I.
In 1978, my wife Kathy and I got married and moved from Massachusetts to Michigan. She is from Ohio and I am from California and we met, of course, in Boston. We lived in Bloomfield Hills the first three years of our married life, and the only thing I wasn’t prepared for there was the tornado warning. In California they don’t have tornados, but in Michigan they do—in fact, a big one had touched done major damage in West Bloomfield right before we got there—and I wasn’t ready for how frightened I would get when the sky would turn that weird color and the sirens would go off and they would tell you to head for a basement. Kathy, of course, looked at me in those panic moments as if to say, “What’s your problem? These are tornado warnings. They happen all the time. No big deal.”
The situation was reversed in 1981 when we moved to Los Angeles and, a month or so after we got there, we had a fairly large earthquake. I had grown up with earthquakes—in fact I’d slept through the big Sylmar earthquake of 1971—and so when this one happened, I got up, looked to see if there had been any damage, and went back to bed. When I got there, I saw two enormous blue eyes looking at me. “What was that?” Kathy asked. I replied. “It’s just an earthquake. No big deal. Go back to bed.”
Even though today is Father’s Day, I don’t think my empathetic response qualified me for “Husband of the Year.” But that’s the way it is. You learn to live with what life gives you, I guess. Midwesterners are blasé about tornadoes; Californians take earthquakes in their stride. But, at some deep level, all of us know the massive extent of destructive force that nature can exert in any geography.
In his great poem, “Tree at My Window,” Robert Frost talks about outer and inner weather. Being human, we must make things more than they are, and it has always been that way with storms. States of weather have always been primary human metaphors for states of the soul. Just think of all those song titles: “Stormy Weather,” “April Showers,” “Good Day Sunshine.” Weather always means more to us than the roaring of the sky or the shaking of the earth. It stands also for the state of our souls. Or as Frost says as he looks out at and addresses a tree being blown about in the heaves of a storm,
But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost. That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather. [Robert Frost, “Tree at My Window”]
When we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll all admit, if even only to ourselves, that life can sometimes be an extended series of storms, a mixed bag of earthquakes and tornadoes, floods, fires, and hurricanes. Life comes at us and we find ourselves “taken and swept/And all but lost” as Frost says. It isn’t always sunny weather.
Jesus knew that it isn’t always sunny weather. He knew that there were disruptions that can overwhelm us. And that is why when, in today’s Gospel, Jesus calms the storm, he comes toward us in love not just as master of our outer weather. It’s good news that Jesus can calm a raging outer storm. It’s even better news that he can calm the rages of our inner weather.
II.
A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?" He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, "Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?" [Mark 4.37-40]
This is a familiar story, similar in many ways to the Gospel account of Jesus walking across the water. In both stories, two things are true. The first is that this is not just a symbolic story: Jesus really does calm the storm. But it’s clear that he calms the storm out of compassion for his friends who are beside themselves with fear.
Beyond that, two more things are going on. The storm outside is raging. The storm inside is raging.
The storm outside is raging. Jesus lived and taught among people who were out there in the storm. To be a Palestinian Jew in Jesus’s day was to be a poor, hungry, person living in a country occupied by a powerful foreign empire. Jesus’s compatriots were depressed and anxious about life, and at least one central aspect of his teaching and ministry was holding out the promise that you can live an abundant life in the midst of real deprivation. When things get tough, we tend to want to pull apart from each other and hunker down separately in survival mode. But Jesus taught and lived a different truth: the way through hard social times is to come together, to live generously and compassionately with each other. When we do that, there is always, as in the feeding of the 5,000, more than enough to go around.
But of course the storm outside is raging in another sense. It’s a real storm threatening to swamp a real boat. Jesus’s friends experienced his calming of the storm as an expression of his divine nature, his deep connectedness to God as the source of his being. In its outward expression, then, the storm is both real weather and challenging economic and social conditions. “Why are you afraid?” Jesus asks.
Many of us in this church today confront the outer weather of this moment in our economic and social lives. Whether it’s your job, your investments, your work, each of us in some way confronts stresses and challenges on behalf of ourselves and others. Life is hard right now, and in the midst of a hard storm like this one, we can all lose heart and wonder whether it’s worth going on. “Why are you afraid?” Jesus asks The first truth we need to hear this morning is this: Jesus rises among us, even now, to calm that storm which rages all around us. He does that precisely by pointing to a way of living—in mutuality, in generosity, in compassion—which is the real strategy for enduring tough times. We will make it through all of this with Jesus and each other as we do it together. That is the real Christian hope he offers us to calm the raging outer storm.
III.
But there’s that inner weather, too. The storm inside is raging. Not only do we suffer the blasts of outer events beyond our control. We all of us suffer those inner blasts of anxiety, depression, fear, loneliness, and loss. It’s part of the sick illusion of our culture that you can always be on top of things outwardly and inwardly. Sometimes the pain we feel for ourselves and on behalf of others is just too much. We all have those nights (or weeks, or months, or years) when, as Frost says, “I was taken and sweptAnd all but lost.” Jesus’s companions thought they were going to go down with the boat. There are times, for each of us, when we fear getting swamped by the inner forces which can feel beyond our control.
It is to calm this inner storm that Jesus invites you in the Gospel this morning. If Jesus had another central point in his ministry beyond a call into compassionate living, it was a call into self-acceptance. You may think that there are parts of you so dark and secret that nobody could love them. You may think that there are aspects of your being that are unlovable. You may think that there are things you have done (or thought about doing) that are unforgivable. It’s normal to think that way. All of us do it, and not just occasionally.
Part of the ministry of hard times is that they carry with them what Frederick Buechner calls a “fierce blessing.” These hard times shine a bright light on our outer and our inner storms, and they often expose to our notice those parts of our selves that we would rather not acknowledge. And it is in bringing all those dark places to light that Jesus also reaches out to us and calms our inner storm. You are made in the image of God. In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God has taken on your life and experience. There is no part of you that God does not know. There is no part of you that God does not bless. There is nothing you have been or done that God does not accept and forgive.
We suffer internally because we think that we and others cannot take the truth about us. The fierce blessing of social and personal storms is that they open us up to the truly important things in life. In the love and companionship of your neighbors and family and friends, you have been given the means to make it through the hardest of economic and social stress. And in Jesus’s call for you to know and love and accept all of yourself—even that part of you that seems unknowable, unlovable, unacceptable—you have been given the way to live with peace and joy and power even in the stormy times which can threaten to swamp us all. When Jesus asks his terrified disciples, “Why are you afraid?” what he is really saying is this: Have no fear. The outward things you worry about have no real power over you. The inward secrets you seek to hide are not as bad as you think they are.
And so Jesus stood in the boat, rebuked the storm, and calmed the waves. Whether it’s tornadoes or earthquakes you fear, whether it’s unemployment, shrunken resources, or the suffering of your friends and neighbors that threatens to overwhelm you; whether it’s your own guilt or sorrow or remorse which keeps you from the joyful acceptance of God’s love for you: take heart. Even now, Jesus stands in the boat and offers to calm the outer and inner storms which seem so powerful. He calls you to step out of your alienation and into compassion with every other human child of God, who feels just as you do. He calls you to let go of your stern judgment of yourself and others and accept God’s love and forgiveness.
We come now to his table, the place where we share this meal which stands as a sign both of our connection to each other and of our acceptance by Jesus and the One he calls his Father. Come forward, be fed, and go forth on a calmer sea, ready to love and be loved by the God who is always at work calming our outer and inner storms. Amen.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Homily: June 14, 2009 [Second Sunday after Pentecost] St. Lawrence, Libertyville, IL
I.
I come from Los Angeles, a part of the world where mustard is an invasive species. When people from the rest of the United States settled in Southern California during the great real estate booms of the 1920s and 1940s, they brought with them non-native species like mustard and snails thinking that they would enhance the natural environment. The snails they brought because some entrepreneur thought he would make a killing raising escargot. What he got was a plague to all gardeners. The mustard importation was easier to understand: it is a beautiful plant, and it looks especially lovely on those hills which run down to the sea adjacent to the Pacific Coast Highway. On an overcast, marine-layer day, the yellow mustard plants are beautiful to behold against the grey sky. The problem is that they are the horticultural equivalent of snails. They don’t belong there, they have no predators to control them, and they run rampant over every species that does.
Now I’m sure that Jesus never meant to compare the kingdom of heaven to a predatory non-native species, but that’s the way things work in a postmodern world. So when I hear a parable like this, I can’t help hearing both its original and its current cultural context. I hear it, as an Indian theologian I know says, in stereo: in one ear I hear Jesus in his native Palestinian biome; in the other I can’t help but hear him in my own. In one ear, the parable of the mustard seed is about the mystery of how God’s hidden purposes work: this tiny seed, over time, becomes a big bush. In the other ear, the parable morphs into a meditation on how the native and the new can abide together in the same neat little seedy package.
Today’s Gospel asks us to consider the seed as the image of two divine processes. When we think about the seed, it embodies two mysterious truths. The first is that something small can generate something big—“mighty oaks from little acorns grow”. The second is that all this happens in secret and over time. Who would think, looking at a redwood seed (also very tiny), that it could produce such a giant sequioa? And, how is it that after almost endless waiting one day you look at the seeds you have scattered and see new life sprouting where there was only lifeless dirt before?
II.
With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade. [Mark 4.30-32]
The first part of Jesus’s teaching this morning comes to us as an image of something small becoming something great. Henry Thoreau, the author of Walden, wrote many other essays about his observations of nature, and one of his last writings was an essay called “The Dispersion of Seeds.” Late in his life, Thoreau became interested in what he called “the succession of forest trees,” how meadows become forests, the way in which, through seed dispersal, trees invade, colonize, and come to dominate an area. Here’s a brief example of the way he saw this process:
As I went by a pitch-pine wood the other day, I saw a few little ones springing up in the pasture from these seeds which had been blown from the wood. There was a puny one which came from the seed this year, just noticeable in the sod, and I came near mistaking it for a single sprig of moss. . . . What a feeble beginning for so long-lived a tree! . . . Thus, from pasture this portion of the earth’s surface becomes forest—because the seeds of the pine, and not of moss and grass alone, fell on it. These which are now mistaken for mosses in the grass will perhaps become lofty trees and endure two hundred years. [Henry D. Thoreau, “The Dispersion of Seeds”]
Now I quote this to show that what Thoreau sees when he looks at a pine tree is what Jesus sees when he looks at a mustard bush: something large that had its origins in something tiny. It has been customary for preachers to read Jesus’s teaching about this natural process as a metaphor for the church. But I’m not sure that Jesus thought very much about the church. True, he did think about his companions and his friends, the ones we call his disciples. And what he thought about them had a lot to do with their lowly, small place in the strata of society.
