Homily: The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost [July 20, 2014] St. John's Cathedral, Los Angeles

It is a great pleasure to be with you at St. John's this morning. I have long loved and admired this parish, and I'm grateful to your present dean both for his continuing the great tradition of leadership here and for the invitation to join you this morning.

I understand that you are working your way through Paul's letter to the Romans this summer. When I first heard that, I wasn't sure if I wanted to applaud or weep. This is tough stuff. Jesus tells stories. Paul writes philosophy. I think we preachers stepped away from him because we quail in the face of so powerful a mind working through such sophisticated arguments. It's easier, frankly, to say a few words about weeds and wheat.

          We lose a lot when we stop talking about Paul. Paul was the first Christian to understand all the implications of the Gospel. He was a foundational genius, like Shakespeare or Freud or Darwin. He thought it all through for the first time, and though he got some of it wrong he got so much more right. I wouldn't have delved so deeply into Romans if I hadn't been asked, but the more I've thought about this provocative letter the gladder I am that Mark gave me this assignment. So here is my attempt to add to your summer exploration of what Paul is up to in his letter to the Romans.

          Nevertheless well-meaning people often set up a false opposition between Jesus and Paul. I've heard them say, "I love Jesus but can't stand Paul." Loving Jesus and hating Paul is the scriptural equivalent of being spiritual but not religious.To these folks, Jesus is loving and forgiving while Paul is stern and judgmental. But no matter what you might think of their contrasting personal styles, Jesus and Paul both have a lot to tell us about how to survive living in an empire.

Much has been written in recent years about Jesus and empire. If you think about the world in which Jesus lived and taught, it was dominated by Rome politically, economically, and militarily. Palestinian Jewish peasants, of which Jesus was one, were taxed mercilessly by the Romans to support their empire. Not only that, most of their food went to support Rome's gigantic standing army as well. Jesus's people were both poor and hungry. One way to understand his teaching is to see it as a way to live an abundant life even in the midst of scarcity and oppression. Rather than isolate and hoard what is yours, join with others and share what you have. Radical then and radical now.

The problem, of course is that empires demand absolute loyalty which Jesus (and Paul) think appropriate only to God. Caesar pretends to be divine and demands that you worship him. The empire is like a bad family, treating its subjects abusively and then expecting worship and obedience in return. To Jesus, the emperor's claims are both arrogant and blasphemous. The great New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan sums up Jesus's teaching with this sentence: "In your face, Caesar!"

          Now we tend to accept that vision of Jesus, but we usually think that Paul is more concerned with personal than social morality. If we strip our preconceptions away and just read the passage we have heard this morning from Romans [Romans 8:12-25], it becomes clear that Paul is up to something very similar to the radical, countercultural teachings of Jesus. He describes our former condition as "slavery" and now calls us "heirs with God and joint heirs with Christ". He memorably tells us that the entire creation itself was "subjected to futility" and is in "bondage to decay". Indeed, just as you and I "groan inwardly", so the whole world is "groaning in labor pains" for the new order to be revealed. Contrary to the way many read it, Paul's language here is not the language of personal morality or of rules and regulations. Paul's language here is the language of social justice. It tells us how to survive living in an empire.

           So what? Why does it matter that Jesus and Paul want us to learn how to live in an empire? Well, first, we need to remember that before there was Christianity, there was Judaism, a religion which also got its start as a critique of absolute power. Just as Jesus's followers gathered around a teacher who showed how to live freely even in Roman oppression, the Jews came to being during their escape from slavery in Egypt, an event we call the Exodus. When Paul uses words like "slavery", "bondage", "freedom", and "hope" he is pointing his readers and hearers back to the earlier story of Jewish, Exodus, liberation. Just as the Jews were freed from bondage in Egypt, just as Jesus's disciples found a community that liberated them from slavery to Rome, so the new, dispersed Christian community that Paul addresses can find hope and meaning even under the oppressive conditions of empire. They do that, in Paul's analysis, by coming together in community and compassion. They do that by recognizing Jesus, not Caesar, as their king.

       The earliest Christians were martyred in the Roman world because they were seen as a challenge to the cult of Caesar and therefore politically dangerous. They refused to worship the emperor and proclaimed that Jesus was their lord and king. The Romans understood just how subversive this teaching really was. It held up the world the empire projected as false, and showed its values to be counterfeits of God's values. To Jesus and Paul, Caesar was merely a parody of God— power masquerading as authority, privilege pretending to be justice, aggression calling itself love.

But the good news, for Paul, is that "the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God." When he says that "the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us," he means not only that we will be personally saved. He means also that what we experience in the life and teachings of Jesus and in the community that gathers around him—what we together have in community and compassion--will ultimately free the world. "In your face, Caesar!"

          Why should you and I care about Jesus and Paul and empire? Why should we recall the liberation of Israel from Pharaoh in the Exodus? We should care because we also live in an empire. Oppression is all around us. And in 2014, the empire is as much cultural as it is political. As did the Roman Christians, so do we live in an empire that promises salvation through all kinds of bogus methods, most of them commodities— the right car, the right neighborhood, the right clothes, the right spouse. Our empire suggests that we need to survive by protecting ourselves from each other rather than joining together in community and compassion. This empire wants us to live in fear that can only be assuaged by buying more stuff, exerting power over others, protecting what is ours. It holds out its answers as the real answers. But finally it offers us only customer satisfaction instead of real hope.

