Two Sundays ago we had a very difficult Gospel: "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” [Matthew 14.25] Luckily for me, Joyce was the preacher that day, and so I dodged a bullet. Today we just heard Beth read the parable of the dishonest manager, [Luke 16.1-13] but even I am not mean enough to ask her to address this impossible story on her first Sunday here. So I guess one learning today is: the rector can run but he cannot hide. Jesus says a lot of strange things in the Gospels, and sometimes the preacher just has to “suck it up and deal” as a faculty colleague of mine once said.
This Gospel—the parable of the dishonest manager —has only been in our Sunday lectionary since the 1970s. Prior to that it was deemed too difficult and so left out. And it’s easy to see why. Jesus tells the story of a dishonest manager who learns he will lose his job. He decides to make friends for himself by cutting deals with those who owe money to his boss. If you owe a hundred jugs of oil, we’ll make it fifty. If you owe a hundred measures of wheat we’ll make it eighty. The shocking moment in the story comes when the master praises the manager for his shrewd, if dishonest, behavior. And then Jesus concludes with this puzzling statement: “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” How on earth do we make sense of this?
One way to make sense of it is to remember the way money worked for Jews and Christians in Bible times. In Jesus’s day, lending money at interest was forbidden by Jewish law. One way they got around that law was to lend commodities—oil and wheat, for example—and to demand inflated amounts in return. So instead of lending money, a landowner could lend 50 jugs of oil and demand 100 jugs as payment of the debt; or he could lend 80 measures of wheat and require 100 measures in return. This was not technically usury, because no money changed hands. But it was a usurious practice. As my father once said when he heard this Gospel, the real thief here wasn’t the manager; the real thief was the boss, who had been lending commodities at usurious rates. When confronted with his own survival, the unjust manager chose to blow the whistle on the master and so save himself. When it is all over, the master cannot help but admire the manager’s shrewdness. He has saved himself from destitution by cutting deals with those who were being cheated by the landowner.
So one way—perhaps the only way—to understand this story is to see it as a story about honesty, about truth-telling. The impending crisis in the manager’s life provokes a moment of truth when everyone has to stop deluding themselves and face in to what is actually happening. Jesus praises the manager not because he is dishonest but because he breaks the collusion and denial and forces a community to tell the truth to itself and each other. And isn’t our desire for truth our deepest desire? “Be it life or death, we crave only reality,” as Henry Thoreau said.
In this month’s issue of Poetry magazine, the poet Tony Hoagland has an essay [“Recognition, Vertigo, and Passionate Worldliness: The tribes of contemporary poetry”] in which he asserts, “We have communication sickness.” As he said in an interview when asked about “communication sickness”:
We are terribly, terribly weary of untrustworthy speech--the ways in which we feel helpless and hopeless about our public discourse and about our situation in a very commercial society. [“Poetry Magazine Podcast”, September 1, 2010]
According to Tony Hoagland, this communication sickness is exacerbated by “the corruption of commercial and political speech.” He describes this disease as “our resulting collective dizziness” and identifies it as “a fundamental symptom of modern life.”
Communication Sickness. If you are anything like me, the minute you heard this you knew what Tony Hoagland was talking about. We are all “terribly weary of untrustworthy speech”—from our leaders, from those who want to be our leaders, from those who comment on our leaders. We suffer untrustworthy speech from those who want to manipulate us into thinking or buying or voting or behaving in a certain way. We are made collectively dizzy by our inability to latch onto words that make simple, trustworthy sense.
And it’s not only that speech is untrustworthy. It’s also that we’re surrounded by so much of it. In an interview published last month, the late writer David Foster Wallace described what it is like to suffer the continued onslaught of communications messages:
I received five hundred thousand discrete bits of information today, of which maybe twenty-five are important. And how am I going to sort those out, you know? --David Foster Wallace quoted in "Smarter than You Think", Wyatt Mason, New York Review of Books, 7/15/10.
Emails, sound bites, advertising, infomercials, blogs, tweets, Facebook postings: How am I going to sort those out? What is being said to me that I can trust, that I really need to hear.
Again, as Thoreau said, “Be it life or death, we crave only reality.” John Lennon put it this way, “All I want is the truth. Just gimme some truth.” If we want to understand what Jesus is saying to us in an admittedly confusing and difficult parable, the best place to start is with our craving for reality, our demand for truth. We all have communication sickness. Who can we trust, and how?
In this morning’s Gospel, the dishonest manager has provoked a moment when another group of people suffering communication sickness were suddenly empowered to face into the truth of their situation. Only when faced with a question of survival did the manager have the ingenuity to call his master’s bluff. The situation we find ourselves in may not be quite so dramatic. But it does require courageous and decisive action.
I believe we all have communication sickness, frankly, because we are too plugged-in. According to recent studies, the average American spends 8.5 hours per day looking at a screen—a TV screen, a computer screen, a smart phone, a video game. We take in three times the information we consumed in 1960. We look at an average of 40 websites a day. We have all signed on to a vision of connectedness that holds that the important messages come to us from outside ourselves. We do not trust the depth and quality of our own interior lives. And so we seek to bring words and ideas from outside into ourselves as a way of filling what we think is a void. Hence our addiction to perpetual connectedness.
Now don’t get me wrong. I believe, as a Christian and as a human being, that there is much I need to take in from outside myself, that I am made complete only in my relations with others and with God. But believing that is not the same thing as being alienated from my own interior life. So I would say, along with the great majority of writers about spirituality in the Christian tradition, that the way into trustworthy speech, the way out of communication sickness, the way to sort out the true from the false messages—that way is the journey within. It is the journey into solitude, into silence. It is the journey into self-knowledge and self-acceptance. It is the journey into prayerful disconnectedness. If I cannot spend the day alone I certainly cannot spend it with you. And if I cannot be present to you I cannot be present to God. We have communication sickness because we have overdosed on noise. And we overdose on noise because we are ignorant or afraid of what we might hear coming from within once the distraction stops.
Christian spirituality has always lived in this dialogue between community and solitude. The world Jesus describes, like our world, is a culture given over to “untrustworthy speech”, to those “five hundred thousand discrete bits of information today, of which maybe twenty-five are important.” And Jesus’s point this morning in the parable is that there is a place we can go for trustworthy, important speech. And that is into the place of silence. God is doing something inside you. If that weren’t true, you wouldn’t be here. How are you going to attend to what God is doing unless you tune out the distractions and listen?
In his new book "Hamlet’s Blackberry", William Powers suggests that everyone take a regular weekly “Internet Sabbath”. Because we are biologically wired to pay attention to new stimuli, disconnecting from all external messages on a regular basis may be as difficult as quitting smoking or saying no to that bacon cheeseburger. But regular disconnection from screens in all their forms will allow us to process our thoughts and feelings, to hear ourselves feel and think, and enable us maybe even to talk to each other. And it’s in that internal/external dialogue—not in cyberspace-- that we actually encounter God.
We don’t know what happened after the dishonest manager blew the whistle on his master. But we do know that the master praised him for his clarity and shrewdness. I don’t know precisely what you will hear when you step away from the screen, turn off the noise, and attend to what God is saying to and within you. But I do know that God is saying something unique through you that only you can hear, and I know that I and the church and the world will be the less if you do not attend to and act on it. We owe it to each other to make the space to listen to what God is up to in our several interior lives. We may not always be praised for the truths we bring back. They may be hard truths. But those truths will be our truths. They will be trustworthy. And they will bind us to one another and the reality we so deeply crave. Amen.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Homily: The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost [September 12, 2010] Christ Church Cranbrook
Whenever we are able to spend some time together, my son Oliver and I try to go to a rock concert that bridges our generational interests. Last month in Los Angeles we drove out to Ontario, California to hear Bob Dylan and John Mellencamp. My hearing should be returning shortly. Several years ago, we made a longer trip to Nashville and Memphis to see some of the sacred spaces of American popular music. In Memphis we visited Sun Records and Graceland. In Nashville we went to hear a concert by the great George Jones at the Ryman Auditorium, the original home of the Grand Old Opry.
George Jones humbly bills himself as “the greatest country singer of all time”. In order to prepare for the experience of basking in his august presence, Oliver had bought the CD George Jones 16 Biggest Hits and we listened to it a couple of times on our long drive south from Philadelphia to Nashville. George Jones did a long and wonderful show the night we saw him, but for me the high point was a song from early in his career which was not on the CD. It was a song called “Sinners and Saints,” and when he announced it the crowd went wild. I understood why when I heard the refrain:
The only thing different in sinners and saints:
One is forgiven, the other one ain’t.
Now “Sinners and Saints”, like all George Jones songs, is a sad tale of a guy who cheated on his woman (who of course then left him), so he now is left to sit alone in a honky tonk drinking wine, but with this difference: whereas in most country songs like that, the singer merely laments his new unhappy life, in this song the singer gestures back at those who would point at him the finger of self-righteousness. “I know I’ve messed up my life. I’m not sure you do.”
The only thing different in sinners and saints:
One is forgiven, the other one ain’t.
The song “Sinners and Saints” reminded me of the definition I once heard of a martyr: a martyr, they say, is someone who is married to a saint. Is there anything worse than someone who revels in their own sanctity? The audience at the Ryman didn’t think so, and neither do I. We all stomped and cheered every time George Jones let loose with his refrain.
The only thing different in sinners and saints:
One is forgiven, the other one ain’t.
This morning’s Gospel [Luke 15:1-10] presents us with two of Jesus’s most familiar yet troubling parables: the stories of the lost sheep and the lost coin. He tells these stories because, as Luke tells us, some were complaining, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them." By way of answering his critics, Jesus tells us of a shepherd who leaves his 99 safe sheep to go look for the one that was lost and carries it back to rejoin the flock. “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.” He also tells us of a woman who has ten silver coins and, losing one, turns the house upside down and searches until she finds it. In both cases, the message is clear: “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” “Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."
These stories are well-known and so familiar. But they are also troubling. Do those ratios make sense to you: 99 safe sheep to one lost? Nine secure coins to one missing? Jesus talks of a God who is willing to act rashly on behalf of those who are lost, a God who seems to take for granted those who are found. If you’re listening closely, these stories might make you angry. That’s fine for the shepherd and the woman, but what about rest of us? Is Jesus really saying that one lost person is more important to God than 99 of us who have gotten up early on Sunday mornings week in and week out to be here?
The only thing different in sinners and saints:
One is forgiven, the other one ain’t.
One of the ways I get at the parables of Jesus is to ask myself this question: Who in this story is Jesus asking me to identify with? Remember that Jesus told these stories in the first place because a group of Pharisees were complaining , "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them." So he tells a story about those who would call themselves “insiders” and those whom the insiders would call “outsiders”. And for Jesus to tell a story in which the shepherd or the woman abandons a large group of insiders to search for one lonely, lost outsider would really make you angry—IF you identified with the so-called insiders. “Here I am, one of the 99. Who does this shepherd think he is to leave me helpless while he seeks for one lost, lonely sheep?” Of course this story will make us angry if, like the Pharisees, we have defined ourselves as people who are worthier of attention than is someone else.
But what if you shift your perspective for a moment and think of yourself primarily as an outsider? In the terms of Jesus’s world, that would mean you’re neither part of the Roman or Jewish elite. You’re a simple, probably poor and hungry, Palestinian Jewish peasant. Because of economic and social conditions you might find yourself doing something disreputable for a living. You inhabit a culture and a world that tells you you’re not worth very much at all.
