there's no reason that you have to fall for it yourself.

 

This year I've been reading and studying a lot about the great Roman Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton.  Merton was a brilliant and complex man who wrote about many issues, but I am most deeply engaged by his reflections on what it means to be an authentic human being.  Following many Jungian thinkers, Merton believed that in childhood and adolescence one develops a "false self"--an identity that will please our various authority figures.  That false self helps us leave home and enter adulthood, but there comes a time when it is no longer adequate to the challenges of our situation.  What we often call the "mid-life crisis" is, for Merton and others, a time when our false self breaks up, and we receive the opportunity to discover and live out of our true one. In Merton's words,

 

It is true to say that for me sanctity consists in being myself and for you sanctity consists in being your self and that, in the last analysis, your sanctity will never be mine and mine will never be yours, except in the communism of charity and grace.

FOR me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. ["Things in Their Identity", New Seeds of Contemplation]

Following Thomas Merton's analysis, we might think of Jesus's withdrawal to the mountain as an attempt to reconnect with his true, authentic self. Jesus knew who he was, and in the Gospels we repeatedly see him behaving not as a traditional holy man is expected to act but as a grounded, compassionate human being would. In the face of human need, Jesus breaks rules.  In spite of a restrictive purity code, he embraces those who are ritually unclean.  Faced with spiritual practices that pretend in themselves to guarantee sanctity, Jesus points us instead to examine the state of our own hearts.

Jesus lived coherently and transparently, and he invites us into the same kind of living. The way Thomas Merton frames this is as a choice between our true or false selves.  A priest friend of mine who is also a therapist puts the alternatives this way:  are we going to persist in the actions that satisfy our ego--that projection of who we are to others; or are we going to engage in work that grows and nurtures our self?  The columnist David Brooks has framed this choice as between the résumé self--the version of me that I list on my résumé--and "eulogy self"--the version of me I would like the preacher to expound on at my funeral.  However you understand this tension--true versus false self, ego versus self, résumé versus eulogy--it's clear that human life is always lived under the opportunity to choose between projecting an identity outward and living an identity from within.

And what we see in the Gospel this morning is how Jesus--an authentic, grounded human being--navigates this tension.  The crowds loved the first, loaves and fishes, trick--in fact they loved it so much they wanted to make him king.  They are hungry for another big event.  Jesus withdraws, regroups, and then comes back for an encore—this time waling on the water.  So it’s not as if he totally abandons his public persona. He bows to the ego’s demands and satisfies the crowd's hunger for a holy magician.  But we are led to believe that, in that centering pause between miraculous feeding and magical walking, Jesus went apart long enough to remember and rediscover who he actually was. And as the gospel story plays itself out for the rest of his ministry, we see Jesus letting the crowd-pleasing side of him decline so that his deeper, more authentic aspects might emerge.

You and I--especially the older ones among us--are familiar with this ongoing struggle between ego and self.  The rewards of the ego—power, status, money, fame--may satisfy in youth, but later in life they pall. As we age, life invites us to let go of the transitory pleasures of the ego and seek the satisfactions that abide. As we shed the false self, the true one begins to emerge. One might say that moving out of ego and into self is the primary work of old age.  The career-topping achievement that meant so much to you at thirty means less when you're sixty-five.  Those relationships you took for granted when younger now seem to be the only things deserving your time and attention.  The world rewards the ego. There are no public celebrations for the virtues of the true self. But who we are matters, and these are the choices always on offer for us human beings. In this as in so many life areas, the Gospel shows us how Jesus himself could make them. And his making them empowers us to make them, too.

Never believe your own propaganda.  For you to be a saint means to be yourself.  Jesus withdrew to the mountain by himself.  As we face into the challenges of any given moment, it is always tempting just to give them another version of the old B.S. Chorus. But life is not a tap dance; and when you’re honest with yourself you know the difference between what is bogus about you from what is real. So let go of your false self. Encourage your true one. Join Jesus on life’s journey into peace and wholeness and authenticity.  As we gather this morning at God's table, may the bread and wine of this sacred meal strengthen us to go forward on that journey, to move away from the claims of ego and toward the growth of the self, and to discover--with Jesus and each other--who we really are.  Amen.

Homily: The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost [July 19, 2015] All Saints, Pasadena

 

"Public and Private"

Kathy and I have lived in Washington DC  for three years now, yet the locals never cease asking me how I'm adjusting to life in the District after having grown up in Los Angeles. "It's really not a problem," I  answer.  “Hollywood and Washington are exactly the same culture. So I’m very much at home here.”