As Paul says, "the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us." The good news from Paul this morning is that you and I are on the same Exodus journey from slavery to freedom walked by Moses and Israel, by Jesus and his companions, by all the great visionary leaders from Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez to Nelson Mandela. Let us join with each other and with everyone who is up against it—those in hospital rooms, in prisons, at the border, the homeless, in our cities, in Gaza—and get on that road with Jesus. Let us hold on to each other, bear one another's burdens, and live the expansive and abundant freedom of life on God's terms.

           The only way to survive living in an empire is to join together and walk toward freedom. So with Paul, with Moses, with Jesus, let's you and I get back out there on that Exodus journey. Liberated resurrection life holds real satisfactions that the tempting values of empire can never deliver. We step into them now as we gather at God's table. "In your face, Caesar!" Jesus and the God he calls his father are the ones who deserve our real allegiance. Amen.

Homily: The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost [July 13, 2014] All Saints Pasadena

 

Hearing today’s parable of the sower just now reminds me of the time, probably 20 years ago now, when I preached in this pulpit about this very same story. It was one of the few sermons I gave here that ever evoked an angry reaction.  I didn’t say anything very inflammatory about the story except to observe that the passage comes in two parts—Jesus’s public parable of the sower and then the private explanation to his companions. Being a bookishly nerdy kind of guy, I observed that most Bible scholars accept the parable as genuine but think the explanation was made up later by the church.  So I announced that I was going to talk only about the story, not about the flimsy allegory tacked on to it.

You would have thought I had spit on the flag.  I stood at the northwest door out there and received nothing but angry accusations.  “Who are you to think that Jesus didn’t say that?” I was stunned.  Remember, this was All Saints, Pasadena, not some Orange County megachurch.  Most of the folks here can’t even say the creed without crossing their fingers.  Yet here they were giving me grief for the merest mention of New Testament criticism.  For weeks I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting villagers with torches to come and ride me out of town on a rail.

I did keep my job—the rector was out of town, and I guess no one wrote him any letters—and I did learn my lesson.  So here goes one more time.  Let’s talk about that parable and only the parable.  I’ll leave scholarly opinions to others.

Here’s another, gentler All Saints story. When I worked here in the 1990s I was fortunate to have shared some of my time with a retired priest I admired very much, Larry Carter. Larry had been the longtime rector of St. John’s Church in downtown Los Angeles, and he was one of my heroes. His ministry at St. John’s had been an expansive peace and justice ministry. He was known to be a fearless advocate for peace, for minorities, and for the poor. He famously closed the doors of St. John’s as a protest for the duration of the Vietnam War.

            My image of Larry was of a fierce prophet. So imagine my surprise, once, in a Bible study I was leading when he said that the opening of today’s Gospel was his favorite passage in the New Testament: “Jesus got in a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach.” [Matthew 13.2] Something about that picture of Jesus teaching from a boat while people listened from the shore touched me. Apart from the content of anything Jesus might have to say in his parables, the image this passage gives us of him in the boat teaches us something about what it means to live a centered life, grounded and at home in God’s creation. Hold that thought.

            Today’s Gospel is the familiar parable of the sower. Whenever I hear this parable I see two images in my mind’s eye: with Larry Carter’s help I see Jesus teaching from the boat; with the aid of my memory of Vincent Van Gogh’s great painting, The Sower, a reproduction of which I have on my desk. I see a man striding through the fields, casting seed in every direction. You and I live so much in the modern urban mental world that we have to exercise some imagination to get what sowing and seeds meant to pre-modern people. A seed, after all, is a tiny mysterious miracle. In this compact package lies a hidden something that can produce life itself and can do so abundantly. We put seeds in the ground and, amazingly, plants and trees and shrubs come up as if by magic. It’s not surprising that Jesus would use the seed as a symbol of God’s creative, mysterious abundance. Something big lies hidden within something small, and the way it works is entirely hidden from our view. According to Jesus, God is like that: miraculous, abundant, mysterious.

            Let’s sit with the story of the sower for a second. What might it be saying to us? To you? To me? If you have ears to hear, listen!

            I spent a good part of my adult life before coming here in 1990 studying and teaching American literature, especially the Transcendentalists: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. They too were alive to the power of the seed as an image not only of fertility and abundance but of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Emerson and Thoreau lived and wrote during the nineteenth century, the age of the rise of science, specifically the time of Charles Darwin. They were alert to the complexity of the processes of natural selection at work in the dispersion of seeds. But they lived in an America that was still mostly rural and agricultural. They saw seeds scientifically, but that awareness did not stop their seeing seeds in a more nuanced way, as part of the farming life of planting, cultivating, and harvesting, and therefore as metaphors for life and its processes. Emerson said that the seed was “God manifest in the mind,” “of which the Beauty of the world is the flower and Goodness the fruit” [quoted in Thoreau, Faith in a Seed, “Introduction”, p. 16]. Toward the end of his life, Thoreau became preoccupied with the way plants propagate themselves, and he increasingly saw seeds and their dispersal as a powerful figure of life, death, and rebirth. At the end of the “The Dispersion of Seeds”, Thoreau exclaimed, “The very earth itself is a granary and a seminary,[and the word seminary embeds in it the Latin word for seed] so that to some minds its surface is regarded as the cuticle of one great living creature” [Faith in a Seed, p. 151]. The little miraculous package that makes this holistic vision of life possible is, of course, the seed.

So my question for everyone here this morning goes like this: what, right now, might this story mean for you? What might it mean for you to think of God as someone who is scattering seeds all over the place? What might it mean for you to think of yourself in relation to these seeds? Are you the path, the rocky ground, the thorns, or the good soil? Or might you be all of them at once? What do these seeds represent? How might we let the truth on offer in this story germinate and sprout within us, bringing forth fruit 30, 60, 100 fold?