And then you hear Jesus telling you that he’s willing to sit at a table with you because, like God, he is one who cares for the lost, the lonely, the alienated, the outcast. And he makes the outlandish claim that one of you is more important to him than 99 of the so-called respectable people. Sure, a statement like that would make the respectable people angry. But wouldn’t it make you feel pretty good?
There are all kinds of ways you and I get ourselves into spiritual trouble. But the number one way, in my estimation, is our tendency to rely on our qualifications as a guarantee of our status. The Pharisees weren’t really bad people. They were good, rule-abiding folk who made the common mistake of believing too much in their own sanctity. When Jesus began his teaching ministry in Matthew’s Gospel, the first thing he said was, “How blest are those who know their need of God; the kingdom of heaven is theirs.”[Matthew 5.3, New English Bible] I get myself into spiritual trouble when I forget my need of God. And I forget my need of God when, like the Pharisees, I take my own sanctity too seriously. I get myself into trouble when I see myself and my interests as tied to those of the haves rather than the have-nots. I get myself into trouble when I think of myself as one of the presumptively safe 99 rather than as the lost one.
The only thing different in sinners and saints:
One is forgiven, the other one ain’t
So here is how George Jones would help Jesus pose today’s question: Are you going to think of yourself as a saint or a sinner? Do you want to be holy and self-righteous, or do you want to be whole and forgiven? Are you going to consort only with people as pious and respectable as you think you are, or are you, like Jesus, going to welcome sinners and eat with them? “How blest are they who know their need of God. “ Those who are heavily invested in an image of their own respectability do not know of their need for God and so, like the 99 in the parable, they are pretty much on their own. It’s only those of us who “get” that we really do need some help who can become the ones whom God goes in search of. If you’re like me you can become dazzled with your own accomplishments and so forget your need of God at the drop of a hat. It’s only by God’s grace that things keep happening to us that allow us to open ourselves up to God and our own need.
Today is Homecoming Sunday here and Christ Church Cranbrook, and the tendency for the preacher on occasions like this is to say something self-congratulatory, to the effect that this, and not someplace else, is our home. But if we listen to what Jesus is saying in today’s parables, we might put it somewhat differently. Yes, sure, this is our home. But it’s our home not because we are more pious or more respectable or better educated or higher achieving than somebody else. It is our home because it is the home of all those who know their need of God. It is our home because, like the sheep and the coin in this morning’s parable, when we are honest with ourselves, we know we are those on behalf of whom God continually goes in search. When others point to Jesus and say, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them,” we take comfort in knowing that Jesus welcomes and eats with us, that we are the people worth enough to Jesus that he will risk all to seek for us. “How blest are those who know their need of God; the kingdom of heaven is theirs.” We will get this wrong if we think of the Kingdom of Heaven is something we own and others don’t. We will get it right if we see how deeply and consistently God continues to love us even when we inevitably get it wrong. And this will be our home not because we deserve it more than anyone else, but because we have been given grace to see that, for some unfathomable reason, God loves us enough to have left the 99 in search of us, to give us a place where we can, in the company of one another, make our way with those who know that they need God, too.
The only thing different in sinners and saints:
One is forgiven, the other one ain’t
We come now to the Eucharist, the central action of our life and witness as followers of Jesus. This is the meal that characterizes our life together, that connects us to each other and to God, the meal that strengthens us for the living of our lives in the world. Remember who it is that Jesus invites to this meal—not the self-righteous but the ones they would call sinners. We gather to dine with one who welcomes sinners and eats with them. As Jesus welcomes and eats with us, may we remember his promise that the One who goes in search of us will find us, that all of us who are lost will be found. Amen.
George Jones humbly bills himself as “the greatest country singer of all time”. In order to prepare for the experience of basking in his august presence, Oliver had bought the CD George Jones 16 Biggest Hits and we listened to it a couple of times on our long drive south from Philadelphia to Nashville. George Jones did a long and wonderful show the night we saw him, but for me the high point was a song from early in his career which was not on the CD. It was a song called “Sinners and Saints,” and when he announced it the crowd went wild. I understood why when I heard the refrain:
The only thing different in sinners and saints:
One is forgiven, the other one ain’t.
Now “Sinners and Saints”, like all George Jones songs, is a sad tale of a guy who cheated on his woman (who of course then left him), so he now is left to sit alone in a honky tonk drinking wine, but with this difference: whereas in most country songs like that, the singer merely laments his new unhappy life, in this song the singer gestures back at those who would point at him the finger of self-righteousness. “I know I’ve messed up my life. I’m not sure you do.”
The only thing different in sinners and saints:
One is forgiven, the other one ain’t.
The song “Sinners and Saints” reminded me of the definition I once heard of a martyr: a martyr, they say, is someone who is married to a saint. Is there anything worse than someone who revels in their own sanctity? The audience at the Ryman didn’t think so, and neither do I. We all stomped and cheered every time George Jones let loose with his refrain.
The only thing different in sinners and saints:
One is forgiven, the other one ain’t.
This morning’s Gospel [Luke 15:1-10] presents us with two of Jesus’s most familiar yet troubling parables: the stories of the lost sheep and the lost coin. He tells these stories because, as Luke tells us, some were complaining, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them." By way of answering his critics, Jesus tells us of a shepherd who leaves his 99 safe sheep to go look for the one that was lost and carries it back to rejoin the flock. “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.” He also tells us of a woman who has ten silver coins and, losing one, turns the house upside down and searches until she finds it. In both cases, the message is clear: “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” “Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."
These stories are well-known and so familiar. But they are also troubling. Do those ratios make sense to you: 99 safe sheep to one lost? Nine secure coins to one missing? Jesus talks of a God who is willing to act rashly on behalf of those who are lost, a God who seems to take for granted those who are found. If you’re listening closely, these stories might make you angry. That’s fine for the shepherd and the woman, but what about rest of us? Is Jesus really saying that one lost person is more important to God than 99 of us who have gotten up early on Sunday mornings week in and week out to be here?
The only thing different in sinners and saints:
One is forgiven, the other one ain’t.
One of the ways I get at the parables of Jesus is to ask myself this question: Who in this story is Jesus asking me to identify with? Remember that Jesus told these stories in the first place because a group of Pharisees were complaining , "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them." So he tells a story about those who would call themselves “insiders” and those whom the insiders would call “outsiders”. And for Jesus to tell a story in which the shepherd or the woman abandons a large group of insiders to search for one lonely, lost outsider would really make you angry—IF you identified with the so-called insiders. “Here I am, one of the 99. Who does this shepherd think he is to leave me helpless while he seeks for one lost, lonely sheep?” Of course this story will make us angry if, like the Pharisees, we have defined ourselves as people who are worthier of attention than is someone else.
But what if you shift your perspective for a moment and think of yourself primarily as an outsider? In the terms of Jesus’s world, that would mean you’re neither part of the Roman or Jewish elite. You’re a simple, probably poor and hungry, Palestinian Jewish peasant. Because of economic and social conditions you might find yourself doing something disreputable for a living. You inhabit a culture and a world that tells you you’re not worth very much at all.
And then you hear Jesus telling you that he’s willing to sit at a table with you because, like God, he is one who cares for the lost, the lonely, the alienated, the outcast. And he makes the outlandish claim that one of you is more important to him than 99 of the so-called respectable people. Sure, a statement like that would make the respectable people angry. But wouldn’t it make you feel pretty good?
There are all kinds of ways you and I get ourselves into spiritual trouble. But the number one way, in my estimation, is our tendency to rely on our qualifications as a guarantee of our status. The Pharisees weren’t really bad people. They were good, rule-abiding folk who made the common mistake of believing too much in their own sanctity. When Jesus began his teaching ministry in Matthew’s Gospel, the first thing he said was, “How blest are those who know their need of God; the kingdom of heaven is theirs.”[Matthew 5.3, New English Bible] I get myself into spiritual trouble when I forget my need of God. And I forget my need of God when, like the Pharisees, I take my own sanctity too seriously. I get myself into trouble when I see myself and my interests as tied to those of the haves rather than the have-nots. I get myself into trouble when I think of myself as one of the presumptively safe 99 rather than as the lost one.
The only thing different in sinners and saints:
One is forgiven, the other one ain’t
So here is how George Jones would help Jesus pose today’s question: Are you going to think of yourself as a saint or a sinner? Do you want to be holy and self-righteous, or do you want to be whole and forgiven? Are you going to consort only with people as pious and respectable as you think you are, or are you, like Jesus, going to welcome sinners and eat with them? “How blest are they who know their need of God. “ Those who are heavily invested in an image of their own respectability do not know of their need for God and so, like the 99 in the parable, they are pretty much on their own. It’s only those of us who “get” that we really do need some help who can become the ones whom God goes in search of. If you’re like me you can become dazzled with your own accomplishments and so forget your need of God at the drop of a hat. It’s only by God’s grace that things keep happening to us that allow us to open ourselves up to God and our own need.
Today is Homecoming Sunday here and Christ Church Cranbrook, and the tendency for the preacher on occasions like this is to say something self-congratulatory, to the effect that this, and not someplace else, is our home. But if we listen to what Jesus is saying in today’s parables, we might put it somewhat differently. Yes, sure, this is our home. But it’s our home not because we are more pious or more respectable or better educated or higher achieving than somebody else. It is our home because it is the home of all those who know their need of God. It is our home because, like the sheep and the coin in this morning’s parable, when we are honest with ourselves, we know we are those on behalf of whom God continually goes in search. When others point to Jesus and say, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them,” we take comfort in knowing that Jesus welcomes and eats with us, that we are the people worth enough to Jesus that he will risk all to seek for us. “How blest are those who know their need of God; the kingdom of heaven is theirs.” We will get this wrong if we think of the Kingdom of Heaven is something we own and others don’t. We will get it right if we see how deeply and consistently God continues to love us even when we inevitably get it wrong. And this will be our home not because we deserve it more than anyone else, but because we have been given grace to see that, for some unfathomable reason, God loves us enough to have left the 99 in search of us, to give us a place where we can, in the company of one another, make our way with those who know that they need God, too.
The only thing different in sinners and saints:
One is forgiven, the other one ain’t
We come now to the Eucharist, the central action of our life and witness as followers of Jesus. This is the meal that characterizes our life together, that connects us to each other and to God, the meal that strengthens us for the living of our lives in the world. Remember who it is that Jesus invites to this meal—not the self-righteous but the ones they would call sinners. We gather to dine with one who welcomes sinners and eats with them. As Jesus welcomes and eats with us, may we remember his promise that the One who goes in search of us will find us, that all of us who are lost will be found. Amen.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Homily: The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost [August 29, 2010] Christ Church Cranbrook
Kathy and I have just returned from some vacation time in California, and even though we have done a lot of air travel in recent years, I have never quite gotten used to the way some airlines have two carpets—a red one for “priority access”, a blue one for the rest of us—to be used by those boarding planes at their gates. It’s a sign, I guess, of my ongoing problem with authority that even though I always travel coach I persist in at least stepping on the priority access red carpet as I board the plane. I mean, if I don’t think of myself as a first class person, who will?
The question of who is in and who is out is a big one in our New Testament readings this morning. In the Gospel [Luke 14. 7-14] Jesus tells us a parable about the embarrassment caused when those assuming a place of importance are asked to move down the social ladder when the honored guests arrive. He also advises us, when throwing a dinner party, to eschew the rich and famous and in their place to invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind”. And then there is the letter to the Hebrews, whose writer advises: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” [Hebrews 13] I suppose if I listened to these readings more carefully, I would not insist on using the airlines’ red carpet—or any of the other perquisites my privileged position offers me. And I know I’d be found more regularly at a dinner table that looks a good deal more diverse than my own.