As you can imagine, this is not a popular answer inside the Beltway, but it is a true one. Washingtonians may think of themselves as civil servants and diplomats, but from what I’ve seen they behave pretty much like network executives and theatrical agents. Both Hollywood and Washington are one-industry towns.  Indeed, both cities refer to themselves as “this town”—as in “you’ll never do lunch in this town again,” or “seasoned politicos see trouble brewing for policy analysts in this town”.  And, when you think about it, show business and politics are really twin branches of one enterprise. They’re both about packaging a person and projecting an image.  Everything in one city is about glitz and hype.  You could also say the same of Los Angeles.

So growing up in L.A. and around Hollywood people has actually been an asset for me, especially when it comes to reading people.  Well-known Washingtonians resemble their Hollywood cousins especially in their personal hidden-ness. In public they are often nothing like they in private.  My father was an actor, and his public and private personae could not have been more different from each other.  Politicians are pretty much the same. They project a public image that has almost nothing in common with how they are when the microphones and cameras disappear.

In some sense, politicians and actors only read back to us the public-private discontinuity that we all inhabit. Who are we in company, and who are we when alone? I've thought about this public-private disjunction a lot, especially as I've contemplated the Gospel for this morning [Mark 6:30-34, 53-56] because it is perhaps our greatest spiritual problem, especially in this social media age. But we humans were this way even before the advent of Twitter. We expect actors and politicians to wear masks. That’s what they do for a living, and at least they know the benefits and the risks they’re taking.  But what about the rest of us?

In today’s reading, Mark’s gospel tells us how, after a whirlwind of teaching and healing, Jesus and his companions decide to come away to a deserted place and rest for a while. But the crowd sees them and they follow the Jesus group to their refuge. Jesus is tired, and he is entitled to be cranky. But here is the difference between Jesus and the rest of us—or at least between Jesus and me.  Jesus does not throw a hissy fit. When cornered in private, Jesus responds as he had in public--not in anger but in love.  He doesn’t tell them to come back during office hours.  He has compassion on the crowd because they seem to him “like sheep without a shepherd”. So he teaches and heals them. He does, in private, what he was doing in public.

For Jesus, there is no Garbo-like "I want to be alone" moment here.  Jesus is who he is.  He’ll heal you in public. He’ll heal you in private. He is a unified self in both arenas. He does not have a public act and a private one.  He is one coherent human being who actually knows who he is and behaves consistently all the time and with everyone. This doesn’t mean that he is always happy or cheerful.  But he is never bogus.  He knows who he is and invites you into a zone of compassion and love, a space of healing and peace—a space where you can know and be who you are, too.

Now you'd think that knowing who you are and being that person consistently would be pretty easy.  But it is actually one of the hardest things we ever attempt to do. Growing up in the hothouse of the family, school, and peer groups, as infants and children we often develop a false self in response to the rewards and punishments we receive from parents and other authority figures.  This false self has its place: it helps us navigate the rapids of adolescence and early adulthood and eventually to get out of the house.  But there comes a time later in life—a personal, relationship, or professional crisis—when that false self is no longer adequate to the demands of the situation.  And what we call the “mid-life crisis” is often simply the breaking up of that false self and the opportunity to discover our real identity.  

By being who he was in both public and private, Jesus exemplifies for us his followers what it means to be a fully realized human being.  The Roman Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton [who I will discuss/did discuss at the Forum this morning] puts it this way:

We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours. We may wear now one mask and now another, and never, if we so desire, appear with our own true face. But we cannot make these choices with impunity. Causes have effects, and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them. If we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that truth eludes us when we finally come to need it! [New Seeds of Contemplation, Chapter 5]

            It is no accident that Thomas Merton learned about true and false selves while living in a monastery.  Monastic community may look peaceful from the outside, but it is the most intense kind of living there is; and there’s no place to hide when you’re with your brothers (or sisters) 24 hours a day.  But monasteries don’t only offer intense communities; they also have what we call a “Rule of Life”, a monastic commitment to balancing prayer, study, work, rest, and play in a holistic structure that allows one to experience the fullness of God’s presence in the routine round of the everyday.  You can’t survive in a monastery very long if you’re always wearing a mask. The pressure is too intense. So one of the ways you learn to live monastically is to relax and accept your identity within a shared structure. As a contemporary monk and writer, Curtis Almquist of the Cowley Fathers, says:

Benedict's [monastic] Rule is for a “24-7” living experience, nothing pie-in-the-sky. If this is what you say you believe and value, how do you live this out in the course of the day, i.e., what’s your praxis? The end of Benedictine spirituality is to develop a transparent personality. [SSJE website]

            What Curtis Almquist says of the Benedictine Rule for monks and nuns could be said of the Christian life itself:  the end of following Jesus is “to develop a transparent personality”. Jesus went into the wilderness seeking rest and found people there who needed him. In his most private moment, he was who he was, and he responded with the compassion he exhibited in public. He was one unified, seamless person.  Jesus had what Almquist would call “a transparent personality”.