            I won’t, like Matthew, try to give you an allegoridal interpretation. (You see, I still can’t let that go!) But I will tell you how I hear the story this morning. Instead of thinking of the types of soil as types of people, I hear the story asking me to think of the types of soil as aspects of myself, perhaps as periods in my life. There are times when I seem open to what God is up to in the world and ready to respond to and participate with God in God’s creative, redemptive, healing work in the world around me. Those are the good soil times. Then there are times when I am more closed to God’s promptings and resist seeing myself and others as God sees us. Those are the path, the rock, the thorn times. The point of this story has less to do with characterizing different kinds of believers than it does simply with seeing ourselves as always involved and ongoing process of life, death, and rebirth. There are times when I am alive and open. There are times when I am closed and as good as dead. That cyclical, rhythmic process of life, death, and rebirth goes on all through the course of our lives. And if I’m hearing this story aright, then it seems the Christian experience is more like a cycle or a process or a journey than it is like having a once-for-all conversion moment. Some days I’m good soil. Some days I’m thorny rocky ground. When I take this parable in, I know myself to be converted almost daily, and that’s because I can be thorny rocky ground almost daily. But on the good days I exhibit some qualities of good soil, too. Over time we move with God in the right direction. Over time those seeds do take root, and  mysteriously and graciously, we become the people God created us to be.

            The good news this morning is that God is like the sower as Jesus describes him in today’s parable. God goes out to sow, and God scatters the seed—the miraculous package of mysterious life—God scatters the seed indiscriminately, with almost reckless, joyful abundance. God does not select certain types of people who are privileged to “get it”. God does not select certain moments in your life when you are going to “get it”. God knows that you and I will get it for a while, then we won’t get it, then we’ll get it again. God does what God does: God sows the seed indiscriminately, abundantly, generously. God is always coming toward us, opening up the possibility for us that God’s love and hope and blessing will take root and bloom and bring forth fruit in our lives.

            And that takes me back to the thought I asked you to hold earlier on. The thought was about the opening picture of Jesus, sitting in a boat, teaching his disciples in parables, the image my friend Larry Carter thought the most beautiful picture in the New Testament. Jesus was at home in that boat because he was at home in the world. He lived a centered life, grounded and at peace in God’s creation. You can live that life, too. Summer is the time when we have the possibility of slowing down, moving to a different rhythm, a time when we can, if only for odd moments, rest and relax and open ourselves just enough to let some of those divine seeds come into us and do their transforming work in our bodies and spirits. Remember that Henry James said the two most beautiful words in English are “summer afternoon”.

            As you go about your life this summer, I invite you to picture Jesus teaching his disciples from the boat. And then I invite you to picture God sowing those seeds in your direction. If Jesus could relax, so can you. Let God’s loving, embracing, renewing purpose wash over you as waves lap against a boat. In so doing, you’ll find yourself becoming open to God’s promise and God’s call to you in ways you maybe hadn’t before. If God’s purpose can take root in rocky ground, it can take root in you. The abundance of God’s blessings will germinate, sprout, bloom, and bear fruit not only in your life but through you in the life of the world. Amen.

             

 

Homily: The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost [July 27, 2014] Washington National Cathedral

There was a day last week when I looked at the front page of the paper and thought that the world had lost its mind. So much public suffering was on display there: the plane crash in the Ukraine, the Central American refugee children at the border, the crisis in Gaza, the outbreak of Ebola virus in Sierra Leone., the 200 Nigerian girls still missing after their abduction by Boko Haram.  U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon summed up all our feelings when he said, "Too many innocent people are dying." [Los Angeles Times, July 21, 2014]

 

On Tuesday, July 29 we will mark the one hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I. I'm sure to many observers at the time, the world must have seemed to have lost its mind then as well.  Because an Austro-Hungarian prince had been killed by a Serbian, a series of interlocking alliances triggered the start of what we have come to call "The Great War".  Russia came to the aid of Serbia. France came to the aid of Russia. Austria-Hungary called on Germany for help.  England jumped in on the side of France. The result was a war that lasted 4 years and cost over 20 million wounded and 16 million killed.

 

It should not be lost on us that the war in 1914 started as a conflict among empires.  England, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans called themselves empires. Germany was an empire in the making. The western world got drawn into a cataclysm because of conflicting imperial ambitions.  Everyone at the time wanted to rule the sea, colonize the developing world, and control both raw materials and the means of production. The European continent was not big enough to accommodate all these expansive visions. Hence the Great War.

 

To us in the 21^st century much of what happened at the dawn of the 20^th seems tragically inexplicable.  But a 22nd century person might be excused for looking at a front page of last week’s newspaper and thinking the same about us. The passengers on Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 found themselves caught in a conflict between Russia and Ukraine.  Children are showing up on our border fleeing violence caused not only by narco-terrorists but also by the policies of Central American governments.  And Israel, a nation I long admired, has increasingly come to behave like a turn-of-the-last century colonialist power.  Today as then, thoughtful people are perplexed by the problem of empires that aggrandize themselves with no regard to the human consequences.

On Sundays this summer in the church we are reading our way serially through Paul’s letter to the Romans.  Contemporary Bible scholars have found much in this letter to suggest that Paul was concerned with the problem of empire.  Christianity came to being amid the dangers and pretensions of imperial Rome. Jesus was put to death by a Roman imperial state that found his teaching subversive and so politically dangerous. Paul’s first generation of Christian converts was martyred because they acknowledged Jesus, not Caesar, as their king. 