Jesus was a Palestinian Jewish peasant. He lived and worked and taught in the world of Palestinian Jewish peasants. These were men and women who lived in a country occupied by the Roman Empire. They worked with their hands, fishing and farming. They were heavily taxed to support the occupying Roman army. They were hungry. They were poor. They were subject to another nation. They were at the bottom of the economic and social ladder.
It seems to me that, when talking about how little seeds become mighty bushes, Jesus is not predicting a world wide Empire-like church: instead, he’s talking about the worth and dignity of the small thing in and of itself. You and I tend to be impressed by greatness. But Jesus looks at the great thing and notices, as we should notice, that even the great thing owes its existence to a small thing.
The first point this morning is this: as a society, we are going through a time of readjustment, a time when we are asked to rethink our values and priorities in the light of changing economic and environmental realities. The dignity of the mustard seed should say something to us about the dignity of the small thing in our own lives. Our worth and dignity do not come from inflated definitions of worldly status. If you are up against it financially or professionally, if you feel a loss of worth because of changes in the economy, consider, as Jesus’s friends did, the mustard seed. “From now on,” says Paul in today’s Epistle, “we regard no one from a human point of view.” [2 Corinthians 5.16] No matter how it looks to others, even the mustard seed has dignity and value in God’s view of things, as do you.
III.
The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come. [Mark 4.26-29]
The mystery of this parable is not only that something small becomes something big; it is also that its revelation takes place over time. You and I and the birds who nest in the bush’s branches have to wait for the mysterious purposes of the seed to do its work. Remember that Jesus and his listeners lived before our modern understanding of plant biology. Even when the seed’s work is finished, how it happened is still a mystery.
Here is Henry Thoreau again:
Nature works no faster than need be. If she has to produce a bed of cress or radishes, she seems to us swift; but if it is a pine or oak wood, she may seem to us slow or wholly idle, so leisurely and secure is she. She knows that seeds have many other uses than to reproduce their kind. If every acorn of this year’s crop is destroyed, or the pines bear no seed, never fear. She has more years to come. It is not necessary that a pine or an oak should bear fruit every year, as it is that a pea vine should. [Henry D. Thoreau, “The Dispersion of Seeds”]
Jesus spoke to men and women who were impatient: they wanted freedom, power, food, justice, and they had waited a long time for them. When he asked them to consider the mystery of the seed and its workings, Jesus was using that image to suggest that God’s processes work themselves out over time. It’s not that he’s asking us to lie back and wait. Far from it; Jesus always enlists us as agents in spreading God’s reign. There is, after all, someone in this story who scatters the seed in order that it may germinate. Instead he’s assuring us that, even when we think that nothing is happening, God and God’s love and faithfulness and blessing are always at work on our behalf.
Like Jesus’s friends and companions, you also may be impatient. You may be at a place in your life where something has to change but you don’t see when or how that can happen. You may feel depressed or anxious about your relationships, your work, your health, even your inner worth. Each of us, every adult human being, lives through stretches of time like this, when nothing seems to work and when there doesn’t seem to be any reason to go on living. If this is true for you right now, then take hold of the image which Jesus offers you this morning. Consider the seed. It is small, yet it produces something great. So it has dignity and worth in itself. Consider the seed: someone plants it and nothing seems to happen. And then, as if by magic, one day it sprouts and produces “first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.”
As small as you may feel, you have worth and purpose and dignity. As frustrated as you may feel, God’s purposes are always, even now, working themselves out in your life. Consider the seed, how it testifies to God’s mysterious love and faithfulness. And come forward to be fed now in the bread and wine made from the bounty of God’s harvest, which itself started out small, grew over time, and now becomes more abundant than any one of us could ask for or imagine. Amen.
I come from Los Angeles, a part of the world where mustard is an invasive species. When people from the rest of the United States settled in Southern California during the great real estate booms of the 1920s and 1940s, they brought with them non-native species like mustard and snails thinking that they would enhance the natural environment. The snails they brought because some entrepreneur thought he would make a killing raising escargot. What he got was a plague to all gardeners. The mustard importation was easier to understand: it is a beautiful plant, and it looks especially lovely on those hills which run down to the sea adjacent to the Pacific Coast Highway. On an overcast, marine-layer day, the yellow mustard plants are beautiful to behold against the grey sky. The problem is that they are the horticultural equivalent of snails. They don’t belong there, they have no predators to control them, and they run rampant over every species that does.
Now I’m sure that Jesus never meant to compare the kingdom of heaven to a predatory non-native species, but that’s the way things work in a postmodern world. So when I hear a parable like this, I can’t help hearing both its original and its current cultural context. I hear it, as an Indian theologian I know says, in stereo: in one ear I hear Jesus in his native Palestinian biome; in the other I can’t help but hear him in my own. In one ear, the parable of the mustard seed is about the mystery of how God’s hidden purposes work: this tiny seed, over time, becomes a big bush. In the other ear, the parable morphs into a meditation on how the native and the new can abide together in the same neat little seedy package.
Today’s Gospel asks us to consider the seed as the image of two divine processes. When we think about the seed, it embodies two mysterious truths. The first is that something small can generate something big—“mighty oaks from little acorns grow”. The second is that all this happens in secret and over time. Who would think, looking at a redwood seed (also very tiny), that it could produce such a giant sequioa? And, how is it that after almost endless waiting one day you look at the seeds you have scattered and see new life sprouting where there was only lifeless dirt before?
II.
With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade. [Mark 4.30-32]
The first part of Jesus’s teaching this morning comes to us as an image of something small becoming something great. Henry Thoreau, the author of Walden, wrote many other essays about his observations of nature, and one of his last writings was an essay called “The Dispersion of Seeds.” Late in his life, Thoreau became interested in what he called “the succession of forest trees,” how meadows become forests, the way in which, through seed dispersal, trees invade, colonize, and come to dominate an area. Here’s a brief example of the way he saw this process:
As I went by a pitch-pine wood the other day, I saw a few little ones springing up in the pasture from these seeds which had been blown from the wood. There was a puny one which came from the seed this year, just noticeable in the sod, and I came near mistaking it for a single sprig of moss. . . . What a feeble beginning for so long-lived a tree! . . . Thus, from pasture this portion of the earth’s surface becomes forest—because the seeds of the pine, and not of moss and grass alone, fell on it. These which are now mistaken for mosses in the grass will perhaps become lofty trees and endure two hundred years. [Henry D. Thoreau, “The Dispersion of Seeds”]
Now I quote this to show that what Thoreau sees when he looks at a pine tree is what Jesus sees when he looks at a mustard bush: something large that had its origins in something tiny. It has been customary for preachers to read Jesus’s teaching about this natural process as a metaphor for the church. But I’m not sure that Jesus thought very much about the church. True, he did think about his companions and his friends, the ones we call his disciples. And what he thought about them had a lot to do with their lowly, small place in the strata of society.
Jesus was a Palestinian Jewish peasant. He lived and worked and taught in the world of Palestinian Jewish peasants. These were men and women who lived in a country occupied by the Roman Empire. They worked with their hands, fishing and farming. They were heavily taxed to support the occupying Roman army. They were hungry. They were poor. They were subject to another nation. They were at the bottom of the economic and social ladder.
It seems to me that, when talking about how little seeds become mighty bushes, Jesus is not predicting a world wide Empire-like church: instead, he’s talking about the worth and dignity of the small thing in and of itself. You and I tend to be impressed by greatness. But Jesus looks at the great thing and notices, as we should notice, that even the great thing owes its existence to a small thing.
The first point this morning is this: as a society, we are going through a time of readjustment, a time when we are asked to rethink our values and priorities in the light of changing economic and environmental realities. The dignity of the mustard seed should say something to us about the dignity of the small thing in our own lives. Our worth and dignity do not come from inflated definitions of worldly status. If you are up against it financially or professionally, if you feel a loss of worth because of changes in the economy, consider, as Jesus’s friends did, the mustard seed. “From now on,” says Paul in today’s Epistle, “we regard no one from a human point of view.” [2 Corinthians 5.16] No matter how it looks to others, even the mustard seed has dignity and value in God’s view of things, as do you.
III.
The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come. [Mark 4.26-29]
The mystery of this parable is not only that something small becomes something big; it is also that its revelation takes place over time. You and I and the birds who nest in the bush’s branches have to wait for the mysterious purposes of the seed to do its work. Remember that Jesus and his listeners lived before our modern understanding of plant biology. Even when the seed’s work is finished, how it happened is still a mystery.
Here is Henry Thoreau again:
Nature works no faster than need be. If she has to produce a bed of cress or radishes, she seems to us swift; but if it is a pine or oak wood, she may seem to us slow or wholly idle, so leisurely and secure is she. She knows that seeds have many other uses than to reproduce their kind. If every acorn of this year’s crop is destroyed, or the pines bear no seed, never fear. She has more years to come. It is not necessary that a pine or an oak should bear fruit every year, as it is that a pea vine should. [Henry D. Thoreau, “The Dispersion of Seeds”]
Jesus spoke to men and women who were impatient: they wanted freedom, power, food, justice, and they had waited a long time for them. When he asked them to consider the mystery of the seed and its workings, Jesus was using that image to suggest that God’s processes work themselves out over time. It’s not that he’s asking us to lie back and wait. Far from it; Jesus always enlists us as agents in spreading God’s reign. There is, after all, someone in this story who scatters the seed in order that it may germinate. Instead he’s assuring us that, even when we think that nothing is happening, God and God’s love and faithfulness and blessing are always at work on our behalf.