You and I can have a transparent personality, too.  But to get it we have to work at it.  We can start by adopting a Rule of Life—a commitment to working, playing, resting, praying in a definable rhythm.  We can continue by deciding, in Thomas Merton’s words, no longer to lie to ourselves or to others.  That decision is one LGBT people have shown straight people like me how to make. It’s a decision that people of color and women and oppressed people have shown white men like me to make.  The step into liberation is the same whatever social location you’re in.  It’s the central act of following Jesus:  I am no longer going to lie to myself or to others.  I am going to be who I am, in all environments, regardless of the discomfort that may cause.  The decision no longer to lie to ourselves or to others is one that each of us faces on a daily basis. It is a choice we can put off but can never finally avoid. It’s one we can be strengthened to make only in community with Jesus and each other.

And that’s why we need the church. Christianity is not a solo act, and the church is really a kind of laboratory for authentic living. We need to come in and hear the stories of how Jesus lived and what Jesus stood for.  We need to come into this place and try on being our authentic selves with each other.  We need to come in and remember that we, like Jesus, are called to love and transform the world.  We need to come in so that we may go out. You don’t have to be two or five or sixteen people to get through life.  You only have to be one:  the precious, fragile person created in God’s image and loved and redeemed by Jesus. 

We come in to go out.  It will be time, soon enough, to navigate the rapids of “this town”. But for now, we are here with divine permission to be who we are. And we come now to this table. May the grace and acceptance we find here empower us to try on being who we really are so that, with practice, we can offer our true selves to the world.  Trust what happens here. The world needs the real you. Nobody needs your public relations version of you. Everyone needs you as you are. This is not the conventional wisdom of Washington, Hollywood, or anyplace else.  But it is the truth. And for it we now proceed together to give thanks.  Amen.

Homily: The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost/Independence Day [July 5, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

            I'm probably one of the very few people in America who loves Elaine May's 1987 movie Ishtar, one of the great box office flops of all time. It’s a comedy starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman about two loser songwriters adrift in the Middle East.  The film is full of the terrible songs they write, and here are the lyrics to my all-time favorite among them:

 

Telling the truth can be dangerous business; 

Honest and popular don't go hand in hand.

If you admit that you play the accordion,

No one will hire you in a rock 'n' roll band.

 

            Truer words were ne'er spoke.  "Telling the truth can be dangerous business."  Or, as Jesus tells us today, "Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house." [Mark 6] We seem only to want to hear the truth when it flatters us.  And we don't particularly like it when people tell us what we really don't want to hear.

 

            A perhaps more high-toned example than Ishtar is Shakespeare’s King Lear, a tragedy with a famous opening scene: the aging King announces his decision to retire and split his realm three ways among his daughters, giving the largest share to the daughter who can answer this question best:  “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?”

            The first two daughters, Regan and Goneril, are practiced bureaucratic infighters, and they outdo each other in fulsome expressions of love for the old man.  When it comes time for Cordelia, the third daughter, to speak, she declines to answer this crazy question, saying:

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty
According to my bond; nor more nor less.

 

            We all know what happens.  Lear becomes enraged, and disowns Cordelia saying: “thy truth, then, be thy dower.” [King Lear, Act I Scene I] She is banished from the kingdom and disinherited to boot.

Whenever I read or see King Lear, I remember what Jonathan Lear [no relation], a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, said about it.  Jonathan Lear is also a Freudian psychoanalyst, and he writes intriguingly about the connections between philosophy and psychology.  In his book Open Minded Lear tells the story of a dream he used to have about his name—Lear—and its connection to the Shakespeare play.   He realized that in his dreams he was not King Lear so much as he was Cordelia, the daughter who refused to tell the king what he wanted to hear.  Jonathan Lear’s flash of insight came when he realized that Cordelia’s problem was his problem too.  Here is what he says:

To identify with Cordelia is to want to be blunt, to avoid embellishment, flattery, or hypocrisy-and to want to be loved for doing just that.  This is not a set of desires which get satisfied often.  By and large, people prefer to be flattered.  They find it hard to recognize love in a blunt appraisal; and they find it even harder to reciprocate such love.  Cordelia's strategy is not the route to massive popularity. -- Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul, p. 3

 

We want to tell the truth, and we want to be loved for doing it.  That was Cordelia’s problem.  That was Jonathan Lear’s problem. In going home to Nazareth and preaching in the synagogue, that may have been Jesus’s problem.  I can’t speak for you, but I realize that often it’s my problem, too.