As our summer reading of Romans has proceeded, we’ve seen Paul’s critique of empire reach its full force.  Just last week, Paul compared the situation of Roman Christians to that of Israel in Egypt. As the Jews fled Pharaoh, so Jesus’s followers can be free of Caesar.  As Christians, we prepare for the coming of Jesus, the true ruler of whom Caesar is only a parody. We are on a new Exodus, moving from slavery to freedom.  Paul’s Gospel of liberation finds its ultimate statement in these ringing words that end the passage we heard this morning:

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8: 37-39)

 

This is a passage often read at funerals, so we tend to think of Paul’s subject here as personal victory over death.  Certainly we are right to hear that: because so many Christians were dying at the hands of Roman executioners, we must hear reassurance about a life beyond death as part of Paul’s message.  But I believe that he is even more emphatically proclaiming the Jesus community’s coming final victory over Caesar.  “We are more than conquerors.” Neither rulers nor powers will be able to defeat us. 

What does Paul have to tell us on this centennial of the onslaught of the Great War?  What does he have to tell us about the front page of our daily paper?

In many ways, World War I changed the way we think not only about war but also about abstract ideas like heroism, glory, and honor on the battlefield. Warfare in this war was brutal and mechanized. Its engagements could hardly be called “battles”. The poets of previous wars celebrated the mighty deeds of warriors in song. The poets of the Great War—Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and others—told the truth about what they saw and experienced in the trenches. Both combatants and non-combatants suffered and died in unprecedented numbers. The after-effects of what was then called “shell shock” and we now call post-traumatic stress prolonged the suffering and death even after hostilities had long ceased.

So the Great War was a new event in human history, and both poets and theologians tried to respond to its newness as best they could.  Just as the confident poetry of war died away, so did the confident liberal Protestantism of the 19^th century seem inadequate to the present moment.  All notions of human progress now seemed to be false.  We weren’t getting better as a species at all. The Great War had revealed a new, mechanized ferocity in us. Christian thinkers like the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth and the American Reinhold Niebuhr turned to Paul’s letter to the Romans precisely to try to understand how a Christian might find meaning in the wake of such tragedy. 

And what those theologians found when they turned to Romans was Paul’s message to an earlier generation of Christians who had also struggled to make sense of human suffering at the hands of a cynical and uncaring imperial state.  The range of forces set against us can seem at times overwhelming, but Paul never gives up hope:

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us?. . Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . .No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:31-39)

 

 

            As deep and painful as the effects of the Great War were, they threw Christians back to the fundamental affirmations of our faith.  After the experience of trenches, of poison gas, of shell shock, we could no longer naively place our faith either in nation states or in a doctrine of human progress.  We were driven back to first things, to the life and witness, the suffering and death, to the resurrection of Jesus.  “If God is for us, who is against us?”  Nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” 

            Only a faith grounded in the death and resurrection of Jesus is adequate to the sufferings of the Great War.  And only a faith so grounded can help us endure and understand subsequent tragedies: the concentration camps, Hiroshima, Vietnam, genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda, the new advent of terrorism and oppression. If we want to understand what happened in the trenches, if we want to understand what is happening in Gaza, at our own border today, we need to look to the imperial Roman cross on which Jesus died and at the empty tomb from which he rose.  The God we know in Jesus knows what it is to suffer as we do.  The God we know in Jesus also knows what it is to live a new and risen life on the other side of that suffering.  God is with us because God has been there. We are not alone.  We are loved and known and held by one who continues to go through all of life’s struggles with us.

            What Paul says to the Romans and to the survivors of the Great War, Paul also says to you and me both individually and in community.  People will always be expendable to empires.  We will always be capable of treating each other cruelly.  But even in the midst of experiencing that disregard and that cruelty we can find seeds of hope and grace and compassion. Put not your faith in empires.  Put your faith in the one who triumphed over all that empire could bring to bear. We are not alone:  not in the trenches, not in the camps, not on the border; not in our prisons, our sickbeds, or in the loneliness of our own rooms.

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

 

Amen.

Homily: The Third Sunday after Pentecost [June 29, 2014] Washington National Cathedral

            Those of us who live in Washington are familiar with spin doctors—political operatives who try to convince you that what you just saw and heard was not really what you saw and heard.  They swarm around after presidential debates and attempt to impose a narrative on the event that flies in the face of common sense. Sometimes candidates can be their own spin doctors, as when Donald Trump rebounded from a humiliating episode by saying, "Today I am very proud of myself because I have accomplished something that nobody else has been able to accomplish.” That’s spin doctoring at a very high level, so please don’t attempt this at home.

            In my day I have also heard a number of what I call “spin preachers”:  clergy who interpret scripture in ways that protect you from the dangerous parts of the Bible.  You know the type. When Jesus says that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God, they find a way to tell you that he actually means something else. This kind of preaching softens the force of Jesus’s admonition about the way wealth can isolate us from each other.  It tames the story to our taste. Spin preachers are not hard to find.  Any one of us can slip into that role whenever we’re given a piece of scripture that puzzles,  frightens, angers, or revolts us.

            Today’s reading from Genesis [Genesis 22: 1-14] is one of those passages. It’s the story Jews call the “binding of Isaac”, and over the course of Jewish and Christian history it has been the occasion of some epic spin preaching, even by the likes of me in my younger days.  It is just an awful story—you heard it read, and I won’t try to retell it—and the temptation a preacher faces is to take the awful weirdness of it away.  God couldn’t seriously have wanted to have Abraham kill his son, could he?  God couldn’t really have done this merely to test Abraham, could he?  We preachers shy away from those questions by reaching for our commentaries and coming up with more ingenious and fanciful readings. Those sermons always fail, because they never explain why God would do such a nasty thing to Abraham and Isaac in the first place. And while we’re at it, why replace a child with a lamb? Why sacrifice any living sentient being at all?