Like Jesus’s friends and companions, you also may be impatient. You may be at a place in your life where something has to change but you don’t see when or how that can happen. You may feel depressed or anxious about your relationships, your work, your health, even your inner worth. Each of us, every adult human being, lives through stretches of time like this, when nothing seems to work and when there doesn’t seem to be any reason to go on living. If this is true for you right now, then take hold of the image which Jesus offers you this morning. Consider the seed. It is small, yet it produces something great. So it has dignity and worth in itself. Consider the seed: someone plants it and nothing seems to happen. And then, as if by magic, one day it sprouts and produces “first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.”
As small as you may feel, you have worth and purpose and dignity. As frustrated as you may feel, God’s purposes are always, even now, working themselves out in your life. Consider the seed, how it testifies to God’s mysterious love and faithfulness. And come forward to be fed now in the bread and wine made from the bounty of God’s harvest, which itself started out small, grew over time, and now becomes more abundant than any one of us could ask for or imagine. Amen.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Homily: June 7, 2009 [Trinity Sunday] St. Lawrence, Libertyville, IL
I.
One of my all time favorite scenes in a movie occurs in Mel Brooks’ "Blazing Saddles". (No, not that scene.) The one I’m thinking of starts in on a tight shot of Sheriff Bart’s Gucci saddlebag, and then pulls back as we see this black cowboy riding across the desert to the swinging accompaniment of Count Basie and his Orchestra playing their big band rendition of “April in Paris.” Gradually, as the music swells, the camera pulls back further and there, live in person, is Count Basie himself seated at the piano with his entire big band spread out on the desert. As Sheriff Bart rides by he gives the Count a low five. The soundtrack, it seems, has come to life.
Something like this happened to me very early last Sunday morning as I was running along the lakefront in Evanston where I live. I had gotten up very early to run as I was scheduled to be part of the Pentecost services at Holy Spirit in Lake Forest last Sunday, and so as I was running at around 5:30 a.m. I began to hear the sounds of a Gospel choir singing the old Protestant hymn, “Blessed Assurance”. Where, I thought, is this music coming from? And then, as I turned my attention away from the lake, I saw a full choir of about 25 or so African American men and women singing their hearts out into the sunrise.
Now I find nature, unadorned and of itself, extraordinarily intoxicating. But when you add Gospel music to it, the experience is almost impossible to withstand, much less to describe.
Last Sunday was, of course, Pentecost. Today, the First Sunday after Pentecost, is the day we Episcopalians traditionally call “Trinity Sunday.” As a seminary professor I have talked myself blue in the face, advising seminarians and newly ordained clergy to refrain from all attempts to explain the Trinity on this day. Given the communication challenges, we might as well call it “Fermat’s Last Theorem” Sunday or “The Second Law of Thermodynamics Sunday” for all the good our intellectual pulpit explanations do us. Trinity Sunday is the Preacher’s Graveyard. Nevertheless, here I am and here we are. And the Trinity is a reality worthy of celebration. The problem is, even though I believe in it, I’m not sure I understand it myself.
II.
So instead of trying to make sense of a big abstract idea, let’s start with something concrete that Jesus says to us in this morning’s Gospel:
"Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above." [John 3.3]
This saying does not come to us out of a vacuum. It occurs in response to a visit from Nicodemus, a prominent Pharisee who comes to Jesus by night and wants to understand more fully who Jesus is. Nicodemus is confused by the tension between what the religious system tells him and the evidence of his senses. The system says that Jesus operates outside the authorized channels God uses to relate to human beings. His eyes and ears tell him that Jesus can perform signs which must be evidence of his connection with God.
Here’s what Nicodemus actually says to Jesus: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”[John 3.2] We might expect that Jesus would respond with some kind of metaphysical, philosophical answer, a kind of first century version of a Trinity Sunday sermon. Instead, he says this: “"Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above." [John 3.3]
Posed a question about meaning and authority, Jesus responds with an answer about a person’s interior life. His answer reminds me of a debate I once saw between a Fundamentalist minister and a seminary professor on the authority of scripture. The Fundamentalist went first, and he spoke for a half hour about the scientific and philosophical reasons why the Bible must be the literal Word of God. After he sat down, the professor got up and said only this: “I value and trust and believe in the Bible because I have met God through it,” and he sat down.
When it comes to the questions which dog us most—who is God, who am I in relation to God, what is my relationship to others and the world, how am I responsible to God and my fellow creatures—often we approach them with the same attitude shown by that Fundamentalist minister: we delve deeply into intellectual arguments and search for philosophical and scientific reasons why such-and-such must be true. But the spirit that Jesus shows us in this encounter with Nicodemus is more like that of the seminary professor: the proof of my faith is not found in theories or in concepts but in my experience of God.
"Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” [John 3.3]
Different kinds of Christians might explain Jesus’s statement differently. To the Catholic “being born from above” would imply the sacrament of Baptism; to the Evangelical it would suggest a born-again conversion experience. Both of these meanings make sense of the text. But what do you think Jesus might have actually meant?
Without trying to be too sentimental or showbiz about it, I would suggest that “being born from above” might mean, for Jesus, having and holding on to some direct interior experience of God, one that you know to be authentic, even if it would make no sense to others. That experience will look various because people are so different and God relates to us in our unique particularity. So for me it might be hearing a Gospel choir as I run along the Lake Michigan shore, while for you it might be sitting in your backyard at the end of the day or serving breakfast to a homeless person. It could be listening to music, making something with your hands, holding your spouse or child or parent close to you. You and I can meet God in as many places as we can imagine, and then some.
III.
We Episcopalians are rule-obeying, orderly Christians, and we tend to be like Nicodemus. We unthinkingly trust that the system will deliver God to us in reliable, predictable ways—say at a certain time on Sunday mornings. But as Jesus says elsewhere in today’s Gospel, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” [John 3.8] God is like the wind, coming out of nowhere and going someplace we can’t even see yet. And Jesus’s challenge to us rule-obeying orderly Nicodemus-like Christians is this: he calls us to be “born from above,” to attend to the authentic, unique, personal ways in which God speaks within and to us, and to trust those experiences at least as much as we trust the orderly, formal system we have grown to know and love called the church.
Which is not to say that we don’t need the church. We do need it, because it is only as we come together and share what God is doing in our lives that we can get the full picture of what God is doing in the world. The church needs you so that you can tell it the truth about God that only you have to tell. As an institution, the church is like Nicodemus’s Pharisees, better at telling you the system’s truth than at listening to yours. That is why Jesus challenged that system: to show that an unpredictable and generous God could actually relate to you and me in original and surprising ways.
God is doing something in and through you that God is doing nowhere else in the world. You are unique, and what God is doing in and through you is unique. Your calling, as a follower of Jesus trying to live a meaningful life in the world, is to claim what God is doing in and through you and offer it, through the church and your relationships and your work, to the world.
As I understand it, the Trinity is Christianity’s way of describing how God, Jesus, and you and I are all connected to each other. It is more true to the spirit of Trinity Sunday to tell stories about how we feel God’s presence in our own lives than it is to try to spin out a theoretical diagram of the relations of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. As a Christian, I believe that God is at work in Jesus, in you and me, and in the world. That doesn’t mean that I always hear Count Basie or a Gospel choir as I go about my business, but it does mean that I need to hold on to and nurture those moments in my own interior experience which tell me I’m connected to the One behind it all. And that’s as true for you as it is for me.
We come now to God’s table, the Eucharist, the meal we share together. This is a place where many of us experience that presence which Jesus describes as being “born from above.” For others of us, it’s a powerful reminder or our connection one to another. Whatever this meal means to you, God invites you to it as a way for you to claim and share the unique thing that God is doing only through you. And with or without Gospel or big band music, that’s as good a glimpse into the mysterious gift of the Trinity as there is in this world. Amen.
One of my all time favorite scenes in a movie occurs in Mel Brooks’ "Blazing Saddles". (No, not that scene.) The one I’m thinking of starts in on a tight shot of Sheriff Bart’s Gucci saddlebag, and then pulls back as we see this black cowboy riding across the desert to the swinging accompaniment of Count Basie and his Orchestra playing their big band rendition of “April in Paris.” Gradually, as the music swells, the camera pulls back further and there, live in person, is Count Basie himself seated at the piano with his entire big band spread out on the desert. As Sheriff Bart rides by he gives the Count a low five. The soundtrack, it seems, has come to life.
Something like this happened to me very early last Sunday morning as I was running along the lakefront in Evanston where I live. I had gotten up very early to run as I was scheduled to be part of the Pentecost services at Holy Spirit in Lake Forest last Sunday, and so as I was running at around 5:30 a.m. I began to hear the sounds of a Gospel choir singing the old Protestant hymn, “Blessed Assurance”. Where, I thought, is this music coming from? And then, as I turned my attention away from the lake, I saw a full choir of about 25 or so African American men and women singing their hearts out into the sunrise.
Now I find nature, unadorned and of itself, extraordinarily intoxicating. But when you add Gospel music to it, the experience is almost impossible to withstand, much less to describe.
Last Sunday was, of course, Pentecost. Today, the First Sunday after Pentecost, is the day we Episcopalians traditionally call “Trinity Sunday.” As a seminary professor I have talked myself blue in the face, advising seminarians and newly ordained clergy to refrain from all attempts to explain the Trinity on this day. Given the communication challenges, we might as well call it “Fermat’s Last Theorem” Sunday or “The Second Law of Thermodynamics Sunday” for all the good our intellectual pulpit explanations do us. Trinity Sunday is the Preacher’s Graveyard. Nevertheless, here I am and here we are. And the Trinity is a reality worthy of celebration. The problem is, even though I believe in it, I’m not sure I understand it myself.
II.
So instead of trying to make sense of a big abstract idea, let’s start with something concrete that Jesus says to us in this morning’s Gospel:
"Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above." [John 3.3]
This saying does not come to us out of a vacuum. It occurs in response to a visit from Nicodemus, a prominent Pharisee who comes to Jesus by night and wants to understand more fully who Jesus is. Nicodemus is confused by the tension between what the religious system tells him and the evidence of his senses. The system says that Jesus operates outside the authorized channels God uses to relate to human beings. His eyes and ears tell him that Jesus can perform signs which must be evidence of his connection with God.