Hospitality is a big deal in the Bible. Both Jews and Christians were, originally, itinerant people, and travelling from place to place in the ancient Near East or the Roman world was a dangerous business. The climate was often inhospitable. And there were marauders and wild animals to be wary of. So it is easy to see why both the Old Testament and the New make such a point of enjoining God’s people to welcome others . In a dangerous world, hospitality is not just a social grace. It is a life-saving practice.
For about a decade I have been an Associate of the Order of the Holy Cross, an Episcopal monastic community with houses in New York, California, Canada, and South Africa. When you become an associate of a monastic order you don’t take their vows but you do commit yourself to observing, as far as you can, what they call their “rule of life”. The Order of the Holy Cross (OHC) is, like many monastic communities, organized around the Rule of St. Benedict, who lived in the sixth century and founded the Abbey at Monte Cassino in Italy. Benedict reformed western Christian monasticism by simplifying it and making its requirements more livable. And because he lived in a time—early Medieval Europe after the decline of the Roman Empire—which was just as dangerous for travelers as was the Palestine of Jesus’s day, Benedict made hospitality a cardinal virtue for monastic establishments. In dangerous times, monasteries were both places of prayer and places of refuge.
In Chapter 53 of the Rule [“The Reception of Guests”], Benedict says, “Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ, for He is going to say, "I came as a guest, and you received me" (Matt. 25:35). He also says, “In the reception of the poor and of pilgrims the greatest care and solicitude should be shown, because it is especially in them that Christ is received.”
When Benedict says that we must receive all guests “like Christ” and that it is “in them that Christ is received”, he is building on a theology as old as the oldest parts of the Bible itself. In Genesis 18, Abraham welcomes three guests with food and water and shelter without knowing who they are, and we later discover that the guests he has entertained are angels or manifestations of the Lord. In Matthew 25, Jesus tells us that when we have visited the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, “as you did it to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.” Seen theologically, hospitality is neither just a social grace nor even a good, life saving practice. From a theological perspective, hospitality is a religious obligation, rooted in the center of our understanding of God’s relation to us human beings. God made us in God’s image. God has become one of us in Jesus. Every human child of God bears that image and so is worthy of the respect that we would extend to God. We welcome the stranger as we would welcome Christ because, for us, the stranger IS Christ. Just as we are Christ to the stranger. And to one another.
I suppose this is why I have found many of the news stories this summer so troubling. This summer has been a time of vocal and aggressive inhospitality. Just think of what we have witnessed in the last several months: the passage of a controversial immigration law in Arizona; the protests raised over the construction of an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan; the active efforts by Baptist churches in California and Ohio to stop the construction of mosques in their own communities; and yesterday’s “Restoring Honor” Washington mall rally organized by a cable TV personality whose slogan, “Christian Faith-Based Patriotism” seem to imagine America as a country with only one religion. Though I’m sure all of us in this room could bring our multiple perspectives to understanding these and other events, and that many of you will differ from my response to them, the sheer avalanche of cultural inhospitality this summer makes me nervous. It is customary in tough times to identify “others” or “outsiders” as the cause of our troubles. This is a natural and understandable human reaction. But it is not a Christian reaction. Welcoming, openness, acceptance—these things are not merely optional Christian values. They are the core of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. As the author of the Letter to the Ephesians puts it, “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” [Ephesians 2.13] Translation: before there was Jesus, all of us were alienated, cut off, lost because of human sin. But in the Jesus event, those of us who were far off have been brought near. Further translation: by our nature, we are not fit even to walk on the blue carpet. But by grace all of us have been asked to walk on the red one. We have made the transition from sinner to saint. But we did not make that passage ourselves. God has made it for us.
The problem, of course, comes when we fool ourselves into thinking that we belong and others don’t. In the musical Finian’s Rainbow, Senator Billboard Rawkins gets so frustrated with foreigners that he finally shouts, “My family’s been having nothing but trouble with immigrants ever since we came to this country!” To be a Christian is always to be aware of the fragility of our own status. We who were far off have been brought near. We who were dead are now alive. We are all strangers in a strange land, sojourners seeking what the letter to the Hebrews calls “a better country, that is, a heavenly one.“ [Hebrews 11.16] It is only when we realize that we, too, are guests (or strangers or aliens or whatever you want to call us) that we understand the depth and power of the gracious gathering of all people that God is up to in God’s world.
"When you give a luncheon or a dinner,” says Jesus, “do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid.” He continues, “But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous." This is a story, really, about God and us. You and I are the strangers, the alienated, the lost—the ones who have been invited to God’s banquet. We are the ones who, in the language of the other story, who have been asked by the host, “Friend, move up higher.” We are the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. We were far off and now we are near. We were dead and now we are alive. We were lost and now we are found. Only as we know this about ourselves will we be open to the radical blessedness of God’s love for us. And the great test of our openness will be our ability to see the other not as a stranger but as us.
It is not coincidental that Jesus uses the image of a dinner party when talking about the embracing, welcoming love of God. We empathize with those we know; we distrust those we don’t. As you gather at your household’s dinner table tonight, look around and see who is there. Then see who is not there. It’s no wonder that we have trouble building a multicultural, embracing society when our own dinner tables are so selective. And I include myself and my own household in that judgment.The challenge from Jesus in today’s Gospel is for us to start to build connections to others at the relational level. The solution to these problems will not ultimately be found in lower Manhattan or Arizona. It will be found at our dinner tables. If we develop relations with others faithfully, the larger social questions will begin to take care of themselves.
We now come to the Eucharist, to God’s banquet, to Jesus’s dinner party. This meal is the model for all our household and social celebrations. Note the uncritical, inclusive way that Jesus presides at this meal. God asks nothing of you—not where you came from, not how you lived your past life, not how you have treated yourself or others. God only asks that you come. In accepting that invitation, you acknowledge God’s hospitality to you. And if God has so totally accepted you, can you be an agent of exclusion for someone else? So come, now, to God’s table where you are welcomed as Christ himself. And knowing yourself loved as Christ is loved, you can love and accept others as he did, too. Amen.
The question of who is in and who is out is a big one in our New Testament readings this morning. In the Gospel [Luke 14. 7-14] Jesus tells us a parable about the embarrassment caused when those assuming a place of importance are asked to move down the social ladder when the honored guests arrive. He also advises us, when throwing a dinner party, to eschew the rich and famous and in their place to invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind”. And then there is the letter to the Hebrews, whose writer advises: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” [Hebrews 13] I suppose if I listened to these readings more carefully, I would not insist on using the airlines’ red carpet—or any of the other perquisites my privileged position offers me. And I know I’d be found more regularly at a dinner table that looks a good deal more diverse than my own.
Hospitality is a big deal in the Bible. Both Jews and Christians were, originally, itinerant people, and travelling from place to place in the ancient Near East or the Roman world was a dangerous business. The climate was often inhospitable. And there were marauders and wild animals to be wary of. So it is easy to see why both the Old Testament and the New make such a point of enjoining God’s people to welcome others . In a dangerous world, hospitality is not just a social grace. It is a life-saving practice.
For about a decade I have been an Associate of the Order of the Holy Cross, an Episcopal monastic community with houses in New York, California, Canada, and South Africa. When you become an associate of a monastic order you don’t take their vows but you do commit yourself to observing, as far as you can, what they call their “rule of life”. The Order of the Holy Cross (OHC) is, like many monastic communities, organized around the Rule of St. Benedict, who lived in the sixth century and founded the Abbey at Monte Cassino in Italy. Benedict reformed western Christian monasticism by simplifying it and making its requirements more livable. And because he lived in a time—early Medieval Europe after the decline of the Roman Empire—which was just as dangerous for travelers as was the Palestine of Jesus’s day, Benedict made hospitality a cardinal virtue for monastic establishments. In dangerous times, monasteries were both places of prayer and places of refuge.
In Chapter 53 of the Rule [“The Reception of Guests”], Benedict says, “Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ, for He is going to say, "I came as a guest, and you received me" (Matt. 25:35). He also says, “In the reception of the poor and of pilgrims the greatest care and solicitude should be shown, because it is especially in them that Christ is received.”
When Benedict says that we must receive all guests “like Christ” and that it is “in them that Christ is received”, he is building on a theology as old as the oldest parts of the Bible itself. In Genesis 18, Abraham welcomes three guests with food and water and shelter without knowing who they are, and we later discover that the guests he has entertained are angels or manifestations of the Lord. In Matthew 25, Jesus tells us that when we have visited the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, “as you did it to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.” Seen theologically, hospitality is neither just a social grace nor even a good, life saving practice. From a theological perspective, hospitality is a religious obligation, rooted in the center of our understanding of God’s relation to us human beings. God made us in God’s image. God has become one of us in Jesus. Every human child of God bears that image and so is worthy of the respect that we would extend to God. We welcome the stranger as we would welcome Christ because, for us, the stranger IS Christ. Just as we are Christ to the stranger. And to one another.
I suppose this is why I have found many of the news stories this summer so troubling. This summer has been a time of vocal and aggressive inhospitality. Just think of what we have witnessed in the last several months: the passage of a controversial immigration law in Arizona; the protests raised over the construction of an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan; the active efforts by Baptist churches in California and Ohio to stop the construction of mosques in their own communities; and yesterday’s “Restoring Honor” Washington mall rally organized by a cable TV personality whose slogan, “Christian Faith-Based Patriotism” seem to imagine America as a country with only one religion. Though I’m sure all of us in this room could bring our multiple perspectives to understanding these and other events, and that many of you will differ from my response to them, the sheer avalanche of cultural inhospitality this summer makes me nervous. It is customary in tough times to identify “others” or “outsiders” as the cause of our troubles. This is a natural and understandable human reaction. But it is not a Christian reaction. Welcoming, openness, acceptance—these things are not merely optional Christian values. They are the core of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. As the author of the Letter to the Ephesians puts it, “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” [Ephesians 2.13] Translation: before there was Jesus, all of us were alienated, cut off, lost because of human sin. But in the Jesus event, those of us who were far off have been brought near. Further translation: by our nature, we are not fit even to walk on the blue carpet. But by grace all of us have been asked to walk on the red one. We have made the transition from sinner to saint. But we did not make that passage ourselves. God has made it for us.
The problem, of course, comes when we fool ourselves into thinking that we belong and others don’t. In the musical Finian’s Rainbow, Senator Billboard Rawkins gets so frustrated with foreigners that he finally shouts, “My family’s been having nothing but trouble with immigrants ever since we came to this country!” To be a Christian is always to be aware of the fragility of our own status. We who were far off have been brought near. We who were dead are now alive. We are all strangers in a strange land, sojourners seeking what the letter to the Hebrews calls “a better country, that is, a heavenly one.“ [Hebrews 11.16] It is only when we realize that we, too, are guests (or strangers or aliens or whatever you want to call us) that we understand the depth and power of the gracious gathering of all people that God is up to in God’s world.
"When you give a luncheon or a dinner,” says Jesus, “do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid.” He continues, “But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous." This is a story, really, about God and us. You and I are the strangers, the alienated, the lost—the ones who have been invited to God’s banquet. We are the ones who, in the language of the other story, who have been asked by the host, “Friend, move up higher.” We are the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. We were far off and now we are near. We were dead and now we are alive. We were lost and now we are found. Only as we know this about ourselves will we be open to the radical blessedness of God’s love for us. And the great test of our openness will be our ability to see the other not as a stranger but as us.