            The older I get, the more allergic I become to spin doctoring and spin preaching.  We’re not crazy. We just saw and heard what we just saw and heard.  There’s no way to make the story of Isaac’s binding easy, simple, or even palatable. So how do we respond to it?

            I have two thoughts:  one of them concerns the weird otherness of God, the other with what this story says about how we treat our children.

            As to the first. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” [Hebrews 10:31] In polite traditions like ours, we tend to want everything to be beautiful and rational.  We want God to be friendly.  We want the stories about God to make sense. Over the years, people like me have done our best to keep the holy at bay, held safely as far away from our hearers as we can.  We don’t think you can take it. But domesticating the holy is an impossible task.  No matter how desperately preachers try their best to insulate you from it, the divine keeps breaking through.  It’s no accident that some backwoods Appalachian Christians call themselves “snake-handlers”.  If you keep messing around with God and Jesus, you’re bound to get bit.

            The writer I know who best explains this phenomenon is Annie Dillard.  This is what she said in her short, sharp, powerful book, Holy the Firm:

I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words that people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed.  In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger.  If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked.  But in the low churches you expect it any minute.  [Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, “Day Three”]

 

For Annie Dillard, sitting in a church is not like sitting in a concert hall.  It’s like going to a circus where high-wire acrobats are doing something they used to describe as “death-defying”.  You and I go to church as if it were the most natural thing in the world.  But as I read stories like the binding of Isaac, it’s clear that churchgoing isn’t natural at all.  It’s risky business.  It celebrates something powerful, irrational and weird. Most times it should be surprising.  Sometimes it can be downright scary. It’s a testament to human ingenuity that we’ve managed, on occasion, to make it dull.

When we try to homogenize the Bible and domesticate God, we end up talking in sentimental, greeting card language. We turn Jesus into Hello Kitty and God into a Care Bear. Now, for the record, I do believe that God loves us and is friendly toward us. I do believe e are all valued, accepted, and loved. But to say that God loves us is not to say that the holy makes rational sense.  When I read the Bible not through the lens of doctrine but through the eyes I use to examine the world around me, I have to admit that God and Jesus do and say some really strange things there. 

When, in Dillard’s words, we “come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though [we know what we are] doing,” we are kidding ourselves.  God is God and we are not.  I believe I love God. I believe I try to follow God.  But I no longer believe I can understand God or explain God’s behavior with any more authority than you can.  God is God and I am not.  A story like the binding of Isaac, or the Flood, or the Crucifixion, or the story of Job makes me fall silent before it. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

So if I fall silent before the story of Abraham and Isaac on the mountain, is there something I can take away from it?

 Just because a story is hard doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have something to say to us. When I search my own life and heart and the state of the world around me, I believe there is.  We recoil from this story because it tells us a hard truth about ourselves. It asks that we confront our human tendency to do an ugly thing—to sacrifice our children to our own interests.  We live in a culture that is sentimental about children, but that sentimentality masks our shared willingness to sacrifice our children at almost every turn. We send them to dilapidated and dangerous and substandard schools; we subject them to the effects of illness, poverty, and violence far more than we do adults; and we send them off to fight wars that people my age dream up. We talk about children in one way, and we treat them another. If you don’t believe me, just think about the state of the planet we will be handing on to them.  Is my freedom to drive a fossil-fueled car and use an electric toothbrush worth subjecting my grandchildren to rising ocean levels, increasingly chaotic weather patterns, and the cycle of drought, flood, and famine that global warming will bring us by the century’s end?

It’s only when I stop kidding myself about my own selfishness, my own tendency to seek my own wellbeing at the expense of even my children, that I can be open to what Jesus says in this morning’s Gospel:

Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple will not lose their reward." [Matthew 10:42]

Faced with the hard truth about our shared willingness, with Abraham, to bind Isaac over and over again, Jesus points us once more toward the possibility of generosity and compassion. We will always put ourselves before others. That is what “original sin” means.  It is the sad, truth of our nature.  But we’re not stuck there, because we can choose to live not like Abraham but like Jesus. We can reach out—to our children, to each other, to the world--with even a cup of cold water.  We can assuage our children’s suffering, embrace and love them, make possible their nurture and growth.

Today’s readings ask that we get real about how we will treat our children.  Will we lead them up the hill, ready to sacrifice them to keep ourselves safe?  Or will we give up some of our own comfort so that they and the world they inherit might have some relation to the one we enjoy? The choice is ours. Abraham failed that choice, but God saved him from it.  May God save us from bad choices, and may we have the grace to see the wisdom in serving the littlest ones in God’s name.  Amen.

 

 

Homily: June 8, 2014 [Pentecost] Washington National Cathedral

 

The choir’s singing of Psalm 104 just now reminds me of a bright spring morning in the late 1980s, when I saw my first school of whales:

Yonder is the great and wide sea
with its living things too many to number, *
creatures both small and great.

There move the ships,
and there is that Leviathan, *
which you have made for the sport of it. [Psalm 104.26-27]

In those days I was the Vicar of St. Aidan’s Church in Malibu, California, and the California gray whales make their way south in the winter and north in the spring passing through the Catalina Channel about 100 yards or so off the coast of Point Dume in Malibu. Up until that time I had been a bit dismissive of the popular piety about whales. But my attitude changed on that spring morning as, running on the beach, I saw an enormous herd of gray whales round the turn of Point Dume and swim north. I had never before been in the presence of something so mysterious and so “other”.