Here’s what Nicodemus actually says to Jesus: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”[John 3.2] We might expect that Jesus would respond with some kind of metaphysical, philosophical answer, a kind of first century version of a Trinity Sunday sermon. Instead, he says this: “"Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above." [John 3.3]
Posed a question about meaning and authority, Jesus responds with an answer about a person’s interior life. His answer reminds me of a debate I once saw between a Fundamentalist minister and a seminary professor on the authority of scripture. The Fundamentalist went first, and he spoke for a half hour about the scientific and philosophical reasons why the Bible must be the literal Word of God. After he sat down, the professor got up and said only this: “I value and trust and believe in the Bible because I have met God through it,” and he sat down.
When it comes to the questions which dog us most—who is God, who am I in relation to God, what is my relationship to others and the world, how am I responsible to God and my fellow creatures—often we approach them with the same attitude shown by that Fundamentalist minister: we delve deeply into intellectual arguments and search for philosophical and scientific reasons why such-and-such must be true. But the spirit that Jesus shows us in this encounter with Nicodemus is more like that of the seminary professor: the proof of my faith is not found in theories or in concepts but in my experience of God.
"Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” [John 3.3]
Different kinds of Christians might explain Jesus’s statement differently. To the Catholic “being born from above” would imply the sacrament of Baptism; to the Evangelical it would suggest a born-again conversion experience. Both of these meanings make sense of the text. But what do you think Jesus might have actually meant?
Without trying to be too sentimental or showbiz about it, I would suggest that “being born from above” might mean, for Jesus, having and holding on to some direct interior experience of God, one that you know to be authentic, even if it would make no sense to others. That experience will look various because people are so different and God relates to us in our unique particularity. So for me it might be hearing a Gospel choir as I run along the Lake Michigan shore, while for you it might be sitting in your backyard at the end of the day or serving breakfast to a homeless person. It could be listening to music, making something with your hands, holding your spouse or child or parent close to you. You and I can meet God in as many places as we can imagine, and then some.
III.
We Episcopalians are rule-obeying, orderly Christians, and we tend to be like Nicodemus. We unthinkingly trust that the system will deliver God to us in reliable, predictable ways—say at a certain time on Sunday mornings. But as Jesus says elsewhere in today’s Gospel, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” [John 3.8] God is like the wind, coming out of nowhere and going someplace we can’t even see yet. And Jesus’s challenge to us rule-obeying orderly Nicodemus-like Christians is this: he calls us to be “born from above,” to attend to the authentic, unique, personal ways in which God speaks within and to us, and to trust those experiences at least as much as we trust the orderly, formal system we have grown to know and love called the church.
Which is not to say that we don’t need the church. We do need it, because it is only as we come together and share what God is doing in our lives that we can get the full picture of what God is doing in the world. The church needs you so that you can tell it the truth about God that only you have to tell. As an institution, the church is like Nicodemus’s Pharisees, better at telling you the system’s truth than at listening to yours. That is why Jesus challenged that system: to show that an unpredictable and generous God could actually relate to you and me in original and surprising ways.
God is doing something in and through you that God is doing nowhere else in the world. You are unique, and what God is doing in and through you is unique. Your calling, as a follower of Jesus trying to live a meaningful life in the world, is to claim what God is doing in and through you and offer it, through the church and your relationships and your work, to the world.
As I understand it, the Trinity is Christianity’s way of describing how God, Jesus, and you and I are all connected to each other. It is more true to the spirit of Trinity Sunday to tell stories about how we feel God’s presence in our own lives than it is to try to spin out a theoretical diagram of the relations of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. As a Christian, I believe that God is at work in Jesus, in you and me, and in the world. That doesn’t mean that I always hear Count Basie or a Gospel choir as I go about my business, but it does mean that I need to hold on to and nurture those moments in my own interior experience which tell me I’m connected to the One behind it all. And that’s as true for you as it is for me.
We come now to God’s table, the Eucharist, the meal we share together. This is a place where many of us experience that presence which Jesus describes as being “born from above.” For others of us, it’s a powerful reminder or our connection one to another. Whatever this meal means to you, God invites you to it as a way for you to claim and share the unique thing that God is doing only through you. And with or without Gospel or big band music, that’s as good a glimpse into the mysterious gift of the Trinity as there is in this world. Amen.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Homily: May 14, 2009 [Thurgood Marshall]
One of my favorite cartoons is a George Booth drawing which appeared in The New Yorker when I was in seminary. It shows a parson being chased out of a lovely white clapboard frame church by an angry congregation: everybody –even nice old ladies and staid businessmen—is visibly enraged. What, you ask, could have made these people so furious? Then you notice in the lower right corner the parish signboard which reads, “United M.E. Church, Reverend Clayton Millstone. Sermon: ‘Are We All Prostitutes?’ You Are Welcome.”
I feel that I risk engendering the same kind of reaction here tonight, because the title of this sermon might well read, “Are We All Pharisees?” Now I know enough about human nature to realize that no-one wants to be called a prostitute; and I know enough about religion to believe that no-one wants to be called a Pharisee, either. But, as regular, church-attending, rule-abiding Christian people, isn’t that what we are?
I ask this without trying to be either accusatory or cute, because I think the New Testament has always given Pharisees a bad rap. That’s understandable: as my New Testament teacher Krister Stendhal used to say, the Pharisees were simply the “Jews down the street” who didn’t sign on to the Jesus movement. Consequently they got caricatured as hopelessly hypocritical fussbudgets who were so blinded by their slavish obedience to rules that they couldn’t recognize the Messiah when he was right in front of them.
But in fact scholars know that the Pharisees were, like us, ordinarily pious religious folk who were attempting, as best they could, to follow the received practices of their religion and live a faithful and respectable life in the world. The New Testament portrays them as almost melodramatically nefarious beings—first century Darth Vaders, skulking around, playing practical jokes on Jesus—but really they were just average conventionally religious folk trying to make sense out of life with the tools their tradition had given them. As someone who believes in regular attendance at worship, living by an ethical code, and in following processes and procedures agreed on by the larger community, I can pretty much count myself as the 21st century equivalent of a Pharisee. And so, I believe, can most of us Episcopalians.
So why is Jesus so cranky about them? And does that mean that Jesus’s critique of them applies also to us?
‘The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practise what they teach.—Matthew 23.2-3
When you correct for the first century grumpiness factor, I believe that you’ll find that Jesus’s criticism of the Pharisees (similar to Amos’s railings against pious Israelites in the first reading) is really a critique of common sense, or received wisdom. As creatures of habit, we human beings tend to codify our behavior and traditions as the will of the gods, or in our case as Episcopalians, “the way we’ve always done it.” Though there is certainly a component of self-interested sin in this—especially if your bread is buttered on the side of the way we’ve always done it—really the problem is our collective inability to see that God might be actually doing a very new and different thing.
And that’s why we need prophets. We need them not so much to “comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable” as we need them (just as we need artists) to help us try on a new way of looking at things. Consider the life and career of Thurgood Marshall, whom we celebrate tonight. We know that Marshall was the first African American Justice on the Supreme Court, appointed by Lyndon Johnson in 1967. Before that, he was Solicitor General (again appointed by Johnson) and a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals appointed by President Kennedy. But Marshall became famous earlier in the 1950s when he served as Chief Counsel to the NAACP and, in that capacity, argued the plaintiff’s case in Brown versus the Board of Education before the Supreme Court. It was that decision, of course, in which the Warren Court decided that “separate but equal” was inherently inequitable and so made an end to school segregation in the United States.
Now there was certainly plenty of human sin and hypocrisy and selfishness involved in school segregation. But to some extent school segregation persisted because of the human habit of becoming entrenched in certain ways of seeing things. And so what Thurgood Marshall brought about was a kind of change which took not only moral courage but also visionary imagination. He and his colleagues had not only to change the system; they had first to be able to imagine that it could be otherwise.
And that combination of moral courage and visionary imagination is what Jesus brought to first century Palestine and what you and I are called to bring to our time and place. Jesus lived in a time when life in the Roman Empire meant political oppression, economic subjugation, and all-around privation and scarcity. In the midst of this bleak situation, Jesus dared to say that human beings could live differently. What brought Jesus to the cross was his implicit challenge to Empire and all its presumptions. You can live an abundant life, he said, even in the midst of privation. By coming together and having things in common, rather than cowering in your corner and holding on to what’s mine, you and I can find joyful plentiful life and love in solidarity with each other. That was liberating and dangerous news. As, of course was the message of the Civil Rights Movement. Thurgood Marshall lived to a good old age. Martin Luther King, Jr. did not.
Jesus challenged the common sense and received wisdom of first century Palestine. Thurgood Marshall challenged the common sense and received wisdom of 1950s America. As we gather tonight—surrounded in our country and our world by men and women suffering at the hands of an economic downturn, in a nation waging two wars (one of which, I’m sorry to say, seems to be expanding), living in a society where 40 million people have no health insurance and where children bear the brunt of our social and economic injustices and inequalities— those who study and teach and graduate from places need to be able to respond to all that. Our vocational question, now and then, is this: how is God calling you and me to witness to this hurting world tonight?
Are we all prostitutes? Are we all Pharisees? At the risk of sharing the fate of Reverend Clayton Millstone: sure we are. That, it seems is human nature. And helping us see how we will always be caught in that trap is why Paul wrote his letters, and why Augustine, Luther, Bonhoeffer, and Barth continued to grapple with the dilemmas our nature offers when confronted with grace.
I wish that Christianity offered a cure for Pharisaism, but two thousand years of lived experience tells me it doesn’t. We’ll always be people who hold on to rules and traditions and practices because we’re ritualistic creatures of habit with lizard brains, and we just can’t seem to keep ourselves for investing our energy in the wrong things from time to time. But I do believe that Christianity holds out a vision of abundant life to a hurting world. As in Jesus’s day, the way toward personal abundance lies not in hoarding but in sharing. As in Thurgood Marshall’s day, the way toward my liberation lies in my standing with you in the struggle for yours. Then as now, the Gospel proclaims that the way to abundance and freedom lies in solidarity and compassion. And what God needs now, as then, is a group of men and women who have both the moral courage and the visionary imagination to glimpse ways in which that just might be true.