It is not coincidental that Jesus uses the image of a dinner party when talking about the embracing, welcoming love of God. We empathize with those we know; we distrust those we don’t. As you gather at your household’s dinner table tonight, look around and see who is there. Then see who is not there. It’s no wonder that we have trouble building a multicultural, embracing society when our own dinner tables are so selective. And I include myself and my own household in that judgment.The challenge from Jesus in today’s Gospel is for us to start to build connections to others at the relational level. The solution to these problems will not ultimately be found in lower Manhattan or Arizona. It will be found at our dinner tables. If we develop relations with others faithfully, the larger social questions will begin to take care of themselves.
We now come to the Eucharist, to God’s banquet, to Jesus’s dinner party. This meal is the model for all our household and social celebrations. Note the uncritical, inclusive way that Jesus presides at this meal. God asks nothing of you—not where you came from, not how you lived your past life, not how you have treated yourself or others. God only asks that you come. In accepting that invitation, you acknowledge God’s hospitality to you. And if God has so totally accepted you, can you be an agent of exclusion for someone else? So come, now, to God’s table where you are welcomed as Christ himself. And knowing yourself loved as Christ is loved, you can love and accept others as he did, too. Amen.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Homily: The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost [August 1, 2010] Christ Church Cranbrook
In the 1980s, during the heyday of the “Yuppie” (Young Urban Professional), the following joke was going around Los Angeles in general and Malibu in particular where I was the Vicar.
A Yuppie was driving through Malibu Canyon in his new Maserati. Losing control of the car, he skidded and crashed, the car going over the embankment and down to the canyon floor, where it burst into flames. Luckily the driver, clad in what was left of his Armani suit, escaped and stood there watching his car burn. A passerby stopped and tried to see if he could help.
“My Maserati, my Maserati!” cried the Yuppie in despair.
“Forget about your Maserati,” said the passerby. You lost your left arm in the accident!”
The Yuppie looked at his empty coat sleeve, back at the passerby, and then down at the flaming ruins. He started to scream once more:
“My Rolex, my Rolex!”
In some ways that joke makes one of the points in Jesus’s parable of the rich fool better than any sermon might. 1980s Young Urban Professionals were not the first and will not be the last people on the planet who, to use Jesus’s words, “store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God”. Approached by a man who wanted him to split his inheritance with him, Jesus tells the parable of the rich fool:
"The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, `What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?' Then he said, `I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, `Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.' But God said to him, `You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?'’” [Luke 12. 16b-20]
It is human nature to seek security, and one of the ways we delude ourselves is into thinking that things (possessions, weapons, status, achievements, power) will insulate us from the consequences of our fragility. The rich fool is a fool not because he is rich but because he thinks that being rich inoculates him from the dangers and vicissitudes of life. Our real problem, of course, is that we are vulnerable to the changes and chances of living in the world. We cannot live very long open to or conscious of our vulnerability. So we place our hope in things that promise to make us safe.
The great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived this way too, until his resistance to the Nazis landed him in a German prison in World War II. When he was in prison, Bonhoeffer wrote notes for a possible book about the idea of insurance as an advanced version of this problem. In his book outline, Bonhoeffer wrote of what he called
The safeguarding of life against ‘accidents’ and ‘blows of fate’; even if these cannot be eliminated, the danger can be reduced. Insurance (which, although it lives on ‘accidents’, seeks to mitigate their effects) as a wetern phenomenon. The aim: to be independent of nature. [Bonhoeffer, "Letters and Papers" from Prison, p. 380]
I want a life free of accidents and blows of fate. In revolt against my own vulnerability, I think that I can spread risk and so make it go away. But Jesus tells us what Bonhoeffer and others have had also to learn, often at great cost: to be alive is to be at risk. If by “safety” we mean invulnerability to accidents and blows of fate, then the only time you’ll ever be perfectly safe is when you’re dead.
When we hear the parable of the rich fool, our thoughts usually go first to the question of possessions. We do invest ourselves in our things, and to the extent that our things serve as idols diverting our attention from God, they can be pernicious. But a lifetime of experience has convinced me that possessions are not the only false bet we can make with the universe. We also place a high valuation on other passing, illusory things too, like accomplishments and reputation. If my Maserati or my Rolex won’t save me, maybe my Ph.D. or my résumé will.
As I thought about these things I noticed a story earlier this week about Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Prize laureate retired Archbishop of Capetown who has, since his retirement, continued to be a voice for reconciliation and justice on the world stage. He’s nearing 80 now, and an article in The Guardian (July 22, 2010) proclaimed in banner headlines, “Archbishop Desmond Tutu announces retirement from public life”. Here, in part, is part of what Desmond Tutu said:
Instead of growing old gracefully, at home with my family, reading and writing and praying and thinking, too much of my time has been spent at airports and in hotels. The time has now come to slow down, to sip rooibos tea with my beloved wife in the afternoons, to watch cricket, to travel to visit my children and grandchildren, rather than to conferences and conventions and university campuses. I have done as much as I can and need time to do things I have really wanted to do. I do want a little more quiet. ["The Guardian", 7/22/10]
Now at first glance Archbishop Tutu’s announcement seems unrelated to Jesus’s parable of the rich fool. Certainly no one could ever accuse such a beloved and prophetic religious leader of using his possessions to insulate himself from the fragility of life. But there is a sense in which what Tutu says connects directly with Jesus’s teaching in today’s parable. “So it is with those who . . . are not rich toward God.” In deciding that he has reached a point in his life where he needs to direct his energy to people closer to home, the Archbishop has demonstrated enormous wisdom. He has accepted, acknowledged, made peace with his own fragility and his own mortality. In the public sphere, he has done all he can to advance God’s work. He understands that he has a limited time left on the earth. And he has readjusted his values and priorities in order to use that time in a way that will further his spiritual journey.
In one sense, there is nothing new in this: in many world cultures, the transition from maturity to age is a movement from achievement to wisdom. So there certainly is precedent for Archbishop Tutu’s movement from a life of action to one of contemplation. But there is more to it than that. In exiting the world stage, Desmond Tutu is giving up a lot of the benefits of public life. He has influence, celebrity, and an audience wherever he goes. He loves people and people love him. And now, he is willing and ready, at age 80, to give up the adrenaline rush of world celebrity (itself a kind of false security) for a new adventure: going within, deepening his knowledge of himself and his connection to his family. And he’s doing this, I believe, precisely because he knows what the rich fool in Jesus’s story does not know. He knows, in Jesus’s words, that “one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions”—be they material or otherwise. He knows that his life is finite and he is fragile. And he knows that there is no cure for that condition. The only way out of living in terror of one’s finitude is to learn to live into it.
In today’s reading from Colossians, Paul gets at what Jesus tells us by a different means:
So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. [Colossians 3.1-3]
According to Paul, you and I have been “raised with Christ”; we are to set our minds on “things that are above.” For a Christian, life only makes ultimate sense from God’s point of view. We only see and know ourselves partially. As Paul says, our “life is hidden in Christ with God”. To quote another mid-20th century theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, even though human life is fragmentary,
The fragmentary character of human life is not regarded as evil in Biblical faith because it is seen from the perspective of a centre of life and meaning in which each fragment is related to the plan of the whole, to the will of God. ["The Nature and Destiny of Man", I, p. 168]
In other words: what looks partial and incomplete from our point of view looks complete and whole from God’s. Standing, as each of us does, in the middle of an incomplete process, our lives can look chaotic or worse. That is why we reach for signs and symbols—even false ones like things, achievements, or power over others—as ways of reassuring ourselves that it all makes sense. But God does not see your life as you see it. God sees your life from God’s point of view, intimately connected with all the rest of God’s creatures in God’s world. So what is hidden to you is absolutely manifest to God. And what is most clearly manifest to God about you is this: you are made in God’s image, worthy of dignity and respect. You matter. And because you matter God calls you to share with God in the redemption and reclamation of the world.
The rich fool did not know that about himself, and so squandered his life in trying to play it safe. He said, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” Jesus says to you: from God’s point of view, your life is beautiful and holy and whole. You are more valuable than any of the lesser things on which you set so much store. Those things—possessions, achievements, power, privileges—will not save you. Only the abundant, unconditional love of God—freely on offer to all of us simply because we matter to God—will. This is the great truth of Christianity. It is why we gather weekly in places like this to give thanks. Seen from God’s perspective and in that light, it is a very good thing that we now come together at God’s table to eat, drink, and be merry.
So: relax. “One’s life does not consist in the abundance [or lack] of possessions.” “Your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Amen.
A Yuppie was driving through Malibu Canyon in his new Maserati. Losing control of the car, he skidded and crashed, the car going over the embankment and down to the canyon floor, where it burst into flames. Luckily the driver, clad in what was left of his Armani suit, escaped and stood there watching his car burn. A passerby stopped and tried to see if he could help.
“My Maserati, my Maserati!” cried the Yuppie in despair.
“Forget about your Maserati,” said the passerby. You lost your left arm in the accident!”
The Yuppie looked at his empty coat sleeve, back at the passerby, and then down at the flaming ruins. He started to scream once more:
“My Rolex, my Rolex!”
In some ways that joke makes one of the points in Jesus’s parable of the rich fool better than any sermon might. 1980s Young Urban Professionals were not the first and will not be the last people on the planet who, to use Jesus’s words, “store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God”. Approached by a man who wanted him to split his inheritance with him, Jesus tells the parable of the rich fool:
"The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, `What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?' Then he said, `I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, `Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.' But God said to him, `You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?'’” [Luke 12. 16b-20]
It is human nature to seek security, and one of the ways we delude ourselves is into thinking that things (possessions, weapons, status, achievements, power) will insulate us from the consequences of our fragility. The rich fool is a fool not because he is rich but because he thinks that being rich inoculates him from the dangers and vicissitudes of life. Our real problem, of course, is that we are vulnerable to the changes and chances of living in the world. We cannot live very long open to or conscious of our vulnerability. So we place our hope in things that promise to make us safe.
The great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived this way too, until his resistance to the Nazis landed him in a German prison in World War II. When he was in prison, Bonhoeffer wrote notes for a possible book about the idea of insurance as an advanced version of this problem. In his book outline, Bonhoeffer wrote of what he called
The safeguarding of life against ‘accidents’ and ‘blows of fate’; even if these cannot be eliminated, the danger can be reduced. Insurance (which, although it lives on ‘accidents’, seeks to mitigate their effects) as a wetern phenomenon. The aim: to be independent of nature. [Bonhoeffer, "Letters and Papers" from Prison, p. 380]
I want a life free of accidents and blows of fate. In revolt against my own vulnerability, I think that I can spread risk and so make it go away. But Jesus tells us what Bonhoeffer and others have had also to learn, often at great cost: to be alive is to be at risk. If by “safety” we mean invulnerability to accidents and blows of fate, then the only time you’ll ever be perfectly safe is when you’re dead.
When we hear the parable of the rich fool, our thoughts usually go first to the question of possessions. We do invest ourselves in our things, and to the extent that our things serve as idols diverting our attention from God, they can be pernicious. But a lifetime of experience has convinced me that possessions are not the only false bet we can make with the universe. We also place a high valuation on other passing, illusory things too, like accomplishments and reputation. If my Maserati or my Rolex won’t save me, maybe my Ph.D. or my résumé will.