            If you’ve ever seen them up close, you’ll agree that whales are impressive creatures. They are huge. But it’s not only their size that is compelling. They are also gracious and stately in their bearing. And there’s one more thing. They come from someplace else. They live in the ocean. They are creatures of the earth, but they dwell in a part of the earth that is mysterious, hidden, removed from us. Looking a whale in the eye as I did that morning is what we at Berkeley in the 1960s used to call a “mind-blowing” experience. When you do that you’re making contact with a creature who inhabits an entirely different reality than you do. When you do that you are connecting with a being from someplace else.

            And recalling that moment reminds me of a related experience just last year. In May 2013, the cicadas took over our world for several days. They reappear every 17 years and make a deafening roar. The first time I heard them I was driving, and I thought that there was something wrong with my car—perhaps the fan belt needed replacing, or I had a cracked block. The sound inside the car was truly disturbing. It was only when I got out that I realized what the sound was—the cicadas had wound themselves up into their full, celebratory screech.

            Now I know there are many who found this sound annoying, but for some reason I found it deeply reassuring and, at times, quite moving. Like the whales off the California coast, the 17-year cicadas I heard came to us from someplace else. Most of the time they inhabit another reality than the one we normally see. And more than that: they are witnesses to a process and a nature that is bigger and deeper than we can easily imagine. This cycle of theirs—17 years underground feeding on the nourishment that tree roots carry to their leaves, 4 to 6 weeks above ground, singing, mating and dying in a relatively short spurt of time—this cycle goes on above us, beneath us, in spite of us. Its rhythms are entirely apart from us humans and the things that usually concern us. As George Harrison said, “Life goes on within you and without you.”

            Whales and cicadas: what could they possibly have to do with Pentecost, today’s festival, literally the “fiftieth day” of Easter. Like the holiday, our fellow creatures remind us that we are part of something bigger, deeper, more wonderful than what we usually perceive. We are in touch, if only for a moment, with the reality of a life from someplace else.

            Let’s look at aspects of Pentecost this morning: the reality hidden, as Gerard Manely Hopkins said, “deep down things”, and the way that reality expresses itself in the here and now.

            First, the big, deep, wonderful reality: if you asked me to summarize what Christianity is “about”, I’d say that it has to do with God’s desire to be connected with us. If you read the Bible straight through, it describes the lengths to which God will go to be in relationship with human beings. God made us in the divine image, and God keeps coming back to us, keeps calling us to live life in the divine light of God’s hopeful promise of joyous and abundant blessing.

            And that’s just the Old Testament. In the New Testament, God takes that mission one step further: Jesus comes to us, lives among us and shows us what an abundant, joyful, compassionate life looks like. Again, we people try to break that connection by taking Jesus to the cross. But once more, God’s drive toward us keeps on coming, and so Jesus returns to us in the resurrection. God comes back again, and again, and again. That is one—perhaps the most important—meaning of Easter.

            But Jesus’s earthly presence could not last forever, and so 40 days later, at Ascension, he returns to the Father and promises us an abiding presence: an Advocate, a Comforter. In receiving the Spirit, the Jesus movement, the community of Jesus’s friends and companions, is first of all taking in the assurance that we are part of some deep, ongoing, loving process that is immensely bigger than we are and which catches us up into it. Just as at Easter, so here today at Pentecost: God has come to us. God has not left us to our own devices. God is in and among and with us. Pentecost is the newest chapter in God’s ongoing drama of the search for a human connection. We matter to God. We matter so much that nothing can remove us from God’s presence. Not death. Not our own faithlessness. Not our worries and fears. Not anything.

            The big, deep reality of Pentecost is that we are not only connected. We are now, like Jesus, taken up into God’s divine life ourselves. The Holy Spirit is not something abstract and gaseous floating around in the sky. The Holy Spirit is the living presence of God in and among us.

            How does that ongoing divinity express itself in us, here and now? I still remember Werner Herzog’s film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a beautiful movie filmed in the caves of southern France where the paintings on the walls are around 30,000 years old. At one point in the movie, Herzog interviews an ethnologist as he tries to understand the creative process of pre-modern people. The ethnologist quotes what an Australian aborigine said to him when asked why he was painting on a rock. The aborigine said, “I am not painting. The hand of the spirit is painting.”

Pentecost is about the hand of the spirit guiding us in our lives. It’s not only the whales and the cicadas who are in touch with life’s rhythms. It’s not only the aboriginal artist who can feel the hand of the spirit at work as he paints.  You and I can do that, too. We now together have been given the gift of the Spirit, and that means that we, like Jesus, have been taken up into God. We are not just watching something from the outside.  We are part of what we proclaim.

As Psalm 104 reminds us,

Yonder is the great and wide sea
with its living things too many to number, *
creatures both small and great.

There move the ships,
and there is that Leviathan, *
which you have made for the sport of it.

            Or, as our Prayer Book antiphon for Morning Prayer says it, “The Spirit of the Lord renews the face of the earth.” The ongoing life of Jesus and his presence among us now are what Pentecost really means. They are God’s ongoing gifts to us. You and I, together, embody God’s life and purpose in the world. Your life is as connected to the depths of reality as are the lives of mysterious creatures who dwell in the deep of the sea or under the earth. Your life is as connected to God as were those of Jesus’s companions who knew firsthand the Spirit’s rushing wind and tongues of fire. Let each of us embrace that presence, feel that wind, and hear those tongues. And then let us together move out in a Pentecost blessing, so that in and with God, Christ, and each other, we may begin to paint the world with the hand of the spirit. Amen.