The church, of course, is the place where we practice and learn that. And this meal we now come to both proclaims that abundant compassion and enacts it. For this meal, and for the life and witness of Thurgood Marshall and the vision of Jesus to which his life gave witness, let us proceed, together, in the Eucharist, to give thanks. Amen.
I feel that I risk engendering the same kind of reaction here tonight, because the title of this sermon might well read, “Are We All Pharisees?” Now I know enough about human nature to realize that no-one wants to be called a prostitute; and I know enough about religion to believe that no-one wants to be called a Pharisee, either. But, as regular, church-attending, rule-abiding Christian people, isn’t that what we are?
I ask this without trying to be either accusatory or cute, because I think the New Testament has always given Pharisees a bad rap. That’s understandable: as my New Testament teacher Krister Stendhal used to say, the Pharisees were simply the “Jews down the street” who didn’t sign on to the Jesus movement. Consequently they got caricatured as hopelessly hypocritical fussbudgets who were so blinded by their slavish obedience to rules that they couldn’t recognize the Messiah when he was right in front of them.
But in fact scholars know that the Pharisees were, like us, ordinarily pious religious folk who were attempting, as best they could, to follow the received practices of their religion and live a faithful and respectable life in the world. The New Testament portrays them as almost melodramatically nefarious beings—first century Darth Vaders, skulking around, playing practical jokes on Jesus—but really they were just average conventionally religious folk trying to make sense out of life with the tools their tradition had given them. As someone who believes in regular attendance at worship, living by an ethical code, and in following processes and procedures agreed on by the larger community, I can pretty much count myself as the 21st century equivalent of a Pharisee. And so, I believe, can most of us Episcopalians.
So why is Jesus so cranky about them? And does that mean that Jesus’s critique of them applies also to us?
‘The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practise what they teach.—Matthew 23.2-3
When you correct for the first century grumpiness factor, I believe that you’ll find that Jesus’s criticism of the Pharisees (similar to Amos’s railings against pious Israelites in the first reading) is really a critique of common sense, or received wisdom. As creatures of habit, we human beings tend to codify our behavior and traditions as the will of the gods, or in our case as Episcopalians, “the way we’ve always done it.” Though there is certainly a component of self-interested sin in this—especially if your bread is buttered on the side of the way we’ve always done it—really the problem is our collective inability to see that God might be actually doing a very new and different thing.
And that’s why we need prophets. We need them not so much to “comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable” as we need them (just as we need artists) to help us try on a new way of looking at things. Consider the life and career of Thurgood Marshall, whom we celebrate tonight. We know that Marshall was the first African American Justice on the Supreme Court, appointed by Lyndon Johnson in 1967. Before that, he was Solicitor General (again appointed by Johnson) and a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals appointed by President Kennedy. But Marshall became famous earlier in the 1950s when he served as Chief Counsel to the NAACP and, in that capacity, argued the plaintiff’s case in Brown versus the Board of Education before the Supreme Court. It was that decision, of course, in which the Warren Court decided that “separate but equal” was inherently inequitable and so made an end to school segregation in the United States.
Now there was certainly plenty of human sin and hypocrisy and selfishness involved in school segregation. But to some extent school segregation persisted because of the human habit of becoming entrenched in certain ways of seeing things. And so what Thurgood Marshall brought about was a kind of change which took not only moral courage but also visionary imagination. He and his colleagues had not only to change the system; they had first to be able to imagine that it could be otherwise.
And that combination of moral courage and visionary imagination is what Jesus brought to first century Palestine and what you and I are called to bring to our time and place. Jesus lived in a time when life in the Roman Empire meant political oppression, economic subjugation, and all-around privation and scarcity. In the midst of this bleak situation, Jesus dared to say that human beings could live differently. What brought Jesus to the cross was his implicit challenge to Empire and all its presumptions. You can live an abundant life, he said, even in the midst of privation. By coming together and having things in common, rather than cowering in your corner and holding on to what’s mine, you and I can find joyful plentiful life and love in solidarity with each other. That was liberating and dangerous news. As, of course was the message of the Civil Rights Movement. Thurgood Marshall lived to a good old age. Martin Luther King, Jr. did not.
Jesus challenged the common sense and received wisdom of first century Palestine. Thurgood Marshall challenged the common sense and received wisdom of 1950s America. As we gather tonight—surrounded in our country and our world by men and women suffering at the hands of an economic downturn, in a nation waging two wars (one of which, I’m sorry to say, seems to be expanding), living in a society where 40 million people have no health insurance and where children bear the brunt of our social and economic injustices and inequalities— those who study and teach and graduate from places need to be able to respond to all that. Our vocational question, now and then, is this: how is God calling you and me to witness to this hurting world tonight?
Are we all prostitutes? Are we all Pharisees? At the risk of sharing the fate of Reverend Clayton Millstone: sure we are. That, it seems is human nature. And helping us see how we will always be caught in that trap is why Paul wrote his letters, and why Augustine, Luther, Bonhoeffer, and Barth continued to grapple with the dilemmas our nature offers when confronted with grace.
I wish that Christianity offered a cure for Pharisaism, but two thousand years of lived experience tells me it doesn’t. We’ll always be people who hold on to rules and traditions and practices because we’re ritualistic creatures of habit with lizard brains, and we just can’t seem to keep ourselves for investing our energy in the wrong things from time to time. But I do believe that Christianity holds out a vision of abundant life to a hurting world. As in Jesus’s day, the way toward personal abundance lies not in hoarding but in sharing. As in Thurgood Marshall’s day, the way toward my liberation lies in my standing with you in the struggle for yours. Then as now, the Gospel proclaims that the way to abundance and freedom lies in solidarity and compassion. And what God needs now, as then, is a group of men and women who have both the moral courage and the visionary imagination to glimpse ways in which that just might be true.
The church, of course, is the place where we practice and learn that. And this meal we now come to both proclaims that abundant compassion and enacts it. For this meal, and for the life and witness of Thurgood Marshall and the vision of Jesus to which his life gave witness, let us proceed, together, in the Eucharist, to give thanks. Amen.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Homily: May 8, 2009 [St. John/Seabury Awards Night]
Because the Seabury chapel is named for St. John, and because the school is always on vacation after Christmas when his feast day comes, we always use the propers for St. John’s Day [December 27] for this annual celebration of Awards Night. The Gospel which we just heard [John 21.19b-24] gives us John’s account of Jesus’s final appearance to his disciples, and it is quite an arresting story: Peter has just heard that he is destined to die a grisly death at the hand of the Romans, and then he asks about the fate of the disciple whom Jesus loves. Jesus answers, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!” [John 21.22] As compelling a story as this is, the way we just heard a snippet of it leaves out some of the other elements which make it so deeply evocative. Here are just a few lines from the earlier part of John 21:
After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. . . . Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. . . . When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. [John 21. 1,4,9]
I grew up in Southern California, and when my parents divorced early in my childhood my father moved out to Malibu and got a house there because, if you can believe this now, it was cheap. So I spent many of my elementary school weekends at the beach, and that early experience probably colors the way I hear the 21st chapter of John’s Gospel when it is read. I cannot hear about Jesus at the beach sitting around a charcoal fire without thinking of what that looks, feels, and smells like from my own early experience. One of the things I remember best about those Malibu weekends was going down to the beach and sitting around a fire. In that seaside setting you have all the elements which early humans thought made up the universe: earth, air, fire, water. There is something primordial and eternal in that kind of moment, and also something fleeting: everything in that scene is ephemeral. As a scene which mixes the eternal and the ephemeral, a fireside by the water is the perfect place to say goodbye.
So since my earliest days of reading the Bible with some care, I have been moved that the risen Jesus’s final meal with his companions occurred on a beach gathered around a charcoal fire. As much as Easter is about the joyful return of Jesus to his friends, it is also ultimately about the loss of Jesus, too. Jesus is returning to the One he calls his Father. This is the last time his companions will see him. And without trying to sound impious or inelegant about it, it means something at least to me that Jesus leaves his friends after a final beach cookout, and the meal he shares with them takes place in the setting not only of a beautiful natural place but also in the context of the work of fishing, the stuff of their daily life.
“Lord, what about him?” [John 21.21] Peter, of course, stands and speaks for all of us here. Having lived with Jesus and the other disciples through the events of Holy Week and Easter, Peter cannot help but wonder that human destinies can be so various. “When you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go,” Jesus had told him [John 21.18]. And when Peter asks about what will happen to the Beloved Disciple, he is gently chastened: “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!” How precisely is this fair?
As Jimmy Carter once said, when talking about the differences between what rich people and poor people could afford, “there are many things in life that are not fair.” It’s not fair that one disciple goes to a martyr’s death while the other dies in peace on an island in the Mediterranean. It’s not fair that some live to old age in health while others die young. And speaking as one who lives in the rhythm of seminary life, it’s not fair that teachers and students grow close to one another through all the shared experience of their time here and then have to go their separate ways.
Tonight begins the observances of a week in which we will do things as we have always done them pretty much for the last time. We will have Awards Night and Commencement next year, but they’ll be smaller, more intimate occasions. Tonight marks the beginning of a week of the final observances of a certain kind of way of being Seabury. Like the Easter season, the week we begin tonight celebrates both resurrection and loss. Graduating students and departing faculty are going on to new life and new work. And the seminary itself is in the midst of being dramatically reborn. All this is good news. In almost all measurable ways, our individual futures are bright.
Nevertheless, there is considerable loss in what we do this week. We will never be together in precisely this way again. Traditions and relationships will change. And we all know how much Episcopalians like change.
I have to confess (if it hasn’t been otherwise obvious) that I have been in a bad mood much of this Spring, and I believe my grumpiness results, in part, from my inability to express the sadness I feel at the graduation of the class of 2009 from Seabury. Part of that is because everywhere I turn, people are telling me how wonderful it is that Seabury has succeeded in reinventing itself. Part of that is because I do not like to say goodbye to people I care about, even if I do so for some very good reasons. And part of that is, no matter how liberal or progressive you and I might think I am, I really don’t like change. As much as I believe in and look forward to that new thing that Seabury is becoming, I loved and valued the old thing, too. That was why I came here. So, for me, this is the first graduation week in which I get to watch not only the students but the faculty and the whole school itself go on to what Milton called “Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.” [“Lycidas”]
Now I don’t know if you are in quite the same emotional place as I am—which I would describe as hopeful and sad at once—but I will bet that like me you feel some combination of excitement and loss as you contemplate what it means for all of us to do these things together in this way for the last time. And as we face into this paradoxical task—what Claudius in Hamlet called “mirth in funeral and . . . dirge in marriage,/ In equal scale weighing delight and dole” [Hamlet 1.2] Jesus’s remark to Peter serves at least as a sharp slap in the face to call us back to our senses and our values.