As I thought about these things I noticed a story earlier this week about Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Prize laureate retired Archbishop of Capetown who has, since his retirement, continued to be a voice for reconciliation and justice on the world stage. He’s nearing 80 now, and an article in The Guardian (July 22, 2010) proclaimed in banner headlines, “Archbishop Desmond Tutu announces retirement from public life”. Here, in part, is part of what Desmond Tutu said:
Instead of growing old gracefully, at home with my family, reading and writing and praying and thinking, too much of my time has been spent at airports and in hotels. The time has now come to slow down, to sip rooibos tea with my beloved wife in the afternoons, to watch cricket, to travel to visit my children and grandchildren, rather than to conferences and conventions and university campuses. I have done as much as I can and need time to do things I have really wanted to do. I do want a little more quiet. ["The Guardian", 7/22/10]
Now at first glance Archbishop Tutu’s announcement seems unrelated to Jesus’s parable of the rich fool. Certainly no one could ever accuse such a beloved and prophetic religious leader of using his possessions to insulate himself from the fragility of life. But there is a sense in which what Tutu says connects directly with Jesus’s teaching in today’s parable. “So it is with those who . . . are not rich toward God.” In deciding that he has reached a point in his life where he needs to direct his energy to people closer to home, the Archbishop has demonstrated enormous wisdom. He has accepted, acknowledged, made peace with his own fragility and his own mortality. In the public sphere, he has done all he can to advance God’s work. He understands that he has a limited time left on the earth. And he has readjusted his values and priorities in order to use that time in a way that will further his spiritual journey.
In one sense, there is nothing new in this: in many world cultures, the transition from maturity to age is a movement from achievement to wisdom. So there certainly is precedent for Archbishop Tutu’s movement from a life of action to one of contemplation. But there is more to it than that. In exiting the world stage, Desmond Tutu is giving up a lot of the benefits of public life. He has influence, celebrity, and an audience wherever he goes. He loves people and people love him. And now, he is willing and ready, at age 80, to give up the adrenaline rush of world celebrity (itself a kind of false security) for a new adventure: going within, deepening his knowledge of himself and his connection to his family. And he’s doing this, I believe, precisely because he knows what the rich fool in Jesus’s story does not know. He knows, in Jesus’s words, that “one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions”—be they material or otherwise. He knows that his life is finite and he is fragile. And he knows that there is no cure for that condition. The only way out of living in terror of one’s finitude is to learn to live into it.
In today’s reading from Colossians, Paul gets at what Jesus tells us by a different means:
So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. [Colossians 3.1-3]
According to Paul, you and I have been “raised with Christ”; we are to set our minds on “things that are above.” For a Christian, life only makes ultimate sense from God’s point of view. We only see and know ourselves partially. As Paul says, our “life is hidden in Christ with God”. To quote another mid-20th century theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, even though human life is fragmentary,
The fragmentary character of human life is not regarded as evil in Biblical faith because it is seen from the perspective of a centre of life and meaning in which each fragment is related to the plan of the whole, to the will of God. ["The Nature and Destiny of Man", I, p. 168]
In other words: what looks partial and incomplete from our point of view looks complete and whole from God’s. Standing, as each of us does, in the middle of an incomplete process, our lives can look chaotic or worse. That is why we reach for signs and symbols—even false ones like things, achievements, or power over others—as ways of reassuring ourselves that it all makes sense. But God does not see your life as you see it. God sees your life from God’s point of view, intimately connected with all the rest of God’s creatures in God’s world. So what is hidden to you is absolutely manifest to God. And what is most clearly manifest to God about you is this: you are made in God’s image, worthy of dignity and respect. You matter. And because you matter God calls you to share with God in the redemption and reclamation of the world.
The rich fool did not know that about himself, and so squandered his life in trying to play it safe. He said, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” Jesus says to you: from God’s point of view, your life is beautiful and holy and whole. You are more valuable than any of the lesser things on which you set so much store. Those things—possessions, achievements, power, privileges—will not save you. Only the abundant, unconditional love of God—freely on offer to all of us simply because we matter to God—will. This is the great truth of Christianity. It is why we gather weekly in places like this to give thanks. Seen from God’s perspective and in that light, it is a very good thing that we now come together at God’s table to eat, drink, and be merry.
So: relax. “One’s life does not consist in the abundance [or lack] of possessions.” “Your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Amen.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Homily: The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost [July 18, 2010] Christ Church Cranbrook
If you’ve been following the international church news this week, you’ll have noticed that the General Synod of the Church of England has been preoccupied with the question of women bishops, an issue which the Episcopal Church settled in 1976. The Church of England has ordained women priests only since the 1990s, and in 2008 it agreed to proceed to the ordination of women bishops. Since that time, Anglican conservatives in England have threatened to leave the church if women are allowed to exercise episcopal authority.
As I have followed this story over the past week, I’ve wished that some of the opponents of women bishops had spent some time thinking about the ministry of St. Thecla, a first century Christian missionary and evangelist who exercised as much ecclesiastical authority as any contemporary bishop—male or female—you could name.
In the early days of Christianity, Paul was accompanied on his missionary journeys by a young woman named Thecla, a virgin of noble birth from Iconium in Asia Minor. Thecla met Paul and Barnabas on their first missionary journey there and became an important leader in the Christian missionary movement, accompanying them to Ephesus and beyond. She was apparently dedicated, fearless, and beautiful. She is not mentioned in the New Testament but is discussed at length in many other contemporary texts, including an early Christian document, “The Acts of Paul and Thecla”.
Because the Thecla story is so interesting to modern biblical scholars, many Christians have dusted off “The Acts of Paul and Thecla” and given it a try. It’s not so compelling a read that you should adjust your summer beach novel plans, but it’s very interesting, especially in the light of England’s current flap about the authority of women. I cannot get very far in the Thecla story without being arrested by this line: “And Thecla said to Paul: I shall cut my hair, and follow thee whithersoever thou mayest go.” Perhaps cutting her hair was Thecla’s way of making herself less appealing to the male population of Ephesus-- thus removing, by this first-century makeover, an impediment to her apostolic effectiveness.
But maybe physical beauty was only part of Thecla’s problem. Maybe she desired to cut her hair not so much to deter lustful advances but more as a support to her ecclesiastical authority. Because the Roman world in which Thecla worked could not imagine authoritative women, Thecla gave herself a leadership image that her followers could understand. Cutting her hair was the early church equivalent of wearing a power suit.
Several years ago I read with interest John Dominic Crossan’s and Jonathan Reed’s book, "In Search of Paul". The book shows how Paul and Thecla worked as a missionary team and exercised equal authority in the churches they founded. Not surprisingly, as Christianity became more “established”, the memory of Paul’s role grew as that of Thecla’s shrank. Roman culture, which organized itself entirely around hierarchies, could not imagine a church in which women held positions of authority. Crossan’s and Reed’s book thus poses a larger set of questions. As they put it, “Does a search for Paul . . . bring Thecla, women, and equality back steadily and inevitably into the light until female and male stand together side by side in the full life of the center?” ["In Search of Paul", p.xiv]
What these scholars are showing us, of course, is the way in which the story of the authentic authority of women in the apostolic Christian community has itself been systematically erased over time. It seems as if what conservative Christians might, in another context, call “revisionists” have succeeded in rewriting the history of the roles of women and men in the apostolic church. No wonder Thecla wanted to cut her hair.
It is in the light of reflecting on this restored story of Thecla that the Gospel for today—Luke’s familiar story of Mary sitting and listening at Jesus’s feet while her sister Martha busies herself with the tasks of hospitality—makes sense to me. As Jesus says, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her." [Luke 10.42]
I have long given up the practice of either praising or blaming Martha and Mary for being “active” or “contemplative”. This is not a story about work and rest. It does not contrast the life of ministry with the spiritual life. It is very much a story about the equality of women and men. The hard-working Martha upbraids her more reflective sister not because she is taking it easy. Martha’s critique of Mary is far more serious: by taking her place at Jesus’s feet instead of in the kitchen, Mary is acting like a disciple rather than a domestic. In other words: she is behaving like a man. In Jesus’s day, women absented themselves from the living room and worked in the kitchen. But here Mary stays in the living room and so takes her place in the public discourse of religious life. In the Palestinian Jewish houses of the first century, men had one sphere and women another. Mary has crossed a boundary and so has offended her more traditional sister. When Jesus says, “Mary has chosen the better part,” he is not telling Martha simply to take a chill. He is, instead, telling Martha that Mary’s assuming the privileges of a male disciple is a good thing. He is saying that it is all right for women to take their places in the councils usually reserved to men. He is, in a deep sense, validating Thecla’s decision to get a haircut. The Jesus movement will not be beholden to cultural norms or stereotypes. Inside the circle that gathers around Jesus, the roles our culture assigns to men and women no longer matter. The Jesus community insists on the radical equality of all people before God.
In this morning’s reading from his letter to the Colossians, Paul gets at the egalitarian implications of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The Christ event has erased all human distinctions. As he says, “And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.” [Colossians 1.2—22] Therefore, Paul is announcing what he calls “the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints.” [Colossians 1.26] And the center of this mystery concerns the way God has called a community together called the church that assigns Jews and Gentiles absolute equality with each other. In the ancient world’s terms, such a community was unimaginable. The Roman world lived and died by hard fixed categories: Roman/Greek, slave/free, male/female. Those categories were seen as part of the fabric of reality itself. But now reality seemed to be changing. God was calling together a body whose members left their categories at the door. So the existence of the church is itself a sign of the new thing that God is doing. If God can erase the boundary between Gentile and Jew, God can do anything.
I have never heard a sermon on this Gospel story of Mary and Martha that didn’t make somebody mad. The old version of the “Mary and Martha” sermon was infuriating because it seemed to make Jesus say that people who work hard aren’t as spiritual as those who sit back and relax. It’s clear, at least to me, that Jesus is not saying that. But what he is saying—about the radical equality of all people before God—can be equally infuriating, especially if you’ve grown up in a culture where you assumed that some kinds of people were made to work in the kitchen and others to sit at the Master’s feet.
The longer I live and work and pray in the church, the longer it seems to me that the deeply egalitarian thing that Thecla and Paul were on to was the sign that they got what Jesus was talking about. If you enjoy certain advantages bestowed by your culture, it is at first challenging to hear that people unlike you in their external markers might also be called to share your status. Jesus did not come to reinforce our cultural habits. Instead, he proclaims the reign of God as a creative alternative to “the way we’ve always done it”. Because the way we’ve always done it usually deems somebody a winner and somebody else a loser. But the church, says Paul, doesn’t work that way. It’s a community where people can explore their gifts and exercise their ministries regardless of where they fit in the world’s social hierarchy. One of the first Popes [Callistus I] was a household slave.
Human categories, as important as they are to us, finally mean much more to us than they do to God. Accustomed as we are to describing ourselves in certain categorical ways, we are always surprised to learn that, when God looks at us, we are seen not according to what social, ethnic, or other category we fall into but in the light of the divine image which each of us uniquely reflects. Mary and Thecla dared to see themselves as beloved human beings made in the image of God and bearing the image of Christ. And seeing themselves that way they offered themselves to God and the world. It was their self-offering, not their category, that finally mattered. And that’s why we remember and honor them to this day.