 

Homily: The Sixth Sunday of Easter [Memorial Day: May 25, 2014] Washington National Cathedral

“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country,” said the Roman poet Horace.  In the Latin original, the phrase went, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”  This Horatian phrase was on the lips of many young European men as they went off to fight at the beginning the First World War, a war that began 100 years ago this July.  As we are coming to remember this year in our centennial observances, the realities of trench warfare turned out to be quite different from the sweet and decorous battles many had imagined. The great English poet of the Great War, Wilfred Owen, took Horace’s phrase and made it the ironic title of his anti-war poem, “Dulce et decorum est.”  Owen’s poem details the horrors of trench warfare and the indignities to which its soldiers are exposed. It memorably ends with these lines, addressed to someone who seemingly still thinks that 20^th century war fits the ancient models:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

 

In a century of trench warfare, nuclear weapons, napalm, and roadside bombs it may no longer seem “sweet and fitting” to die for one’s country, but still it is often necessary to do so, and as a nation we pause each year to honor that sacrifice. Memorial Day, which we observe today, had its origins during the American Civil War, the first “modern” war, which was also notable for its horrific battlefield conditions.  Decoration Day, as the holiday was first known, began when women in the South and North decorated the graves of soldiers on the last weekend in May as a time of remembrance.  Over the years, Decoration Day turned into Memorial Day and became a national holiday.  It is the day on which we rightly remember all those who have given their lives in the service of their country. It is a holiday which unites all of us —strong believers in national defense, staunch critics of military engagement—in remembering and honoring those who have died while fighting on our behalf.

As we gather on Memorial Day weekend 2014, the news is sadly filled with stories of the mistreatment of many of our veterans in the healthcare system run by the Veterans’ Administration.  According to a front page story in last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times,

The Phoenix VA Health Care System is under a federal Justice Department investigation for reports that it maintained a secret waiting list to conceal the extent of its patient delays . . . But there are now clear signs that veterans' health centers across the U.S. are juggling appointments and sometimes manipulating wait lists to disguise long delays for primary and follow-up appointments, according to federal reports, congressional investigators and interviews with VA employees and patients.

 

The growing evidence suggests a VA system with overworked physicians, high turnover and schedulers who are often hiding the extent to which patients are forced to wait for medical care. [“Portrait of a Troubled VA Taking Shape,” Los Angeles Times 5/18/14]

 

Now I want to be clear about a couple of things before I proceed.  One of them is that Memorial Day and Veterans’ Day are two distinct holidays with two very different agendas.  It is understandable that we often mix them up, but when we do so we fail fully to honor the dead and to care for the living.  As I said in this pulpit last year, “Let us not confuse Veterans Day with Memorial Day. “ I still hold to that distinction. And the second thing is this:  I have no interest in piling on in criticism of the VA that is often demagogic and self-serving. If I hear one more politician describe himself as “mad as hell” about these reports I will scream.  This is not about resignations. This is about a change in all our hearts. Nevertheless:  there comes a time when we cannot easily separate the concerns of the dead from those of the living.  There comes a time when we can no longer just thank heroic men and women for their service rhetorically.  There comes a time when the best way to honor and remember the dead is not to lay a wreath at their tomb but to care for the living.  That time is clearly now. In Luke’s Gospel’s account of the resurrection, the young men at Jesus’s tomb ask the women who come there to see him, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.^*” [Luke 24.5b] As Jesus himself says also in that Gospel, our God “is God not of the dead, but of the living.” [Luke 20:38]

The allegations against some of the VA hospitals, if true, are horrifying.  One complaint alleges that two preventable deaths occurred in Phoenix because of “long wait times and poor patient care.” And the Times story goes on to report how

agency staffers were "gaming the system" by making it appear that appointments set for weeks or months in the future were "desired dates" requested by veterans. In fact, they said, veterans grudgingly accepted future appointments because they felt they had no other choice.

 

Now those of us who live in a city whose principal business is government know something about the self-protective nature of bureaucracies. If you ever watched David Simon’s HBO series, The Wire, you’ll remember how each season centered on a way in which a system (police, schools, city government, even the press) threw its own members under the bus in order to perpetuate the system’s elite. This is natural, organizational human behavior.  It explains the bad faith of political, governmental, educational, and even religious systems.  So while I am disappointed in the allegations about the VA health system, I am not really surprised.

But what does shock me is our continued national willingness to live with these conditions.  We say we honor the war dead, and we say we care for the survivors.  But our national behavior tells another story. Over the past several years we have heard increasing accounts of veterans living below the poverty line in rural parts of the U.S. and many even homeless in our cities.  We continue to learn of the lasting effects of Post-Traumatic Stress even as those who suffer from it struggle to get treatment and have their discharges given before PTS was recognized deemed “honorable”.  As the rest of us become increasingly socially distanced from those who serve in the military, the problems faced by soldiers and veterans seem to fall out of our range of shared concern.  How many of us actually know people serving right now in Afghanistan?  How many of us actually know Iraq war veterans?  There are some, I’m sure, but the ratio is much different from the days of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

So it’s hard for me to pile on to the VA or its leadership because the primary problem is really my own lack of engagement.  And while that may be excusable for me as a citizen, it is not excusable for me as a Christian.  Because Jesus taught and lived in a way that showed that the needs and pains and struggles of everyone—even and especially those of the most marginalized and socially distant from me—are my concerns.  In today’s Gospel, the risen Jesus expresses his own care for the needs and pains of all with these words of reassurance to his companions:

"I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them." [John 14: 18-21]

 

Just as Jesus does not leave us orphaned, so we cannot leave our veterans to make their way on their own.  Washington National Cathedral honors those who served and those who died not only by remembering and thanking them with words and rituals.  We remember and thank them through action by standing with and for them in their quest for fair and equitable treatment.  The struggle is not only to reform the bureaucracy.  The struggle is also to change our hearts.  If we say that we care, then we must act like we care. As the faith community we must take up the cause for public programs that will ensure veterans and their families the best in social, medical, educational, psychological, and employment policies. This cathedral’s veterans’ initiative must go beyond saluting the fallen and those who served to include advocacy for the living as well as the dead.