“If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!” Working in a seminary, like working in the church itself, is not about preserving a museum exhibit of the past. It is about being agents of God’s love, justice, healing, and reconciliation. Because our life together in a place like this is so intense, it is our natural human tendency to want to build a wall around it and preserve it as an artifact of our experience—much as Peter wants to do at the Transfiguration. But what Jesus says to Peter here tonight is what Jesus says, in a variety of ways, to each of us. If it is God’s will that we separate and go our different ways, and if it is God’s will that Seabury itself be transformed into something different than any of us has ever known, and if it is God’s will that God use each of us in ways that we could never ask for or imagine, what is that to us? Our task, like Peter’s and like the Beloved Disciple’s, is to follow Jesus. That is what we are here for. As Jesus said to his friends in another context, “No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” [Luke 9.62]
The briskness of that retort does not, in fact, leave us comfortless, because God never does. As we all prepare ourselves to drop what we are doing and follow Jesus, let us never forget that Jesus’s last earthly gathering with his friends took place at a meal on the beach, gathered around a charcoal fire, sharing the Eucharistic elements of bread and fish. Earth, air, fire, water. Bread, fish. The ephemeral and the eternal. We will never be together in precisely this way again. But we are together, because, in our various ways, we share this meal and then get up and go out to follow Jesus. Amen.
After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. . . . Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. . . . When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. [John 21. 1,4,9]
I grew up in Southern California, and when my parents divorced early in my childhood my father moved out to Malibu and got a house there because, if you can believe this now, it was cheap. So I spent many of my elementary school weekends at the beach, and that early experience probably colors the way I hear the 21st chapter of John’s Gospel when it is read. I cannot hear about Jesus at the beach sitting around a charcoal fire without thinking of what that looks, feels, and smells like from my own early experience. One of the things I remember best about those Malibu weekends was going down to the beach and sitting around a fire. In that seaside setting you have all the elements which early humans thought made up the universe: earth, air, fire, water. There is something primordial and eternal in that kind of moment, and also something fleeting: everything in that scene is ephemeral. As a scene which mixes the eternal and the ephemeral, a fireside by the water is the perfect place to say goodbye.
So since my earliest days of reading the Bible with some care, I have been moved that the risen Jesus’s final meal with his companions occurred on a beach gathered around a charcoal fire. As much as Easter is about the joyful return of Jesus to his friends, it is also ultimately about the loss of Jesus, too. Jesus is returning to the One he calls his Father. This is the last time his companions will see him. And without trying to sound impious or inelegant about it, it means something at least to me that Jesus leaves his friends after a final beach cookout, and the meal he shares with them takes place in the setting not only of a beautiful natural place but also in the context of the work of fishing, the stuff of their daily life.
“Lord, what about him?” [John 21.21] Peter, of course, stands and speaks for all of us here. Having lived with Jesus and the other disciples through the events of Holy Week and Easter, Peter cannot help but wonder that human destinies can be so various. “When you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go,” Jesus had told him [John 21.18]. And when Peter asks about what will happen to the Beloved Disciple, he is gently chastened: “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!” How precisely is this fair?
As Jimmy Carter once said, when talking about the differences between what rich people and poor people could afford, “there are many things in life that are not fair.” It’s not fair that one disciple goes to a martyr’s death while the other dies in peace on an island in the Mediterranean. It’s not fair that some live to old age in health while others die young. And speaking as one who lives in the rhythm of seminary life, it’s not fair that teachers and students grow close to one another through all the shared experience of their time here and then have to go their separate ways.
Tonight begins the observances of a week in which we will do things as we have always done them pretty much for the last time. We will have Awards Night and Commencement next year, but they’ll be smaller, more intimate occasions. Tonight marks the beginning of a week of the final observances of a certain kind of way of being Seabury. Like the Easter season, the week we begin tonight celebrates both resurrection and loss. Graduating students and departing faculty are going on to new life and new work. And the seminary itself is in the midst of being dramatically reborn. All this is good news. In almost all measurable ways, our individual futures are bright.
Nevertheless, there is considerable loss in what we do this week. We will never be together in precisely this way again. Traditions and relationships will change. And we all know how much Episcopalians like change.
I have to confess (if it hasn’t been otherwise obvious) that I have been in a bad mood much of this Spring, and I believe my grumpiness results, in part, from my inability to express the sadness I feel at the graduation of the class of 2009 from Seabury. Part of that is because everywhere I turn, people are telling me how wonderful it is that Seabury has succeeded in reinventing itself. Part of that is because I do not like to say goodbye to people I care about, even if I do so for some very good reasons. And part of that is, no matter how liberal or progressive you and I might think I am, I really don’t like change. As much as I believe in and look forward to that new thing that Seabury is becoming, I loved and valued the old thing, too. That was why I came here. So, for me, this is the first graduation week in which I get to watch not only the students but the faculty and the whole school itself go on to what Milton called “Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.” [“Lycidas”]
Now I don’t know if you are in quite the same emotional place as I am—which I would describe as hopeful and sad at once—but I will bet that like me you feel some combination of excitement and loss as you contemplate what it means for all of us to do these things together in this way for the last time. And as we face into this paradoxical task—what Claudius in Hamlet called “mirth in funeral and . . . dirge in marriage,/ In equal scale weighing delight and dole” [Hamlet 1.2] Jesus’s remark to Peter serves at least as a sharp slap in the face to call us back to our senses and our values.
“If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!” Working in a seminary, like working in the church itself, is not about preserving a museum exhibit of the past. It is about being agents of God’s love, justice, healing, and reconciliation. Because our life together in a place like this is so intense, it is our natural human tendency to want to build a wall around it and preserve it as an artifact of our experience—much as Peter wants to do at the Transfiguration. But what Jesus says to Peter here tonight is what Jesus says, in a variety of ways, to each of us. If it is God’s will that we separate and go our different ways, and if it is God’s will that Seabury itself be transformed into something different than any of us has ever known, and if it is God’s will that God use each of us in ways that we could never ask for or imagine, what is that to us? Our task, like Peter’s and like the Beloved Disciple’s, is to follow Jesus. That is what we are here for. As Jesus said to his friends in another context, “No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” [Luke 9.62]
The briskness of that retort does not, in fact, leave us comfortless, because God never does. As we all prepare ourselves to drop what we are doing and follow Jesus, let us never forget that Jesus’s last earthly gathering with his friends took place at a meal on the beach, gathered around a charcoal fire, sharing the Eucharistic elements of bread and fish. Earth, air, fire, water. Bread, fish. The ephemeral and the eternal. We will never be together in precisely this way again. But we are together, because, in our various ways, we share this meal and then get up and go out to follow Jesus. Amen.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Sermon: The Fourth Sunday of Easter [Church of the Holy Spirit, Lake Forest, IL, May 3, 2009]
I.
All the recent media talk about swine flu has put me in mind of pork in general, and that has made my thoughts turn to everyone’s favorite film about pigs, Babe. You’ll remember that Babe is a pig who wants to be a sheepdog, and the climax of the movie comes when Babe unexpectedly wins the sheepdog trials. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Babe is the way in which it puts in a good word for the dignity and intelligence of sheep, a claim you don’t hear made a lot in churches on Good Shepherd Sunday. You may remember that early on, when Babe tries, as the dogs do, to boss the sheep around, he fails. He asks his adoptive sheepdog mother why, and she replies: “You’re treating them like equals. They’re sheep, they’re inferior.” “Oh, no they’re not,” says Babe. “Of course they are,” she rejoins. “We are their masters, Babe. Let them doubt it for a second and they’ll walk all over you.” She must have had a prior career as a Middle School teacher.
Chanting “Baa, ram, ewe. To your fleece be true. Baa, ram, ewe.” the sheep on Babe’s farm have an un-sheeplike sense of their own dignity, and they respond to Babe’s interspecies respect with cooperation. Like the duck who thinks he’s a rooster and the pig who thinks he’s a dog, the sheep in Babe refuse to accept the world’s definition of them. Our cultural stereotype of sheep, to the extent that we urban and suburban people still have one, is that they are dirty, smelly, stupid creatures who need guidance and direction from dogs and people. What that stereotype fails to acknowledge, however, is that even dogs and people need guidance and direction. Sheep may need a shepherd, but so does everyone else. And not because we’re stupid. We need guidance and direction because we are social beings, and it is one of Western culture’s most dangerous presumptions to think that we can navigate all the thickets of life without the aid and companionship of others. “I Did it My Way” is a song best sung by a sheep hurtling over a cliff, followed closely by a dog and a man.
Today is the Fourth Sunday of Easter, a day commonly called “Good Shepherd Sunday” because of the phrase from today’s collect which calls Jesus “the good shepherd” of God’s people and prays that “when we hear his voice we may know him who calls us each by name, and follow where he leads.” In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us: “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.” [John 10.14] To be a Christian one must come to terms with this metaphor in all of its implications. Jesus tells us that he is our shepherd and we his sheep. We need guidance; we need direction. But to need guidance and direction is not, contrary to what Babe’s sheepdog’s mother says, to be inferior. How do we hear this comparison of us to sheep in all its fullness without forgetting that we, like sheep, have both limitations and dignity, too?
II.
That comparison which Jesus made was not new:
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]
That’s the Servant Song from Isaiah; and our Psalm for today, the familiar 23rd Psalm, begins by proclaiming, “The Lord is my shepherd.” Israel turned to sheep as a human metaphor because they saw in sheep some observable aspects of human behavior. They saw that sheep do not always know or do what is in their best interest. They saw that sheep flourish more in an ordered community than they do in a wild free for all. When looking at shepherds and sheep, Israel’s prophets saw an image of the human condition. We think we’re individuals and that we know what is best for us. But the actual facts are otherwise. We achieve our fulfillment not alone but in community. We flourish as part of something bigger than we are. And we need guides, mentors, friends, companions to help us navigate away from life’s thickets and cliffs.