Yesterday was the Fourth of July--Independence Day--and we're gathered this morning both to celebrate America and to think theologically about it.  Like King Lear, Nations and empires—from ancient Rome to 19^th century Britain, to 21^st century America--are better at praising themselves than they are at opening up to judgment.  We love our boosters more than we do our critics.  Jesus's journey to his hometown synagogue and that congregation's rejection of him raise some important questions for us about what it means for religious people to tell (or hear) the truth.  Telling the truth can, indeed, be dangerous business.  Sometimes prophets can feel like the accordion player who showed up at a heavy metal concert.

Of course, truth-tellers often make things hard on themselves. On occasion, we wrap ourselves in the slogan, "speaking truth to power", a phrase I have never liked.  Here is what the great progressive intellectual Noam Chomsky says about “speaking truth to power”:

I don’t agree with the slogan [“speak truth to power”]. First of all, you don’t have to speak truth to power, because they know it already. And secondly, you don’t speak truth to anybody, that’s too arrogant. What you do is join with people and try to find the truth, so you listen to them and tell them what you think and so on, and you try to encourage people to think for themselves. [Noam Chomsky]

 

 

            So what is a prophet, or a prophetic community, to do?  We want to speak the truth, we want to hold power accountable, and we want, if possible, to avoid being crushed. Many of the people we call saints today were those who stood up for Christianity against the oppressive claims of empire.  They were martyrs—literally “witnesses”—to the truth of the Gospel, and they did indeed speak truth to power.  So martyrdom—witness—is an ancient and honorable tradition in Christianity.  And there are times when we need to risk martyrdom in the service of what is right.  But I’ve been around the movement world a long time, and a lot of what we call prophecy is simply self-dramatization.  There is another ancient tradition, a more pragmatic one, a tradition that counsels working with power to achieve good ends. Of course, there are times when imperial power is intractable, when you have to speak. But there are also times to work with power to bring about a good result for everybody.  The trick, of course, is to be able to tell the difference.

            Today's Epistle from the Letter to the Hebrews [Hebrews 11:8-16] is one of my very favorite passages in scripture.  The writer lists all the great patriarchs and matriarchs who lived their lives in faith and died without seeing God's promises fulfilled.  He concludes with these words:

All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them. [Hebrews 11]

            Like our Israelite forbears, we contemporary Christians also "desire a better country".  We know that we are "strangers and foreigners here on earth".  We too seek a homeland.  Christians will always be caught in the gap between the country we desire and the country we have.  Christianity is always countercultural in every era and civilization. Gospel values can never be perfectly realized in any earthly nation state. Even as great as we may think America is, it will always fall short of our longings for the divine standard.  Like the Israel of Bible times, America will espouse values to which it cannot always live up.  As great as our accomplishments may be, the list of our shortcomings is long.  We are deluding ourselves if we think it can ever be otherwise.

            And so God sends us truth-tellers, call them prophets or idealists, who dare to speak what we often do not wish to hear.  Sometimes they're Civil Rights demonstrators, sometimes anti-war activists.  Sometimes they advocate for the homeless and the poor.  Sometimes they blow whistles and expose secrecy or wrongdoing in high places. 

            Jonathan Lear was right: if we want to be blunt, to avoid embellishment, flattery, or hypocrisy, then we're probably not going to be loved for doing so.  Noam Chomsky was right: power already knows the truth, and they don’t need to hear it from you. We need to talk not to but with each other to find a new truth. Jesus was rejected in his hometown, but many who denied him eventually became his followers.  His truth-telling always served God’s greater purpose of love.

            On this Independence Day weekend, let us rededicate ourselves to building that heavenly country that we continue to want America to be.  Let us acknowledge that we will inevitably fall short of the better country God holds out to us as the divine standard. But let us never give up trying to make it real for ourselves, our households, our communities, and all the special recipients of God’s care:  the poor, the sick, the oppressed, the lonely, the lost.  And let us continue to give thanks for the prophets, the truth-tellers, the blunt talkers who help us identify and close up the distance between God’s hope for us and the lived reality of how things are.

 

            Telling the truth can be dangerous business; 

            Honest and popular don't go hand in hand.

            If you admit that you play the accordion,

            No one will hire you in a rock 'n' roll band.

 

            So then: Power knows the truth. God’s better country awaits. If we persist in talking respectfully with each other in truth and in love, one day we just might find an accordion somewhere out there in the mosh pit.  Amen.