It was Mary’s shrewd critique of Palestinian Jewish culture to take her place with the men, where the teaching was going on. It was Thecla’s apostolic insight that she needed to cut her hair so she could exercise her own God-given authority. As we gather this morning to give thanks at God’s table, let us celebrate the life and ministry and of Thecla, of Mary before her, and of the countless Theclas and Marys who have striven to live out their response to Jesus in the way that fits them best. And let’s celebrate the Marthas—those who find their authentic existence living within the confines of established roles. The good news that Mary and Martha and Thecla bring us this morning is that God sees and knows us as we are. Regardless of how others would define you, when God looks at you all those other status markers mean nothing at all. You are free to live your life in ways that may puzzle the world or may even surprise yourself. In spite of what their culture told them, Mary dared to sit at Jesus’s feet and Thecla dared to preach the Gospel. They refused to let their cultural roles or family expectations define them. Male or female, what might their witness mean for you? How might you be set free from roles and expectations not authentic to who you actually are?
It is o.k. to be who God has made and called you to be—even if being that surprises and shocks the world. It is o.k. to be a woman with authority, a man who does the household chores. Surprising as it may sound to English men, it is even o.k. to be an English woman bishop. Thecla and Mary have shown us how God calls us to live our lives beyond categories. Let us pray and work for the courage to live into the equality and freedom of that blessing. Amen.
As I have followed this story over the past week, I’ve wished that some of the opponents of women bishops had spent some time thinking about the ministry of St. Thecla, a first century Christian missionary and evangelist who exercised as much ecclesiastical authority as any contemporary bishop—male or female—you could name.
In the early days of Christianity, Paul was accompanied on his missionary journeys by a young woman named Thecla, a virgin of noble birth from Iconium in Asia Minor. Thecla met Paul and Barnabas on their first missionary journey there and became an important leader in the Christian missionary movement, accompanying them to Ephesus and beyond. She was apparently dedicated, fearless, and beautiful. She is not mentioned in the New Testament but is discussed at length in many other contemporary texts, including an early Christian document, “The Acts of Paul and Thecla”.
Because the Thecla story is so interesting to modern biblical scholars, many Christians have dusted off “The Acts of Paul and Thecla” and given it a try. It’s not so compelling a read that you should adjust your summer beach novel plans, but it’s very interesting, especially in the light of England’s current flap about the authority of women. I cannot get very far in the Thecla story without being arrested by this line: “And Thecla said to Paul: I shall cut my hair, and follow thee whithersoever thou mayest go.” Perhaps cutting her hair was Thecla’s way of making herself less appealing to the male population of Ephesus-- thus removing, by this first-century makeover, an impediment to her apostolic effectiveness.
But maybe physical beauty was only part of Thecla’s problem. Maybe she desired to cut her hair not so much to deter lustful advances but more as a support to her ecclesiastical authority. Because the Roman world in which Thecla worked could not imagine authoritative women, Thecla gave herself a leadership image that her followers could understand. Cutting her hair was the early church equivalent of wearing a power suit.
Several years ago I read with interest John Dominic Crossan’s and Jonathan Reed’s book, "In Search of Paul". The book shows how Paul and Thecla worked as a missionary team and exercised equal authority in the churches they founded. Not surprisingly, as Christianity became more “established”, the memory of Paul’s role grew as that of Thecla’s shrank. Roman culture, which organized itself entirely around hierarchies, could not imagine a church in which women held positions of authority. Crossan’s and Reed’s book thus poses a larger set of questions. As they put it, “Does a search for Paul . . . bring Thecla, women, and equality back steadily and inevitably into the light until female and male stand together side by side in the full life of the center?” ["In Search of Paul", p.xiv]
What these scholars are showing us, of course, is the way in which the story of the authentic authority of women in the apostolic Christian community has itself been systematically erased over time. It seems as if what conservative Christians might, in another context, call “revisionists” have succeeded in rewriting the history of the roles of women and men in the apostolic church. No wonder Thecla wanted to cut her hair.
It is in the light of reflecting on this restored story of Thecla that the Gospel for today—Luke’s familiar story of Mary sitting and listening at Jesus’s feet while her sister Martha busies herself with the tasks of hospitality—makes sense to me. As Jesus says, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her." [Luke 10.42]
I have long given up the practice of either praising or blaming Martha and Mary for being “active” or “contemplative”. This is not a story about work and rest. It does not contrast the life of ministry with the spiritual life. It is very much a story about the equality of women and men. The hard-working Martha upbraids her more reflective sister not because she is taking it easy. Martha’s critique of Mary is far more serious: by taking her place at Jesus’s feet instead of in the kitchen, Mary is acting like a disciple rather than a domestic. In other words: she is behaving like a man. In Jesus’s day, women absented themselves from the living room and worked in the kitchen. But here Mary stays in the living room and so takes her place in the public discourse of religious life. In the Palestinian Jewish houses of the first century, men had one sphere and women another. Mary has crossed a boundary and so has offended her more traditional sister. When Jesus says, “Mary has chosen the better part,” he is not telling Martha simply to take a chill. He is, instead, telling Martha that Mary’s assuming the privileges of a male disciple is a good thing. He is saying that it is all right for women to take their places in the councils usually reserved to men. He is, in a deep sense, validating Thecla’s decision to get a haircut. The Jesus movement will not be beholden to cultural norms or stereotypes. Inside the circle that gathers around Jesus, the roles our culture assigns to men and women no longer matter. The Jesus community insists on the radical equality of all people before God.
In this morning’s reading from his letter to the Colossians, Paul gets at the egalitarian implications of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The Christ event has erased all human distinctions. As he says, “And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.” [Colossians 1.2—22] Therefore, Paul is announcing what he calls “the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints.” [Colossians 1.26] And the center of this mystery concerns the way God has called a community together called the church that assigns Jews and Gentiles absolute equality with each other. In the ancient world’s terms, such a community was unimaginable. The Roman world lived and died by hard fixed categories: Roman/Greek, slave/free, male/female. Those categories were seen as part of the fabric of reality itself. But now reality seemed to be changing. God was calling together a body whose members left their categories at the door. So the existence of the church is itself a sign of the new thing that God is doing. If God can erase the boundary between Gentile and Jew, God can do anything.
I have never heard a sermon on this Gospel story of Mary and Martha that didn’t make somebody mad. The old version of the “Mary and Martha” sermon was infuriating because it seemed to make Jesus say that people who work hard aren’t as spiritual as those who sit back and relax. It’s clear, at least to me, that Jesus is not saying that. But what he is saying—about the radical equality of all people before God—can be equally infuriating, especially if you’ve grown up in a culture where you assumed that some kinds of people were made to work in the kitchen and others to sit at the Master’s feet.
The longer I live and work and pray in the church, the longer it seems to me that the deeply egalitarian thing that Thecla and Paul were on to was the sign that they got what Jesus was talking about. If you enjoy certain advantages bestowed by your culture, it is at first challenging to hear that people unlike you in their external markers might also be called to share your status. Jesus did not come to reinforce our cultural habits. Instead, he proclaims the reign of God as a creative alternative to “the way we’ve always done it”. Because the way we’ve always done it usually deems somebody a winner and somebody else a loser. But the church, says Paul, doesn’t work that way. It’s a community where people can explore their gifts and exercise their ministries regardless of where they fit in the world’s social hierarchy. One of the first Popes [Callistus I] was a household slave.
Human categories, as important as they are to us, finally mean much more to us than they do to God. Accustomed as we are to describing ourselves in certain categorical ways, we are always surprised to learn that, when God looks at us, we are seen not according to what social, ethnic, or other category we fall into but in the light of the divine image which each of us uniquely reflects. Mary and Thecla dared to see themselves as beloved human beings made in the image of God and bearing the image of Christ. And seeing themselves that way they offered themselves to God and the world. It was their self-offering, not their category, that finally mattered. And that’s why we remember and honor them to this day.
It was Mary’s shrewd critique of Palestinian Jewish culture to take her place with the men, where the teaching was going on. It was Thecla’s apostolic insight that she needed to cut her hair so she could exercise her own God-given authority. As we gather this morning to give thanks at God’s table, let us celebrate the life and ministry and of Thecla, of Mary before her, and of the countless Theclas and Marys who have striven to live out their response to Jesus in the way that fits them best. And let’s celebrate the Marthas—those who find their authentic existence living within the confines of established roles. The good news that Mary and Martha and Thecla bring us this morning is that God sees and knows us as we are. Regardless of how others would define you, when God looks at you all those other status markers mean nothing at all. You are free to live your life in ways that may puzzle the world or may even surprise yourself. In spite of what their culture told them, Mary dared to sit at Jesus’s feet and Thecla dared to preach the Gospel. They refused to let their cultural roles or family expectations define them. Male or female, what might their witness mean for you? How might you be set free from roles and expectations not authentic to who you actually are?
It is o.k. to be who God has made and called you to be—even if being that surprises and shocks the world. It is o.k. to be a woman with authority, a man who does the household chores. Surprising as it may sound to English men, it is even o.k. to be an English woman bishop. Thecla and Mary have shown us how God calls us to live our lives beyond categories. Let us pray and work for the courage to live into the equality and freedom of that blessing. Amen.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Homily: The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost [July 11, 2010] Christ Church Cranbrook
At a church meeting I attended last month I heard Bishop Mark Beckwith of Newark tell the story of a bicycle accident he suffered in April. Bishop Beckwith was rear-ended and thrown from his bicycle by a driver on a Saturday morning ride, and though he was profoundly shaken up he decided to go ahead with that morning’s Confirmation liturgy at the Newark Cathedral. As the service proceeded it became increasingly clear to everybody (including him) that he was in shock, so much so that they finally called the paramedics who carried him from the church during the closing hymn. Ever the bishop, Mark continued to bless the people, making the sign of the cross as he was borne forth from the church by EMS workers on a stretcher.
I tell this story because it helps orient us to the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan told by Jesus in this morning’s Gospel. A man lies nearly dead in the road. Three people pass by: a priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan. Only the Samaritan stops and takes care of the man lying in the road. The priest and the Levite are both Jewish religious functionaries. The Samaritan is a member of an ethnic group looked down on by traditional Jews. Part of Jesus’s point in this story, of course, is that the right thing is done not by the insiders but rather by someone “insiders” would define as an outsider.
When we hear this story, though, it is always easy to identify with one of the presumed insiders, perhaps less easy to identify with the Samaritan outsider. But with whom do you think Jesus actually wants you to identify in this story? I think it is with the unnamed person lying half dead in the road. Of course, it burnishes my self-image to see myself as an able-bodied, if callous, passerby. But it is probably closer to the truth of the situation to see myself as one deeply in need of assistance.
Like my friend Bishop Beckwith, you and I often don’t realize when we’re in trouble and when we need help. We get through life by claiming agency and power, seeing ourselves in control of our own destinies. This attitude serves us much of the time, but when surprising, unexpected things overtake us we often fail to recognize our own need. Who are you in this parable—the priest, the Levite, the Samaritan, or the person lying in the road? To the good religious people in the story—the priest and the Levite—the one in the road might be dead, and so ritually unclean. They see that person as “other”, and so are willing, indeed eager, to pass him by. The Samaritan does not see the man in the road in those religious terms and so is more able to see himself in him. The Samaritan can be a “good Samaritan” because he is willing to risk seeing the man in the road as potentially himself. The religious code of the priest and the Levite gives them a warrant to objectify the nearly dead person and so do nothing on his behalf. The Samaritan is not burdened by that religious code, and so he can feel with and act for the person in trouble. Doing the right thing only happens when we see what we have in common with another.