That is certainly the way the book of Genesis understands the human condition in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. And that is certainly how our Gospels understand the story of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. We human beings mistake our own interest. When we think only of our own personal needs, wants, and aspirations we can become easy prey for charlatans and demagogues. When we follow what we think is our own self-interest divorced from that of others, we see what happens: Adam and Eve get expelled from the Garden; Jesus gets crucified; Americans live in a world with failed financial institutions, bankrupt companies, collapsing infrastructure, massive unemployment, two wars, and a society where 45 million Americans have no health insurance, to say nothing of what we’ve done to the planet. “All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way.” We like sheep get into trouble when we fail to realize that there is a larger, shared, common good. And that is why we need shepherds—prophets, mentors, guides, companions, friends—to help us remember that human life is impossible without the sustaining fabric of a community and culture and a commitment to mutual respect and obligation. As they say, “It Takes a Village.”
III.
So we are like sheep in that we can get ourselves into personal and social trouble. And we need shepherds and sheepdogs to nip at us and guide us not just into safety but toward God’s vision of our real human destiny. Because the purpose of life is not just to be safe. The purpose of life is to live, as Jesus did, a fully realized joyous and compassionate existence. And that brings us back to the question of our sheeply and human dignity.
If we think again about what sheep represent in the ancient Near Eastern economy, we’ll see that sheep are, to their owners and shepherds, precious. The sheep are worth a good deal to those who own and maintain them. So when Jesus calls himself our “Good Shepherd”, or when Psalm 23 tells us that the Lord is our shepherd, what we should hear in that is not just a program of divine command and control. What we should hear in that is about human dignity and worth. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The Lord as shepherd leads the sheep through the valley to green pastures and still waters. You don’t lay down your life for someone worthless. You don’t give your shepherdly attention to someone whom you don’t care about. God, as shepherd, sacrifices and leads us precisely because we have so much worth and value in God’s sight. God made you and me in God’s own image. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us as one of us. God loves us not out of sentimental pity but out of identification and worth. God in Jesus knows what it is to be us. God desires that we have life and have it abundantly.
Right before we saw the movie Babe¸ our family spent a summer in England where we became familiar with a BBC show called “One Man and His Dog”. Every week for a half an hour, viewers of “One Man and His Dog” used to watch a shepherd put a sheepdog through the complex trials of guiding sheep through a complicated set of gates into pens. Like many people, we found this show oddly soothing. There was little commentary, and the only sound you heard was of the calls the man would make to the dog. Watching it was like sitting outside on a farm at the end of the day watching the advance of evening. It was also like finding yourself in the vision of the loving, safe, and generous world which God holds out to us at Easter.
I think about those sheepdog trials whenever I hear the words from today’s Gospel: “I am the Good Shepherd.” You and I, like sheep, need the nipping of that heavenly sheepdog at our heels to keep us thinking about how what we want can more closely resemble what we need and can live in harmony with what the everyone else needs. And you and I, like sheep, are blessed to have each other and the continued presence of the One who cares enough about us to guide and lead us away from thickets and cliffs and towards pastures and still waters.
Easter is about many things, but most deeply it is about what God means to us and what we mean to God. What God means to us is that the Lord is our shepherd, and this is good and gracious news. And what we mean to God is that we are precious to the One who lays down his life for the sheep. You mean everything to God. The fullness of both these meanings is what Easter represents. And Easter’s gracious surprise--for that One and for all of us-- is that we now have a resurrected, risen life with Jesus and God and each other and the world in which to live out the joyous implications of what being precious in God’s sight can mean. May our love and gratitude toward God and our compassion and solidarity with each other be the most contagious things we experience this spring. Amen.
All the recent media talk about swine flu has put me in mind of pork in general, and that has made my thoughts turn to everyone’s favorite film about pigs, Babe. You’ll remember that Babe is a pig who wants to be a sheepdog, and the climax of the movie comes when Babe unexpectedly wins the sheepdog trials. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Babe is the way in which it puts in a good word for the dignity and intelligence of sheep, a claim you don’t hear made a lot in churches on Good Shepherd Sunday. You may remember that early on, when Babe tries, as the dogs do, to boss the sheep around, he fails. He asks his adoptive sheepdog mother why, and she replies: “You’re treating them like equals. They’re sheep, they’re inferior.” “Oh, no they’re not,” says Babe. “Of course they are,” she rejoins. “We are their masters, Babe. Let them doubt it for a second and they’ll walk all over you.” She must have had a prior career as a Middle School teacher.
Chanting “Baa, ram, ewe. To your fleece be true. Baa, ram, ewe.” the sheep on Babe’s farm have an un-sheeplike sense of their own dignity, and they respond to Babe’s interspecies respect with cooperation. Like the duck who thinks he’s a rooster and the pig who thinks he’s a dog, the sheep in Babe refuse to accept the world’s definition of them. Our cultural stereotype of sheep, to the extent that we urban and suburban people still have one, is that they are dirty, smelly, stupid creatures who need guidance and direction from dogs and people. What that stereotype fails to acknowledge, however, is that even dogs and people need guidance and direction. Sheep may need a shepherd, but so does everyone else. And not because we’re stupid. We need guidance and direction because we are social beings, and it is one of Western culture’s most dangerous presumptions to think that we can navigate all the thickets of life without the aid and companionship of others. “I Did it My Way” is a song best sung by a sheep hurtling over a cliff, followed closely by a dog and a man.
Today is the Fourth Sunday of Easter, a day commonly called “Good Shepherd Sunday” because of the phrase from today’s collect which calls Jesus “the good shepherd” of God’s people and prays that “when we hear his voice we may know him who calls us each by name, and follow where he leads.” In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us: “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.” [John 10.14] To be a Christian one must come to terms with this metaphor in all of its implications. Jesus tells us that he is our shepherd and we his sheep. We need guidance; we need direction. But to need guidance and direction is not, contrary to what Babe’s sheepdog’s mother says, to be inferior. How do we hear this comparison of us to sheep in all its fullness without forgetting that we, like sheep, have both limitations and dignity, too?
II.
That comparison which Jesus made was not new:
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]
That’s the Servant Song from Isaiah; and our Psalm for today, the familiar 23rd Psalm, begins by proclaiming, “The Lord is my shepherd.” Israel turned to sheep as a human metaphor because they saw in sheep some observable aspects of human behavior. They saw that sheep do not always know or do what is in their best interest. They saw that sheep flourish more in an ordered community than they do in a wild free for all. When looking at shepherds and sheep, Israel’s prophets saw an image of the human condition. We think we’re individuals and that we know what is best for us. But the actual facts are otherwise. We achieve our fulfillment not alone but in community. We flourish as part of something bigger than we are. And we need guides, mentors, friends, companions to help us navigate away from life’s thickets and cliffs.
That is certainly the way the book of Genesis understands the human condition in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. And that is certainly how our Gospels understand the story of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. We human beings mistake our own interest. When we think only of our own personal needs, wants, and aspirations we can become easy prey for charlatans and demagogues. When we follow what we think is our own self-interest divorced from that of others, we see what happens: Adam and Eve get expelled from the Garden; Jesus gets crucified; Americans live in a world with failed financial institutions, bankrupt companies, collapsing infrastructure, massive unemployment, two wars, and a society where 45 million Americans have no health insurance, to say nothing of what we’ve done to the planet. “All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way.” We like sheep get into trouble when we fail to realize that there is a larger, shared, common good. And that is why we need shepherds—prophets, mentors, guides, companions, friends—to help us remember that human life is impossible without the sustaining fabric of a community and culture and a commitment to mutual respect and obligation. As they say, “It Takes a Village.”
III.
So we are like sheep in that we can get ourselves into personal and social trouble. And we need shepherds and sheepdogs to nip at us and guide us not just into safety but toward God’s vision of our real human destiny. Because the purpose of life is not just to be safe. The purpose of life is to live, as Jesus did, a fully realized joyous and compassionate existence. And that brings us back to the question of our sheeply and human dignity.
If we think again about what sheep represent in the ancient Near Eastern economy, we’ll see that sheep are, to their owners and shepherds, precious. The sheep are worth a good deal to those who own and maintain them. So when Jesus calls himself our “Good Shepherd”, or when Psalm 23 tells us that the Lord is our shepherd, what we should hear in that is not just a program of divine command and control. What we should hear in that is about human dignity and worth. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The Lord as shepherd leads the sheep through the valley to green pastures and still waters. You don’t lay down your life for someone worthless. You don’t give your shepherdly attention to someone whom you don’t care about. God, as shepherd, sacrifices and leads us precisely because we have so much worth and value in God’s sight. God made you and me in God’s own image. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us as one of us. God loves us not out of sentimental pity but out of identification and worth. God in Jesus knows what it is to be us. God desires that we have life and have it abundantly.
Right before we saw the movie Babe¸ our family spent a summer in England where we became familiar with a BBC show called “One Man and His Dog”. Every week for a half an hour, viewers of “One Man and His Dog” used to watch a shepherd put a sheepdog through the complex trials of guiding sheep through a complicated set of gates into pens. Like many people, we found this show oddly soothing. There was little commentary, and the only sound you heard was of the calls the man would make to the dog. Watching it was like sitting outside on a farm at the end of the day watching the advance of evening. It was also like finding yourself in the vision of the loving, safe, and generous world which God holds out to us at Easter.
I think about those sheepdog trials whenever I hear the words from today’s Gospel: “I am the Good Shepherd.” You and I, like sheep, need the nipping of that heavenly sheepdog at our heels to keep us thinking about how what we want can more closely resemble what we need and can live in harmony with what the everyone else needs. And you and I, like sheep, are blessed to have each other and the continued presence of the One who cares enough about us to guide and lead us away from thickets and cliffs and towards pastures and still waters.