We do not confuse Memorial Day with Veterans’ Day, but sometimes the best way for us to honor the dead is to care for the living. If we really value the sacrifice of those who died in the service of our country, we will do all we can to make sure that their fellow soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are adequately cared for and empowered to live full and fulfilling lives.  It is not enough to say, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” and leave it at that.  Jesus will not leave us comfortless.  We cannot leave them comfortless either.  They gave everything.  We owe them, their comrades and survivors,  no less.  Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

Homily: Staff Farewell Evensong [May 21, 2014] Washington National Cathedral

            I really love those signs you see in some workplaces.  “You want it when?” “Quality, Price, Speed:  Choose Any Two”.  My favorite, though, is the time-honored, “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.”  Those of us who work in churches know something about all three signs.  We live under the constant pressure of the tyranny of the urgent.  We are always trying to do more than we have resources for.  And our work lives are dominated by intense, interpersonal relations with parishioners, coworkers, and ourselves.  Nobody goes into this business to make a lot of money, and nobody goes into it who doesn’t carry a personal burden of some kind.  And nobody goes into it who hasn’t, in one way or another, felt the personal touch of God.

            Why do we do what we do?  As a former seminary person, I have long pondered the mystery of why people go to work in the church.  I know a priest/therapist who firmly believes that all clergy were what they call “parentified children” when they were young.  According to him, those of us who gravitate toward church work grew up by functioning as adults before we were ready to do so, and we spend the rest of our lives fitting neatly into that role.  There are all kinds of ways to psychologize people who give their lives over to serving God and the world. In the 1960’s, the great psychologist Robert Coles was criticized by his colleagues at the Harvard Health Service for refusing to diagnose the students who went on Freedom Rides as neurotic.  Some impulses, Coles felt, went beyond analysis.  Call it conscience, call it faithfulness, call it the Holy Spirit.  We do what we do because something both within ourselves and from outside ourselves prompts us to.  Like the Richard Dreyfus character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, we follow these promptings not because we’re better or nicer or smarter than other people. We follow them because we have no other choice.

            Tonight we gather to say thank you and goodbye to three of our colleagues:  The Reverend Canon Kim Turner Baker, our Canon Pastor; Duke DuTeil, our Head Verger, and Richard Weinberg, Director of Communications.  Because this is a valediction and not a funeral, I will not attempt to eulogize them.  But I’d like you to think with me for a couple more minutes about our readings tonight and what they say to us as we send these friends and colleagues off to the next phases of their lives and ministries.

            In the Old Testament reading tonight, we heard this:  “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” [Leviticus 19: 2b] A series of commandments, both ritual and ethical, follows that statement.  As important as those commandments are, though, we should not let them obscure the basic premise of Yahweh’s charge to the people of Israel.  “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” We do what we do—we follow Jesus, we worship God, we spread the Word—primarily because we have experienced holiness in some primary and powerful way.  In her great little book On Beauty, the Harvard philosophy professor Elaine Scarry says that our primary response to the beautiful is the desire to replicate it.  In the same way, for those of us who experience the holy, our primary response to it is the desire to make it available to others.  Some of us do that through preaching and teaching.  Some of us do that through pastoral care.  Some of us do that through liturgy and music and the care of beautiful buildings like this one.  Some of us even do that through seemingly secular means like public relations.  Whatever the avenue, all of us who love and work in the church do so because we want to extend the experience we have had of the One whose presence we feel in ineffable and numinous ways. 

            Sometimes, given the highly interpersonal nature of this work, we can become overwhelmed by stress and conflict, and working in the church can feel more like laboring in a sausage factory than serving as custodians of the divine.  That’s why it’s important that people who work in the church pray together:  so we can remain grounded in the fundamental experience that brought us here.  “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”  As we stay connected and present to God’s holiness, we can exemplify and live out our own.

            Our Gospel reading for this evening is from the 15^th chapter of John’s Gospel:

Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. [John 15: 3-5]

           

            In this familiar analogy, Jesus is the vine and we are the branches.  Paul’s metaphor uses the body:  Jesus is the head, we are the members.  However we think of God, Jesus, and the church, it’s clear that we are all in this together.  If the first reading reminded us of why we do all this in the first place, the second tells us that we need both each other and God if we are to do anything truly meaningful and lasting. “Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.”  Apart from God and Jesus, we can do nothing.  Apart from each other, we can do less.  Jesus left behind him a community who would live out his love and purpose in the world.  And it is in living out his love and purpose in the world—not in celebrating ourselves or advancing our own personal agendas—that we live out and keep faith with the call that brings us together to work in blessed and complicated places like Washington National Cathedral.

“You want it when?” “Quality, Price, Speed:  Choose Any Two”.  “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.”  We are holy only because God is holy.  We are empowered to serve only as we are in and with God, Jesus, and each other.  I am so grateful to all of you for being the body of Christ with me and our brother and sister followers of Jesus, and I am so grateful to Kim and Duke and Richard for the ways they are members of that body and so will stay a part of us as they go forth from this place.  For them, for their work and ministries, for their love and dedication to this place, for their friendship and their collegiality, let us all proceed to give thanks.  Amen.