Our collect for today expresses our situation before God and each other in starkly simple and compelling terms. It asks God to grant that we “may know and understand what things [we] ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them”. We might translate that lofty Prayer Book language this way: Help me, God, to know what I ought to do. And help me, God, to do it. The problem with the priest and the Levite in Jesus’s story is that they know neither what they should do nor how to do it. They don’t even see the man lying in the road as a problem. So if they do not know what they should do, how can they possibly have the grace and power to do it? Our prayer today guides us to thinking both about knowing the right thing and doing the right thing. I think our scriptures give us some insight here.
This morning we begin a several week journey through Paul’s letter to the Colossians. In today’s reading, Paul says this:
[God] has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. [Colossians 1.13-14]
When I worked in Pasadena, All Saints Church decided to do a direct-mail campaign to all the households in a ten-mile radius of the church. At a staff meeting the rector solicited ideas for an attention-getting headline. Now these were the days when you would get that Publisher’s Clearing House envelope in your mailbox with the banner headline, “You May Already Be A Winner!” emblazoned on it. I suggested that our direct mail envelope display in large letters the slogan, “You May Already Be Saved!”
Then as now my brilliant suggestions sounded a bit too edgy for the church, so we opted for something far less original and compelling. But that proposed slogan stuck with me because it gets to the heart of what Paul is saying in Colossians: Here is his language: “God has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. “ Here is my language: you may already be saved. In fact, Paul and I believe you are. Both versions pose this next question: What are you going to do about it?
Like the priest and the Levite in this morning’s Gospel, most of us spend most of the time we give to religious speculation worrying about the state of our souls. The reason Jesus is so critical of the Law is that it misleads people into thinking that they are supposed to try to know and do the right thing in order to be all right with God. But the point of Jesus’s teaching, as is the point of today’s reading from Colossians, is that you are all right with God already.
“God has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” Religious systems and institutions—even and especially the church—persistently misunderstand and misapply the fundamental message of the Gospel. The Good News is that you are already a winner, you are already saved. So our biggest question ought not to be, “How do I get right with God,” but rather, “Now that I am right with God, how do I get right with the rest of creation?”
The priest and the Levite, the “good religious people”, in today’s Gospel are so worried about getting right with God that they fail to notice the human tragedy in front of them. The Samaritan, the one unburdened by that worry, is free actually to respond in love and compassion to someone in great need. It is only because of his ability to see himself beloved of God that the Samaritan can also risk seeing himself lying half dead in the road. And only when you risk seeing yourself that way can you actually reach out and do something for someone else.
This is the essential doubleness of Christianity, without an appreciation for which one can never quite grasp the fullness and depth of the Gospel. We are, like the man in Jesus’s story, like someone lying half dead in the road. We are small, powerless, at the mercy of forces bigger than we are. At the same time, we are, in Paul’s words, those who “share in the inheritance of the saints in the light”. Because we like to think of ourselves as powerful, competent people, we resist self-identifying as those in need of help. But only as we open ourselves to the truth of our situation does another, deeper reality emerge: we do not have to pretend be in control of our destinies because we are already in the embrace of a God who is. We are both powerless and redeemed at the same time. We live lives of love and compassion not to earn something but because the grace we have compels us to do so.
In the words of today’s collect, how do we know what is right? And once we know it, how do we find grace and power to do it? Like my bike-riding bishop friend, all too often we fail to acknowledge the reality of our situation. All of us need help. All of us depend on others. It’s only when we see and say that that we become open to the grace and power of what it means to share in “the inheritance of the saints in light.”
We will only be open to the depth and power of the Gospel when we acknowledge both sides of our situation. We are fragile, finite men and women in need of help from somewhere outside ourselves. And we are those who already stand in the kingdom of God’s beloved son and share in the inheritance of the saints in light. Both things are true about us at the same time. And it’s part of the divine paradox we stand in that you can’t experience the glory of God’s holiness until you acknowledge the depth of your own need.
You may already be a winner. You are already saved. As you know yourself both to need help and to have received it, you will be set free and empowered to be an agent of help and blessing to others. It is all right to ask for help, to acknowledge your limitations, your weakness, your pain, your loss. The universe does not require your leadership in order to function correctly. But it does require your compassionate heart to feel with those who lie half dead in the road. Only those who know themselves both to be fragile and to be loved can see the need in others and respond as the Samaritan did.
“This is a great mystery” [Ephesians 5.32] as Paul says elsewhere. This profound doubleness, this ambiguity, this dual truth about us is always more than we can take in mentally. We get it not by thinking about it but by living into it. And we can only live into it because of the profound and myriad ways in which we each have been supported and nourished by God in the guise of Samaritans who have picked us up when we were lying half dead in the road. Amen.
I tell this story because it helps orient us to the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan told by Jesus in this morning’s Gospel. A man lies nearly dead in the road. Three people pass by: a priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan. Only the Samaritan stops and takes care of the man lying in the road. The priest and the Levite are both Jewish religious functionaries. The Samaritan is a member of an ethnic group looked down on by traditional Jews. Part of Jesus’s point in this story, of course, is that the right thing is done not by the insiders but rather by someone “insiders” would define as an outsider.
When we hear this story, though, it is always easy to identify with one of the presumed insiders, perhaps less easy to identify with the Samaritan outsider. But with whom do you think Jesus actually wants you to identify in this story? I think it is with the unnamed person lying half dead in the road. Of course, it burnishes my self-image to see myself as an able-bodied, if callous, passerby. But it is probably closer to the truth of the situation to see myself as one deeply in need of assistance.
Like my friend Bishop Beckwith, you and I often don’t realize when we’re in trouble and when we need help. We get through life by claiming agency and power, seeing ourselves in control of our own destinies. This attitude serves us much of the time, but when surprising, unexpected things overtake us we often fail to recognize our own need. Who are you in this parable—the priest, the Levite, the Samaritan, or the person lying in the road? To the good religious people in the story—the priest and the Levite—the one in the road might be dead, and so ritually unclean. They see that person as “other”, and so are willing, indeed eager, to pass him by. The Samaritan does not see the man in the road in those religious terms and so is more able to see himself in him. The Samaritan can be a “good Samaritan” because he is willing to risk seeing the man in the road as potentially himself. The religious code of the priest and the Levite gives them a warrant to objectify the nearly dead person and so do nothing on his behalf. The Samaritan is not burdened by that religious code, and so he can feel with and act for the person in trouble. Doing the right thing only happens when we see what we have in common with another.
Our collect for today expresses our situation before God and each other in starkly simple and compelling terms. It asks God to grant that we “may know and understand what things [we] ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them”. We might translate that lofty Prayer Book language this way: Help me, God, to know what I ought to do. And help me, God, to do it. The problem with the priest and the Levite in Jesus’s story is that they know neither what they should do nor how to do it. They don’t even see the man lying in the road as a problem. So if they do not know what they should do, how can they possibly have the grace and power to do it? Our prayer today guides us to thinking both about knowing the right thing and doing the right thing. I think our scriptures give us some insight here.
This morning we begin a several week journey through Paul’s letter to the Colossians. In today’s reading, Paul says this:
[God] has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. [Colossians 1.13-14]
When I worked in Pasadena, All Saints Church decided to do a direct-mail campaign to all the households in a ten-mile radius of the church. At a staff meeting the rector solicited ideas for an attention-getting headline. Now these were the days when you would get that Publisher’s Clearing House envelope in your mailbox with the banner headline, “You May Already Be A Winner!” emblazoned on it. I suggested that our direct mail envelope display in large letters the slogan, “You May Already Be Saved!”
Then as now my brilliant suggestions sounded a bit too edgy for the church, so we opted for something far less original and compelling. But that proposed slogan stuck with me because it gets to the heart of what Paul is saying in Colossians: Here is his language: “God has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. “ Here is my language: you may already be saved. In fact, Paul and I believe you are. Both versions pose this next question: What are you going to do about it?
Like the priest and the Levite in this morning’s Gospel, most of us spend most of the time we give to religious speculation worrying about the state of our souls. The reason Jesus is so critical of the Law is that it misleads people into thinking that they are supposed to try to know and do the right thing in order to be all right with God. But the point of Jesus’s teaching, as is the point of today’s reading from Colossians, is that you are all right with God already.
“God has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” Religious systems and institutions—even and especially the church—persistently misunderstand and misapply the fundamental message of the Gospel. The Good News is that you are already a winner, you are already saved. So our biggest question ought not to be, “How do I get right with God,” but rather, “Now that I am right with God, how do I get right with the rest of creation?”
The priest and the Levite, the “good religious people”, in today’s Gospel are so worried about getting right with God that they fail to notice the human tragedy in front of them. The Samaritan, the one unburdened by that worry, is free actually to respond in love and compassion to someone in great need. It is only because of his ability to see himself beloved of God that the Samaritan can also risk seeing himself lying half dead in the road. And only when you risk seeing yourself that way can you actually reach out and do something for someone else.
This is the essential doubleness of Christianity, without an appreciation for which one can never quite grasp the fullness and depth of the Gospel. We are, like the man in Jesus’s story, like someone lying half dead in the road. We are small, powerless, at the mercy of forces bigger than we are. At the same time, we are, in Paul’s words, those who “share in the inheritance of the saints in the light”. Because we like to think of ourselves as powerful, competent people, we resist self-identifying as those in need of help. But only as we open ourselves to the truth of our situation does another, deeper reality emerge: we do not have to pretend be in control of our destinies because we are already in the embrace of a God who is. We are both powerless and redeemed at the same time. We live lives of love and compassion not to earn something but because the grace we have compels us to do so.
In the words of today’s collect, how do we know what is right? And once we know it, how do we find grace and power to do it? Like my bike-riding bishop friend, all too often we fail to acknowledge the reality of our situation. All of us need help. All of us depend on others. It’s only when we see and say that that we become open to the grace and power of what it means to share in “the inheritance of the saints in light.”
We will only be open to the depth and power of the Gospel when we acknowledge both sides of our situation. We are fragile, finite men and women in need of help from somewhere outside ourselves. And we are those who already stand in the kingdom of God’s beloved son and share in the inheritance of the saints in light. Both things are true about us at the same time. And it’s part of the divine paradox we stand in that you can’t experience the glory of God’s holiness until you acknowledge the depth of your own need.
You may already be a winner. You are already saved. As you know yourself both to need help and to have received it, you will be set free and empowered to be an agent of help and blessing to others. It is all right to ask for help, to acknowledge your limitations, your weakness, your pain, your loss. The universe does not require your leadership in order to function correctly. But it does require your compassionate heart to feel with those who lie half dead in the road. Only those who know themselves both to be fragile and to be loved can see the need in others and respond as the Samaritan did.
“This is a great mystery” [Ephesians 5.32] as Paul says elsewhere. This profound doubleness, this ambiguity, this dual truth about us is always more than we can take in mentally. We get it not by thinking about it but by living into it. And we can only live into it because of the profound and myriad ways in which we each have been supported and nourished by God in the guise of Samaritans who have picked us up when we were lying half dead in the road. Amen.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Homily: The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost [June 27, 2010] Christ Church Cranbrook
Last weekend Kathy and I finally got around to watching the movie, "Fantastic Mr. Fox", the DVD of which had been sitting on top of our TV set since mid-March. The movie is Wes Anderson’s 2009 stop-motion animated version of Roald Dahl’s 1970 children’s novel of the same name. It tells the story of what happens when Mr. Fox decides to go back into the chicken stealing business two years after he had promised his wife Felicity that he would give it up for good.