Easter is about many things, but most deeply it is about what God means to us and what we mean to God. What God means to us is that the Lord is our shepherd, and this is good and gracious news. And what we mean to God is that we are precious to the One who lays down his life for the sheep. You mean everything to God. The fullness of both these meanings is what Easter represents. And Easter’s gracious surprise--for that One and for all of us-- is that we now have a resurrected, risen life with Jesus and God and each other and the world in which to live out the joyous implications of what being precious in God’s sight can mean. May our love and gratitude toward God and our compassion and solidarity with each other be the most contagious things we experience this spring. Amen.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Homily: John Muir and Hudson Stuck [Earth Day: April 22, 2009]
Although I am a longtime admirer of John Muir (hey, the guy’s on the back of the California quarter!), I must admit that until a couple of days ago I had never heard of Hudson Stuck. John Muir, as many of us know, was a naturalist and writer who emigrated from Scotland to Wisconsin and then spent most of his life in California. He is most famous as the author of The Mountains of California, My First Summer in the Sierra, and as the founder of the Sierra Club. Hudson Stuck was also an immigrant: born in England he came to America in 1885 and attended the University of the South. He was ordained a priest and served as Dean of the Cathedral in Dallas, Texas before becoming Archdeacon of the Yukon in 1905. He was well-known in his day as the author of such books as Ascent of Denali and Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled. In 1913 he organized the first successful ascent of Mount Denali.
Now I never quite know what our lectionary makers are up to when they set aside days for us to remember saints. I don’t know if Muir and Stuck were friends, but aside from their love of nature I’m not sure they had a lot in common. While Hudson Stuck was both a mountaineer and a priest, John Muir was not what any of us would call conventionally pious. I always get nervous when our church tries to claim celebrities as our own—I’m old enough to remember how we bragged when Vice President Spiro Agnew was an Episcopalian, a fact we tried to hide after Watergate—and I’m not sure that Muir would appreciate being lumped together with the Archdeacon simply because they are dead Britons who loved the American west. But taken on their own terms, each is an admirable person and their separate and joint witness has something important to tell us about our own relationship to God in nature.
What has always interested me about John Muir’s life is the moment when he made the vocational transition from nature-lover to activist. When you read Muir’s earlier writings, you get the sense that his earliest experiences of nature were private, personal ones. He moved to Yosemite Valley and lived there because he loved the transcendent qualities he experienced there. But, over time, Muir began to realize that some kind of collective action had to be organized to save the California wilderness from the encroachments of industrial society. So Muir gave up living in the wild and moved back into the world and in 1892 organized the Sierra Club. In 1901 he led the unsuccessful fight to stop San Francisco from buying and flooding the Hetch Hetchy valley, a near duplicate of Yosemite, also in the Sierra. For the rest of his life, John Muir was a tireless advocate of natural preservation.
And something like this transition from nature-lover to advocate took place in the life and ministry of Hudson Stuck. Though Stuck obviously combined the active and contemplative lives by being a mountain-climbing Archdeacon, he too moved more and more into political activism on behalf of the natural world as he got older. Stuck’s last great cause became his effort to outlaw large fishing ships called “floating canneries”, and this campaign led to the regulations of 1920 for salmon conservation in Alaska and the restoration of native fishing rights. As they aged, both men moved from a spirituality of individual “communing with nature” to a corporate, communal understanding of nature as a shared and sacred space to which all creatures, including people, have rights of access.
The Gospel which we’ve read today [Luke 8.22-25] tells the familiar story of Jesus calming the storm: “They went to him and woke him up, shouting, ‘Master, Master, we are perishing!’ And he woke up and rebuked the wind and the raging waves; they ceased, and there was a calm.” [Luke 8.24] Just as I’m a bit suspicious of the lectionary-makers, so I’m not so sure that Luke would understand being in touch with nature in the same way you and I would. If anything, this story seems to be about command and control rather than about organic connectedness. Nevertheless, beneath the easy and overt connection that’s being proposed, I think there is a deeper and truer way in which this story about Jesus says something about John Muir, Hudson Stuck, the planet, and us.
What has always struck me about this story in Luke’s Gospel is the way it shows us a Jesus who knows who he is. And what Jesus knows in this particular moment is that he is at home in God’s world. Right now, that world appears to be a dangerous place: the winds are roaring and the waves are crashing. But Jesus knows he is safe there because he knows that this world is God’s world and his world, and so it is his home. He belongs to it. He knows it, he loves it, he accepts it on its own terms. And so he is able to speak to it precisely NOT from a command-and-control mode but from a posture of love.
And it is by speaking to the world from that sense of being at home and that posture of love that Jesus is able to take on advocacy on behalf of those in the boat with him, people who operate out of alienation and fear, who see the natural world as more of a problem than a gift. So in a profound way, Jesus embodies the characteristics we admire in John Muir and Hudson Stuck. He loves the natural world on its own terms and makes himself at home there. And his love for that world moves him beyond mere appreciation of it into advocacy both for it and for the people with whom he is in community. Jesus knows what America’s indigenous people know: that the natural world is as much about community and justice as it is about Romantic transcendence.
Today, of course, is Earth Day, an occasion celebrated in America since 1970. As we gather at Jesus’s table to give thanks on this day for the created world and our place in it, let us remember and give thanks for the lives and witnesses of John Muir and Hudson Stuck. Yes, they were sensitive souls who responded to the sublime transcendence of the natural world. But they answered God’s call in their lives to be more than chroniclers of nature and its beauties. They stepped into the responsibility of standing for and with God’s world against those who would treat it as an object and not as the precious subject that it is. Like Jesus, Muir and Stuck loved the world, were at home in it, and they gave the last part of their lives in service not only to the planet but to all us creatures who live on it together. It is not enough just to admire something or someone. True love and compassion call us toward the next step—to move beyond appreciation into advocacy. May we embrace this day’s calling with similar love and commitment. And may we also gather at Jesus’s table in solidarity with John Muir, Hudson Stuck, and all those who love and serve God’s world and God’s people, and together with them give thanks. Amen.
Now I never quite know what our lectionary makers are up to when they set aside days for us to remember saints. I don’t know if Muir and Stuck were friends, but aside from their love of nature I’m not sure they had a lot in common. While Hudson Stuck was both a mountaineer and a priest, John Muir was not what any of us would call conventionally pious. I always get nervous when our church tries to claim celebrities as our own—I’m old enough to remember how we bragged when Vice President Spiro Agnew was an Episcopalian, a fact we tried to hide after Watergate—and I’m not sure that Muir would appreciate being lumped together with the Archdeacon simply because they are dead Britons who loved the American west. But taken on their own terms, each is an admirable person and their separate and joint witness has something important to tell us about our own relationship to God in nature.
What has always interested me about John Muir’s life is the moment when he made the vocational transition from nature-lover to activist. When you read Muir’s earlier writings, you get the sense that his earliest experiences of nature were private, personal ones. He moved to Yosemite Valley and lived there because he loved the transcendent qualities he experienced there. But, over time, Muir began to realize that some kind of collective action had to be organized to save the California wilderness from the encroachments of industrial society. So Muir gave up living in the wild and moved back into the world and in 1892 organized the Sierra Club. In 1901 he led the unsuccessful fight to stop San Francisco from buying and flooding the Hetch Hetchy valley, a near duplicate of Yosemite, also in the Sierra. For the rest of his life, John Muir was a tireless advocate of natural preservation.
And something like this transition from nature-lover to advocate took place in the life and ministry of Hudson Stuck. Though Stuck obviously combined the active and contemplative lives by being a mountain-climbing Archdeacon, he too moved more and more into political activism on behalf of the natural world as he got older. Stuck’s last great cause became his effort to outlaw large fishing ships called “floating canneries”, and this campaign led to the regulations of 1920 for salmon conservation in Alaska and the restoration of native fishing rights. As they aged, both men moved from a spirituality of individual “communing with nature” to a corporate, communal understanding of nature as a shared and sacred space to which all creatures, including people, have rights of access.
The Gospel which we’ve read today [Luke 8.22-25] tells the familiar story of Jesus calming the storm: “They went to him and woke him up, shouting, ‘Master, Master, we are perishing!’ And he woke up and rebuked the wind and the raging waves; they ceased, and there was a calm.” [Luke 8.24] Just as I’m a bit suspicious of the lectionary-makers, so I’m not so sure that Luke would understand being in touch with nature in the same way you and I would. If anything, this story seems to be about command and control rather than about organic connectedness. Nevertheless, beneath the easy and overt connection that’s being proposed, I think there is a deeper and truer way in which this story about Jesus says something about John Muir, Hudson Stuck, the planet, and us.
What has always struck me about this story in Luke’s Gospel is the way it shows us a Jesus who knows who he is. And what Jesus knows in this particular moment is that he is at home in God’s world. Right now, that world appears to be a dangerous place: the winds are roaring and the waves are crashing. But Jesus knows he is safe there because he knows that this world is God’s world and his world, and so it is his home. He belongs to it. He knows it, he loves it, he accepts it on its own terms. And so he is able to speak to it precisely NOT from a command-and-control mode but from a posture of love.
And it is by speaking to the world from that sense of being at home and that posture of love that Jesus is able to take on advocacy on behalf of those in the boat with him, people who operate out of alienation and fear, who see the natural world as more of a problem than a gift. So in a profound way, Jesus embodies the characteristics we admire in John Muir and Hudson Stuck. He loves the natural world on its own terms and makes himself at home there. And his love for that world moves him beyond mere appreciation of it into advocacy both for it and for the people with whom he is in community. Jesus knows what America’s indigenous people know: that the natural world is as much about community and justice as it is about Romantic transcendence.
Today, of course, is Earth Day, an occasion celebrated in America since 1970. As we gather at Jesus’s table to give thanks on this day for the created world and our place in it, let us remember and give thanks for the lives and witnesses of John Muir and Hudson Stuck. Yes, they were sensitive souls who responded to the sublime transcendence of the natural world. But they answered God’s call in their lives to be more than chroniclers of nature and its beauties. They stepped into the responsibility of standing for and with God’s world against those who would treat it as an object and not as the precious subject that it is. Like Jesus, Muir and Stuck loved the world, were at home in it, and they gave the last part of their lives in service not only to the planet but to all us creatures who live on it together. It is not enough just to admire something or someone. True love and compassion call us toward the next step—to move beyond appreciation into advocacy. May we embrace this day’s calling with similar love and commitment. And may we also gather at Jesus’s table in solidarity with John Muir, Hudson Stuck, and all those who love and serve God’s world and God’s people, and together with them give thanks. Amen.
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