I mention "Fantastic Mr. Fox" because of a line in today’s Gospel. When an admirer tells Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go,” Jesus replies, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” In the film "Fantastic Mr. Fox" the protagonist has a hole, but after two years of occupying it he decides he’d rather live in a large beech tree instead. As we know and Mr. Fox has yet to learn, there are good reasons foxes inhabit holes and not beech trees. Mr. Fox’s simultaneous decisions to re-enter the chicken stealing game and to move into an arboreal environment signal both a mid-life crisis and an example of bad planning, and the rest of the story involves the dangerous consequences of these actions.
Decisions, as we know, have consequences. In the case of this morning’s Gospel [Luke 9.51-62], Jesus makes his “foxes have holes” statement as a result of a decision almost casually announced in the Gospel moments before: ”When the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” In the early days of his ministry, Jesus appeared simply to be a teacher and healer. But as what scholars called his “Messianic consciousness” developed, he determined that the logic of his life and mission called him to take his cause to the center of Israel’s political and religious authority. So what we witness in this ninth chapter of Luke’s Gospel is a turning point in the Jesus story. Jesus decides that he will go to Jerusalem, and he makes this decision knowing that he will run into conflict with some very powerful forces. The certainty of this conflict means that accompanying Jesus will now be a lot more dangerous than it was before.
"Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” "Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God." "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God." If Jesus is such a nice man, you’re probably asking yourself, why is he saying these hard things about foxes and holes and the dead burying their own dead and not looking back after you put your hand to the plow?
My friend, the late Bishop George Barrett, once told me the story of being interviewed on television in its early days, when guests were asked to wear lavalier microphones, the kind you hang around your neck. During a commercial break the sound technician came to adjust his microphone: it was banging upagainst the bishop’s large, pectoral cross worn on his chest. The technician said, “The problem is the cross. It’s causing interference.” George Barrett looked up at him and replied, “It always does.”
The cross always causes interference. The people who want to follow Jesus have not reckoned on the reality of the cross as part of the transaction. Jesus has set his face to go to Jerusalem, and he knows that his critique of the Empire and the religious system that colludes with it will result in his being brought to a political prisoner’s death on the cross. Those who want to follow Jesus think that following him will be all about sitting at his feet and taking notes copying down his good advice. But Jesus knows that following him means being called into a life at odds with the forces of Empire, a conflict that will result for many of his followers in persecution, martyrdom, and death. “The problem is the cross. It’s causing interference.” “It always does.”
"Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” "Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God." "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God." When we hear Jesus say these hard things we feel he is being uncharacteristically harsh on the well-intentioned people who want to become his disciples. But if we understand these sayings in the light of Jesus’s setting his face to go to Jerusalem, these sayings turn out to be not hard sayings at all but rather kind ones. In effect, Jesus tells his would-be followers, “You think you know what you will be getting into. But you don’t. Think twice before you sign on for such a life-changing and dangerous assignment.”
To be a Christian, to live under the judgment and sign of the cross, is constantly to be a voice for interference. It means that we will always bring the Gospel values to bear upon social, ethical, and cultural problems. Because the imperial presumptions with which we are called to interfere are always centered on power, the Gospel critique of those presumptions will always promote the voices and concerns of the powerless. In Jesus’s day and ours, the consequences of that cultural critique will not always be pretty. The cross always causes interference, because in signing on to be followers of Jesus we are signing on to be fellow travelers with him of the way of the cross. And while walking that way with Jesus promises ultimate joy and peace, in the near term it often delivers suffering and loss. "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
How do we make sense of all that? In today’s reading from the letter to the Galatians [Galatians 5.1, 13-25] Paul gives us some help. When he says, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery,” Paul articulates one of the great principles of Christian ethical practice: “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.” Precisely because we have been set free by the cross of Christ, we now express that freedom by becoming mutually accountable to each other. Christian freedom is not license to do whatever I might think I want to. Christian freedom is lived out in responsibility to others in the belief that one finds life’s ultimate meaning in mutuality and compassion.
And as the test of this freedom, Paul gives us his famously enduring list of the fruits of the Spirit. Since Christ has set us free from enslavement to the Law, we are now free to live by the Spirit. But what does life under the guidance of the Spirit look like? Here his is answer: “[T]he fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
When Jesus set himself to go up to Jerusalem he decided to stand with the nameless, powerless, voiceless people of the world and against the religious and political forces that would enslave them. So his going to the cross was not only an act of self-sacrifice. It was an act of self-sacrifice in the service of a vision of the preciousness of every individual human life. The decision to follow Jesus is always a costly decision. Globally and locally, socially and personally, you and I face challenges that will only be addressed when we decide to walk with Jesus toward Jerusalem, to stand under the sign and judgment of the cross that always causes interference. Our social and personal problems will only begin to be addressed by our willingness mutually to subject ourselves to each other. I am not free if you are not free. And neither of us is free until everyone—even people we disagree with and don’t like very much—is free as well.
“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Following Jesus always takes us someplace we hadn’t counted on going and gives us more than we bargained for.
In the end, “Fantastic” Mr. Fox decides both to retire from chicken stealing for good and to return to living underground. But in the process he has learned something both about the world and about himself. The call to follow Jesus as he turns from the comfortable world of Galilee toward the conflict and struggle of Jerusalem is a similar call into greater depth of awareness of ourselves and of the world and its pain.
A life lived with Jesus on the road to Jerusalem is never easy. “The problem is the cross. It’s causing interference.” “It always does.” Such a life always brings us into conflict and tension with the prevailing values of our world and culture, values that diminish human beings and destroy the soul. But if we put our hands to the plow and look forward with Jesus and not back, if we go with Jesus to proclaim the kingdom of God, the benefits will outrun the cost from the moment we say yes. And though like Jesus we may have to look around for a place to lay our heads, our new life will bear new and abundant fruit, and the signs of that fruit in our lives will be these: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control”. Amen.
I mention "Fantastic Mr. Fox" because of a line in today’s Gospel. When an admirer tells Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go,” Jesus replies, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” In the film "Fantastic Mr. Fox" the protagonist has a hole, but after two years of occupying it he decides he’d rather live in a large beech tree instead. As we know and Mr. Fox has yet to learn, there are good reasons foxes inhabit holes and not beech trees. Mr. Fox’s simultaneous decisions to re-enter the chicken stealing game and to move into an arboreal environment signal both a mid-life crisis and an example of bad planning, and the rest of the story involves the dangerous consequences of these actions.
Decisions, as we know, have consequences. In the case of this morning’s Gospel [Luke 9.51-62], Jesus makes his “foxes have holes” statement as a result of a decision almost casually announced in the Gospel moments before: ”When the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” In the early days of his ministry, Jesus appeared simply to be a teacher and healer. But as what scholars called his “Messianic consciousness” developed, he determined that the logic of his life and mission called him to take his cause to the center of Israel’s political and religious authority. So what we witness in this ninth chapter of Luke’s Gospel is a turning point in the Jesus story. Jesus decides that he will go to Jerusalem, and he makes this decision knowing that he will run into conflict with some very powerful forces. The certainty of this conflict means that accompanying Jesus will now be a lot more dangerous than it was before.
"Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” "Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God." "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God." If Jesus is such a nice man, you’re probably asking yourself, why is he saying these hard things about foxes and holes and the dead burying their own dead and not looking back after you put your hand to the plow?
My friend, the late Bishop George Barrett, once told me the story of being interviewed on television in its early days, when guests were asked to wear lavalier microphones, the kind you hang around your neck. During a commercial break the sound technician came to adjust his microphone: it was banging upagainst the bishop’s large, pectoral cross worn on his chest. The technician said, “The problem is the cross. It’s causing interference.” George Barrett looked up at him and replied, “It always does.”
The cross always causes interference. The people who want to follow Jesus have not reckoned on the reality of the cross as part of the transaction. Jesus has set his face to go to Jerusalem, and he knows that his critique of the Empire and the religious system that colludes with it will result in his being brought to a political prisoner’s death on the cross. Those who want to follow Jesus think that following him will be all about sitting at his feet and taking notes copying down his good advice. But Jesus knows that following him means being called into a life at odds with the forces of Empire, a conflict that will result for many of his followers in persecution, martyrdom, and death. “The problem is the cross. It’s causing interference.” “It always does.”
"Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” "Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God." "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God." When we hear Jesus say these hard things we feel he is being uncharacteristically harsh on the well-intentioned people who want to become his disciples. But if we understand these sayings in the light of Jesus’s setting his face to go to Jerusalem, these sayings turn out to be not hard sayings at all but rather kind ones. In effect, Jesus tells his would-be followers, “You think you know what you will be getting into. But you don’t. Think twice before you sign on for such a life-changing and dangerous assignment.”
To be a Christian, to live under the judgment and sign of the cross, is constantly to be a voice for interference. It means that we will always bring the Gospel values to bear upon social, ethical, and cultural problems. Because the imperial presumptions with which we are called to interfere are always centered on power, the Gospel critique of those presumptions will always promote the voices and concerns of the powerless. In Jesus’s day and ours, the consequences of that cultural critique will not always be pretty. The cross always causes interference, because in signing on to be followers of Jesus we are signing on to be fellow travelers with him of the way of the cross. And while walking that way with Jesus promises ultimate joy and peace, in the near term it often delivers suffering and loss. "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
How do we make sense of all that? In today’s reading from the letter to the Galatians [Galatians 5.1, 13-25] Paul gives us some help. When he says, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery,” Paul articulates one of the great principles of Christian ethical practice: “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.” Precisely because we have been set free by the cross of Christ, we now express that freedom by becoming mutually accountable to each other. Christian freedom is not license to do whatever I might think I want to. Christian freedom is lived out in responsibility to others in the belief that one finds life’s ultimate meaning in mutuality and compassion.
And as the test of this freedom, Paul gives us his famously enduring list of the fruits of the Spirit. Since Christ has set us free from enslavement to the Law, we are now free to live by the Spirit. But what does life under the guidance of the Spirit look like? Here his is answer: “[T]he fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
When Jesus set himself to go up to Jerusalem he decided to stand with the nameless, powerless, voiceless people of the world and against the religious and political forces that would enslave them. So his going to the cross was not only an act of self-sacrifice. It was an act of self-sacrifice in the service of a vision of the preciousness of every individual human life. The decision to follow Jesus is always a costly decision. Globally and locally, socially and personally, you and I face challenges that will only be addressed when we decide to walk with Jesus toward Jerusalem, to stand under the sign and judgment of the cross that always causes interference. Our social and personal problems will only begin to be addressed by our willingness mutually to subject ourselves to each other. I am not free if you are not free. And neither of us is free until everyone—even people we disagree with and don’t like very much—is free as well.
“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Following Jesus always takes us someplace we hadn’t counted on going and gives us more than we bargained for.
In the end, “Fantastic” Mr. Fox decides both to retire from chicken stealing for good and to return to living underground. But in the process he has learned something both about the world and about himself. The call to follow Jesus as he turns from the comfortable world of Galilee toward the conflict and struggle of Jerusalem is a similar call into greater depth of awareness of ourselves and of the world and its pain.
A life lived with Jesus on the road to Jerusalem is never easy. “The problem is the cross. It’s causing interference.” “It always does.” Such a life always brings us into conflict and tension with the prevailing values of our world and culture, values that diminish human beings and destroy the soul. But if we put our hands to the plow and look forward with Jesus and not back, if we go with Jesus to proclaim the kingdom of God, the benefits will outrun the cost from the moment we say yes. And though like Jesus we may have to look around for a place to lay our heads, our new life will bear new and abundant fruit, and the signs of that fruit in our lives will be these: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control”. Amen.
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